Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections but instantly set about remedying them - every day begin the task anew.
-- Saint Francis de Sales
Showing posts with label FORGE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FORGE. Show all posts
Every Day Begin the Task Anew
Every Day You May Make Progress
Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
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You Have to Actually Practice
Cultivating mindfulness is not unlike the process of eating. It would be absurd to propose that someone else eat for you. And when you go to a restaurant, you don’t eat the menu, mistaking it for the meal, nor are you nourished by listening to the waiter describe the food. You have to actually eat the food for it to nourish you. In the same way, you have to actually practice mindfulness in order to reap its benefits and come to understand why it is so valuable.
-- John Kabat-Zinn, from Letting Everything Become Your Teacher: 100 Lessons in Mindfulness
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Courage is Resistance to Fear
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.
-- Mark Twain
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Changing the Inner Attitudes
Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
-- William James
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Nothing is Really Work
Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
-- James M. Barrie
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Do What Lies Clearly at Hand
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance but to do what lies clearly at hand.
-- Thomas Carlyle
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You Must Sometimes Fight It Out
You cannot run away from a weakness; you must sometimes fight it out or perish. And if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
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The Most Difficult Task of All
For one human being to love another:
that is perhaps the most difficult task of all…
the work for which all other work is but a preparation.
It is a high inducement to the individual to ripen…
a great exacting claim upon us, something
that chooses us out and calls us to great things.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
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Believe in Your Strength
There are admirable potentialities in every human being. Believe in your strength and your youth. Learn to repeat endlessly to yourself, 'It all depends on me.'
-- Andre Gide (1869 - 1951)
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Excellence and Intensity
The excellency of every art is in its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate.
-- Keats
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Everything Lies in the Intensity
It is not enough for an activity to satisfy your desire for knowledge, bring you joy, or make you calmer and more relaxed. In every activity you must look for an opportunity to perfect yourself and become free inside. Yet even the manner in which humans practise art and science, as well as religion, betrays the fact that they are not really looking for a means of self-perfection. You will ask, ‘But what does perfecting yourself mean, then? What must we do to succeed?’ Perfecting yourself means to change the quality of your vibrations, so that you make them more intense or, in other words, more spiritual.
Everything lies in the intensity of your thoughts, feelings and the life within you; that is what initiatic Science reveals to us. Once human beings manage to live this intense life, all their activities, physical as well as spiritual, will only contribute to their evolution.
-- Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov
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Illuminate the Path According to Your Inner Light
Foster and polish
The warrior spirit
While serving in the world;
Illuminate the path
According to your inner light.
- Morihei Ueshiba
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The Direction of Your Train of Thought
Real, constructive mental power lies in the creative thought that shapes your destiny, and your hour-by-hour mental conduct produces power for change in your life. Develop a train of thought on which to ride. The nobility of your life as well as your happiness depends upon the direction in which that train of thought is going.
-- Laurence J. Peter (1919 - 1988)
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Strength and Will
Strength doesn't come from physical capacity. It comes from indomitable will.
-- Mahatma Gandhi
When the Sun Rises You Had Better Be Running
Every morning in Africa a gazelle awakens knowing it must today run faster than the fastest lion or it will be eaten. Every morning a lion awakens knowing it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It matters not whether you are a gazelle or a lion, when the sun rises you had better be running.
-- African Proverb
Tapas: The Way of Disciplined Effort
He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. This is the nature of living creatures.
-- Friedrich Nietzche
The previous discussion of Santosa included mention of our modern versions of the five kleshas. A klesha is literally an affliction, just as we would describe blindness or a spinal problem as an affliction. In the yogic tradition, the five afflictions are avidyā, asmitā, rāga, dwesha and abhinivesha. These can be translated as ignorance, egotism, attraction, aversion, and fear.
The way to overcome these afflictions, we are told, is through Tapas. In Sanskrit, Tapas means "heat," but in the context of the niyamas -- or observations -- of the Yoga Sutras it is usually translated as "disciplined effort." Tapas implies self-discipline in restraining our desires, controlling our senses, and focusing our actions towards pursuing a higher purpose in life. Through disciplined effort, we can "burn off" the negative aspects of life and clear a path towards happiness.
In the sixth teaching of the Bhagavad Gita, it is explained this way:
When a man disciplines his diet
and diversions, his physical actions,
his sleeping and waking,
discipline destroys his sorrow.
-- The Bhagavad Gita
Effort equals action, and action is the root of Karma. Action is both the rush through traffic to make the three o'clock meeting and the act of restraint to keep your cool and not descend into road rage. This first layer of Tapas, then, is Karmic: our choice of correct effort. The next step is the addition of discipline.
Disciplined effort can also be thought of as "doing what must be done," plus one other dimension: consistency. Often our best intentions guide us to go to the gym, eat healthier, put down the cigarettes or turn off the TV. We often start the new year with an abundance of actionable resolutions and great intentions. But old habits die hard, and it is consistency which allows us to overcome our habitual inertia and turn our intent into practice.
Consistency replaces old habits with new ones. It is putting the cigarettes in the trash and never picking up another, ever. It is being mindful of the food we put in our bodies at every meal. It is repurposing a piece of every day for practice, prayer, exercise, or whatever brings your personal life closer to a pursuit of your higher purpose.
Now let's add that subtle third layer, because this is where the transforming "burn" of Tapas comes in. It is not enough to be consistent in your correct efforts; your discipline must carry your actions through the difficult times as well. A friend just failed in his third attempt to stop smoking. "I had a stressful weekend," he explained.
The transcendent power of Tapas comes when we no longer allow any excuse or justification to stop us from doing what must be done. When the going gets tough is when we discover and forge our resiliency.
The single thread that weaves its way through all of these layers of Tapas, however, is Love. It is Karmic Action taken because it is the right thing to do, not born of fear, guilt, or aversion. This is such a delicate concept that my words could never express it as eloquently as does this quote:
Perhaps one of the most clear examples of the practice of tapas is marriage. Marriage requires commitment, consistency and love. Without any of these three things, marriage does not work. When these qualities are present however, we can celebrate the good days and hang on through the bad ones.
Tapas requires the same things. When we bring a commitment born of love to our consistent practice of yoga, we are practicing the niyama of tapas. It is with this spirit of abiding in the midst of difficulty which is at the heart of tapas.
-- Judith Hanson Lasater
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