Roger Housden Quotes

When we fall utterly, something gathers us up. But our falling must be without reservation, without expectation, without hope, though not hopeless. You cant plan that kind of falling. When you abandon yourself utterly to life, the river will flow, and the log jam will free. Impossible is another word for grace. Who wouldve thought it, life takes another turn, and you are gathered up into a whole different way of seeing and being.

Be willing to be where you actually are. In my experience, that is the most inherently meaningful experience you can have.

I bring my attention to my hands on the steering wheel and notice how the chatter in my mind begins to fall away as my breathing slows. I'm awake and alive, simply driving the car going where I need to go, on time and in time. A still point of the turning world. With that awareness, I bring my attention into my body, and the body is the doorway to the timeless, because the body is always where we are and always in the present moment.

If we're trying to get the perfect house, the perfect relationship or the perfect job, it's likely there's some kind of fear driving us beyond the natural wish to improve. It's really the refusal to acknowledge that life - including ourselves - is simply not perfect.

Time, for example, is intimately connected with the goddess Kali, which partly accounts for her destructive nature. Energy - in Einstein's equation, E=MC2 - is personified in India as Shakti in her various guises.

The heart, like the grape, is prone to delivering its harvest in the same moment it appears to be crushed.

Day by day, tiny specks of us float away.

We have all had serendipitous moments - the most unlikely meetings out of nowhere - that can happen when we have this quality of deep acceptance towards ourselves.

If you allow yourself to fully feel the life you're in - not conceptually, but viscerally in the present moment - then that is inherently meaningful.

To keep faith with life is to experience that everything- everything that comes to us whatever it is- has its place in the puzzle of our existence.

In today's world it is deceptively easy to lose sight of our direction and the things that matter and give us joy. How quickly the days can slip by, the years all gone, and we, at the end of our lives, mourning the life we dreamed of but never lived. Poetry urges us to stand once and for all, and now, in the heart of our own life.

The natural wish and impetus to feel oneself to be an individual, to be special, includes standing out more than anyone else.

Love, like everything else, exists in a spectrum. Love of another, love of the world, love of God, all these loves are really one love in different degrees of light and density.

When the heart opens, we forget ourselves and the world pours in.

When you die, God and the Angels will hold you accountable for all the pleasures you were allowed in life that you denied yourself.

I woke up early one morning a couple of years ago and felt the tenderness of my being alone, the bitter sweetness of it. It has many colors, being alone. I walked out into my living room and I can say honestly that everything was pouring with life - the red sofa, the chairs with their patterns of roses, even the coffee table with its scattering of books. Everything was alive with the presence of being. Seeing the world though those eyes, I realized that I could never really be alone.

When the heart opens, we forget ourselves and the world pours in: this world, and also the invisible world of meaning that sustains everything that was and ever shall be.

I belong on this earth in the way that an oak tree does.

I don't think one can run out and try and chase love.

This question of love begins and ends with the willingness to be welcoming to one's own experience as a loving action towards oneself. It may be dark, it may be light, it may be joyous, it may be sorrowful, but it's your experience, and therefore, your life. As we have that kind of loving response towards our own life, then life itself in terms of the outside world, begins to feel different.

The ego, as our familiar sense of self, seems predicated on fear. The fear that we might not make it, that we might not get where we want to go. But deep down there is also a grain of fear that we have nothing to give or nothing to offer. I think that's the ego's justifiable anxiety about its substantiality and existence.

The great French Impressionist painter Renoir, right at the end of his very long life, said to a friend, "I am just now learning to paint." Renoir carried his gift with a humility which realized how much he still had to learn. Anyone who goes deeply into a field in life and realizes this, gains a sense of proportion that can only make you humble.

I had a classic case of what people call "seeker's disease." That was part of my journey, but now, meaning is like a secret that's revealing itself moment by moment, day by day.

I certainly spent many years in my early life chasing all over the globe for meaning and purpose. I'd feel like I'd found it, then it would fade away again.

It's the bringing together of knowledge and wisdom that is a great part - perhaps the greatest part - of our life's journey.