★★★★☆ (4/5)
A selection of my favourite passages
• Try to have compassion for the person and remember how painful it is to be in such an enormous hurry. This way, we can maintain our own sense of well-being and avoid taking other people’s problems personally.
• This strategy has nothing to do with ceasing to do your very best but with being overly attached and focused on what’s wrong with life.
• The solution is to notice what’s happening in your head before your thoughts have a chance to build any momentum. The sooner you catch yourself in the act of building your mental snowball, the easier it is to stop.
• Then, instead of obsessing on your upcoming day, you say to yourself, “Whew, there I go again,” and consciously nip it in the bud. You stop your train of thought before it has a chance to get going. You can then focus, not on how overwhelmed you are, but on how grateful you are for remembering the phone call that needed to be made.
• The nature of your “in basket” is that it’s meant to have items to be completed in it – it’s not meant to be empty. There will always be phone calls that need to be made, projects to complete, and work to be done. In fact, it can be argued that a full “in basket” is essential for success. It means your time is in demand!
• In reality, almost everything can wait. Very little in our work lives truly falls into the “emergency” category. If you stay focused on your work, it will all get done in due time.
• Think about it for a moment. When you hurry someone along, interrupt someone, or finish his or her sentence, you have to keep track not only of your own thoughts but of those of the person you are interrupting as well.
• when you surrender your need to hog the glory, the attention you used to need from other people is replaced by a quiet inner confidence that is derived from letting others have it.
• Mark Twain said, “I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
• Your job is to try to determine what the people in your life are trying to teach you.
• You’ll discover the joy of participating in and witnessing other people’s happiness, which is far more rewarding than a battle of egos.
• I have found that, if you look deeply enough, you can almost always see the innocence in other people as well as in potentially frustrating situations.
• You can start with as little as five minutes and build up your capacity for patience, over time. Start by saying to yourself, “Okay, for the next five minutes I won’t allow myself to be bothered by anything. I’ll be patient.” What you’ll discover is truly amazing. Your intention to be patient, especially if you know it’s only for a short while, immediately strengthens your capacity for patience.
• Whenever we hold on to our anger, we turn “small stuff” into really “big stuff” in our minds. We start to believe that our positions are more important than our happiness. They are not.
• a year from now you aren’t going to care. It will be one more irrelevant detail in your life.
• “People are no longer human beings. We should be called human doings.”
• The beauty of doing nothing is that it teaches you to clear your mind and relax. It allows your mind the freedom to “not know,” for a brief period of time.
• Fortunately, there is an inviolable law in our emotional environment that goes something like this: Our current level of stress will be exactly that of our tolerance to stress. You’ll notice that the people who say, “I can handle lots of stress” will always be under a great deal of it! So, if you teach people to raise their tolerance to stress, that’s exactly what will happen.
• We take our own goals so seriously that we forget to have fun along the way, and we forget to cut ourselves some slack. We take simple preferences and turn them into conditions for our own happiness. Or, we beat ourselves up if we can’t meet our self-created deadlines.
• Using your back burner means allowing your mind to solve a problem while you are busy doing something else, here in the present moment.
• In other words, even though we often mess up, most of us are doing the best that we know how with the circumstances that surround us.
• Whether it’s ten minutes of meditation or yoga, spending a little time in nature, or locking the bathroom door and taking a ten-minute bath, quiet time to yourself is a vital part of life. Like spending time alone, it helps to balance the noise and confusion that infiltrate much of our day.
• Think of someone who truly irritates you, who makes you feel angry. Now, close your eyes and try to imagine this person as a tiny infant. See their tiny little features and their innocent little eyes. Know that babies can’t help but make mistakes and each of us was, at one time, a little infant. Now, roll forward the clock one hundred years. See the same person as a very old person who is about to die. Look at their worn-out eyes and their soft smile, which suggests a bit of wisdom and the admission of mistakes made. Know that each of us will be one hundred years old, alive or dead, before too many decades go by. You can play with this technique and alter it in many ways. It almost always provides the user with some needed perspective and compassion.
