Every difficult situation in our life provides us with an opportunity to be a better version of ourselves! When the panic because of the pandemic began to arise in our community, we started to wonder in what ways we could help. My daughters questioned how people would eat as there are so many kids who rely on food from school. The day that the stay at home order was released, they started collecting donations of boxed foods. Up till now, they have run 5 successful donation campaigns and their 6th is on the way!! If you're worried, always wonder how you can help others in need. When we think about others needs then our worries and anxiety starts to vanish! We all will have a story to tell about these times — what did we do? How did we help? How we made a difference? What is going to be your story!

Drive all blames into one!

This is advice on how to work with fellow beings. Everyone is looking for someone to blame and therefore aggression and neurosis keep expanding. Instead, pause and look at what's happening with you. When you hold on so tightly to your view of what they did, you get hooked. Your own self-righteousness causes you to get all worked up and to suffer. So work on cooling that reactivity rather than escalating it. This approach reduces suffering-yours and everyone else's
 ~🌹Pema Chodron

Be grateful to everyone!

Others will always show you exactly where you are stuck. They say or do something and you automatically get hooked into a familiar way of reacting-shutting down, speeding up, or getting all worked up. When you react in the habitual way, with anger, greed, and so forth, it gives you a chance to see your patterns and work with them honestly and compassionately. Without others provoking you, you remain ignorant of your painful habits and cannot train in transforming them into the path of  awakening.
🌹~ Pema Chodron

Logic depends on knowledge and since your knowledge is limited, your logic is also limited. If you can recognize this, you can take a a leap into the unknown, otherwise you are stuck in a whirlpool.

Sri Sri@www.artofliving.org

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves!

At the end of each day, someone were to play a video of you back to yourself and you could see it all, you would wince quite often and say "Ugh!"

You probably would see that you do all those things for which you criticize all those people you don't like in your life, all those people you judge. 

Basically, making friends with yourself is making friends with all those people too, because when you come to have this kind of honesty, gentleness and goodheartedness, combined with clarity about yourself, there's no obstacle to feeling loving-kindness for others as well.

So the Ground of Maitri is ourselves!

🌹Pema Chodron ~ The wisdom of no escape

* Maitri towards ourselves doesn't mean getting rid of anything, change ourselves or become something better. It's about befriending who we are already. It is accepting ourselves just as we are right now without any judgements.

What you seek is seeking you!

As you start to walk on the way....
the way appears!
~Rumi

First Day of School - Such a beautiful poetry!

In summertime the butterflies

dance around our dogwood tree.

Now summer's done and school's begun,

they're fluttering in me!

Will my teacher like me?

Will I make new friends?

Will I learn to write my name

before the school year ends?

Look! There's my teacher now-

she winks as I walk in.
And a boy with a friendly, freckled face
just flashed me a wide grin.

We learn to write alphabet-

and it's only the first day!

hey, I think those butterflies

are fluttering away!

I'll see you soon, my sunny friends

back where you belong-

dancing 'round the dogwood tree

when summer sings its song.

Maria Fleming’s 

"The path isn't a straight line; its a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths." – Barry H. Gillespie

Ekam sat, vipraha bahudha vadanti - The truth is one; seers express it in many ways - A beautiful thought to ponder upon for a peaceful world!

I say my prayers on beads of love, strung together with everlasting threads of devotion. I hold to no single Name—God, Spirit, Brahma, Allah, Heavenly Father, Divine Mother, for All are Thine.

I invoke Thee sometimes as Christ, Krishna, Shankaracharya, Mohammed, Buddha, Moses and other prophets; for I know Thou has delighted, and will ever delight, in revealing Thyself in different forms.

Anyone who says, "My master is the greatest incarnation of God, or the only liberated master," is unquestionably ignorant. The yardstick of judging fully liberated masters is possessed only by fully liberated disciples. A liberated disciple is completely loyal to his master, the guru who had shown him the way to liberation, but he always respects other avatars and masters.

🌹Paramhansa Yogananda

A thoughtful thought!!!

You should make a greater effort. Forget the past and trust more in God. Our fate is not predestined by him; nor is karma the sole factor, though our lives are influenced by our past thoughts and past activities. If you are not happy with the way life is turning out, change the pattern. I don't like to hear people sigh and ascribe present failure to past-life errors; to do so is spiritual laziness. Get busy and weed the garden of your life.

- Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda

Happiness is an inside job!!

Enlightenment ~

Knowing.... how much we don't know!!:)

We are creating our reality!

"Each person’s life is like a mandala – a vast, limitless circle. We stand in the center of our own circle, and everything we see, hear and think forms the mandala of our life."
~ Pema Chodron

What Enhances Your Beauty?

 

When your mind is not complaining, responsible, courageous, confident and hollow and empty, you are inexplicably beautiful. A person who cannot correct or act has no right to complain. And when a person can correct or act, he will never complain. Complaining is a sign of weakness. Complaining is the nature of utter ignorance where one does not know the Self. Complaint takes away the beauty that is inborn in you. And it shows up more on the one who is on this path. Worldly mind is a complaining mind; Divine mind is a dancing mind. Just complaining without indicating the solution is irresponsibility. When the solutions are not workable, finding alternative solutions is courage. For external beauty, you put on things; for real beauty, you have to drop all the things. For external beauty you have to have make-up; for your real Beauty you only have to realise that you are MADE-UP!

🌹Sri Sri
www.artofliving.org

Here's to strong women!

May we know them,
May we be them,
May we raise them!!