Gratitude invites a sense of sufficiency.

A kind life...is fundamentally a life of courage.

Because we do not rest, we lose our way.

In that inevitable, excruciatingly human moment, we are offered a powerful choice. This choice is perhaps one of the most vitally important choices we will ever make, and it determines the course of our lives from that moment forward. The choice is this: Will we interpret this loss as so unjust, unfair, and devastating that we feel punished, angry, forever and fatally wounded-- or, as our heart, torn apart, bleeds its anguish of sheer, wordless grief, will we somehow feel this loss as an opportunity to become more tender, more open, more passionately alive, more grateful for what remains?

Effortlessness is the ability to slow down and listen for the spaces between the joints... Deep within all things there is a natural rhythm, a music of opening and closing, expansion and contraction.

Many of us incorrectly assume that a spiritual life begins when we change what we normally do in our daily life. We feel we must change our job, our living situation, our relationship, our address, our diet, or our clothes before we can truly begin a spiritual practice. And yet it is not the act but the awareness, the vitality, and the kindness we bring to our work that allows it to become sacred.

If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath— our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us.