Rob Tourtelot

Art and the artist both suffer most when the artist gets too heavy, too focused on results.

And I don’t think this situation resolves itself as you grow older. In fact, more people just die. Loss becomes the primary condition of living. That doesn’t mean you’re in a hopeless, grief-stricken state all the time; it just means that you carry a deeper understanding of what it is to be human.

Recently, one of my private meditation students asked me, “What do you feel like when you meditate?” Right away I said, “Ordinary. Beautifully ordinary.”

But fear-based anxiety that stems from feelings of inadequacy—such as the fear of speaking your mind, fear of being misunderstood, or fear of failure—is all rooted in being disconnected from your True Self. When you feel you are not enough, when you feel that you are not lovable, it means you are identifying with your ego. This is the antithesis of

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Morning Pages is another tactic for getting out of your own way like this – a ritual, in a deep sense of that word, because what's key is the observance, not harnessing that observance for some particular outcome. Everyone should have one or two such rituals, if you ask me, to help unclench one's agitated grip on the world and to encounter reality

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I call these experiences our dark teachers. The lessons that hurt, scare, scar, wound, and almost destroy us are very often the things that make us who we are because they require us to muster what we thought we could not muster—courage, compassion, kindness, forgiveness, love, resilience, strength, generosity of spirit, ferocity of heart. The... See more