As you recognize that you already own the wholeness you seek, and no one outside you can give you more than you already are, dysfunctional situations will evaporate like bad dreams exposed to the morning sun.
Alan CohenRead
You can be helping many people, but if you are not helping yourself, you have missed the one person you were born to heal.
Interpretation
Self-care is essential for effectively helping others.
This quote emphasizes the importance of self-care and self-healing as foundational to being able to support and help others. It suggests that neglecting one's own needs can lead to an inability to truly assist those around us, thereby underlining the significance of prioritizing personal well-being.
In practice
During a seminar on mental health, you can use this quote to stress the importance of self-care.
As you recognize that you already own the wholeness you seek, and no one outside you can give you more than you already are, dysfunctional situations will evaporate like bad dreams exposed to the morning sun.
Communication is an offering. When you tell someone your truth, you must release your expectation of what the other person should do with it. They may thank you profusely, love you forever, argue with you, or ignore you. It doesn't matter. Of course we hope the gift will be received with appreciation and thanks. But if it isn't we must not dictate. We've done our part, and we must trust the universe to do the rest.
When you learn to say yes to yourself, you will be able to say no to others, with love.
We attain freedom as we let go of whatever does not reflect our magnificence. A bird cannot fly high or far with a stone tied to its back. But release the impediment, and we are free to soar to unprecedented heights.
When you protect yourself from pain, be sure you do not protect yourself from love.
Enlightenment does not ask you to be perfect; it simply asks you to find perfection right where you stand.
We are ever free if we would only believe it, only have faith enough.
Proper effort is not the effort to make something particular happen. It is the effort to be aware and awake each moment, the effort to overcome laziness and merit, the effort to make each activity of our day meditation.
The best way to deal with that is to live in a fully conscious, compassionate, loving way. Don't wait until you're on your deathbed to recognize that this is the only way to live.
You can't help but... with 20/20 hindsight, go back and say, 'Look, had we done something different, we probably wouldn't be facing what we are facing today.'
I am glad there are things in the Bible I do not understand. If I could take that book up and read it as I would any other book, I might think I could write a book like that.
Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That’s the ground, that’s what we study, that’s what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.
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