Image / Vadim Sadovski


“Hope is a state of mind, not of the world.

It is an orientation of the spirit and orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”  

- Vaclav Havel


Dana Wyss Healing Arts
Breathe deeply, practice often, be well.
http://www.danawyss.com/

Image / Sergey Nivens


"Egolessness" is defined by an absence, rather than by a presence.

It means "absence of the fantasy of self-importance," and it implies the growth of social rather than selfish motivation.

It is unrealistic to expect that we can all become totally egoless, like a Buddha, but we can all gradually emerge from local to open perspective, from personal to participatory concerns, from  historical time to eternal immediacies.

We can come to experience ourselves as a cosmologist might see us, a drop in the ocean of time, but also a tiny force field bending the rays of the world ever-so-slightly into universal, peaceful directions.

Instead of a personal ego struggling to solidify itself against the tides of time, we can become channels through which the stream of peace flows.

- Paul Fleischman, from Cultivating Inner Peace


Dana Wyss Healing Arts
Breathe deeply, practice often, be well.
http://www.danawyss.com/

Santiago
by David Whyte

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside

hiding then revealing the way you should take,

the road dropping away from you as if leaving you

to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,

when you thought you would fall,

and the way forward always in the end

the way that you followed, the way that carried you

into your future, that brought you to this place,

no matter that it sometimes took your promise from you,

no matter that it had to break your heart along the way:

the sense of having walked from far inside yourself

out into the revelation, to have risked yourself

for something that seemed to stand both inside you

and far beyond you, that called you back

to the only road in the end you could follow, walking

as you did, in your rags of love and speaking in the voice

that by night became a prayer for safe arrival,

so that one day you realized that what you wanted

had already happened long ago and in the dwelling place

you had lived in before you began,

and that every step along the way, you had carried

the heart and the mind and the promise

that first set you off and drew you on and that you were

more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way

than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach:

as if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a city

with golden towers, and cheering crowds,

and turning the corner at what you thought was the end

of the road, you found just a simple reflection,

and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back

and beneath it another invitation, all in one glimpse:

like a person and a place you had sought forever,

like a broad field of freedom that beckoned you beyond;

like another life, and the road still stretching on.



Dana Wyss Healing Arts
Breathe deeply, practice often, be well.
http://www.danawyss.com/

"It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life.

I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house.

But that is not its only meaning for me.

It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part.

It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.

The music is never the same for me, never.

Each day is something new, fantastic, unbelievable.

That is Bach, like nature, a miracle!"


- Legendary cellist Pablo Casals,
from Joys and Sorrows


Dana Wyss Healing Arts
Breathe deeply, practice often, be well.
http://www.danawyss.com/