Experience

Historian Michael Quinn was asked, "As a historian, what can we as members and future members learn from church history?  His answer, "Compassion.  Humility.  Diversity, are the things I think you can learn from the past.   It's more difficult to be arrogant and to be intolerant of diversity and to be intolerant of people's errors when you look at the past.  Try to look at it and see well-intentioned people whether they're presidents and congresses or whether their a church leader or whether it's your grandmother, who made decisions and did things with the best of intent and had consequenceshat  that are sometimes negative and sometimes even horrifying that were unintended.  I think that when you look at that in the past and see that, it creates a sense of compassion.  It's not as easy to be unforgiving of  mistakes other people make when you say, "Well certainly they should have seen that" or "how could they be so stupid?" when you realize that good intentioned people sometimes do stupid things.  But very often by their best lights they make decisions that they hope will have good consequences and sometimes it doesn't turn out that way.

  Diversity: it's so easy to see the world only through our own lenses, only through our own experience, whether that experience is male or female, Mormon or Utahn or American or whatever it may be.  When we look at the past, and the more broadly we look at the past, it helps us to see that there are many experiences out there that are alien to our own.   People who have experienced a very different world than we have experienced.  That will help us to understand that there are people in our own families that are experiencing the world very differently than we are experiencing it, and we may never be able to really understand how they experience the world, but communication is a great way to begin.  

The past is not the only way, but it is one way to get past that "I-centered" experience and expectation.  To avoid, "Well, this wasn't a problem for me.  Why should it be a problem for them?" or "Why can't they do what I did?" or "This experience did not hurt me and I got over it.  Why are they continuing to whine about it?" 

When we look at the past and other people in the past and we realize that there were so many experiences that they had that were different from ours it helps us to gain a great deal of compassion as well as a great sense of respect for diversity.  

Arrogance is a terrible thing and very often it's most terrible when you don't realize you are arrogant.  Looking at the past is one way to indirectly start cutting away at what I see as a prison of being limited by your own experience and therefore judging people in terms of your own experience and I see that as of great value."

Relationships and Truth

"In a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for truth and have begun striving for ourselves". ~ Abraham J Heschel

Teachers

WHO’S ON YOUR LIST?

"Boss, coworker, spouse, roommate, mother, father, child—who are the people you really dislike and wish would simply go away? Be grateful to them: they’re your own special gurus, showing up right on time to keep you honest. It’s the troublemakers in your life who cause you to see that you’ve shut down, that you’ve armored yourself, that you’ve hidden your head in the sand. If you didn’t get angry at them, if you didn’t get fed up with them, you would never be able to cultivate patience. If you didn’t envy them, if you weren’t jealous of them, you would never think to stretch beyond your mean-spiritedness and try to rejoice in their good fortune. If you never met your match, you might think you were better than everybody else and arrogantly criticize their neurotic behavior rather than do something about your own."

(Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change)   Pema Chodron 

No more Swatting

"We all suffer the uncertainty of being hurt by the life that surrounds us, and we all have a changing ring of safety beyond which we are likely to hurt other living things in the guise of self-defense.  How often we imagine things are dangerous when they are only doing what comes naturally.  This is too much like the dance we do with strangers and loved ones alike.  How often we murder parts of ourselves by not letting things advance or come close.  How often we let fear and the swat rule our emotional lives.  How often we kill or chase away everything that moves.  I think of Francis of Assisi, who held so still the birds landed on his branchlike arms, and we wonder why we are so lonely when we won't let anything full of life come near.   If we could only see the bee, or the bird, or our enemy as a brief living center like ourselves, we could let them go on their way without pulling us into opposition."   Mark Nepo

Urgency

"The doorway to our next step of growth is always behind the urgency of now.  Now more than ever, when all feels urgent, you must cut the strings to all events.  Now more than ever, when the weights you carry at your wrists, you must not run or flail.  Now more than ever, when each decision feels like the end, you must believe that each question is a beginning.   Now more than ever, when you fear that being who you are is a knife to those you love, you must be strong inside where no one has seen you, for loving from there can only make those you love grow.  Now more than ever, when feeling that you are the source and recipient of all pain, you must bow your head till the ancient channel from the sky to the heart can reopen, til you remember that you are a blessed piece of spirit-dust in spirit-wind. 

In this way, pray to know your place in the human family like you've never known it.  In this way, pray to have your True Self inch through your turmoil.  In this way, love yourself the way you love your children or your dog or your dearest friend, without reservation.  In this way, today with all it's hardships will spill into tomorrow, and decisions will become clear as streams thawing."  Mark Nepo

Family

"Sometimes when i think of my parents, who have hurt me, I am lulled by a wintering sky to feel for them, to try on their view, but in my empathy an old pattern kicks in and I start to lose the truth of my hurt, as if there is only room for one set of feelings -theirs.

