100 Grounding Quotes

Here are 100 grounding quotes to bring us back to ourselves. Centering, soulful and loving – my hope is that this evergrowing list of quotes and poems will help remind us of who we are beneath the surface and how to reconnect with this part of ourselves. 

This is not a recipe and may not be what you are looking for on the blog, but it is my birthday today and I wanted to give myself a gift! HA! 😉

I thought there may be a few of you out there that would enjoy this too. A little space to hold the wise words that seem to come at just the right time. I am going to keep adding to the list and I wholeheartedly encourage you to please add your own quotes, poems, or simple words of grounding or wisdom in the comments below.

If you’ve been here a while, you’ll probably already know how much I turn to cooking as an act of self-love. Not only the making of something nourishing and nutritious for our bodies but the actual act of taking time after a busy day to unwind, reset, be present and mindful and look inward, while creating a meal.

This time, for some of you, is the only time you have during the day to connect with yourself. And it can one of the most healing and restorative gifts! But the amazing and beautiful thing is how our reconnecting with ourselves actually affects those around us, without us even uttering a word.

Those closest to us will feel it.

A gift to your family too. Magic.

1. Peace is this moment without judgment. That is all. This moment in the Heart-space where everything is welcome.~Dorothy Hunt 
2. Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.— Ekhart Tolle
3. Your self-love is a medicine for the earth.  ~ Yung Pueblo
4. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection. ~Buddha
5. Do not try to save the world or do anything grandiose.Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently,until the song that is your life falls into your own cupped hands and you recognize and greet it. Only then, will you know how to give yourself to this world so worthy of rescue.- Martha Postlewaite
6. Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands. ~ Linda Hogan
7. Your sadness doesn’t make you less of a human being. In fact, it makes you more. More expansive. More connected. Painfully beautiful. Raw. Open. Completely alive. ~ Panache Desai
8. I have woven a parachute out of everything broken. ~William Stafford
9. We must teach ourselves, actively remind ourselves, what being wild means. We must make room for it and invite it back. ~Brian Meier,  Awaken the Bear. 
10. Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.~Mozart
11. Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is an adequate perception of the world.  Hans Margolius
12. It is in the nature of things to be drawn to the very experiences that will spoil our innocence, transform our lives, and give us necessary complexity and depth. ~Thomas Moore
13. I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am. ~ Sylvia Plath
14. Continually trying to look on the bright side interferes with our finding the wisdom that lies in the fruitful darkness.~ Stephen Buhner
15. Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside awakens.~ Carl Jung
16. Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. ~Pema Chodron
17. Empty yourself and let the universe fill you. ~ Yogi Tea
18. You have walked through fire, survived floods and have triumphed over demons- remember this the next time you doubt your own power.  Jung Pueblo
19. The more grateful I am, the more beauty I see.~ Mary Davis
20. When it’s over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement.~  Mary Oliver
21. We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide an example for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves.~ James Hollis
22. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.~ Emerson
23. “Look deep into nature and you will understand everything better”-Albert Einstein
24. If bein’ afraid is a crime, we’ll hang side by side. ~ Paul Westerberg
25. What am I asking of my beloved that I need to do for myself? – James Hollis
26. What happens when people open their hearts? They get better. ~Haruki Murakami
27. Poetry is a language against which you have no defenses. ~David Whyte. 
28. Once you realize this floating life is the perfect mirage of change, it’s breathtaking – this wild joy at wandering boundless and free. ~Han Shan
29. God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare-up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.~Rilke
30. The world changes when we change. the world softens when we soften. The world loves us when we choose to love the world.~ Marianne Williamson 
31. Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could. ~ Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
32. What does it mean to fully experience a moment—any moment? It means to directly experience what is here now without separation from it. It means opening, seeing, listening, feeling, being intimate and at one with what is. While thoughts may appear in the present moment, thoughts do not experience anything. Thoughts do not see, but YOU do. ~Dorothy Hunt
33. The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.~ Anias Nin
34. Even if you are on the right track, you will still get run over if you just sit there. -Will Rogers
35. Learning to live with ambiguity is learning to live with how life really is, full of complexities and strange surprises… ― James Hollis
36. Slowly slowly, gently gently.  My Grandmother, in a dream. 
37. Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable. ~Mary Oliver
38. To fall seven times, to get up eight, life starts from now. ~Japanese Proverb
39. The world is not here to make you happy- it’s here to make you conscious. ~ Ekhart Tolle 
40. Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? ~Mary Oliver 
41. The healer you have been looking for is your own courage to know and love yourself completely. ~ Yung Pueblo
42. Learn the alchemy true human beings know. The moment you accept what troubles you’ve been given, the door will open.-Rumi
43. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. ― David Whyte.
44. I am gathering past like skin and reeling towards what I haven’t seen yet;  a moth suddenly struck by moonlight. ~Jodi Miller
45. Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
46. Our work (career) is the excuse by which we get to love people. We are put in exactly the place we need to be, to love the people we are around. ~Panache Desai
47. It always seems impossible until it’s done.~ Nelson Mandela
48. Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor. ~Marianne Williamson
49. Letting go doesn’t mean forgetting, it just means we stop carrying the energy of the past into the present. ~ Yung Pueblo
50. In each life there comes at least one moment which, if recognized and seized, transforms the course of that life forever. Rely, therefore, on radical trust, even though the moment may call for you to leap empty-handed into the void.~ Ralph Blum
51. And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. ~Kahlil Gibran
52. You can not teach someone to love, you must show them. ~Finnish Saying
53. Hear blessings dropping their blossoms around you. ~ Rumi 
54. A spark is a little thing, yet it may kindle the world.~ Tupper
