YOUR GREATEST SUCCESS …
You don’t have to be famous to be important. You don’t have to be a celebrity to be successful.
You don’t have to live in opulent luxury to be rich. You don’t have to be irresponsible to be free.
You don’t have to be outrageous to be creative. You don’t have to be abusive to be impressive.
You can be quietly humble and still be amazingly effective. You can be kind and considerate and still have great influence.
Just because people don’t fall at your feet and worship you, doesn’t mean you are a failure. Quiet success is just as sweet as loud, flamboyant success, and usually much more real.
Success is what you choose for it to be, not what everyone else says it must be. Live your life in each moment in a way that truly fulfills you and brings value to your world, for that is the greatest success. Daily Motivator. Journey to Balance
I believe we all need to be loved.
We need to be touched, to know that we exist, and that we need to express and receive expressions of love. It does matter that somebody cares about us. Somebody sees a hope in us. Someone who truly believes in us. The more love you give, the more love you will receive.
Leo Rosten, beautifully answers the question, “How do we live a life of love?”
“In some way, however, small and secret, each of us is a little mad…Everyone is lonely at bottom and cries to be understood, but we can never entirely understand someone else, and each of us remains part stranger even to those who love us…Those who do not know fear are not really brave, for courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined.
…You can understand people better if you look at them- no matter how old or impressive they may be—as if they are children. For most of us never mature; we simply grow taller…Happiness comes only when we push our brains out and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable…The purpose of life is to matter – to count, to stand for something, to have it make some difference that we lived at all.”
Yes, I do believe we all need to be loved, appreciated and cherished. And only then can we genuinely and unconditionally love others more….
Perspectives .. Peace & Blessings, Journey to Balance
EMOTIONS AND FEELINGS
Great lovers of love run towards what everybody else is running away from. For ‘heartfelt’ people every risk is a challenge, every pain, an opportunity to grow. The heart embraces all sides of life, the positive and the negative, peace and conflict, happiness and suffering. Our inner most beings do not avoid any of the experiences of life because heart-centered people tend to stay away from making judgments between right and wrong, good or bad. It is impossible for the true heart to separate from anything because it is one with its own experiences.
Emotions and feelings are the most powerful forces we experience inside of us. Under the power of spontaneous feelings and emotions, human beings can perform the most heroic acts or do the most violent things. Civilization itself can be defined as the attempt at the intelligent channeling of human emotional power. Actually history is a record of Man’s constant quest for control, for it has always been known, since the earliest days of tribal life, that the inner world of even one individual can wreck havoc on any totally controlled or harmonious social situation.
It could be said that our feelings and emotions are fuel that propel and motivate us and the mind is the pilot that is there to help steer or help us refine, discern, penetrate, and challenge our feelings and emotions as they occur. The mind can help us decide what the feelings and emotions mean and how they should best be expressed.
How we approach and manage the inner universe of feelings and emotions is enormously important. Misguided drives for total control have stifled the heart with its passions as well as its super intelligent guidance system.
Sending you heartfelt Love, Peace and True Happiness
REMEMBER…
Remember to spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not going to be around forever.
Remember to say a kind word to someone who looks up to you in awe, because that little person soon will grow up and may leave your side.
Remember to give a warm hug to the one next to you, because that is the only treasure you can give with your heart and it doesn’t cost anything.
Remember, to say “I Love You” to your partner and your loved ones. A kiss and an embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep inside of you.
Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment, for some day, that person will not be there again.
Give time to Love,
give time to speak,
give time to share the
precious thoughts in your mind….
Have a great weekend!
Perspectives … Peace & Blessings, Journey to Balance
PEACEMAKING
At the individual level we can think about peacemaking in the same way. If we treat people around us with an angry heart, if we interact with anger in our minds, people will inevitably respond with anger. We then have an environment of violence against violence. However, if we can treat people with kindness and compassion, they will not find it so easy to remain angry at us. So we need to start from within ourselves, from our within our own minds; we need to keep a mind of peace, of kindness, and compassion. Then we will have a standpoint from which to build peace from within ourselves instead of resorting to forceful change. So the important thing to attain peace in the world is to first cultivate an attitude of non-harming and non-violence. If we have peace in our minds, the world we experience will be at peace; even though the objective reality may be one of conflict, our inner experience will be one of peace. That is to say, at least we will not become the source of conflict and violence. When we are at peace in our minds and we do not generate conflict and violence, then we can truly begin to also help others attain peace and eliminate violence and conflict.
