Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.
For decades, free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I have changed this policy.
Excellence" is not a gift, but a skill that takes practice.
We do not act "rightly" because we are "excellent",
in fact we achieve "excellence" by acting "rightly".
The first practice is the practice of undiscriminating virtue: take care of those who are deserving; also, and equally, take care of those who are not. When you extend your virtue in all directions without discriminating, you feet are firmly planted on the path that returns to the Tao.
It is not enough to belong to a religion. You also have to put it into practice. Religion is like medicine. You have to ingest it to combat the illness.
Men have their virtues and their vices, their heroisms and their perversities; men are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but possess and practice all that there is of good and bad here below. Such is the general rule. Temperament, education, the accidents of life, are modifying factors. Outside of this, everything is ordered arrangement, everything is chance. Such has been my rule of expectation and it has usually brought me success.
It's been a hard lesson for me , but contrary quite frankly to what is a common practice in politics, I can tell from my own experience, it is better to stay away from personalities.
'Wherefore, brethren, thus must ye train yourselves : Liberation of the will through love will develop, we will often practice it, we will make it vehicle and base, take our stand upon it, store it up, throughly set it going.'
Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities.