Moffitt Quotes

Living a spiritual life may not be easy. It demands total authenticity. It brings you to dance to a unique song that only you can hear fully, and sometimes you dance alone because no others can hear the music.

Damn the wars but bless the soldier.

The nature of life is mess, chaotic, exquisitely beautiful, excruciatingly painful, immensely joy-filled, and unpredictable.

Our true nature is bliss. That bliss is like the sun that always shines. It remains ever present, but the events in life and clouds of worry and even emotions like happiness may obscure it like storm clouds obscure the sun.

I don't believe the inner work ever really ends, and sometimes I'd like to take a vacation.

Quoting from Phillip Moffitt Will Yoga and Meditation Really Change My Life? The most profound change I’m aware of just now is a growing realization that life is not personal. This may seem a surprising or even strange view to those unfamiliar with Eastern spirituality, but it has powerful implications. It’s very freeing to see that events in my life are arising because of circumstances in which I am not involved, but that I’m not at the center of them in any particular way. They’re impersonal. They’re arising because of causes and conditions. They are not “me.” There is a profound freedom in this. It makes life much more peaceful and harmonious because I’m not in reaction to events all the time. (134)

Observation and expansion are two elements of meditation. While a teacher may guide you to have the right posture and give instruction on following the breath, no one can teach you about the experience. It comes through practice and patience.

The soul-Self doesn't follow the crowd. It encourages you to speak up when you need to and live by your truth.

what the melancholy among us sometimes know, though may not be able to articulate, is that coming to the end of our resources may be our only hope for coming to the beginning of something more substantial than self.

When you treat your time as though you are a machine; a doing machine; you are committing violence against the sacredness of life itself.

Surround yourself with reminders of what you are doing, such as objects or photographs of places or persons that symbolize your desired change.

Up high in the sky, Far and not near, Not seen by your eye, Nor hear by your ear...

shocking conclusion. It suggested that there appears to be one common pathway to all mental illnesses. Caspi and Moffitt called it the p-factor, in which the p stands for general psychopathology. They argued that this factor appears to predict a person’s liability to develop a mental disorder, to have more than one disorder, to have a chronic disorder, and it can even predict the severity of symptoms. This p-factor is common to hundreds of different psychiatric symptoms and every psychiatric diagnosis. Subsequent research using different sets of people and different methods confirmed the existence of this p-factor.25 However, this research was not designed to tell us what the p-factor is. It only suggests that it exists—that there is an unidentified variable that plays a role in all mental disorders.

I calculated how easy it would be to pull a chair next to the windowsill, climb up, and simply allow my body to fall four stories to the street. Then an inner voice broke in, "There's got to be something more. Go find it.

A con artist, a total imposter, had played on my desires for the Cinderella dream and won a Monopoly trip to jail. I had hoped for uprightness, integrity, and potentially a relationship. Longing overshadowed the voice of conscience.

A deep acceptance of life “just as it is” allows you to be more fully present in your life moment by moment, no matter how difficult or how sweet it is, and it empowers you to act more from your deepest values. Regardless of the circumstances of your life at any given time, your experience is richer, more alive.

It always amazes me when taking off from a stormy airport, how once you reach a certain altitude and get through the clouds, the sun shines as brightly as ever. If we learn to choose the experience of joy in our bodies, minds, hearts, and spirits, we will move in tune with the universe and dance in a flow of light and love, and remain above the clouds.

A house is a home when it shelters the body and comforts the soul. — Phillip Moffitt Creating

To look at any thing, If you would know that thing, You must look at it long: To look at this green and say, "I have seen spring in these Woods," will not do—you must Be the thing you see: You must be the dark snakes of Stems and ferny plumes of leaves, You must enter in To the small silences between The leaves, You must take your time And touch the very peace They issue from.

In Buddhist psychology identifying with and clinging to desire are said to result in your “taking birth.” In other words, you have created an illusory self whose happiness and well-being depend on getting what it wants.

Death is just a door that only love can come and go through.

FIRST NOBLE TRUTH What is the Noble Truth of Suffering? Birth is suffering, aging is suffering, and death is suffering. Disassociation from the loved is suffering, not to get what one wants is suffering ... First Insight There is this Noble Truth of Suffering: Such was the vision, insight, wisdom, knowing, and light that arose in me about things not heard before.

Second Insight This Noble Truth must be penetrated to by fully understanding suffering ... Third Insight This Noble Truth has been penetrated to by fully understanding suffering ... SECOND NOBLE TRUTH What is the Noble Truth of the Origin of Suffering? Fourth Insight It is craving ... accompanied by relish and lust, relishing this and that ... craving for sensual desires, craving for

relinquishing, leaving, and renouncing of it....

-you must Be the thing you see: You must enter in to the small silences between the leaves, take your time and touch the very peace they issue from

Life’s difficulties aren’t the cause of most suffering; rather, it’s a lack of being connected to self, to others, and to life as a whole that leads to suffering. Separation from your natural enthusiasm dampens or kills your spirit. Therefore the question in contemplating change is always: “Am I moving more fully into my essence and into being my most authentic self?” In

Ya Abdul,” Aziz said quietly, “for each of us in this universe of tears, Allah places a special treasure. Some people never find theirs, and go to the Day of Decision unfulfilled. I’ve found my treasure, and I knew it right away. You don’t let it get away. Allah has placed yours right under your nose. But your neck is too stiff to bend.

It was too much for the mullah. “It is forbidden to alter the creations of Allah!” he erupted. “If sculpture is enjoined by the Prophet, how much greater an abomination is it to sculpt living flesh? Six-legged camels! Horses with toes! Turbofalcons and three-headed hunting dogs! The production of novelties for the idle rich! And now the idolaters have not shrunk from dabbling in man himself!

When this state of selfless gratitude starts to blossom, your mind becomes more spacious and quiet, and your heart receives its first taste of release from fear and wanting.

What good is a truck?” the man went on. “Can it forage for its own fuel? Can it go where a camel goes? Can it repair its own wounds? Can it sire more trucks? Machines are no good here in the Emptiness!

he liked the 20th century novels because they got all of the science wrong, so he could never guess what would happen.

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Jesus chose Passover to do what had to be done. He did not choose the Day of Atonement. It is striking, indeed, that though the gospels, particularly John, mention many of the Jewish holy days, Yom Kippur is conspicuously absent. This relates to something my colleague David Moffitt has stressed in various places: when in the grip of exile – as many Jews believed they still were – what is required is not another regular sacrifice, but a fresh rescuing divine action. And the obvious model for that is not the Day of Atonement but the rescue from Egypt: Passover, in other words.

When their subjects were between the ages of three and eleven, the researchers, led by the psychologists Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt and including Brent Roberts, used a variety of tests and questionnaires to measure the children’s self-control and then combined those results into a single self-control rating for each child. When they surveyed the subjects at age thirty-two, they found that the childhood self-control measure had predicted a wide array of outcomes. The lower a subject’s self-control in childhood, the more likely he or she was at thirty-two to smoke, to have health problems, to have a bad credit rating, and to have been in trouble with the law. In some cases, the effect sizes were huge: Adults with the lowest self-control scores in childhood were three times more likely to have been convicted of a crime than those who scored highest as kids. They were three times more likely to have multiple addictions, and they were more than twice as likely to be raising their children in a single-parent household.