- Chan Master Sheng Yen
Have a great weekend!
Perspectives … Peace & Blessings, Journey to Balance
THE CULTIVATION OF JOY WITHIN
“There is no sunshine for those who persist in keeping their shutters barred,” said Theodore Cuyler. “Joy is not gained by asking for it, but only by acting for it.” If we want to be happy we must throw down the bars that keep sunshine and cheerfulness out of our lives. We must keep clear our avenues of joy, or joy cannot enter our souls.
There is no other thing in human philosophy which pays so well, from every point of view, as the cultivation of heart sunshine, a cheerful outlook upon life, a mental attitude that sees the best instead of the worst side of everything.
It is the most magical of physicians, for it heals all ills and affords a balm for all the sorrows and misfortunes of life. Even though a person may have very little money, a cheerful soul seems to have about everything that is necessary to make life happy, while a morose, gloomy, sad, melancholy person is miserable, no matter how much money he/she may have.
Sunshine in the inner, as well as in the outer world is the source of all that is strong, wholesome and uplifting.
The tonic of soul sunshine which makes the eyes sparkle and sends the health bounding through the system, which lights up the face of hope, is one of the most beneficial forces that was ever given to mankind. It is a great producer. It is to the individual what the sun is to the earth. It adds wonderfully to one’s active ability, and increases mental and physical power.
There is no doubt that multitudes of people are physically and mentally indisposed because of the fearful depressing influence of discouragement. Our best physicians, realizing this fact, keep all unfavorable knowledge away from their patients and take great pains to cheer them up and to surround them with a bright, joyous and courageous atmosphere. Good cheer has wooed many a sufferer back to health. Uplifting thoughts are a healing balm. They are helpful to every physical and mental process, because they produce mental harmony, and every thought, every mood, every emotion which tends to produce mental harmony produces physical harmony, improves the health, increases the strength of every faculty, and hence increases our power, our efficiency.
Just think what it would mean to us if we could learn to hold constantly, in the mind, mechanically at first, if necessary, helpful, hopeful, unselfish, cheerful, optimistic thoughts! Yet this is possible for everyone. No matter how antagonistic our feeling or our particular mood may be at any time, we can, by using our will power, change and neutralize it by a little mental chemistry.
Perspectives … Peace & Blessings, Journey to Balance
ON MAKING LOVE GROW … Perspectives
Love, like a muscle, is strengthened by use. On the other hand, love, like faith, is totally dead if one doesn’t work at it. Words and acts, motivated by our feelings deep within us, come from the heart, representing our inner motivation.
What thoughts and feelings do you cultivate in your heart? If you daily meditate on the ways in which God has shown love, and seek to imitate His example, fine motivations will be strengthened. The more you exercise this love, the more you act and speak in harmony with it, the more deeply inscribed it will become on your heart. Daily practice of it in little things will make such love habitual. Then, when occasional big issues arise, this love will be there, strongly entrenched, to help you to cope with them.
Do you notice something commendable in your mate? Give voice to it! Do you have an impulse to do a kind deed? Obey that impulse! We must show love in order to reap it. Practicing these things will bring you and your mate closer, make the two of you one, make the love between you grow.
To increase love, share it. Have you ever been alone as you gazed in amazement at a spectacular sunset, and wished that a loved one were there to share it with you? Or have you had exciting good news, but no one to tell it to? Sharing brings two people together, and helps love to take root and grow.
God bless you all … Peace & Blessings, Journey to Balance
If I could give you one thing in life, I would give you the ability to see yourself through my eyes. Only then would you realize how special you are to me…
Perspectives … Peace & Blessings, Journey to Balance
THE TRUE WAY OF LIFE
Enlightened beings, sages and seers of old have suggested guidelines for a very happy and healthy way of life. They have said that human beings should live by the spirit or soul and not merely through our body and mind. The mind and the intellect are the vital tools to filter our wants, desires, feelings and emotions so that we cease to identify ourselves with our body and centre ourselves in the soul within. They have emphasized that this is the right way of life.
We will always enjoy perpetual happiness and contentment when our soul is always in resonance (tune) with the cosmic energy. When we tune ourselves in this way, not only do we lead a blissful, peaceful and contented life, but we are also in harmony with the cosmic energy around us.
