We are on an inevitable course of awakening. If you understand that message deeply, it allows you to enter into your spiritual practices from a different perspective, one of patience and timelessness.
You do your practices not out of a sense of duty or because you think you should, but because you know in your soul there really is nothing else you would rather do.
– Ram Dass, excerpt from Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart.
You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing. You don’t have to do anything to earn it. Your shortcomings, your lack of self-esteem, physical perfection, or social and economic success— none of that matters. No one can take this love away from you, and it will always be here.
Imagine that being in this love is like relaxing endlessly into a warm bath that surrounds and supports your every movement, so that every thought and feeling is permeated by it. You feel as though you are dissolving into love.
This love is actually part of you; it is always flowing through you. It’s like the subatomic texture of the universe, the dark matter that connects everything. When you tune in to that flow, you will feel it in your own heart—not your physical heart or your emotional heart, but your spiritual heart, the place you point to in your chest when you say, “I am.”
– Ram Dass
At the same moment when I see this stuff, my heart hurts. But you don’t protect your heart from breaking, because a broken heart is like cracking a shell to let the deeper heart come forth.
Cultivating a compassionate heart is like the monk who is crying because his son has died, and his student comes up and says, “What are you crying about? You know it is all illusion.” The monk replies, “Yes, but the death of a son is the greatest illusion.”
You don’t close off your humanity, but if you don’t find balance within that humanity you’ll burn out. If you don’t balance your humanity you end up putting armor around your heart, and if you armor your heart you’ll starve to death; that’s why you burn out, because you’re not getting fed.
If you are going to be free, your freedom means that you do not avert your eyes from anything, in yourself or in anyone else.
– Ram Dass
