The Five Levels Of Attachment Quotes

I am only responsible for what I say; I am not responsible for what you hear.

When we become too attached to an ideal, the first thing that we lose is respect; first for the people around us, and eventually for ourselves.

This is what freedom is: the ability to enjoy and be exactly who you are without suppressing yourself in the form of judgment.

The more attached you are to something, the more your vision is obscured and narrowed, sometimes to the point where you are convinced that there is only one way to proceed.

Your beliefs, and your beliefs alone, belong to you. You are the only one who is with you for your entire life.

Without respect for the freedom of choice, peace is not possible.

I have always been perfect, and so have you. When we can't perceive this, it's because we are too busy judging everything for not being something other than what it is.

Our life is a canvas, and we are all Picassos.

Looking at the story of your life, do you take action as dictated by your attachment to knowledge, or do you use knowledge to take an action based on the awareness of your present moment?

I am a living being regardless of my knowledge, which exists only because I exist.

Let go of the attachment that you must obtain some image of perfection in order to be happy.

This relationship between us, however small it may be, is the dream called us.

This is my art, my agreement: to allow myself to experience life in its ever-changing truth with love. Think about an individual

Harmony exists when we engage one another with respect, honoring each other's yeses and nos as we construct the dream of us.

Self-judgment resides where self-acceptance wishes to be.

It is like taking a sip of wine and saying, “It’s a bit dry; it has definitely aged well, but I can taste the bark. I’ve had better.” Instead of simply experiencing the joy and flavors of the wine, we are analyzing the flavor, trying to break it down and fit it into a context and language we already know. In doing this, we miss out on much of the actual experience.

We think that in order to be worthy of our own love we must live up to the expectations we place on ourselves—but we need to realize that these expectations are the expression of our agreements, not of our true nature.

We all want to be a part of a group or a community, to find that place that allows us to feel as one. We are always looking for that communion, so in the end, all of this work is about the ability to have a harmonious relationship with my brothers, my sisters, and myself.

All the things my narrators told me were based on my attachment to what I believed a relationship should be in order for us to continue loving each other. All these expectations were informed by my past experience and the beliefs I had acquired growing up. I allowed my knowledge to analyze how a relationship is supposed to be, and I believed it.

At a higher level of abstraction, the behavioral correlates of life history strategies can be framed within the five-factor model of personality. Among the Big Five, agreeableness and conscientiousness show the most consistent pattern of associations with slow traits such as restricted sociosexuality, long-term mating orientation, couple stability, secure attachment to parents in infancy and romantic partners in adulthood, reduced sex drive, low impulsivity, and risk aversion across domains. Conscientiousness and (to a smaller extent) agreeableness are also the most reliable personality predictors of physical health and longevity; the contribution of neuroticism is mixed and may depend on the specific facets considered. The life history correlates of neuroticism are much less straightforward; for example, high neuroticism tends to predict increased short-term mating in women but reduced short-term mating in men, with much cross-cultural variation. There is also evidence that slow life history–related traits can be associated with social anxiety and insecurity, which is consistent with a general profile of risk aversion and behavioral inhibition. As a first approximation, then, metatrait alpha can be treated as a broadband correlate of slow strategies, with the caveat that neuroticism may be elevated at both ends of the continuum.

Swan had used them to send Sophie messages. He fished out the tiny velvet pouch and Sophie caught herself clutching her allergy remedy necklace. She still kept the silver moonlark pin that Calla had given her attached to the cord—a reminder of the friend she’d lost, and a symbol of the role she needed to figure out how to play. “Looks like we’re good,” Sandor said, handing her the small boobrie pin—a strange black bird with bright yellow tail feathers. “Can’t imagine that means anything important.” Sophie couldn’t either. Especially since the Black Swan had been annoyingly silent. No notes. No clues. No answers during their brief meetings. Apparently they were “regrouping.” And it was taking forever. At least the Council was doing something—setting up goblin patrols and trying to arrange an ogre Peace Summit. The Black Swan should at least be . . . Actually, Sophie didn’t know what they should be doing. That was the problem with having her friend join the enemy. “There you are!” a familiar voice said behind her. “I was starting to think you’d ditched us.” The deep, crisp accent was instantly recognizable. And yet, the teasing words made Sophie wish she’d turn and find a different boy. Fitz looked as cute as ever in his red Level Five uniform, but his perfect smile didn’t reach his trademark teal eyes. The recent revelations had been a huge blow for all of her friends, but Fitz had taken it the hardest. Both his brother and his best friend had run off with the Neverseen. Alvar’s betrayal had made Fitz wary—made him doubt every memory. But Keefe’s?

One of the more interesting ways of informally assessing extraversion at the biogenic level is to do the lemon-drop test. There are several variations on the test, and I draw here on a demonstration procedure I frequently used with my undergraduates.7 Here are the ingredients you will need: an eyedropper, a cotton swab (the little stick with a wrap of cotton on either end we use for babies and are admonished not to stick in our ears), a thread, concentrated lemon juice (regular lemon juice won’t work as effectively), and the willing tongue of a volunteer (such as yourself). Attach the thread to the center of the double-tipped cotton swab so that it hangs exactly horizontal. Swallow four times, then put one end of the swab on the tongue, holding it for twenty seconds. Then place five drops of the concentrated lemon juice on the tongue. Swallow, then place the other end of the swab on the same portion of the tongue and hold it for twenty seconds. Then hold up the swab by the thread. For some people the swab will remain horizontal. For others it will dip on the lemon juice end. Can you guess which? For the extraverts, the swab stays relatively horizontal, but for introverts it dips. The reason is that introverts, because they have relatively high levels of chronic arousal, respond more vigorously to strong stimulation, like lemon juice, so they create more saliva. Extraverts, being less responsive to high levels of stimulation, stay relatively dry mouthed. In fact, there is evidence that because of this tendency toward lower salivation levels, extraverts actually have higher levels of tooth decay than do introverts.8 I have done this exercise on myself a number of times, and each time my swab dips deeply. I am, at least by this measure, a biogenic introvert.

The Western medical model — and I don't mean the science of it, I mean the practice of it, because the science is completely at odds with the practice — makes two devastating separations. First of all we separate the mind from the body, we separate the emotions from the physiology. So we don't see how the physiology of people reflects their lifelong emotional experience. So we separate the mind from the body, which is not something that traditional medicine has done, I mean, Ayuverdic or Chinese medicine or shamanic tribal cultures and medicinal practices throughout the world have always recognized that mind and body are inseparable. They intuitively knew it. Many Western practitioners have known this and even taught it, but in practice we ignore it. And then we separate the individual from the environment. The studies are clear, for example, that when people are emotionally isolated they tend to get sick more quickly and they succumb more rapidly to their disease. Why? Because people's physiology is completely related to their psychological, social environment and when people are isolated and alone their stress levels are much higher because there's nothing there to help them moderate their stress. And physiologically it is straightforward, you know, it takes a five-year-old kid to understand it. However because in practice we separate them... when somebody shows up with an inflamed joint, all we do is we give them an anti-inflammatory or because the immune system is hyperactive and is attacking them we give them a medication to suppress their immune system or we give them a stress hormone like cortisol or one of its analogues, to suppress the inflammation. But we never ask: "What does this manifest about your life?", "What does this say about your relationships?", "How stressful is your job?", "To what extent do you lack control in your life?", "Where are you not authentic?", "How are you trying to work so hard to meet your attachment needs by suppressing yourself?" (because that is what you learn to do as a kid). Then we do all this research that has to do with cell biology, so we keep looking for the cause of cancer in the cell. Now there's a wonderful quote in the New York Times a couple of years ago they did a series on cancer and somebody said: "Looking for the cause of cancer inside the individual cell is like trying to understand a traffic jam by studying the internal combustion engine." We will never understand it, but we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year looking for the cause of cancer inside the cell, not recognizing that the cell exists in interaction with the environment and that the genes are modulated by the environment, they are turned on and off by the environment. So the impact of not understanding the unity of emotions and physiology on one hand and in the other hand the relationship between the individual and the environment.. in other words.. having a strictly biological model as opposed to what has been called a bio-psycho-social, that recognizes that the biology is important, but it also reflects our psychological and social relationships. And therefore trying to understand the biology in isolation from the psychological and social environment is futile. The result is that we are treating people purely through pharmaceuticals or physical interventions, greatly to the profit of companies that manufacture pharmaceuticals and which fund the research, but it leaves us very much in the dark about a) the causes and b) the treatment, the holistic treatment of most conditions. So that for all our amazing interventions and technological marvels, we are still far short of doing what we could do, were we more mindful of that unity. So the consequences are devastating economically, they are devastating emotionally, they are devastating medically.

domestication.

This is precisely why we invest so much of our energy in trying to prove that our definitions and our interpretations of things are right. This is the fabric that constructs our reality. However, when we become so attached to that reality, and to the meanings of the symbol that constructed that reality, we do not allow room for change and growth. We may find ourselves struggling, fighting, arguing with others (and with ourselves) to maintain our beliefs and definitions of the way things work, becoming prisoners of our own beliefs. It is through those beliefs that we have constructed the story of us.

He continued probing within himself to experience the real nature of suffering, and he found that “attachment to the five aggregates is suffering.”2 At a very deep level, suffering is the inordinate attachment that each one of us has developed toward this body and toward this mind, with its cognitions, perceptions, sensations, and reactions. People cling strongly to their identity—their mental and physical being—when actually there are only evolving processes. This clinging to an unreal idea of oneself, to something that in fact is constantly changing, is suffering. Attachment

Before the war, five-stories was the rule, and commercial life was carried on primarily at ground level—in streets and showrooms, at sales counters, on exchange floors. After the war, office buildings went vertical, climbing to unprecedented heights—six stories, seven, eight. “Our business men are building up to the clouds,” one newsman exclaimed. The elevator made this possible. Lift technology had improved since the vertical screw used at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Now the “steam and drum” method was available. Steel wire cables were run over a drum at the top of the shaft, which was then revolved to raise or lower the cab. An alternative model hauled the cage up and down the shaft by looping its wire cable over a pulley, then attaching a wrought-iron bucket almost as weighty as the cage. When filled with water from a tank, the bucket descended by gravity, pulling the cage up. At the bottom, an operator emptied the bucket, shifting the weight balance in favor of the cage, which then descended and pulled the bucket back up.

To sum up, the tonal is the perception attached to physical matter and to our five senses. It is governed by sunlight and responsible for creating our identity and location in time and space when we are awake. Nahual comes from two words: nehua, which means ‘I’, and nahualli, which means ‘what can be extended’. In the ancient cosmology, it refers to everything that extends beyond the tonal — that is, who we really are. The tonal is solely ruled by solar energy, but the nahual is ruled by the energy of the whole universe, and mainly by the energy of the moon, Venus and the Pleiades. At a human level, we can detect this energy as a bluish-grey radiance, similar to the cold moon’s light, that is located around the navel when we are awake but moves up around the head when we are asleep or when we enter an altered state of consciousness. The nahual is the energy body that travels to the world of slumber, the one in which we dream. That’s why we perceive things differently when sleeping and dreaming. The nahual also allows us to go to the Mictlan, the land of the dead, and to other worlds. In other words, when we’re asleep, we’re very close to being what is known nowadays as a spirit.

Most of us have an ideal version of how we think the world should be. I have to. You must. They should. It has to be.

Sometimes we think that the only way to make someone a better person, and, by extension, make the world a better place, is to convince them that they should see things our way. But there are plenty of people around us who don't behave the way we think they should, and we waste energy trying to convince them to be something they are not, instead of allowing them to be who they are.

There are seven billion people living in our world, and so there are seven billion different points of view. If we each insisted that only our point of view is valid, then we would also have seven billion clashes in our world.

When you become aware of how attachment distorts and corrupts knowledge, you can begin to see how some people easily confuse the quest for truth with the quest for being right. These are not the same thing. The quest to be right is about self-importance: we need to be right in order to accept ourselves; this is a condition we place on our self-acceptance and our acceptance of others. The quest for truth, on the other hand, is the desire to discover—regardless of whether our beliefs are supported in the process.