God bless you all.
Perspectives … Peace & Blessings, Journey to Balance
EACH HEART IS A VALLEY OF LOVE
Life is nothing but an opportunity for love to blossom. If you are alive, the opportunity is there — even to the last breath. You may have missed your whole life: just the last breath, the last moment on the earth, if you can be love, you have not missed anything — because a single moment of love is equal to the whole eternity of love.
You shout and the valleys shout, or you sing and the valleys sing. Each heart is a valley. If you pour love into it, it will respond. The first lesson of love is not to ask for love, but just to give. Become a giver. And people are doing just the opposite. Even when they give, they give only with the idea that love should come back. It is a bargain. They don’t share, they don’t share freely. They share with a condition. They go on watching out of the corner of their eye whether it is coming back or not. Very poor people… they don’t know the natural functioning of love.
You simply pour, it will come. And if it is not coming, nothing to be worried about — because a lover knows that to love is to be happy. If it comes, good; then the happiness is multiplied. But even if it never comes back, in the very act of loving you become so happy, so ecstatic, who bothers whether it comes or not? Love has its own intrinsic happiness. It happens when you love. There is no need to wait for the result. Just start loving. By and by you will see much more love is coming back to you. One loves and comes to know what love is only by loving….. OSHO
Have a Wonderful Weekend.
Perspectives … Peace & Blessings … Journey to Balance
GOING BEYOND THE DUALITY
It is so easy to advise others. Only the one who suffers knows the severity of the pain. But actually there is no difference between one person’s pain and another’s, whether rich or poor. No philosophy, sermon or concept will help relieve that suffering immediately. But remember that at the core of any pain-causing conflict, there is duality. We are all part of a cycle that contains pain and pleasure, creating a split between mind and body, thus delaying the healing process.
Our daily actions are preceded by a struggle: to come to a decision on this or that, pain or pleasure, day or night, north or south, hot or cold, left or right, we keep on playing the game of duality.
Duality is our creation. We describe breathing as inhalation and exhalation, but in reality there is only one breath. As long as we split things, conflict will be present. Conflict always breeds fear, stress and war.
In reality, there is no duality. There is an all-pervasive oneness. No day or night, since the sun never sets. No beginning and no end, no birth and no death. Anything we experience with our senses has a definite end. The body will die but the soul is eternal, it never dies.
When body and mind are one and the duality becomes absent (by meditation), the senses get dissolved and the mind transcends to a higher level of consciousness. There emerges energy and compassion – the moment of creativity when you become one with nature.
Nature has bestowed upon us power to overcome pain and suffering. We seldom leave the task of alleviating the pain to nature. We want instant solutions. But actually pain and suffering give us the opportunity to look within and experience that oneness or wholeness where no duality is present.
In order to get back one’s real self one has to go inward where there is no past, no future, but there is only the present. In this state of meditation, one may get in touch with our inner being, the non-dual state. Once this insight is gained, one is awakened. This is the true enlightenment, where there is no duality: there is only completeness.
What this enlightenment promises is an inner heaven which enables one to live with pain and to take possession of it, and experience a profound peace of mind in the midst of suffering.
God bless you all. Have a wonderful week!
Perspectives … Peace & Blessings, Journey to Balance
THE SECRET OF A HAPPY LIFE
We have to consciously make efforts to create a new personality which will in turn create a new world around us, a better world surely. The attributes needed for this are:
1. We have to forget our egos,
2. We should always be eager to help and to serve those in distress,
3. We should be able to talk quite openly and naturally about things that we have stored away in the secret places of our hearts,
4. We should be able to gladly admit our mistakes and apologise for them at once,
5. We should openly make restitution if we have wronged anybody,
6. We should be liberated in mind and spirit and not get besieged by the forces of egotism and selfishness,
7. We should make sure that there are no secret burdens weighing on our minds.
And the most important of all – LISTEN. Listen very carefully to all who interact with you. Listen to the underlying cries of help, of wanting love and affection, of the hidden pain, of the words which go unsaid. A soothing word, a wise advice, a thoughtful plan, an immediate offer to help, will go a long way to put back the smile on that someone. This will in turn help you to remove the blemishes which have fallen on your mind. After a while, you will have mastered your mind, and nothing and no one will be able to hurt you ever, in anyway. Then you will start seeing the New You, who you have always wanted to meet – in that Person lies The Secret of a Happy Life, my friend.
