Trade 4

It didn’t hit my coffee money, but felt uncomfortable holding it below the spine.. did go back up in the end.
Maybe ill fix to a hard SL in future. Will see how things go

Negative day

-$36.86

Beginning :781.96
Ending: 745.10

Very bad week from averaging in… Gaining back my discipline on Thur and Fri.
Even though the results are not impressive yet, with this level of discipline I will be able to scalp my way back slowly!

How to see yourself as you really are by Dalai Lama

• Ignorance leads to exaggerating the importance of beauty, ugliness, and other qualities
• Exaggeration of these qualities lead to lust, hatred, jealousy, belligerence, and so on
• These destructive emotions lead to actions contaminated by misperception
• These actions lead to powerless birth and rebirth in cyclic existence and repeated entanglement in trouble
• Removing ignorance undermines our exaggeration of positive and negative qualities; this undercuts lust, hatred, jealousy, belligerence, and so on, putting an end to actions contaminated by misperception, thereby ceasing powerless birth and rebirth in cyclic existence
• Insight is the way out
• At the point when anger and lust are generated, reality is not seen; rather, an unreal mental projection of extreme badness or extreme goodness is seen, evoking twisted, unrealistic actions.
• In all areas of thought, you need to be able to analyze, and then, when you have come to a decision, you need to be able to set your mind to it without wavering

Change your mind and your life will follow by Karen Casey

• We are as happy as we make up our minds to be
• We can have better lives if we make up our minds to do so
• We decide
• It doesn’t take much effort but willingness to make tiny shifts in how we perceive our experiences and our fellow travellers
• 12 principles
  • Tend your own garden; attend to your own life, we are not in charge of others!
  • Stop focusing on problems so their solutions can emerge; our answers are always within
  • Let go of outcomes; you are responsible only for making the effort, nothing more
  • Change your mind; If you don’t like your thinking, particularly if it’s harmful, you can change it; you choose your thoughts
  • Choose to act rather than react; don’t let others decide what kind of day you are going to have; stop being so dependent on the opinions of others; detach from other people’s business; express gratitude for every experience in your life
  • Give up your judgements; see the good in others and make it a habit; choose to be peaceful rather than right; our criticism always reflect how we feel about ourselves
  • Remember that you are not in control; our desire to control comes from insecurity and inadequacy. The more we try to control, the less willing they are to remain in our life; back off; don’t speak unless someone honestly asks you for your input. Letting others make their own choices, which might turn well into mistakes, is good for other people and for us; attempt to control and you will fail. Every choice, every experience, every person in our lives is here for a reason. No one shows up by accident. We chose every person and interaction for the lessons they bring.
  • Discover your own lessons; Get a life. With someone else on your mind, you miss your own lessons. You can’t hear your inner voice if your mind is on someone else
  • Do no harm; do no verbal harm. Doing anything less than giving our full attention is simply rude, and rudeness harms the spirit of everyone touched by the interaction. Give up criticism. Do no physical harm. Give up arguing, one argument at a time
  • Quiet your mind. We can take control of our minds. We can enjoy peace, experience serenity, and become aware of the messages God has for us. Any thought can be released. Choose your thoughts wisely. If a thought is troubling you, choose another. You can’t hear your inner guide without a quiet mind
  • Every encounter is a holy encounter – respond accordingly. No experience is accidental. Try to find the lesson in every experience. Everyone we meet is destined to be on our journey
  • There are always 2 voices in your mind – one is always wrong. Be vigilant of your choices. Each day the process for change can begin again
• Summary
  • Live and let live
  • Turn your focus from problem to solution
  • Let go; we cannot be an example of peace except in each present moment
  • Experience a miracle
  • Act, don’t react
  • Drop your judgements. Judgements and love cannot co-exist
  • Accept your powerlessness. It’s the greatest gift
  • Be the centre of your own attention
  • Do no harm
  • Quiet your mind and hear God’s voice
  • Every encounter is a holy encounter
  • There are 2 voices in your mind. One is always wrong. Choose carefully

Evolve Your Brain by Joe Dispenza

 

