Quotes from the book Living from the heart

Some really wonderful quotes from the book - Living from the Heart: Heart Rhythm Meditation for Energy, Clarity, Peace, Joy, and Inner Power by Puran Bair

• Trust requires honesty and reciprocity. We don’t trust someone who doesn’t trust us. Where does it start? It starts with someone who has found something in himself or herself that is trustworthy and who looks for the same in others. Such a person is often a 'deep' person, who thinks about things deeply. This quality is developed by meditation.

• Practicing meditation has been compared to exploring a castle - the castle of the mind. As a result of this exploration, the mind of the meditator holds fewer surprises than that of one who has not yet explored the inner depths and heights. Consequently, the meditator is more reliable over a greater range of unexpected events.

• To be what you want to be, you need the help of your closest allies: your body and your mind. If you have trained them through concentration and rhythm, they will respond to your wish.

• The mind follows the tuning of the heart. If you try to control your mind directly, it easily escapes. But your thinking follows the desire of your heart like a raft follows the current.

• Drugs don’t produce energy in the taker; they only borrow it from the next day. Taking drugs is like taking out a shortterm loan with high interest.

• It is the stream of desire flowing in the heart that gives us our sense of direction. When we are unaware of this stream of emotion, we waste our time in pursuit of things whose attainment doesn't bring us happiness, and neglect those things that would fulfill us. The Heart Focused state can be disruptive to a life organized to avoid emotion and fill time with unimportant activities. Your heart will remind you of what you have always wanted, and then the question is, "What are you doing about it?"

• Although upward meditation provides relief from stress, downward meditation increases one’s ability to handle stress. What was stressful before will no longer be stressful or as stressful. We cannot remove all stressors from our life, and life would be boring if we could. What we can do is increase our physical and emotional strength, the strength of the heart, so that we can better handle the stress we have. Then, without making any changes in our life situation, we are at ease where we used to be tense.

• Don’t row against the current, and don’t simply float with the current, but direct your will along the current. In meditation we are consciously aiding an experience that we do not create consciously.

• Doing Meditation is like swimming in an infinite ocean of energy or, some would say, of love, spirit, or peace. As in swimming, there is a little technique to be learned, and there is a risk of the unfamiliar. When we learn to swim, entering the water seems like taking a risk, even though our bodies are mostly water and even though our natural buoyancy makes swimming easy. We don’t have to support our weight—the water does it. The water surrounding us has a current, making movement in one direction easier than in others. We learn to trust the water and then to direct our motions to navigate through it, diving deeply, swimming far, and generally enjoying our fluid nature. Swimming, like meditation, allows movement through a space that would otherwise be a barrier and an experience of an otherwise inaccessible portion of the world. When there is a barrier on land, one can go by sea.