FIVE SOULS
CHINESE MEDICINE FOR THE SOUL
Pearls of Wisdom
We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love... and then we return home.
Australian Aboriginal Proverb
"He who binds to himself a joy does the winged life destroy; but he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity's sun rise."
William Blake
"Don't waste your time with explanations, people only hear what they want to hear. "
Paulo Coehlo
"If one person dreams alone, it is only a dream. When many people dream together, it is the beginning of a new reality."
Hundertwasser
"But strange that I was not told that the brain can hold in a tiny ivory cell God's heaven and hell."
Oscar Wilde
“I think it’s very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person.”
Oscar Wilde
"Life is the veil that obscures the heart, and there you will find what you are looking for.”
Kabir
“Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”
Anonymous
"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."
Confucius
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Transl. by Coleman Barks
"When I was five years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.
When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I wrote down happy.
They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life. "
John Lennon
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The best revenge is not to be like your enemy."
Marcus Aurelius
"Live like you would die tomorrow, learn like you would live forever."
Mahatma Ghandi
“A man needs a little madness, or else... he never dares cut the rope and be free.”
Nikos Kazantzakis
“To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don't need to be accepted by others.
You need to accept yourself”
Thich Nhat Hanh
“Enjoy the little things in life for one day you may look back
and realize they were the big things.”
Robert Braul
“The quieter you become the more you can hear.”
Ram Das
How to travel
"We always need to aim for locations in the outer world that can push us toward where we need to go within.
We need to relearn how to use travel as a way of maturing and developing in the long-term rather than merely being entertained and tanned.
There are places that by virtue of their remoteness, vastness, climate, chaotic energy, haunting melancholy or sheer difference from our homelands can exert a capacity to salve the wounded parts of us."
The School of Life, London
“Yesterday I was clever so I wanted to change the world, today I am wise so I am changing myself.”
Rumi
“To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don't need to be accepted by others.
You need to accept yourself”
Thich Nhat Hanh
“We are one heart, one mind, one spirit”
Native American saying
“You see, I want a lot.
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.
So many are alive who don't seem to care.
Casual, easy, they move in the world
as though untouched.
But you take pleasure in the faces
of those who know they thirst.
You cherish those
who grip you for survival.
You are not dead yet, it's not too late
to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
And it was the demon of my dreams, the most beautiful of all angels.
Brilliantly like steel shone his triumphant eyes,
and the bleeding flames
of his torch lit
the deep crypt of my soul.
"Will you come with me?"—"No, never; tombs
and the dead frighten me."
But his iron hand
clutched my right hand.
"You will come with me."...And I went forward in my dream,
blinded by the red light.
And in the crypt I heard the sound of chains
and the stirring of caged beasts.
Antonio Machado, Times Alone