The stories that we tell about ourselves to make us feel comfortable and safe are simply history.

If you fail to listen to what else is going on in the world and only rely on what you think you know and believe, you've attached yourself to an idea that blinds.

This level of attachment can feel great when your team wins, or when things are going your way; but as life shows us, what goes up must come down, and no one wins all the time.

Acceptance is the reward of domestication, while rejection is the punishment.

Ever-Changing Meanings I am only responsible for what I say; I am not responsible for what you hear. –DON MIGUEL RUIZ

A symbol's meaning is derived from agreement by a community, a culture, a nation, and so on.

When you let go of your attachment to the meaning and the perceived truth that you apply to words and symbols—mine, yours, and others'—you have the freedom to step back and decide for yourself if those meanings reflect your experience in life. In addition, by openly listening to someone else's expression of their knowledge without holding an attachment of what those symbols mean, you have the opportunity to better understand them.

I imagined what the situation was like from her point of view: everything she knew would be going away. Her whole world was going to change, and she did not know who or what was going to remain.

When we place ourselves in a safety zone where we feel comfortable and secure, and we are firmly entrenched in the this-is-who-I-am mindset, the worst thing imaginable is that it will all go away.

When we look closely, we can notice how we're always defending the object of our attachment in one way or another.

In essence, we are defending our definition of self.

Our attachments no longer define us. Instead, the knowledge we gather becomes a tool that can help us decide how we want to engage in dreams—the personal and collective—and how we choose to act is the manifestation of our intention.

Forgive me, I have used your words most of all to go against myself, and I will no longer use them to hurt myself again.

the emotional roller coaster makes the game more exciting. You decide which team to root for based on just about anything—from the color of the uniforms

The Buddha told Mahamati, “There are three different levels of srota-apannas and attainments of srota-apannas.436 And what are the three? They are basic, intermediate, and advanced. Those at the basic level are reborn seven more times at the most. Those at the intermediate level are reborn three to five more times before they attain nirvana. And those at the advanced level attain nirvana in this life. “For each of these three, there are three bondages: coarse, intermediate, and subtle. And what are the three bondages? They are belief in a body, doubt, and attachment to codes.437 In terms of differences among these three bondages, whoever reaches the subtlest of the advanced level becomes an arhat.

I began at the beginning, learning to love myself and giving gratitude every morning for being alive.

I am because I am at this moment.

Our point of view creates our reality. When we are stuck in our beliefs, our reality becomes rigid, stagnant, and oppressive. We become bound to our attachments because we have lost our ability to recognize that we have a choice to be free of them.

says, “Our life is a canvas, and we are all Picassos.

But if we accept ourselves for who we are at this very moment, we change because we want to grow and evolve with life; love is no longer the condition for change, it is the starting point for change.

Makes about seventy-two 3-inch cookies 16 tablespoons (1 cup) vegetable shortening 2 large eggs, beaten 2 cups sorghum molasses (see Tip) 1 tablespoon ground ginger 1 tablespoon ground allspice 1 tablespoon baking soda ½ teaspoon table salt 6 tablespoons hot water (110°F) 5 to 6 cups all-purpose flour, sifted, plus more for the work surface Beat the shortening in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, or in a bowl with a hand mixer, on medium speed until smooth and creamy. Stop to scrape down the bowl. Add the eggs, sorghum, ginger, allspice, baking soda, and salt, beating on medium speed until well incorporated. Add the hot water and start by adding 4½ cups of flour or more as needed, beating on low speed to form a soft, evenly caramel-colored dough that just pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour and up to overnight. When you’re ready to bake, move the middle oven rack up one level and preheat the oven to 350°F. Line several baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone mats. Lightly flour a 2-inch cookie cutter or the rim of a small glass, your rolling pin, and a work surface. Turn out half the dough and roll it to an even thickness of ¼ inch. Cut out the cookies, transferring them to the prepared baking sheets, where they should be spaced 1 inch apart. The cookies will spread as they bake. Re-flour the cookie cutter and rolling pin and reroll the dough. Gather up the scraps and reuse them as needed. Bake one sheet at a time on the repositioned rack for 7 to 9 minutes, turning the pan front to back halfway through. The cookies will be lightly golden and soft. Let them sit on the sheet for a few minutes, then transfer the cookies to a wire rack to cool while you repeat rolling, cutting, and baking the remaining dough. tip: Sorghum molasses (syrup) is different from blackstrap or unsulphured molasses. It’s made from the cooked cane of sorghum grasses, and it is sweeter, lighter in color, and thicker than molasses.

