Resources for Doing Nothing (Meditation):
- Oprah.com's A New Earth webcast recordings and related meditation mp3s, all free (I feel peaceful just listening to these classes)
- Martha Beck's Anxiety Meditation (easy to follow, includes movement)
- The Joy Diet by Martha Beck p. 19-21 (practical, great for beginners)
- The Not So Big Life by Susan Susanka p. 155-177 (traditional meditation)
- Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser - Appendix (traditional meditation)
- Steering By Starlight by Martha Beck p. 138-140 (magical)
Favorite Quotes:
Life does not control you. What you believe about it does. – Alan Cohen
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. – Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke
When you trust yourself, you will know how to live. – Goethe
And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. – Anais Nin
What comes at you comes from you. – Bert Winn
Don’t keep searching for the truth; Just let go of your opinions. – Chinese sage Seng Ts’an
Don’t worry about what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive. - Howard Thurman
Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one’s own sunshine. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are disturbed not by what happens to us, but by our thoughts about what happens to us. – Epictetus, Greek philosopher
If you let go, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you will have complete peace. – Ajahn Chah, twentieth-century Buddhist monk
Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way is actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want. -Margaret Young
There are two ways to live you life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. – Albert Einstein
The important thing is not to think much but to love much; and so do that which best stirs you to love. – St. Teresa of Avila
When you follow your bliss…doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors; and where there wouldn’t be a door for anyone else. – Joseph Campbell
It’s only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth – and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up – that we begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it (were) the only one we had. – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
The greatest revolution in our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives. – William James
“If I promise you that you will never have any reason in your life to ever worry about anything, will you believe me?” Ketut to Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love
Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly. – Proverb
Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity. – Gilda Radner
Just take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. -Joseph Campbell
This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it's with us wherever we go. -Pema Chodron
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. – Mark Twain
Love After Love by Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.


