Thrive

Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything - anger, anxiety, or possessions - we cannot be free.

Millions of people never analyze themselves. Mentally they are mechanical products of the factory of their environment, preoccupied with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, working and sleeping, and going here and there to be entertained. They don’t know what or why they are seeking, nor why they never realize complete happiness and lasting satisfaction. By evading self-analysis, people go on being robots, conditioned by their environment. True self-analysis is the greatest art of progress.

Wouldn’t it be powerful if you fell in love with yourself so deeply that you would do just about anything if you knew it would make you happy? This is precisely how much life loves you and wants you to nurture yourself. The deeper you love yourself, the more the universe will affirm your worth. Then you can enjoy a lifelong love affair that brings you the richest fulfillment from inside out.

The way to happiness: Keep your heart free from hate, your mind from worry. Live simply, expect little, give much. Scatter sunshine, forget self, think of others. Try this for a week and you will be surprised.

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

You are sad. Go into your sadness rather than escaping into some activity, into some occupation, rather than going to see a friend or to the movie or turning on the radio or the TV. Rather than escaping from it, turning your back towards it, drop all activity. Close your eyes, go into it, see what it is, why it is – and see without condemning it, because if you condemn you will not be able to see the totality of it…

And you will be surprised: the deeper you go into it, the more it starts dispersing. If a person can go into his sorrow deeply he will find all sorrow has evaporated. And in that evaporation of sorrow is joy, is bliss. Bliss has not to be found outside, against sorrow. Bliss has to be found deep, hidden behind the sorrow itself. You have to dig into your sorrowful states and you will find a wellspring of joy.

Don’t be bothered with the next moment, or the next life, or the next world. Make this moment rejoicing, make this moment a moment of bliss, and the next will follow it, and the next life, and the next world. And everything that you are this moment is going to become deepened more and more. And when you see that you are responsible for your bliss, your bliss will be far more. When you see that nobody has given it to you, that you have not been a beggar, that it is not a gift from somebody else — because nobody has given it to you, nobody can take it away — when you see this you will be far happier.

An open mind is the key to an open heart.
What you can’t feel you can’t heal.
Whatever comes up is on the way out.

Each relationship seeks its own level when we let it. Operating on this principle, we can welcome each of our partners for precisely who they are: we don’t need them to be anybody else or to bring us any particular resources or skills. If you don’t want to play tennis with me, I’ll ask somebody else, and if you don’t want to play bondage games with me, again, somebody else will—our relationship will not be less for it. What we share is valuable for what we share. Period.