We’ve had Ivy in our daily sights for nearly five years. Even from afar, she’s been a constant. Regardless of our mission, a certain level of comfort and attachment accompanies that for us all. The loss alone would be devastating.

The person I am right now is the accumulation of my yeses and nos over the course of my life, and that is true for each and every one of us.

I might know you for years, but I will never know what it feels like to be you.

When we take action based on our ideas, it seems like we have manifested them as reality.

Turn on any news station and it's easy to see. It's important to realize that when we, or anyone else, become attached to a set of beliefs at this level, it is easy not to see the humanity of an individual since we can only see the personalization of an idea that we stand against.

I am grateful to my emotions for telling me my truth, for it is only through exposure that we regain the power to choose between “I will continue to agree” and “I am ready to let go.

Becoming aware of your responsibility for your half of a relationship is crucial as well—it's not just the other person's fault.

Forgive me, I have used your words and actions against myself, and I will no longer use them to hurt myself again.

When you look in the mirror, instead of accepting yourself for who you are at this very moment, you likely start telling yourself why you are unacceptable in your current form, and what you need to do to be able to accept yourself: I must meet this expectation to be worthy of my own love.

I remember clearly the professor who introduced me to Buddhist and Hindu thought. As a final exam, she took all five of us students to a remote weekend retreat facility and issued the rules: no speaking allowed, and no clocks or wristwatches. During the night she would awaken a student, ask the student to assume a yogic position, then ask questions: How does a Christian speak about the nature of God? How does a Buddhist speak about the nature of reality? What is the truth of eternal life? What is the purpose of this life? The questions were deep and penetrating. It wasn’t the quality of our responses that she was evaluating; rather, it was our attachment to any particular school of thought. If she sensed that we were attached to one form of truth more than another, we had failed to learn the lesson of her class: All truth is the same at the level of truth itself. That it becomes “enculturated” is an illusion. For her, this was the essence of what it means to become conscious: to seek truth that is detached from its social or cultural form. In looking back at her influence upon me, I credit her with laying the groundwork for my own abilities in symbolic sight.

If my attachment to what I know blinds me to all the available options, then my knowledge is controlling me; it is controlling my intention, and it is creating my Personal Dream for me. But with awareness of my attachments comes the opportunity to take back that control and to live as I choose.

We honor our emotions by realizing that they are an expression of how we feel and what we are going through. We look at what has triggered our emotions, while still allowing ourselves to simply feel.

Listening to what others say without giving their words power over us allows us to become aware of our own truth.

Our emotions rise to the surface, and we initially feel pain when we try to reduce our dependence on things outside ourselves—the things to which we are most strongly attached.

As you embark upon the final chapter of this book, I wish to leave you with the idea that it truly is possible to engage in our human existence while seeing beyond our attachments and fully experiencing life.

We never stopped being the potential that our parents envisioned for us when we were babies. The only difference is that as adults we now have control of not just our body but also our mind. We require no knowledge to be our Authentic Self, and our awareness of this is what allows us to use knowledge as we engage the world, using our body through our mind as the vehicle that allows us to take action in life.

In our shared dream, it is my preference to be in this relationship at this moment and to love everyone, as well as myself, unconditionally.

The truth will set you free.

Redirection We must first become aware of where our attention is in the moment. Becoming aware of our attachments is the start of any process; recognizing which beliefs we have either become identified with, internalized, or fanaticized is the first step in moving towards our Authentic Self in any situation.