• Mental rehearsing and actual doing feels the same to the brain
• Whatever you spend your time mentally attending to, that is what you are and what you will become
• We choose to remain in the same circumstances because we have become addicted to the emotional state they produce and the chemicals that arouse the state of being
• To change is to become different; it means that are we are no longer who we used to be
• We have modified how we think, what we do, what we say, how we act
• Personal change takes an intentional act of the will, and it usually means that something was making us uncomfortable enough to want to do things differently
• Our thoughts become matter
• Our thoughts literally become matter
• An innate higher intelligence gives us life and can heal the body
• Thoughts are real; thoughts directly affect the body
• Most of the thoughts are ideas that we make up and then come to believe. Believing merely becomes a habit
• We can reinvent ourselves
• We can make a conscious effort to change and reinvent ourselves
• Stop visiting memories of the past and the associated attitudes that defines me as a victim
• We are capable of paying attention so well that we can lose track of time and space
• Each person have to reach a state of absolute decision, utter will, inner passion and complete focus
• We can rewire our brain and change our mind
• Remembering through the law of repetition
• The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind
• If we have been accustomed to feeling unworthy, we want to continue to feel that way because we are in the neurochemical habit of being unworthy. It’s the routine, familiar, natural, easy way that we have been thinking and feeling about ourselves
• What this power is I cannot say: all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it
• The biggest reason most people cannot utilize the frontal lobe is because we are addicted to our emotions and feelings from the body
• Properly employed, the frontal lobe affords us the ability to look at situations objectively, organize our thoughts, make a plan of action, follow through on that plan, and evaluate our actions as successful or unsuccessful
• Having your intention, focus and will all coming into alignment
• Engage the frontal lobe, don’t be distracted by external stimuli
• When we focus and think of something, we become unaware of time, we lose awareness of the environment and we don’t have any concept of our body
• When the frontal lobe is not activated, we can only respond to what we know and what is already stored in our brain, and we will always choose what we know. We think we are choosing, but actually, we are just using automatic response mechanisms designed for immediate relief and gratification
• When frontal lobe is activated
  • Intentional awareness and long attention span
  • Contemplation of possibilities, acting on them
  • Decisiveness
  • Clarity
  • Joy
  • Usable skills
  • Adaptability
  • Ability to learn from mistakes and do things differently next time
  • Ability to plan a future and stick to projected plans
  • Focus
  • Daily review of options
  • Strengthened sense of self
  • Ability to take action towards goal
  • Disciplined behaviour
  • Ability to build greater options from prior experiences
  • Ability to make dreams, goals, and intents more real than external world and feedback of the body
  • Concentration to the exclusion of everything else
  • Ability to stay present with the self and internal thoughts
  • Proactiveness
  • Individuality
• When frontal lobe is not functioning
  • Listless and lazy
  • Uninspired and unmotivated, with no initiative
  • Desirous of sameness, routine and predictability
  • Unwilling to learn
  • Able to be easily distracted
  • Unable to make future plans
  • Behaving in ways that never match desires
  • Unable to complete tasks and actions
  • Reactive
  • Mentally rigid, disliking change
  • Fixated on the same negative thoughts
  • Unable to listen well
  • Disorganized
  • Impulsive
  • Overly emotional
  • Forgetful
  • Unable to see options
  • Follower
• There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen
• To change takes a great deal of effort, will and commitment
• Mental rehearsal and actual doing are one and the same
• If we slow down, get our mind focused on specifics of who and how we want to be, and start to put a mental image of that new person in the sights of the frontal lobe (or mentally practice a new act of any nature), by our cognitive effort, we get a double bonus. Not only are we able to wire new circuits, but also prune the previously hardwired connections
• Spend time rehearsing that idea, and fall in love with that idea
• To truly reinvent, revise and reconceptualise ourselves, we have to use the process of mental rehearsal to dire those new circuits on a daily basis and at every opportunity. If we rehearse every day, especially first time in the morning, we walk out of the house with these circuits already warmed up. Since we’ve already been that new person in our mind – we are already in that mindset – it’s a lot easier to be that person when we encounter a situation that challenges that new concept
• By firm intention and by quieting the rest of the brain, we can become more astute at observing ourselves. We can better identify our tendencies and weaknesses
• We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an action, but a habit.
• Knowledge, instruction, feedback
• It takes no more effort to form a positive thought than it does a negative one
• Look at the old pictures, but don’t go back there
• After modifying your thinking, you need to modify your behaviour
• Actions to be consistent with thoughts
• We keep seeing the same things the same way in our life because we have been conditioned to keep looking for the same
• As we get better at paying attention and applying wilful intention, our thoughts can affect our life.
• Feelings and emotions are only end products of past experiences. To feel is to think in the past. When we unconsciously feel the same feelings every single day, we create more of the familiar
• If we think in new and different ways, we are altering our future
• The world offers more possibilities than we have been trained and conditioned to accept
• It is not enough to put little time and effort into changing the mind, We must become the mind until it is natural and easy to express the new self
• We have to transform ourselves from being an intellectual thinker to a passionate doer, until we can “be” what we set our mind to become
• And when we can be anything, we can observe reality from an expanded state of mind, instead of the desperate states of mind that plague humanity
• Aligning our thoughts, actions and intentions bring this field of possibility to us

