Reading Archive (Love and Kindness)
When You Don't Choose Love You Choose Fear
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross & David Kessler
If we could literally reach into you and remove all your fears – every one of them – how different would your life be? Think about it. If nothing stopped you from following your dreams, yo...
The Golden Eternity
Jack Kerouac
I have lots of things to share now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Eve...
I Have Decided to Stick With Love
Martin Luther King Jr.
I’m concerned about a better World. I’m concerned about justice; I’m concerned about brotherhood and sisterhood; I’m concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that...
Come Home to Love
Rick Hanson
Take a breath right now, and notice how abundant the air is, full of life-giving oxygen offered freely by trees and other green growing things. You can't see air, but it's always available for...
Love Like Water
Mark Nepo
Water in its clear softness fills whatever hole it finds. It is not skeptical or distrusting. It does not say this gully is too deep or that field is too open. Like water, the miracle of love is that ...
The Trick is to Keep Seeing
Pema Chodron
(The Tibetan word shenpa) is usually translated “attachment,” but a more descriptive translation might be “hooked.” When shenpa hooks us, we’re likely to get stuck. We co...
Kindness Includes Everything
George Saunders
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded ... sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly. Or, to lo...
Reaching Underneath Our Protective Shell
Pema Chodron
There's a slogan in the Mahayana teachings that says, "Drive all blames onto oneself." The essence of this slogan is, "When it hurts so bad, it's because I am hanging on so tigh...
The Messiah Is One Of Us
Megan McKenna
Once upon a time there was a wise abbot of a monastery who was the friend of an equally wise rabbi. This was in the old country, long ago, when times were always hard, but just then they were even wor...
A Deep, Uncritical Love
Bhante Gunaratana
You can't make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you begin to see yourself exactly as you are now. As soon as you do that, changes will flow naturally. You don't have to force anything...
The Poisoned Tree
Jack Kornfield
The maturity we can develop in approaching our difficulties is illustrated by the traditional story of a poisoned tree. On first discovering a poisoned tree, some people see only its danger. Their imm...
Mass Movement
J. Krishnamurti
We see throughout the world extremes of poverty and riches, abundance and at the same time starvation; we have class distinction and racial hatred, the stupidity of nationalism and the appalling cruel...
I Have No Need For An Enemy
Troy Chapman
In passing my sentence, the judge said, “There’s no hope that you can ever be rehabilitated.” My sentence of 60-90 years was a tragic and too predictable end of the road I’d be...
Force of Kindness
Sharon Shalzberg
Many of us long for an underlying sense of meaning, something we can still believe in no matter what happens to us, a navigational force to pull all the disparate pieces of our lives together into som...
Love Needs to be Constantly Cleansed
Ajahn Jayasaro
In the stories that I cherished in my youth, happy endings almost always involved some kind of love, and I began to observe that in “real life” love is not always a guarantee of happiness ...
In Eyes Of God, We're All Minorities
Barbara Brown Taylor
Krister Stendahl, former dean of Harvard Divinity school, told a reporter shortly before his death in 2008, "In the eyes of God, we are all minorities. That’s a rude awakening for many, who...
Law Of Love
Mahatma Gandhi
I have found that life persists in the midst of destruction. Therefore there must be a higher law than that of destruction. Only under that law would well-ordered society be intelligible and life wort...
Cultivation of that Dormant Love
Radhanath Swami
Mother Nature is always speaking. She speaks in a language understood within the peaceful mind of the sincere observer. Leopards, cobras, monkeys, rivers and trees; they all served as my teachers when...