The struggle is a common one.  So often we feel for others and lose ourselves, or cut others off to preserve ourselves.  Like a radio that can only tune to one station at a time, it seems like only one side of things can be received, though all sides are broadcast.

But compassion is a deeper thing that waits beyond the tension of choosing sides.  Compassion, in practice, does not require us to give up the truth of what we feel or the truth of our reality.  Nor does it allow us to minimize the humanity of those who hurt us.  Rather, we are asked to know ourselves enough that we can stay open to the truth of others, even when their truth or their inablility to live up to their truth has hurt us.

This does not remove the emotional facts of our lives, nor does it ask us to remain in a hurtful situation.  Rather compassion asks that we open like mountains to the sky, like mountains that can withstand every kind of weather."  Mark Nepo

Transformation and Change

"We create patterns that others depend on, and then the last thing we ever imagined happens; we grow and change, then then to stay vital we must break the patterns we created. There is no blame or fault in this. It is commonplace in nature. Watch the ocean and the shore do their dance of buildup and crumble and you'll see this happens daily.

We know we are close to this threshold when we hear someone say, "You're not yourself," or "That was out of character for you." What is difficult at this juncture is to resist either complying with how others see us or withholding who we really are.

The challenge, which I don't do well but stay committed to, is to say to those we love, "I am more than I have shown you and more than you are willing to see. Let's work our love and know each other more fully." Mark Nepo

Inner Work

"Real and abiding consciousness change doesn't just happen.  We have to work for it, in our own hearts and in the world.  I am just as impressed by the inner work that each one of us does as I am by the work we do in the world.   By inner work, by spiritual work, I mean living the examined life; watering the seeds of wisdom, confronting our shadowy parts, because I'm telling you, inside each one of us is our own little mean mini-Maciavilli.   It takes work to tame our mini-Maciavilli.  It takes spiritual work that quiets the reactivity of the mind and expands the heart in wider cirlces.  It takes psychological inquiry to heal our family wounds and uncoil our unconscious ego urges to dominate and punish.  Without this kind of inner work our primal, tribal reactivity waits in the wings and it takes over when crisis' loom.  I'm not saying the point is to become some egoless saint.  I'm just asking you to consider trying to change yourself even as you try to change the world because how we do what we do is as important as what we do."  Elizabeth Lesser

Worry

“We spend precious hours fearing the inevitable. It would be wise to use that time adoring our
families, cherishing our friends, and living our lives.” Maya Angelou

Family Story

"If we step up to the challenge of healing the family story we need to be grounded in the healing of our personal story.   We start there, standing firm in our own life experience and the person we have become through linking, editing, disorienting, and revisioning our personal story.   This is the psychological and spiritual foundation required to head into family history."  Christina Baldwin

Soulful Relationships

"The soulful relationship asks to be honored for what it is, not for what we wish it could be.   It has little to do with our intentions, expectations and moral requirements.   It has the potential to lead us into the mysteries that expand our hearts and transform our thoughts, but it can't do that when our primary interest is in pursuing our cherished ideologies of love, family, marriage and community."   Thomas Moore

Relationship

"The soul of relationship is not goal-minded, nor is it any one narrow, clearly defined entity.   A friendship may not have to endure throughout life in order to leave its eternal mark on the soul.   A marriage may not have to live up to its promises of lasting a lifetime in order to generate an eternal union.   A family may be riddled with betrayal and misunderstanding, and still offer the soul the cradle it craves.   A partnership may dissolve and yet continue to feed each of the members with gifts of remembrance."  Thomas Moore

Individuality

"The kind of individuality that soul generates is deeply rooted.   It isn't the kind that is manufactured as a life project.   It isn't the existentialist self made of choices or the psychologist's self-fashioned by family influences.   It isn't willed into existence, and it isn't shaped and sustained intentionally and consciously.   It is a mysterious emergence that is seeded in eternity and is truly limitless.   The power of this individuality is not forced but emanates from it's own depth and inherent  veracity."  Thomas Moore

Friends

"Friends, unlike family, have no claim on each other to live in certain ways.   They enjoy an element of distance in that regard that sustains their necessary individuality, and given that distance, friends can choose to be close.   In families, and in other structured relationships, we could foster deeper friendship by easing up on power issues inherent in those structures and by giving more attention to the ways of freely chosen friendship."  Thomas Moore

Relatedness

"Relatedness means staying in life, even when it becomes complicated and when the meaning and clarity are elusive.   It means living with the particular individuals who come into our lives, and not only with our ideals and images of the perfect mate or the perfect family.   On the other hand, honoring the particular in our lives also means making the separations and endings that the soul requires."   Thomas Moore