Chloe

“In the most ordinary terms, egolessness is a flexible identity. It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure about who we are, or who anyone else is, either. Every moment is unique, unknown, completely fresh.”
― Pema Chödrön, Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion

“In general, the values of our culture require that perspectives remain unintegrated—for once it is integrated, a perspective gives us sensitivity rather than leverage; kinship rather than ownership; responsibility rather than power; and an attentiveness to the present rather than to schemata. Our patrifocal culture warns that such sensitivities are hindrances to our willpower—and we learn our lessons early, so that our resistance to the integration we so desperately need is often too subtle to notice.”
― Philip Shepherd, New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century

“As we practice moving into the present moment this way, we become more familiar with groundlessness, a fresh state of being that is available to us on an ongoing basis. This moving away from comfort and security, this stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted, and shaky—that’s called liberation.”
― Pema Chödrön, Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion

“As Father Thomas Berry has pointed out, the trees and grasses are our kin, our relations, our genetic cousins; the rocks of the earth are born of the same star matter that made us. How apt, then, that Thich Nhat Hahn should write of washing a teapot “with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath.”
― Philip Shepherd, New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century