Learning how to be kind

"Learning how to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves, is important. The reason it's important is that, fundamentally, when we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn't just ourselves that we're discovering. We're discovering the universe."
Ane Pema Chodron

"Ubuntu"

"Ubuntu" is not easy to describe because it has no equivalent in any of the Western languages...Ubuntu speaks to the essence of being human and our understanding that the human person is corporate. The solitary individual is in our understanding a contradiction in terms. You are a person through other persons. Ubuntu speaks about the importance of communal harmony... speaks about warmth, compassion, generosity, hospitality, and seek to embrace others."
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Conscious

" The human being in whom the earth has become spiritually aware, has awakened into consciousness, has become self-aware and self-reflecting. In the human, the earth begins to reflect upon itself. In our deepest definition and deepest subjectivity, we humans are earth. Conscious."
Sister Miriam McGillis

Happy

"When I was 5 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. I told them they didn't understand life." ~ John Lennon

One-sided

"Choose one side of a dilemma and the other side resurfaces with a vengeance. For picking one side or being "one-sided" about a true dilemma only delays and even intensifies the issue. Choose one side and the conflict will return at a deeper level at some future time. That's the nature of the genuine dilemmas of life in this left and right, dark and light, abundant and empty world. Only when the tension of opposing forces can be held long enough does a genuine solution appear that can dissolve the tension and renew the flow of life at another level."
Michael Mead, in his book "The World Behind the World"

Right relationship

"Right relationship means right relationship with the elements, the land, the sacred directions...The seed of pure mind is within all people. It is always there. It is not made impure. Our actions may be impure and set up a stream of reactions, but always we can come again to the seed of pure mind and right relationship... it is time now for people to choose. Their first step is to see the power of your own consciousness... The common kernel is care for all beings, good relationship, cycles of reciprocity, generosity, giving of oneself, being an empty bowl so you can know what is."
Dhyani Ywahoo - in Voices of Our Ancestors