When we live in a future that we have not yet experienced with our senses but have lived in our mind, we live by what may be the ultimate demonstration of quantum law.

The richest man who ever lived by Steven K. Scott

• What keeps us from being truly happy?
  • Looking for happiness in the wrong places
  • A lack of gratitude
  • Envy; It takes your eyes off what you have and focuses your attention on what you don’t have
  • A sense of entitlement; as long as our heart is focused upon what we don’t have and on what we think we’re entitled to, we will not be happy
  • Foolishness; our feelings are subjected to an emotional roller coaster. They are unreliable and can change in an instant
• Overcoming barriers to happiness
  • Develop a grateful heart
  • Eliminate your sense of entitlement
  • Root out the weeds of envy
  • Start living wisely; wisdom involves action
• 4 qualities to make you invaluable
  • Impeccable honesty; dishonesty destroys foundation of relationship and produces never-ending stress
  • Kindness
  • Generosity – the quality that receives more than it gives
  • Graciousness
• Winning conflicts and overcoming adversity
  • Understand the potential consequences of the conflict
  • Keep as your goal “achieving the best possible outcome for all parties involved”. Conflicts are to make things better
  • Do not answer a fool in the manner he attacks
  • Never prolong an argument
  • Give an unexpected gift
  • Be quick to forgive
• Dealing with adversity
  • Realize that adversity is a valuable part of life; it reveals the gold and silver of our character
  • Accept responsibility for your contribution to the situation
• Gary Smalley’s steps to removing anger
  • Define the offense in writing
  • Allow yourself to grieve the loss
  • Try to gain a better understanding of the offender
  • “Treasure-hunt” the offense; look for the good that have come out
  • Write a letter, but don’t send it out
  • Release the other person from the hurts they have inflicted and from future expectations; forgiveness isn’t a feeling or a word, it’s a choice.
  • Reach out
• Naivete and IQ
  • Oversimplification. Important decisions are never simple. There are important factors hidden under the surface
  • Presumption
  • Misplaced trust
  • Superficial appearances
  • Laziness
  • Haste
  • Narrow vision
  • Integrity
  • Greed
  • Arrogance
  • Wrong priorities
• Look well enough into the matter before making any important decisions
• The consequences of greed
  • It can steal your life away
  • It can destroy your financial security
  • It can affect your loved ones
  • It can bankrupt you spiritually
  • It can steal your happiness and reason for a living
  • It can steal your integrity
  • It creates a false sense of security
• Replacing pride with humility
  • Be grateful
  • Become more attentive to and focused upon the needs of others
• Acquiring wisdom
  • A checking account of knowledge
  • Understanding why you act the way you do
  • A fountain of life; understanding not only brings life to your deepest needs and desires, it also makes you a source of life to those around you
  • The favour of those in authority
  • Value and honor
  • Riches; spiritual richness
  • Protection and safety
  • Long life
• Consequences of not gaining wisdom
  • Decisions that look good but end badly
  • A life without purpose, fulfilment and happiness
  • Self deception
  • Foolish decisions

