Compassion Quotes

It’s highly refined stuff—holding to one’s purpose and focus, but also intuiting the value of being a piece in a larger design and evolution. The balance between these two rhythms is where and when true harmony is achieved and magic happens. Often, just the release of the obsession for personal preferences and to personally gain opens the door.

~ Darrell Calkins

The essential dynamic underlying almost every elite and esoteric physical art is work with the breath, so there’s information available. I would only add that it’s unfortunate that so much work is done with it, and not much play. Laughter has got to be the single healthiest activity one can perform. Just think how healthy you would be if you could sincerely laugh at that which now oppresses you. I’ve mentioned before that one good measure of someone’s depth of spirituality is how long it takes before they become offended. Imagine laughing hysterically at the criticisms, complaints and impositions you receive. At the least, you’d be breathing well.

~ Darrell Calkins

People generally believe that stress is responsible for depletion, but apathy and uninspired systematic repetition are equally responsible. Or rather, systematic repetition produces as much or more stress and anxiety as anything else.

~ Darrell Calkins

Getting down to the gym a couple days a week and having low-fat milk in your morning latte isn’t going to make much of a dent in a system or lifestyle that is essentially, well, unwell.

~ Darrell Calkins

If you’re ignoring a high percentage of the elements of your entire being, and the range of qualities they can naturally engage, there will be no real recovery or progress until you do. The typical relentless worker is just as lazy as the typical indulgent idler; they’re both just going through the habitual motions. To break the repetitive pattern, and discover more energy and effectiveness, one simply must stretch out in all directions, rotating focus and application of the qualities that make up one’s natural versatility.

~ Darrell Calkins

The human body, like the human mind, is best at versatility and adaptability. This is our greatest skill and our greatest chance to unlock natural potential. What that means in terms of physical movement is that a fairly equal amount of time and effort should be allocated to the widest possible range of activity. That includes strength, flexibility, precision and endurance, but it certainly doesn’t stop there.

~ Darrell Calkins

As I’ve mentioned too often before, we are governed, and specifically our physicality is governed, by fairly strict rules, which are easily observable in nature. We have some freedom to manipulate some of these, but really not by very much. Everyone knows, or at least has the information, about the horrors of ignoring health issues and expecting your body to do what you want it to do with the least investment in it. Another “authority” telling you what you should do is not the answer.

~ Darrell Calkins

Besides having been identified recently as the single most important factor in what men find sexy in women, the list of how correct posture influences internal organs and systems, and also mood and general energy, is very long indeed. Your internal environment depends on the efficiency of the flow of elements within it. Obviously, this includes oxygen, blood, hormones and nutrients, but also all interaction between nerves and the brain. The spine, which is your foundation and support, has a natural position that guarantees the efficiency of movement and interaction of the related elements. Your internal organs are all right alongside the spine and depend on its correct position to function well. Any prolonged restriction or deviation from this natural position will result in some, at least partial, dysfunction. Over a long time, the results can be devastating.

~ Darrell Calkins

I look at the idea of rest as rotating one’s qualitative focus, not just doing less or changing activity. The role of rest is recovery. If you keep pushing the same quality button (fast or slow, concentrated or dispersed, hard-working or lazy…) for the same component all the time, of course it’s going to become depleted, just like if you keep working a single muscle in the same fashion or don’t use it at all.

~ Darrell Calkins

The trick is in genuinely appreciating the elements of apparent resistance while you are engaging them. Not to oppose or remove them as much as to creatively fold them into one’s linear line of movement, exploiting them and making the necessary adjustments as you go.

~ Darrell Calkins

A balanced diet” is not so much about protein/fat/carbohydrate ratios. The real ratios to consider, at least for the typical American or European, are energy consumption/expenditure, pleasure/actual need, food/everything else.

~ Darrell Calkins

If one follows what is in one’s heart (let’s leave out mind for the moment), one ends up with what one truly values and loves in life—and one acts accordingly. One’s own private indulgent cyclic habitual reactive subjective transitory feelings are, hopefully, not at the head of that list.

~ Darrell Calkins

If you, one, loves something or someone, that means that one is willing to, and does, sacrifice for it. That is, one chooses to do and give what is better to the being or thing one loves than to sacrifice the loved one for the personal emotion that is unrelated to or even hinders the giving. In other words, the way to transform an emotion is with a deeper one. This involves discernment and, yes, discipline, which are both frowned upon and seen as emotionless and less important. Which is immaturity, plain and simple, and is the fundamental aspect of human growth from child to adolescence to adult.

~ Darrell Calkins

Although each of us has the right to believe we are suffering, I suppose, there is a definite and ultimately essential distinction to be made between actual suffering, its cause and resolution, and invented or imagined suffering.

~ Darrell Calkins

The subjective experience of intense pain (“That’s all I can take”) corresponds exactly to one’s subjective experience in relation to truth (“That’s all I can take”).

~ Darrell Calkins

The transitory and random quality of emotions (“Well, that’s just the way I feel about it”) is deeply connected to, and largely the cause of, random engagement of one’s values and priorities. This very randomness and inconsistency is actually the cause of deeper suffering, primarily through the accumulation of addictions and the indulgence in reactions that are disproportionately small in comparison to what is really being sacrificed for them. Curiously—and a major theme in my own work over decades—the casual association of emotions to love is part of the insanity in all this.

~ Darrell Calkins

True balance, and harmony, necessitates finding a way to override the addictive, reactive emotions that are the fabric of one’s subjective illusion, and discover emotions that correspond to actuality.

