Mindfulness and Madness Quotes

“Meditation is an expression of tender courage. It suggests that it is refreshing to meet the nakedness of situations with your own nakedness, here and now. Outside of nowness we fail to genuinely appreciate our lives because we are struggling to survive in time, projecting ourselves into the future or attempting to resolve the past.”
― Ira Rechtshaffer, Mindfulness and Madness: Money, Food, Sex And The Sacred

“Art in everyday life is the deepening or intensifying of experience that gives new significance to the ordinary things of our world. It is feeling the breath of life pulsating in and through the ordinary events and activities of our everyday world. We might regain a childlike sensitivity to the immediate freshness of this moment. Here we are unashamedly more fully alive, already enjoying an abundant life which can no longer be exhausted.”
― Ira Rechtshaffer, Mindfulness and Madness: Money, Food, Sex And The Sacred

“We’re continually being thrown of balance if we try to preserve an exclusively positive spiritual image of ourselves and maintain a life of peace and harmony. We do not want our neatly patterned existence to be abruptly interrupted because it sends our spiritual identity into a freefall. The strategic effort to defend ourselves from the rawness and unpredictability of life is the invitation to make peace and reconcile ourselves with the shadow side of life.”
― Ira Rechtshaffer, Mindfulness and Madness: Money, Food, Sex And The Sacred

“Without the ordinary stuff of our daily life with all of its complications and irritations, there is no dharma path of spiritual practice.”
― Ira Rechtshaffer, Mindfulness and Madness: Money, Food, Sex And The Sacred

“The fruitional aspect of mindfulness practice is when we finally stop wanting others to be different than they actually are. This”
― Ira Rechtshaffer, Mindfulness and Madness: Money, Food, Sex And The Sacred

“Even Real Men Need Loving Kindness”
― Ira Rechtshaffer, Mindfulness and Madness: Money, Food, Sex And The Sacred

“Every culture through which Buddhism radiated its wisdom shaped the enlightened one’s message to the mentality of its populace, and by doing so, offered novel and fresh opportunities for his dharma to shine through. In the present cross fertilization of East and West, contemporary Western culture and the ancient tradition of Buddhism are shining a light on each other’s blind spot. Something very unique in the history of spirituality is being born.”
― Ira Rechtshaffer, Mindfulness and Madness: Money, Food, Sex And The Sacred