Passage Meditation - A Complete Spiritual Practice: Train Your Mind and Find a Life that Fulfills (Essential Easwaran Library Book 1)

likeness of Thee. I must do my allotted task with unflagging faithfulness even though the eye of no taskmaster is on me. I must be gentle in the face of ingratitude or when slander distorts my noblest motives. I must come to the end of each day with a feeling that I have used its gifts gratefully and faced its trials bravely. O Lord, help me to be

we become what we meditate on.

Concentrate on one word at a time, and let the words slip one after another into your consciousness like pearls falling into a clear pond.

Say with perfect courtesy, “This is a poor time to go browsing for a best-seller. Won’t you kindly rejoin me in the room where we’re meditating on the Prayer of Saint Francis?”

We don’t have to compare our lives or work with others’. All that is expected of us is that we give our very best to whatever responsibilities come our way. As our capacity to contribute increases, greater responsibilities will come to us.

There is another valuable aid too: to refrain from doing more than one thing at a time, to abandon totally our habit of trying to perform several operations simultaneously.

As a novice-master, he advised his charges to forget the world they had left behind. Our goal, on the other hand, is to be “in the world but not of it”: to strive to move gracefully among all the activities of daily life without being ensnared by either outer things or inner desires.

When you see opposition, do not get afraid. Look upon tough opposition as a challenge to test your inner growth—to see if your capacities have grown so that through patience, courtesy, and the depth of your conviction, you can win over your opponent into a fast friend.

In the case of rushing, the problem is not only one of speed. Our attention is riveted on ourselves — our needs, our deadlines, our desires — so there is no attention to give to those around us. Especially for children we need to slow down so that we can give them our attention, which they require as much as food and sleep.