Barefoot Doctor’s Handbook for the urban warrior

• I need no longer struggle and strain to get what I want. There’s nothing heroic about the busted gut or tensed jaw, these are pastimes for fools. I deserve to have things be easy for me, this doesn’t make me lazy. I’m willing to ease off on myself now and let things come to me. I ease off on the world now and, as I do, the world eases off on me- now there’s more space for us all to play in. I choose “easy” so everything is easy for me. I am not a slacker, I’m just choosing ease, for I am free to take things as easy as I please
• Visualise yourself as a pure, radiant being, with no baggage from past or plans for the future
• Feel it. You’re not your possessions, your desires, your people, your habits, your fears, you’re not even your body. You’re simply nobody. Revel in the freedom of it, then move out on to the street. Being no one at all, you’ve nothing to lose, and everything is yours.
• Everything you do requires you first be clear about what kind of outcome you intend.
• Real strength comes from a unity of intention, passion and energy
• True strength comes from softness.
• Sleep on your right side, coiled up like a dragon
• Removing waste, don’t force out. Just relax and sink and flow. Tie top
• You do not possess anything. Everything is on loan.
• When you make an agreement, stick to it
• Move your body from the one point 6cm below your naval. The more often you concentrate on bringing awareness to the one point, the more you find yourself naturally moving from it
• When you wake up, tell yourself “I choose to enjoy this day come what may
• Breathe freely
• Lengthen your spine
• Broaden your hips and shoulders
• Soften your muscles
• Sink your chi down to one point
• Be mindful of what you are doing, saying, thinking and feeling at all times

Who Will Cry When You Die by Robin Sharma

• Discover your calling; bring more of yourself into your work and focus on what you do best
• Every day, be kind to a stranger
• Maintain your perspective; Is there a wiser and more enlightened way to look at the situation?
• Practice tough love, which is self-discipline!
• Keep a journal, analyse and evaluate what you do, lessons learnt, personal growth
• Develop a honest philosophy; don’t say what you don’t mean
• Honor your past; Every second you dwell on the past, you steal from the future. Every minute you spend focusing on the problems, you take away from finding the solutions. And thinking about all those things that you wish never happened to you is actually blocking all the things you want to happen from entering into your life. Given the timeless truth that holds that you become what you think about all day long, it makes no sense to worry about past events or mistakes unless you want to experience them for a second time. Success is not measured by the position that one have reached in life, but by the obstacles he have overcome while trying to succeed.
• Start your day well, first 30 minutes only purest thoughts and finest actions. Focus on all the good things in life, and good things that you expect to unfold
• Learn to say no graciously, concentrate on areas of excellence
• Take a weekly Sabbatical
• Talk to yourself; select your phrase and train yourself to focus on it
• Schedule worry breaks; Mark Twain: I’ve had a lot of trouble in my life, some of which actually happened
• Model a child, they are more energetic, creative
• Genius is 99% inspiration, be inspired in life!
• Care for the temple
• Learn to be silent. To reconnect with who you really are as a person and to come to know the glory that rests within you, you must find time to be silent on a regular basis. Experiencing solitude will keep you centred on your highest life priorities
• Think of your ideal neighbourhood
• Get up early
• See your troubles as blessings
• Laugh more!!
• Spend a day without your watch
• Take more risks
• Live a life, there are no tragedies, only lessons. No problems, only opportunities waiting to be recognized as solutions by the person of wisdom
• Learn from a good movie
• Bless your money
• Focus on the worthy; know what needs to be left undone
• Create a love account; random acts of kindness, senseless acts of beauty
• Get behind people’s eyeballs
• List all your worries
• Practice the action habit
• See your children as gifts
• Enjoy the path, not just the reward; the real value of setting and achieving goals lies not in the rewards you receive but in the person you become as a result of reaching your goals
• Remember that awareness precedes change; you will never be able to eliminate a weakness you don’t even know about. By paying attention to weakness, you attract solutions into your life
• Master your time
• Keep your cool, use only words that are true, necessary and kind
• Cure your monkey mind; present moment awareness
• Get good at asking
• Look for the higher meaning of your work
• Develop your talents; too many people spend more time focusing on their weaknesses than developing their strengths
• Connect with nature
• Use your commute time
• Go on news fast
• Get serious about setting goals
• Remember the rule of 21
• Practice forgiveness
• Drink fresh fruit juice
• Create a pure environment
• Walk in the woods
• Get a coach
• Take a mini vocation
• Become a volunteer; learn to serve
• Listen to music daily
• Write a legacy statement
• Find 3 great friends
• Meditate
• Have a living funeral, practice dying
• Stop complaining and start living
• Increase your value. To get more, you have to be more
• Be unorthodox. Don’t do things because everyone else does them. Do things that are right for you.
• Carry a goal card
• Be more than your moods. You are just the thinker of your thoughts.
• Savor the simple stuff; the only things we can take away are our memories and all those great life experiences that adds value to our lives
• Stop condemning. See the richness of the society from its diversity Take your life into your own hands and you have no one to blame
• See your day as your life
• You change your life from the second you make a decision from the depths of your heart to be a better, more dedicated human being. The effort to maintain that discipline takes much longer
• Create a mastermind alliance
• Create a daily code of conduct, values, virtues and vows
• Imagine a richer reality. To improve your life, you must first improve your thinking. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are.
• Be the CEO of your life
• Be humble. You have so much more to learn
• Don’t finish every book you start
• Don’t be so hard on yourself, human beings are designed to make mistakes
• Make a vow of silence
• Don’t pick up the phone every time it rings
• Recreation must involve re-creation
• Choose worthy opponents
• Sleep less
• Have a family mealtime
• Become an imposter, fake it till you make it
• Take a public speaking course
• Stop thinking tiny thoughts; Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never ho any higher than you think. It’s not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult. It’s not what you are that’s holding you back. It’s what you think you’re not.
• Don’t worry about things you cannot change
• Re-write your life story. At any moment I could start being more of the person I dream to be- but which moment should I choose?
• Plant a tree
• Find your place of peace; youth is not a time of life, it’s a state of mind
• Take more pictures. Record the best times of your life
• Become an adventurer. Make a list of pursuits and go for them!
• Decompress before you go home
• Respect your instincts
• Collect quotes that inspire you
• Love your work
• Selflessly serve
• Live fully so you can die happy. When all the clutter is stripped away from your life, its true meaning will become clear; to live for something more than yourself. The purpose of life is a life of purpose.