55. The shortest interval between two points is the awareness that they are not two.~ Eric Micha’el Leventhal
56. Nothing is worth more than this day. ~ Goethe
57. But Sylvia, I am everywhere. ~my mother, in a dream, after her passing.
58. Your healing lifts up the ocean of existence. When you heal we all heal.  ~ Yung Pueblo
59. Life is to be experienced, not fought against, run from, or engaged halfheartedly. Though we may wish to make changes in the future, to be conscious is to be with an experience as it’s unfolding, rather than thinking about how we would like to change it. Taking charge of our life so that we alter the quality of our experiences in the future comes after an experience.~Shefali Tsabary
60. The soul often asks more of us than we plan on giving. ~  James Hollis.
61. One of the best actions we can take, with courage, is to relax. ~Yogi tea
62. Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke 
63. A new moon teaches gradualness and deliberation and how one gives birth to oneself slowly. ~ Rumi
64. Our inner monologues have tremendous power over us. They can affect not only our mood, not only our physical bodies, but also our every waking moment—and, therefore, every consequence.~ Panache Desai
65. If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life. ~Wu-men
66. Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event. ~Carl Jung
67. It may be when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. ~Wendell Berry
68. Always we hope someone else has the answer. Some other place will be better, some other time it will all turn out. This is it.No one else has the answer. no other place will be better, and it has already turned out. At the center of your being, you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want. Lao Tzu
69. Nothing the heart gives away is gone… it is kept in the hearts of others. ~Robin St. John
70. The world around us is nothing more and nothing less than a mirror of what we have become from within.~ Gregg Braden
71. Whatever arises, love that. ~ Matt Kahn 
72. There is no need to run outside for better seeing. Nor to peer from a window. Rather abide at the center of your being; for the more you leave it, the less you learn. Search your heart and see the way to do is to be.  Lao Tzu
73. At one glance, I love you with a thousand hearts.~   Mihri Hatun, Turkish poet
74. The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper. ― W.B. Yeats
75. Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.― Mary Oliver
76. Enter with love the temple that is your own heart.~ Ramana Maharshi
77. Remember the pure open sky of your own true nature~ Tibetan Book of the Dead 
78. When we repress our emotions or suppress our emotional content, whatever we are denying accumulates weight, or what I call vibrational density. This heaviness can take on many forms. But in all cases, it impedes your spirit’s natural ability to shine. ~Panache Desai
79. If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart… Pema Chodron
80. Hold on to what is good even if it is a handful of earth.  Hold on to what you believe even if it is a tree which stands by itself. Hold on to what you must do even if it is a long way from here…Hold on to my hand even when I have gone away from you. -Nancy Wood, from Many Winters
81. Therein lies the universal truth that puts us all on equal footing: each of us must come to discover through our many life experiences whether we have faith in our spiritual purpose, in our very existence, or whether we fear the journey of our life. ~Carolyn Myss
82. Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second. Then decide what to do with your time. ~Naomi Shihab Nye
83. The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that it is everything. ~Anatole France
84.  Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself? The Master doesn’t seek fulfillment. Not seeking, not expecting, she is present, and can welcome all things.” – Lao Tzu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell
85. I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance; to live so that which comes to me as seed goes to the next as blossom and that which comes to me as blossom, goes on as fruit. Dawna Markova
86. Every blade of grass has an angel that bends over it and whispers, “Grow, grow.” The Talmud
87. You make the path by walking. ~ Robert Bly
88. Listen–are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? ― Mary Oliver
89. Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. ~Harold Whitman
90. The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.— Ekhart Tolle
91. We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us, that they may see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer, life because of our quiet. ~William Butler Yeats
92. Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. ~James Arthur Baldwin 
93. I am not fully healed, I am not fully wise, I am still on my way. What matters is that I am moving forward. ~ Yung Pueblo
94. In the midst of the chaos when the wind is howling I hear the ancient song of the ones who went before and know that peace will come. – Anonymous
95. I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. ~Pablo Neruda
96. The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment, every sin already carries grace in it. Hermann Hesse
97. Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is a nobler art of leaving things undone…. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials. — Lin Yutang
98. We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things … [but] there are times when we stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.— James Carroll
99. The time came when the risk it took to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. ~Anais nin
100. Above all, trust in the slow work of the Spirit.
     We are quite naturally impatient in everything
     to reach the end without delay.
     We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
     We are impatient of being on the way to something
     unknown, something new.
     And yet it is the law of all progress
     that it is made by passing through
     some stages of instability-
     and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you.
     Let your ideas mature gradually-let them grow
     let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
     Don’t try to force them on,
     as though you could be today what time
     (that is to say, grace and circumstances
     acting on your own good will)
     will make of you tomorrow
     Only God could say what this new spirit
     gradually forming within you will be.
     Give her the benefit of believing
     that her hand is leading you,
     and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
     in suspense and incomplete.~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:
101. The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
102. You are today where your thoughts have brought you. You will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you. ~  James Allen
103. Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?~ Marcus Aurelius
104. Regardless of desire, life hands you who you are.  ~Casey Haymes
105. Love after Love The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile the others welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. ~Derek Walcott