Meditation Inspirations and Success Quotes

This page offers you success quotes and meditation inspirations,stories and musings that will encourage you to reflect on, and perhaps deepen your practice of meditation. It is also the home of the top blog entries.

Success quotes and meditation inspirations...#8 If I should die before I wake

My watch battery died. My car wouldn't start this morning and it's battery had died too. Is somebody up there trying to tell me something?

Looking through the notices, one of my yuwie friends seems to be involved in some drama where she is afraid for her life. Hopefully she has friends and security professionals to advise her on dealing with her troubles, but I can feel the muse firing up the engine and getting ready to ride...hey wait for me, I want to take my blankie!

We spend a lot of time being afraid of... just about everything. I want a perfect body, I am afraid of being ill. I want a young body, I am afraid of getting old. I want to make lots of money, I am afraid of being poor.

Grammatically, 'fear' takes an object in English. The pattern is 'someone is afraid of something'. The language belies the reality. It is just fear. It is a feeling which when acted on causes us to create dramas around it.

It is no doubt useful to be afraid if fear nurtures caution in a dangerous situation. But that's it. There is no more value to fear than that. Anything else is adding something extra to what was a natural feeling.

So what about dying? Most people are afraid of dying, aren't they?

I think a better question is, how would we live if we knew we were going to die...and by the way you are, and so am I.

Would the dramas be so compelling? Perhaps some would indulge even more in the theater of it all, anxious to forget their future. Turn up the volume on sensation and drown everything else out.

Perhaps some would want to consider what state of mind they were going to be in at that 'final' moment. Perhaps learning how to navigate our thoughts and our feelings might be an investment of greater value than the latest, 'get one million page views on yuckie...'

This is not a counsel of despair, nor a call to solitary lives of quiet and undisturbed meditation. It is a call to develop a skill. The skill of being able to step out of the daily concerns and just rest in a centred awareness without adding to, or avoiding what is there and then.

Well enough... The muse is getting fidgity and shuffling towards the door. It is time to return to the world of page views and online marketing schemes.

There is nothing wrong with this world, only perhaps useful to know we have a choice, to play in this world. It is not a choice we will always have and, a final word from the muse as, genderless, it kicks the Harley Metaphor into life, 'proper preparation prevent piss poor performance'...

'Nuff said' as Stan Lee used to.

Success quotes and meditation inspirations...#7 Plant a tree for feng shui!

It was my wife's idea...

We took a house on a corner, on the inside of an 'L' shape. The path to our front door continues the road in 'feng shui' terms and my (Chinese) wife decided that was a bad thing.

So I dug up and rerouted the path and planted a tree in the direct line between the road and the front door.

"Better" she said.

Knowing when to keep quiet is an important part of meditation and marriage!

Does it work? I don't really know. I know many things do work that do not seem to have convenient explanations. Chinese medicine is one of them and I have benefited tremendously from skilled practitioners.

Applying similar principles to the world around us feels like a good idea. What is this crazy separation between individual and environment?

We think we are masters of the environment but the next gale force wind or extreme weather condition reminds us that we are not!

So, I have a lot of time for feng shui. It is a good exercise in awareness to notice the effect that our surroundings have on us and coax them into a more beneficial state.

So on this note check out my friend's site about feng shui. here is the link: Feng-Shui-Vibes Feng Shui Vibes is dedicated to raising awareness on the importance of intentionally creating harmony and balancewithin our homes and business environments.

Success quotes and meditation inspirations...#6 Even more inspiration!

We all need encouragement as we journey along the way. Here is a site that I go to for more 'heart'.

For more information, you could look at Secret Changes.com Tools for Personal Development. This is a great Personal growth site that has a wealth of information and encouragement about the law of attraction, affirmations and positive thoughts.

Sometimes we just need a hint or two in order to cut through a mood or feeling that is holding us back. Have a look!

Success quotes and meditation inspirations...#5 Changing practices

This is just a thought that occurred today as I was thinking about writing for this success quotes and inspirations page. Practice changes over the years, which is one reason why it is important to practice consistently. For me I noticed that when I was younger and one of life’s crisis's came along, I would stop meditating because my mind was too agitated and the pain too intense. Now a major life crisis has come my way, I see how I have created it in the past and I meditate more …for exactly the same reasons!

