Retreat Quotes
I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.
The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
Let us fight the battle-retreat from the things that attract us and rouse ourselves to meet the things that actually attack us.
If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.
The thing that comes most frequently to me on yoga retreats is excruciating pain in my hips.
Whether we're in retreat or out in the world, we should try to develop the quality of awareness as much as possible.
When I was in retreat I just did my meditation sessions and, in-between, reading and things I had to do.
The improv technique does one of two things. It either makes you raise your game, or retreat into a corner and decide to find a new career. But you do feel like you want to match and develop things.
Retreat might give us a moment of respite but years of repentance at our weakness would, I believe, follow.
He who lives wisely to himself and his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.
Laughter has got to be the single healthiest activity one can perform. Just think how healthy you would be if you could sincerely laugh at that which now oppresses you.
Well-being, or wholeness, implies integrity and harmony between all existing elements, providing freedom for the whole.
Getting down to the gym a couple days a week and having low-fat milk in your morning latte isn’t going to make much of a dent in a system or lifestyle that is essentially, well, unwell.
Appreciation, affection, focus and intention fill up the space of self-reflection, and one loses oneself in the engagement. And what a relief it is when you get there.
The essential war within, and the cause of suffering, begins with the presumption that yearning, impulse and curiosity, desire and question, exist so as to end them. To attain, to acquire, to answer.
The subjective experience of intense pain (“That’s all I can take”) corresponds exactly to one’s subjective experience in relation to truth (“That’s all I can take”).
By its nature, what you yearn for is most often intimidating. It produces, and itself is, a question, and one that is not easy to engage or answer.
My intention is not to define a perfect life and then cause an unhappy analysis of what you are not doing correctly or are incapable of doing.
If you are “playing” too much or “working” too much, you will have a reaction on the other side, which indicates your pace is off, too slow or too fast.
Sometimes I wonder how much of our suffering we allow or impose on ourselves simply in search of our worthiness to accept our own respect and appreciation.
The exact proportion and combination of the qualities within you, as they are, even while you search and struggle for them to be different or better, is a unique beauty.
In making a clear distinction between desire (answer) and yearning (question), we inevitably end up back at personal purpose.
What you have to do to achieve what you want necessitates the creative actualization of the totality of your being as it is. Nothing more, but also nothing less.
The challenges are illusions, but necessary ones to determine if you can see through them.
What is at the base of shame or guilt? It is the consciousness of an imbalance, or of an action in the past that has caused, and probably continues to cause, suffering.
If you know what life really wants, and if you know what you really want, you can begin to create the relationship.
Transformation, on the other hand, is creating beauty from horror or destruction (or, for beginners, an actually pleasant evening with the usual family problems).
I think that as a species we’ve played at being the self-indulgent, spoiled adolescent way too long, and now there are permanent damages and absolute risks that most people are ignoring.
Through the realization of the potentials and possibilities within and outside of you, one connects imagination with reality. What could be becomes so.
The purest definition of “religious” is: relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality.
We do have some capacity to determine how things evolve, and how we evolve, individually and as a community or race. That’s a tremendous freedom and a tremendous responsibility.
There’s surprising relief and regeneration in finding ourselves within a moment of genuine grace, however small or temporary it may be.
Ignorance is avoiding that which stands in front of me out of the misplaced hope that it will put what I’m ignoring behind me. Instead, it’s most certain to drop it on top of me.
Sadly, in too many cases surrender is having been ‘outrun’ by fear rather than having ‘run out’ of heart.
If there’s any redeeming quality that I can find in running away from something, it’s that I’m on my feet. Now all I’ve got to do is alter my direction.
Safety is not a destination that we reach for, rather it is a retreat that we escape to. And if our lives are marked by the incessant search for safety, we will live the whole of it going in reverse.
The choice to avoid risk is the choice to avoid living, and to avoid living is one of the greatest risk of all.
To fall is not to fail. To fail is to never fall because I never got up in the first place.
If I’m perplexed by the fact that I’m constantly lost, maybe somewhere in my head I’ve determined that being lost serves a greater purpose than being found.