This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a true force of Nature instead of a feverish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and, as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work, the more I love. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It’s a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle

• If you can recognize, even occasionally, the thoughts that go through your mind as simply thoughts, if you can witness your own metal emotional reactive patterns as they happen, then that dimension is already emerging in you as the awareness in which thoughts and emotions happen – the timeless inner space in which the content of your life unfolds
• The stream of thinking has enormous momentum that can easily drag you along with it. Every thought pretends that it matters so much. It wants to draw your attention in completely.
• Wisdom is not a product of thought. The deep knowing that is wisdom arises through the simple act of giving someone or something your full attention. It is the healer of separation
• Whenever you are immersed in compulsive thinking, you are avoiding what is. You don’t want to be where you are. Here. Now.
• The realm of consciousness is much vaster than thought can grasp. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.
• You discover that a “bored person” is not who you are. Boredom is simply a conditioned energy movement within you. Neither are you an angry, sad, or fearful person. Boredom, anger, sadness or fears are not “yours”, not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and go is you. You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.
• Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don’t see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.
• The next step in human evolution is to transcend thought. This is now our urgent task. It doesn’t mean not to think anymore, but simply not to be completely identified with thought, possessed by thought.
• Feel the energy of your inner body. Immediately mental noise slows down or ceases. Feel it in your hands, your feet, your abdomen, your chest. Feel the life that you re, the life that animates the body. The body then becomes a doorway, so to speak, into a deeper sense of aliveness underneath the fluctuating emotions and underneath your thinking
• On the surface it seems that the present moment is only one of the many, many moments. Each day of your life consists of thousands of moments where different things happen. Yet if you look more deeply, is there not only one moment, ever? Is life ever not “this moment”?
• This one moment – Now – is the only thing you can never escape from, the one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens, no matter how much your life changes, one thing is certain: it’s always Now.
• Since there is no escape from the Now, why not welcome it, be friendly with it?
• The division of life into past, present and future is mind-made and ultimately illusionary. Past and future are thought forms, mental abstractions. The past can only be remembered Now. What you remember is an event that took place in the Now, and you remember it Now. So the only thing that is real, the only thing there ever is is the Now.
• There is something that matters more than any of those things and that is finding the essence of who you are beyond that short-lived entity, that short-lived personalized sense of self.
• You find peace not b rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level
• By knowing yourself as the awareness in which phenomenal existence happens, you become free of dependency on phenomena and free of self-seeking in situations, places, and conditions. In other words: what happens or doesn’t happen is not that important anymore. Things lose their heaviness, their seriousness. A playfulness comes into your life. You recognize this world as a cosmic dance, the dance of form – no more and no less.
• Most people’s lives are run by desire and fear. Desire is the need to add something to yourself in order to be yourself more fully. All fear is the fear of losing something and thereby becoming diminished and being less.
• Surrender is surrender to this moment, not to a story which you interpret this moment and then try to resign yourself to it
• For instance, you may have a disability and can’t walk anymore. The condition is as it is. Perhaps your mind is now creating a story that says, “this is what my life has come to. I have ended up in a wheelchair. Life have treated me harshly and unfairly. I don’t deserve this. Can you accept the isness of this moment and not confuse it with a story the mind has created around it?
• Suffering is necessary until you realise it is unnecessary
• Unhappiness needs a mind-made “me” with a story, a conceptual identity. It needs time – past and future. When you remove tie from your unhappiness, what is it that remains?? The such-ness of this moment remains.
• Much suffering, much unhappiness arises when you take each thought that comes into your head for the truth. Situations don’t make you unhappy. They may cause you physical pain, but they don’t make you unhappy. Your thoughts make you unhappy. Your interpretations, the stories you tell yourself make you unhappy.
• “The thoughts I am thinking right now are making me unhappy.” This realization breaks your unconscious identification with those thoughts.
• What a miserable day.
  He didn’t have the decency to return my call
  She let me down
  Little stories we tell ourselves and others, often in the form of complaints. They are unconsciously designed to enhance our always deficient sense of self through being “right” and making something or someone “wrong”. Being “right” places us in a position of imagined superiority and so strengthens our false sense of self, the ego. This also creates some kind of enemy: yes, the ego needs enemies to define its boundary, and even the weather serves that function.