• Essentially, “seek first to understand” implies that you become more interested in understanding others and less in having other people understand you. It means mastering the idea that if you want quality, fulfilling communication that is nourishing to you and others, understanding others must come first. When you understand where people are coming from, what they are trying to say, what’s important to them, and so forth, being understood flows naturally; it falls into place with virtually no effort.
• Effective listening is more than simply avoiding the bad habit of interrupting others while they are speaking or finishing their sentences. It’s being content to listen to the entire thought of someone rather than waiting impatiently for your chance to respond.
• We often treat communication as if it were a race.
• If your primary goal isn’t to have everything work out perfectly but instead to live a relatively stress-free life, you’ll find that most battles pull you away from your most tranquil feelings.
• In low moods we lose our perspective and everything seems urgent. We completely forget that when we are in a good mood, everything seems so much better. We experience the identical circumstances – who we are married to, where we work, the car we drive, our potential, our childhood entirely differently, depending on our mood! When we are low, rather than blaming our mood as would be appropriate, we instead tend to feel that our whole life is wrong.
• When you’re in an ill mood, learn to pass it off as simply that: an unavoidable human condition that will pass with time, if you leave it alone, A low mood is not the time to analyze your life.
• The trick is to be grateful for our good moods and graceful in our low moods not taking them too seriously. The next time you feel low, for whatever reason, remind yourself, “This too shall pass.” It will,
• When you look at life and its many challenges as a test, or series of tests, you begin to see each issue you face as an opportunity to grow, a chance to roll with the punches. Whether you’re being bombarded with problems, responsibilities, even insurmountable hurdles, when looked at as a test, you always have a chance to succeed, in the sense of rising above that which is challenging you. If, on the other hand, you see each new issue you face as a serious battle that must be won in order to survive, you’re probably in for a very rocky journey.
• it simply means having the perspective to give others the benefit of the doubt.
• Seeing the innocence is a powerful tool for transformation that means when someone is acting in a way that we don’t like, the best strategy for dealing with that person is to distance ourselves from the behavior; to “look beyond it,” so that we can see the innocence in where the behavior is coming from.
• Underneath even the most annoying behavior is a frustrated person who is crying out for compassion.
• I’m not suggesting that it’s not okay for you to be right – only that if you insist on being right, there is often a price to pay – your inner peace.
• Humility and inner peace go hand in hand. The less compelled you are to try to prove yourself to others, the easier it is to feel peaceful inside.
• People are drawn to those with a quiet, inner confidence, people who don’t need to make themselves look good, be “right” all the time, or steal the glory. Most people love a person who doesn’t need to brag, a person who shares from his or her heart and not from his or her ego.
• It’s really difficult to become a contented person if you’re keeping score of all you do. Keeping track only discourages you by cluttering your mind with who’s doing what, who’s doing more, and so forth.
• Making things like garbage less relevant in your life will undoubtedly free up more time and energy for truly important things.
• Occasional harmless comments have an insidious tendency to become a way of looking at life. When you are weatherproofing another human being, it says nothing about them – but it does define you as someone who needs to be critical.
• One of the cardinal rules of joyful living is that judging others takes a great deal of energy and, without exception, pulls you away from where you want to be.
• When we judge or criticize another person, it says nothing about that person; it merely says something about our own need to be critical.
• there are many times when simply agreeing with criticism defuses the situation, satisfies a person’s need to express a point of view, offers you a chance to learn something about yourself by seeing a grain of truth in another position, and, perhaps most important, provides you an opportunity to remain calm.
• When you expect something to break, you’re not surprised or disappointed when it does. Instead of becoming immobilized when something is destroyed, you feel grateful for the time you have had.
• This philosophy is not a prescription for becoming passive or apathetic, but for making peace with the way things are. When your drinking glass does break, this philosophy allows you to maintain your perspective. Rather than thinking, “Oh my God,” you’ll find yourself thinking, “Ah, there it goes.”
