“If you have spent your whole life becoming somebody and having something, the beginning of awakening requires you to turn around and start the journey in the other direction, towards becoming nothing, becoming nobody, and having nothing. ⁣⁣It would seem to make the entire first part of your life meaningless or like some sort of error.⁣⁣ But it’s important to see that this sequence is a necessary sequence, that when you incarnate in an evolutionary moment when you are going to awaken, you still have to become somebody and become grounded on earth before you can do the spiritual work. ⁣⁣Part of the experience of living richly has been identification with the desires and emotions, with the passions of life, with the hatreds and the joys, with what I call the “mellow drama” of life. ⁣⁣Each of us has an intense drama going on around us. Will we, won’t we, can we, can’t we, should we, shouldn’t we? And with awakening one begins to see the way one has been trapped in one’s storyline. But it doesn’t mean the story ends. ⁣⁣The Ram Dass story is alive and well. The only question is, who’s living it?⁣”

Baba Ram Dass (1931 – 2019)

“Everything is beautiful and I am so sad. This is how the heart makes a duet of wonder and grief. The light spraying through the lace of the fern is as delicate as the fibers of memory forming their web around the knot in my throat. The breeze makes the birds move from branch to branch as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh of the next stranger. In the very center, under it all, what we have that no one can takeaway and all that we’ve lost face each other. It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured by a holiness that exists inside everything. I am so sad and everything is beautiful.”- Mark Nepo

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us… Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

Pema Chödrön