When Things Fall Apart
Pema Chodron
Summary
How to accept life for what it is
Rating: 5/5
Notes
We all need to be reminded and encouraged to relax with whatever arises and bring whatever we encounter to the path
Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth
No one ever tells us to stop running away from fear. We are rarely told to move closer, to just be there, to become familiar with fear
The most heartbreaking thing of all is how we cheat ourselves out of the present moment
We don’t know anything. We call something bad, we call it good. But really we just don’t know.
Things are always in transition if only we could realize it
The spiritual journey makes going beyond hope and fear, stepping into unknown territory and continuing to move forward
We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives
Meditation is about opening and relaxing with whatever arises, without picking and choosing
The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves yet we need to be most compassionate and develop a love/kindness relationship with ourselves
We spend our whole lives escaping from the monster of our minds
Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides
Death and hopelessness provide proper motivation for living an insightful compassionate life
8 dharmas we get caught up in: pleasure and pain, praise and criticism, fame and disgrace, gain and losing what we have
- When we are caught up in these, we suffer
Become inquisitive about these things and understand how each of them feels
People need help and there’s no way to help anybody unless we start with ouorselves
Impermanence is the goodness of reality - it is the essence of everything
Pain and pleasure are inseparable - pain is not a punishment and pleasure is not a reward
Recognize everything in your life as impermanent
What we habitually regard as obstacles are not our enemies but our friends
We are all addicted to avoiding pain
Seeking security or perfection is some kind of death. It doesn’t have any fresh air. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience
To be fully alive and fully human is to be thrown out of the nest, to always be in no man’s land experiencing each moment as new and fresh
running away from the immediacy of our experience is like preferring death to life
Studying ourselves provides all the tools we need
Compassionate action involves working with ourselves as much as working with others
We can’t make things completely wrong or right because things are a lot more slippery and ambiguous than that
Ego is our opinions which we take to be solid, real and the absolute truth of how things are
Never give up on yourself so you never give up on others
‘Approach what you find repulsive, help the ones you think you cannot help and go to places that scare you’
The world is always displaying itself, always moving and changing but we are so self-involved that we miss it
There is no attention to the experience we have. Our experience is the only experience there is. This is the ultimate teacher
Sometimes you have to let everything just fall apart
The path is the goal
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Make Something Wonderful
Steve Jobs
Summary
The life of Steve Jobs in his own words
Rating: 5/5
Notes
Make something wonderful and put it out there
‘You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear’
When you’re a stranger in a place, you notice thing you don’t otherwise (Jobs after India trip)
Whenever you start with nothing, always shoot for the moon. You have nothing to lose.
You never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few times
Never be afraid to fail. You never achieve what you want without falling flat on your face a few times
We are never taught to listen to our intuitions, to develop and nurture them. But if you do pay attention to these subtle insights, you can make them come true
Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights others don’t see
Believe that some of what you follow with your heart will come back and make your life richer. And it will. And you will gain even firmer trust on your instincts and intuitions
Make your avocation your vocation. Make what you love your work.
The journey is the reward. The reward isn’t in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it’s in crossing the rainbow
To find A+ talent, if experienced, look at their track record and results
The world we know is a human creation and we can push it forward
The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do (read whole ad ‘here’s to the crazy ones)
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit - Aristotle
Hire people better than you are
You can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life
It’s impossible to connect the dots looking forward, but they make sense looking backwards so you have to trust the dots will somehow connect in your future
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you
***
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