  Through habitual mental judgement and emotional contraction, you have a personalized, reactive relationship to people and events in your life. These are all forms of self-created suffering, but they are not recognized as such because to the ego they are satisfying. The ego enhances itself through reactivity and conflict.
  How simple life would be without those stories.
  It is raining.
  He did not call.
  I was there. She was not.
• When you are suffering, when you are unhappy, stay totally with what is Now. Unhappiness or problems cannot survive in the Now.
• Suffering begins when you mentally name or label a situation in some way as undesirable or bad. You resent a situation and that resentment personalizes it and brings in a reactive “me.”
  Naming and labelling are habitual, but that habit can be broken. Start practising “not naming” with small things. If you miss a plane, drop and break a cup, or slip and fall in the mud, can you refrain from naming the experience as bad or painful? Can you immediately accept the “isness” of that moment?
  Naming something as bad causes an emotional contraction within you. When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is suddenly available to you.
• The contraction cuts you off from that power, the power of life itself
• Accept that you cannot accept. Bring acceptance into your nonacceptance
• As long as the ego runs your life, most of your thoughts, emotions, and actions arise from desire and fear. In relationships you then wither want of fear something from the other person.
  What you want from them may be pleasure or material gain, recognition, praise or attention, or a strengthening of your sense of self through comparison and through establishing that you are, have, or know more than they. What you fear is that the opposite may be the case, and they may diminish your sense of self in some way.
  When you make the present moment the focal point of your attention – instead of using it as a means to an end – you go beyond the ego and beyond the unconscious compulsion to use people as a means to an end, the end of being self-enhancement at the cost of others. When you give your fullest attention to whoever you are interacting with, you take past and future out of the relationship, except for practical matters. When you are fully present with everyone you meet, you relinquish the conceptual identity you made for them – your interpretation of who they are and what they did in the past – and are able to interact without the egoic movements of desire and fear. Attention, which is alert stillness, is the key.
  How wonderful to go beyond wanting and fearing in your relationships. Love does not want or fear anything.
• If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion, peace.
  The ego doesn’t like to hear this, because if it cannot be reactive and righteous anymore, it will lose strength.
• To know another human being in their essence, you don’t really need to know anything about them – their past, their history, their story. We confuse knowing about them with a deeper knowing that is non-conceptual. Knowing about and knowing are totally different modalities. One is concerned with form, the other with formless. One operates through thought, the other through stillness.
  Knowing about is helpful for practical purposes. On that level, we cannot do without it. When is it the predominant modality in relationships, however, it becomes very limiting, even destructive. Thoughts and concepts create an artificial barrier, a separation between human beings. Your interactions are then not rooted in Being, but become mind-based. Without the conceptual barriers, love is naturally present in all human interactions
• Most human interactions are confined to the exchange of words – the realm of thought. It is essential to bring some stillness, particularly into your close relationships. No relationships can thrive without the sense of spaciousness that comes with stillness. Meditate or spend silent time in nature together. When going for a walk or sitting in the car or at home, become comfortable with being in stillness together. Stillness cannot and need not be created. Just be receptive to the stillness that is already there, but is obscured by mental noise.
  If spacious stillness is missing, the relationship will be dominated by the mind and can easily be taken over by problems and conflict. If stillness is there, it can contain anything.
• True listening is another way of bringing stillness into the relationship. When you truly listen to someone, the dimension of stillness arises and becomes an essential part of the relationship. But true listening is a rare skill. Usually, the greater part of a person’s attention is taken up by their thinking. At best, they may be evaluating your words or preparing the next thing to say. Or they may not be listening at all, lost in their own thoughts.
  True listening goes far beyond auditory perception. It is the arising of alert attention, a space of presence in which the words are being received. The words now become secondary. They may e meaningful or they may not make sense. Far more important than what you are listening to is the act of listening itself, the space of conscious presence that arises as you listen. That space s a unifying field of awareness in which you meet the other person without the separative barriers created by conceptual thinking. And now the other person is no longer “other”. In that space, you are joined together as one awareness, one consciousness.
• You free yourself from the pain body by becoming aware of it. Realize that it is not who you are, and recognize it for what it is: past pain. Witness it as it happens in your partner or in yourself. When your unconscious identification with it is broken, when you are able to observe it within yourself, you don’t feed it anymore, and it will gradually lose its energy charge.
• When you appreciate an object for what it is, when you acknowledge its being without mental projection, you cannot not feel grateful for its existence. You may also sense that it is not really inanimate, that it only appears so to the senses.

