32 Quotes About Spiritual-practice

Forgiveness is a process, an admittedly difficult one that often can feel like a rigorous spiritual practice.

Every night before I go to sleep I say out loud three things that I am grateful for, all the significant, insignificant, extraordinary, ordinary stuff of my life. It is s small practice and humble, and yet, I find I sleep better holding what lightens and softens my life every so briefly at the end of the day.

Waking up is the end of spirituality in the usual sense of that word. With that in mind, we can approach various nondual explorations (or practices, if you want to call them that) in a playful way, as natural and spontaneous activities of life. Like art, music or dancing, they are ways in which life is exploring, enjoying, revealing, loving and entertaining itself.

My personal opinion is that the neutral position on the mood spectrum—what I called emotional sea level—is nothappiness but rather contentment and the calm acceptance that is the goal of many kinds of spiritual practice.

The greatest spiritual challenge is an attachment to material things. Even the most dedicated spiritual practice is meaningless when we are controlled by what we own.

Phyllis and I pray these chaplets together; at three o'clock, every first Saturday. We are never in the same town. For months, we do not speak on the phone or email. We pray these chaplets for just a few minutes, maybe as many as sixty minutes, once a month on a Saturday afternoon. Intimacy with the elusive God is that kind of intimacy. It is the closeness of praying together, apart.

Aloneness seems to be the heart of discipline [...] You cannot develop yourself properly unless you give up your need for companionship. Once you give up your search for companionship, you can make friends with your loneliness. At that point, you become a genuine practitioner.

Everything we say, do, and think, aligns us with darkness or light, love or grievance. Thus everything is a spiritual practice, whether we are aware of it or not. We are constantly, in every moment, aligning with one way of being or another. The choice is ours to make each moment of the day.

Awareness is more essential than a hundred skills. To be aware is to be open. And to be open is to know the path of every master who has roamed the earth.