Have a Wonderful Weekend.
Perspectives … Peace & Blessings, Journey to Balance
WHY A BUD BLOSSOMS
It is only those who have known that joy expresses itself through law who have learnt to transcend the law. Not that the bonds of law have ceased to exist for them – but that the bonds have become to them as the form of freedom incarnate. The freed soul delights in accepting bonds, and does not seek to evade any of them, for in each does it feel the manifestation of an infiniteenergy whose joy is in creation.
As a matter of fact, where there are no bonds, where there is the madness of license, the soul ceases to be free. There is its hurt; there is its separation from the infinite, its agony of sin. Whenever at the call of temptation the soul falls away from the bondage of law, then, like a child deprived of the support of its mother’s arms, it cries out, Smite me not! “Bind me,” it prays, “oh, bind me in the bonds of thy law; bind me within and without; hold me tight; let me in the clasp of thy law be bound up together with thy joy; protect me by thy firm hold from the deadly laxity of sin.”
The soul of man is ever freeing itself from its own folds by its activity; had it been otherwise it could not have done any voluntary work. The more man acts and makes actual what was latent in him, the nearer does he bring the distant Yet-to-be. In that actualization, man is ever making himself more and yet more distinct, and seeing himself clearly under newer and newer aspects in the midst of his varied activities, in the state, in society. This vision makes for freedom.
Freedom is not in darkness, nor in vagueness. There is no bondage so fearful as that of obscurity. It is to escape from this obscurity that the seed struggles to sprout, the bud to blossom. It is to rid itself of this envelope of vagueness that the ideas in our mind are constantly seeking opportunities to take an outward form. In the same way our soul, in order to release itself from the mist of indistinctness and come out into the open, is continually creating for itself fresh fields of action, and is busy contriving new forms of activity, even such as are not needful for the purposes of its earthly life. And why? Because it wants freedom. It wants to see itself, to realize itself. – Sadhana by Rabindranath Tagore
Perspectives …Peace & Blessings, Journey to Balance
YOU’RE THE BEST
There’s nothing to fear – you’re as good as the best
As strong as the mightiest, too.
You can win in every battle or test;
For there’s no one just like you.
There’s only one you in the world today;
So nobody else, you see,
Can do your work in as fine a way:
You’re the only you there’ll be!
So face the world, and all life is yours
To conquer and love and live:
And you’ll find the happiness that endures
In just the measure you give;
There’s nothing too good for you to possess,
Nor heights where you cannot go:
Your power is more than belief or guess –
It is something you have to know.
There is nothing to fear – you can and you will.
For you are the invincible you.
Perspectives … Peace & Blessings, Journey to Balance
COMING FACE TO FACE WITH THE ETERNAL
Life holds a very real purpose for every human soul. But before we can find it we need to have a sense of the Eternal. We need to have a sense of the things beyond the narrow limits of our own worldly activities. For we are so often apt to be blind to the fact that we are living in a very wonderful universe about which human minds know so very little. We are inclined to think of our lives as turning upon the events of the house in which we live, or upon the office or factory or profession in which we work.
The size and nature of the universe is more likely to be understood by the contemplation of falling rain than by the mental measurement of continents and maps. A sense of the Eternal alone can bring the right perspective to us. The life of the world needs quickening by the knowledge of the life of Heaven. For our pavements have the sky above them, and the roofs of our houses reflect the light of the stars at night.
Under our feet there is soil. The fields are in our bread. The grass of the meadow is in our milk. And in the fields and meadows is the warmth of the sun, the breath of the wind, the life-sustaining rain. Perhaps we have forgotten all this. Perhaps we are too deep in our morning papers to be still and to know. But it is true. We are face to face with the Eternal all the time.
The rain is glistening in the field,
The roots are damp where corn is green,
And though men eat the harvest yield,
They do not know the great unseen….
And yet we touch the unseen as we touch every material thing. We stand amid eternal ways as much in the crowded street as anywhere else. The laws of life are at work all the time. We are sowing seeds that we shall one day reap. We are creating the future in the present. We are drawing into our lives conditions for good or ill. Day by day we are building character, forming habits, losing or gaining the nectar of life. Our roots are in the Eternal and will always be there, and if we do not know this, then sadly we do not know ourselves….
Perspectives … Peace & Blessings … Journey to Balance