As we grow more attached to what we believe, it is much more difficult to see the power of our intent. This is especially true when we have agreements that do not allow us to detach without first judging ourselves for even thinking of changing our mind.

To make matters worse, we not only are predisposed to assume things, we also become attached to our assumptions and convince ourselves of their truth.

When we are no longer controlled by the distorted voices of our narrators, our identity gives our experiences significance and allows us to understand them by using our knowledge as an effective, helpful tool.

In my experience, the only motivator that brings lasting change is self-love. When I love and accept myself, I want to treat myself well and be as healthy as I can be, only then do I have the freedom to detoxify from whatever has been subjugating my will.

The labyrinth expands as you live your life, but the only truth is in that center, that present moment where you are alive. The labyrinth ceremony ends when you recognize that you are worthy of your own love because you are alive in this very moment.

When you recognize your truth, that you are a living being regardless of what you know, you are free to let go of the attachment of needing to know who you are, because you have the awareness that you are.

We are attached to creating a story about every action from our own point of view, describing, explaining, and fitting it into our own belief system. This is what we have been taught to do.

As long as we engage in the I-am-right-and-you-are-wrong struggle, there will always be conflict.

We have always been love. But we have grown so accustomed to the smoky, distorted reflection of love that doesn't allow us to see or accept ourselves that we don't know how to live life without it, which is the biggest lie.

Taking steps to improve our health, change careers, or really do anything that will transform our lives is often an emotional process. The fear of failure or of not obtaining the goal we set out to achieve often keeps us from taking action and actually perpetuates what we do not want.

practice the Toltec agreements, Be impeccable with your word Don't take anything personally Don't make assumptions Always do your best Be skeptical, but learn to listen

With awareness of how attached we are to a particular belief or idea, we regain something very important: our ability to make a choice, to say yes or no all over again.

When we let go of our attachment to our narrators— specifically their judgments and criticisms—and accept ourselves as we are, conditional love will no longer be the motivator that compels us to change.

A well-conditioned oarsman or oarswoman competing at the highest levels must be able to take in and consume as much as eight liters of oxygen per minute; an average male is capable of taking in roughly four to five liters at most. Pound for pound, Olympic oarsmen may take in and process as much oxygen as a thoroughbred racehorse. This extraordinary rate of oxygen intake is of only so much value, it should be noted. While 75–80 percent of the energy a rower produces in a two-thousand-meter race is aerobic energy fueled by oxygen, races always begin, and usually end, with hard sprints. These sprints require levels of energy production that far exceed the body’s capacity to produce aerobic energy, regardless of oxygen intake. Instead the body must immediately produce anaerobic energy. This, in turn, produces large quantities of lactic acid, and that acid rapidly builds up in the tissue of the muscles. The consequence is that the muscles often begin to scream in agony almost from the outset of a race and continue screaming until the very end. And it’s not only the muscles that scream. The skeletal system to which all those muscles are attached also undergoes tremendous strains and stresses. Without proper training and conditioning—and sometimes even with them—competitive rowers are apt to experience a wide variety of ills in the knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, ribs, neck, and above all the spine. These injuries and complaints range from blisters to severe tendonitis, bursitis, slipped vertebrae, rotator cuff dysfunction, and stress fractures, particularly fractures of the ribs. The common denominator in all these conditions—whether in the lungs, the muscles, or the bones—is overwhelming pain. And that is perhaps the first and most fundamental thing that all novice oarsmen must learn about competitive rowing in the upper echelons of the sport: that pain is part and parcel of the deal. It’s not a question of whether you will hurt, or of how much you will hurt; it’s a question of what you will do, and how well you will do it, while pain has her wanton way with you.

We do not need to take the blame for these self-judgments. We can simply become aware that they have been developing in our lives since childhood through the process of domestication. Once we are aware of our self-judgments, we can reclaim our freedom by choosing for ourselves to transcend the rewards and punishment model that has been imposed upon us to eventually arrive at a place of self-acceptance.

With this kind of perfection, whenever our story does not match our beliefs, we judge it as imperfect; then we punish ourselves for not living up to our beliefs of how we think we should live.