~ Darrell Calkins

On the high-end spectrum of emotions, which are innately connected to intuition and direct comprehension as well as imagination and creativity, meaning true empathy and knowledge, appreciative realization, transformation and invention, one finds a richer and more voluptuous combination of experience. Unfortunately, to “get there,” one has to be willing to sacrifice what is known for what is not.

~ Darrell Calkins

As a soul, you have the freedom – and earned responsibility – to transpose your personal process of evolution, to manifest your greatest talents and vision, into the work that matters to you most as a means to personal redemption.

~ Darrell Calkins

Human beings are not separate from nature. We are nature. The beauty of the sunset is your own beauty. The power of the ocean is your power. We are inseparable from the beauty of the mountains, rivers, and forests that surround us. The more that you can allow your natural self to come out – to honour your natural beauty, your natural creativity, your natural thirst for leadership and compassion – the happier and healthier you’ll be.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

Very few great artists feel the giant agony of the world.

~ Edith Hamilton

Although we are urged to walk in another man's shoes, I think, first, we have to walk in another pair of our own shoes. Doing that will free up a lot, including our ability to be more compassionate and less judgmental.

~ Charles F. Glassman

The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our compassion between two infinities of happiness and peace.

~ Michel Houellebecq

Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

Whenever we take the focus off ourselves and move it outward, we benefit. Life's most fortunate ironies are that what's best for the long run is best now, and selflessness serves our interests far better than selfishness. The wider our circle of considerations, the more stable we make the world—and the better the prospects for human experience and for all we might wish. The core message of each successive widening: we are one. The geometry of the human voyage is not linear; it's those ripples whose circles expand to encompass self, other, community, Life, and time.

~ Carl Safina

Are we truly obeying the command to love our neighbor as ourselves if we're storing up money for potential future needs when our neighbor is laboring today under actual present needs?

~ Randy Alcorn

When I save, I lay something aside for future need. If I sense God's leading, I will give it away to meet greater needs. When I hoard, I'm unwilling to part with what I've saved to meet others' needs, because my possible future needs outweigh their actual present needs. I fail to love my neighbor as myself.

~ Randy Alcorn

Forgiveness... a secret garden where Joy and miracles abound, and the garden is always open to everyone who makes the Loving choice to visit there.

~ Raymond D. Longoria Jr.

Fear banged at the door; Love answered,and discovered the disturbance had gone.

~ Raymond D. Longoria Jr.

Anger is Always built upon a foundation of fear and suffering.

~ Raymond D. Longoria Jr.

Be with someone that makes you happy... STRIKE THAT...Be Someone that makes you happy.

~ Raymond D. Longoria Jr.

In having compassion for another's Spiritual blindness, I can learn to Forgive myself.

~ Raymond D. Longoria Jr.

ALL that man has touched, will be used... For both Good and evil. Such is the way of the world.

~ Raymond D. Longoria Jr.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly.” —Richard David BachThe caterpillar believes it is dying because it's being sealed in a tomb. The Master knows that the caterpillar is not dying, and is simply transitioning (to something more). This points out that things are never over, that change is carrying us, (so often kicking and screaming), to higher states of being.I find it interesting that the caterpillar spends it's caterpillar existence crawling, (on a lone weed in the midst of an endless beautiful forest), surviving on bitter, poisonous leaves. Yet resists the changes to come.After the caterpillars death... And upon the butterflie's rebirth... The butterfly lives out it's butterfly existence experiencing all of the forest's wonders, being carried by the wind, landing on beauty, and drinking sweet nectar, all the while, being shielded from harm by the caterpillar's bitter and poisonous experiences of eating the weeds.Without the struggles of the caterpillar, the butterfly could never be.It is Truly wonderful how something as simple as caterpillars and butterflies can be such amazing reminders sent to us by a Loving Eternal Creator.

~ Raymond D. Longoria Jr.

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Pain is what the world brings on us, suffering is what we do to ourselves emotionally and Spiritually.Most Spiritual teachings tell us (in one form or another) to Give thanks in ALL things nothing is left out when the word ALL is used. So ALL would definitely include pain. Whenever we do not give thanks in ALL things, on some level, we will Spiritually suffer. So give Thanks for the pain and avoid the suffering.

~ Raymond D. Longoria Jr.

Why would I want to believe this? I am a human being having a spiritual experience.When I could Choose to Live this;I AM a Spiritual being having a human experience.By True Faith, living and embracing the latter, There can be no fear, no worry. Existing as a Spiritual Being there is Truly nothing in this world that can harm me. For I AM Eternal, absent beginning or end.

~ Raymond D. Longoria Jr.

Shortly after I started hitting some notable milestones on my Spiritual journey, I went into a thrift store that benefits veterans, My eyes were quickly drawn to a dusty and tattered image of Christ laying mixed in with some other things on a shelf. I picked it up, And on it was written these words:If you accept it...I would give you the gift of seeing yourself as I see you...The truth and love of that image and simple words stopped me in my tracks and opened my heart. Since then I have received a wonderful gift, to know myself as an Eternal Spiritual Being, a Child of our Loving Father in Heaven....And no I didn't buy it, I received the message loud and clear, So I left it there, in hopes that the image and words would speak to someone else's Soul in the same way they had spoken to mine.

~ Raymond D. Longoria Jr.

In the darkest of places, even the slightest glimmer of Light shines as the Sun.

~ Raymond D. Longoria Jr.

When I carried the world entire upon my shoulders, so much of me was painfully dedicated to fixing myself, till finally I invited Christ into my Life and discovered that I had never been broken at all. EVERYTHING I thought was lacking in myself He had long ago made Whole.

~ Raymond D. Longoria Jr.

I find my greatest Power when I am Kind.

~ Raymond D. Longoria Jr.