When you're in bed and unable to sleep, the best thing to do is to go back to your breathing.

In - out Deep - slow. Breathing in I feel fine, breathing out I feel light. Breathing in, my mind is still. Breathing out, my lips are smiling. Breathing in, I dwell in the present moment. Breathing out I know this is a wonderful moment.

If you can be aware that you have a living body, and notice when there's tension in your body, that's already an important insight.

By the same token, Christians find that, insofar as the "prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day" (the ordinary stuff of life) are taken and offered up to God in union with Jesus Christ's own self-offering, they are transfigured—transubstantiated—and restored to us, not as the inert routines of the day, or as sheer, intractable adversity, or as boredom, which they might otherwise appear to be, but rather as vessels for grace.

The real purpose of meditation is this: to teach a man how to work himself free of created things and temporal concerns, in which he finds only confusion and sorrow, and enter into a conscious and loving contact with God in which he is disposed to receive from God the help he knows he needs so badly, and to pay to God the praise and honor and thanksgiving and love which it has now become his joy to give.

Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God. Hope is proportionate to detachment.

There is therefore one fundamental religious experience which the Psalms can all teach us: the peace that comes from submission to Gods will and from perfect confidence in Him.

What would have been the good of my being plunged into a lot of naked suffering and emotional crisis without any prayer, any Sacrament to stabilize and order it, and make some kind of meaning out of it?

Lord, I refuse to let my attitude be controlled by regrets and worries that reflect a lack of trust in You. My goal is to take every thought captive and destroy any thought that contradicts my knowledge of You. Through the power of Your Holy Spirit, I pray that You will enable me to do this.

All I am saying is relax. Listen to the wind, feel the water. See where life's breeze wants to take you. Look, if God wants to give you a bigger oar or two, he will. He has plenty. There are times, however, when he's trying to blow us one way and we're paddling like crazy the other. Occasionally we just need to stop and be grateful.

Worries, he'd learned, are like rabbits: they compound in the dark.

Chile with the purpose of finding her lover and becoming his slave forever, believing that was the way to extinguish her thirst to submit and her hidden wish for possession, but now she doubted that she could give up those new wings beginning to sprout on her shoulders.