It is important to choose a meditation practice and just keep going. It is just like running, even if you walk for a while, just keep going and be gentle with yourself and others.

Success quotes and meditation inspirations...#4 Mind the gap

One of the processes we engage with during meditation is to watch our feelings and thoughts. This process can be done more or less skilfully and with greater or lesser refinement. In essence , though, we practice a conscious awareness of what is normally unconscious. The thoughts and feelings that normally trigger behaviour , now become the subject of a patient attention.

This gradually begins to give us choice. To begin with the choice is to not have to follow the conditioned habits. I learn that I do not have to have that bar of chocolate, or be angry. I can feel the feelings and be patient with them.

This is a valuable and lifelong process that can be refined to a high level. There is another benefit of this way of practice.

In seeing that we are separate from our thoughts and feelings we begin to have choice about which ones to encourage.

As we are not living in monasteries, it makes sense to support positive emotions and thoughts that will support us in our business life.

Positive thinking does not come from no where and does not exist in a vacuum. You probably have all the thoughts and feelings you need. Meditation allows you to be selective and skilful with them.

This is quite a novel concept for many: we are not at the mercy of our feelings. We really can choose. It takes skill and strength to be able to do so, but it is a learnable skill.

Success quotes and meditation inspirations...#3 Make real not make over

One of the benefits of getting older if that I can begin to see how people now near the end of their lives live and have lived. I have friends who were mad about movies in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and I am sure you get the picture. Now they are in their seventies and still 'mad about movies'. Their heroes are all dead.

What should have been an interesting diversion became a habit of life. As their bodies become infirm and they approach their last breaths, this conditioned habit will not serve them.

Today is the age of the 'make over'. We take what is perceived to be inadequate, whether that be a kitchen or a face and decorate it until it meets our biases, our preferences.

All though I can judge much of my life as a failure in material terms, one habit that I have conditioned and continue to cultivate is meditation.

I trust that in my last moments I will 'make real' rather than cling to my attachments and undergo the ultimate make over which is being born again into this world.

Success quotes and meditation inspirations...#2 Samsara is noisy

I lay in bed on a bank holiday afternoon trying to doze. Door opened, doors crashed shut, cars zoomed by, children shouted, there was no end to the noise. This is the world. Respite is at best temporary. What is worse, this is exactly how it should be, even when it shouldn't!

Success quotes and meditation inspirations...#1 Always Leaving

The moment we are born in to this life we begin leaving. Our journey will always take us to death; we will always arrive at a point when we leave everyone and everything.

How strange and yet how normal that we spend so much time building the illusion that we have 'settled down' somewhere.

We seek to develop a career and think of it as an entity that we can cultivate forever, and to the exclusion of everything else. We nurture a home and family knowing that all could vanish in a moment, yet hoping that it will all be permanent and happy.

Permanent... We have created an over busy consumer / work slavery society in which we hide from the impermanent nature of everything.

There is fear. There is loss and grief. They feel as if they would be overwhelming. So we keep busy and push down the frustration that 'things' are not how we want them to be.

Things will only ever be how we want them to be for a (short) while. Things will always be exactly how they are.

And yes - there is fear and loss and grief, and perhaps we would be wiser to accept that we are always leaving.

What would that mean? It would mean that we need to learn how to patiently co-exist with the feelings.

That's right...The feelings that threaten to submerge us at such inconvenient times. Not to deny them but to give them space to be exactly as they are; without secretly hoping that they will quickly go away and everything will be all right.

In the end, if we can develop this skill,we learn that we are more than the fear, the anger, the sadness. We hold on less tightly and actually love more; become kinder. We can learn to appreciate where we are right now, because we won't be here forever. We can learn to be more patient with th people around us right now because they won't be here forever - and that includes our parents, partners and children.

We can learn to be gentler with ourselves too... We won't be here forever either. We are all of us,always leaving, so it is always possible to be present for the journey.