• As you focus more on becoming more peaceful with where you are, rather than focusing on where you would rather be, you begin to find peace right now, in the present. Then, as you move around, try new things, and meet new people, you carry that sense of inner peace with you. It’s absolutely true that “Wherever you go, there you are.”
• The strategy itself is remarkably simple. It involves nothing more than pausing – breathing – after the person to whom you are speaking is finished.
• This harried form of communication encourages us to criticize points of view, overreact, misinterpret meaning, impute false motives, and form opinions, all before our fellow communicator is even finished speaking. No wonder we are so often annoyed, bothered, and irritated with one another. Sometimes, with our poor listening skills, it’s a miracle that we have any friends at all!
• Being more relaxed involves training yourself to respond differently to the dramas of life-turning your melodrama into a mellow-drama. It comes, in part, from reminding yourself over and over again (with loving kindness and patience) that you have a choice in how you respond to life.
• A closed mind is always fighting to keep everything else at arm’s length.
• The eye of the storm is that one specific spot in the center of a twister, hurricane, or tornado that is calm, almost isolated from the frenzy of activity. Everything around the center is violent and turbulent, but the center remains peaceful. How nice it would be if we too could be calm and serene in the midst of chaos – in the eye of the storm.
• You’ll find that if you create the goal to become more flexible, some wonderful things will begin to happen: You’ll feel more relaxed, yet you won’t sacrifice any productivity. You may even become more productive because you won’t need to expend so much energy being upset and worried
• there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way
• Pascal said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” I’m not sure I would go quite this far, but I am certain that a quiet mind is the foundation of inner peace. And inner peace translates into outer peace.
• the amount of stress we feel has more to do with how we relate to our problems than it does with the problems themselves.
• Mentally, hold the problem near to your heart. Ask yourself what valuable lesson(s) this problem might be able to teach you. Could it be teaching you to be more careful or patient? Does it have anything to do with greed, envy, carelessness, or forgiveness? Or something equally powerful?
• Practice the strategies, keep them in mind, yet don’t worry about being perfect. Cut yourself some slack!
• Circumstances don’t make a person, they reveal him or her.
• when you are upset, you are playing a key role in the creation of your own feelings. This means that you can also play a key role in creating new, more positive feelings
• Perhaps Benjamin Franklin said it best: “Our limited perspective, our hopes and fears become our measure of life, and when circumstances don’t fit our ideas, they become our difficulties.”
• True happiness comes not when we get rid of all of our problems, but when we change our relationship to them, when we see our problems as a potential source of awakening, opportunities to practice patience, and to learn. Perhaps the most basic principle of spiritual life is that our problems are the best places to practice keeping our hearts open.
• If being peaceful and loving are among your primary goals, then why not redefine your most meaningful accomplishments as being those that support and measure qualities such as kindness and happiness?
• Developing a more tranquil outlook on life requires that we know our own limits and that we take responsibility for our part in the process.
• It’s enormously helpful to experiment with the awareness that life is just one thing after another. One present moment followed by another present moment.
• If you regularly take a minute to check in with yourself, to ask yourself, “What’s really important?” you may find that some of the choices you are making are in conflict with your own stated goals. This strategy can help you align your actions with your goals and encourage you to make more conscious, loving decisions.
• If, for example, you get the message to write or call someone you love, go ahead and do it. If your intuitive heart says you need to slow down or take more time for yourself, try to make it happen. If you’re reminded of a habit that needs attention, pay attention. You’ll find that when your intuition gives you messages and you respond with action, you’ll often be rewarded with positive, loving experiences.
• Minding your own business goes far beyond simply avoiding the temptation to try to solve other people’s problems. It also includes eavesdropping, gossiping, talking behind other people’s backs, and analyzing or trying to figure out other people. One of the major reasons most of us focus on the shortcomings or problems of others is to avoid looking at ourselves.
• When you catch yourself involved where you really don’t belong, congratulate yourself for having the humility and wisdom to back off.
• We argue for our limitations, and they become our limitations.
FuzzyRants 