I do not make changes in my life today because I feel I must change in order to accept and love myself; I make changes to express myself and experience more of life, because I already accept and love myself for who I am.

But if we accept ourselves for who we are at this very moment, we change because we want to grow and evolve with life; love is no longer the condition for change, it is the starting point for change. This is the true meaning of unconditional love.

Authentic love is the greatest motivator for letting go of our attachments, while conditional love only strengthens our attachments

The more attached I am to my beliefs, the more difficult it becomes to see myself for who I am at this moment, and the less freedom I have to see life from a fresh perspective and perhaps choose a different path.

Os toltecas foram grandes homens e mulheres muito sábios que viveram há milhares de anos na atual região Centro-Sul do México. Na língua náuatle, tolteca significa “artista”, e, de acordo com nossos ensinamentos, a tela para nossa arte é a própria vida. Aprendi sobre o modo de vida tolteca pelas tradições orais da minha família que, de acordo com meu tataravô paterno, Don Exiquio, é descendente direta dos toltecas da linhagem dos Cavaleiros da Águia. Este conhecimento chegou até mim pela minha avó, Madre Sarita. Nós nos autodenominamos toltecas não apenas devido à linhagem, mas também porque somos artistas. A vida é a tela da nossa arte, e nossa tradição se dedica a ensinar as lições de vida que vão nos ajudar a criar nossa obra-prima. A tradição tolteca não é uma religião, e sim um modo de vida para o qual a grande obra-prima é viver com felicidade e com amor. Ela abraça o espírito ao mesmo tempo em que honra os vários grandes mestres de todas as tradições do mundo. O cerne da questão de todo este trabalho é ser feliz, aproveitar a vida e curtir os relacionamentos com as pessoas que mais amamos, começando por nós mesmos.

Quando traduz, você tenta expressar as minhas palavras com o que já sabe, com o que acha que é verdade. Você não me ouve, você ouve a si mesmo. Imagine fazer a mesma coisa a cada momento da vida. Se estiver passando os olhos pela vida e traduzindo-a à medida que ela segue, vai deixar de vivê-la. No entanto, se aprender a ouvir a vida, vai sempre ser capaz de expressar as palavras à medida que elas vierem. Seu conhecimento tem de se tornar uma ferramenta que você possa usar para guiar a si mesmo ao longo da vida, mas que também possa ser abandonada. Não deixe que o conhecimento traduza tudo o que você vivencia.

Quando você deixa de acreditar em uma autocrítica, ela para de exercer qualquer poder sobre você. É possível escolher ver a si mesmo com aceitação, tendo como base a verdade inegável de que já é perfeito e completo exatamente da forma que é neste momento. A partir desse ponto de vista, você ainda pode decidir fazer algumas mudanças na vida, mas agora a motivação para mudanças não se deve à esperança de um dia amar a si mesmo, mas justamente pelo fato de já se amar.

Quando olhamos com atenção, podemos notar que sempre defendemos o objeto do apego, de uma forma ou de outra. Cada um de nós está defendendo a sua definição do “eu”.

O amor por nós mesmos nos permite dar amor a todos na comunidade. Afinal, não podemos dar ou compartilhar o que não temos.

Quando faz escolhas para abandonar os apegos que não funcionam mais para você, suas opções parecem crescer e se expandir. Mas o que você está realmente fazendo é aumentar a perspectiva, uma vez que todas as possibilidades estão lá o tempo todo.

When each of us expresses something, we express it from the point of view of what we know. Listen closely, but receive all words and other symbols with skepticism. When you let go of your attachment to the meaning and the perceived truth that you apply to words and symbols—mine, yours, and others'—you have the freedom to step back and decide for yourself if those meanings reflect your experience in life. In addition, by openly listening to someone else's expression of their knowledge without holding an attachment of what those symbols mean, you have the opportunity to better understand them.

Our distortions turn the angel of unconditional love into the demon, a symbol of the distortion of the truth, exaggerating our fears and distorting our view even more, creating a personal hell for ourselves.