Dalai Lama: The Path to Tranquillity – Daily Wisdom

• If you have fear of some pain or suffering, you should examine whether there is anything you can do about it. If you can, there is no need to worry about it; if you cannot do anything, then also there is no need to worry
• Human happiness and human satisfaction must ultimately come from within oneself. It is wrong to expect some final satisfaction to come from money or from a computer
• The basic nature of human beings should be very gentle, or we would have been born with animal claws and huge teeth
• If objects and people evoke attachment in us, we do not understand the true nature of phenomena. We can only become detached by realizing the true nature of things
• Human potential is the same for all. Your feeling, “I am of no value” is wrong. Absolutely wrong. You are deceiving yourself. We all have the power of thought – so what are you lacking? If you have willpower, then you can do anything. It is usually said that you are your own master.
• If one’s life is simple, contentment has to come. Simplicity is extremely important for happiness. Having few desires, feeling satisfied with what you have, is very vital: satisfaction with just enough food, clothing, and shelter to protect yourself from the elements. And finally, there is an intense delight in abandoning faulty states of mind and in cultivating helpful ones in meditation.
• Happiness is a state of mind. With physical comforts if your mind is still in a state of confusion and agitation, it is not happiness. Happiness means calmness of mind.
• It looks like there is an awful lot of work to do. If you had to analyse all your dreams there will be no time left to dream
• For a bodhisattva to be successful in accomplishing the practice of the six perfections – generosity, ethical discipline, tolerance, joyous effort, concentration and wisdom – cooperation with and kindness toward fellow beings are extremely important.
• The very purpose of religion is to control yourself, not to criticize others. Rather, we must criticize ourselves. How much am I doing about my anger? About my attachment, about m hatred, about my pride, my jealousy? These are the things which we must check in daily life.
• Ideals are very important in one’s life. Without ideals you cannot move – whether you achieve them or not is immaterial. But one must try and approximate them
• When we are able to recognize and forgive ignorant actions done in one’s past, we strengthen ourselves and can solve the problems of the present constructively
• When we are able to recognize and forgive ignorant actions done in one’s past, we strengthen ourselves and can solve the problems of the present constructively
• Guilt, as experienced in western culture, is connected with hopelessness and discouragement and is past oriented. Genuine remorse, however, is a healthy state of mind – it is future oriented, connected with hope, and causes us to act, to change
• The 6 perfections
  • Generosity
  • Ethical discipline
  • Patience
  • Perseverance
  • Concentration
  • Wisdom
• Anything that contradicts experience or logic should be abandoned
• Our intention should not be soiled by the eight worldly preoccupations: gain or loss, pleasure or pain, praise or criticism, and fame or infamy