Travel

"No matter where you travel, or how you travel or how exotic your gurus,or how exotic the geography that might be presented to you for potential travel, if you're not looking after the identity of the traveler, the tickets and the destinations make no difference whatsoever".  John O' Donahue

Awakening

"When your soul awakens,you begin to truly inherit your life. You leave the kingdom of fake surfaces, repetitive talk and weary voices and slip deeper into the true adventure of who you are and who you are called to become. The greatest friend of the soul is the unknown. Yet we are afraid of the unknown because it lies outside our vision and our control. The normal way never leads home.

Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for old patterns. Now you realize how precious your time here is. You are no longer willing to squander your essence on undertakings that do not nourish your true self; your patience grows thin with tired talk and dead language. You see through the roster of expectation which promises safety and the confirmation of outer identity. Now you are impatient for growth, willing to put yourself in the way of change. You want your work to become an expression of your gift. You want your relationship to voyage beyond the pallid frontiers to where the danger of transformation dwells. You want your God to be wild and to call you to where your destiny awaits. When you begin to sense that your imagination is the place where you are most divine, you feel called to clean out of your mind all the worn and shabby furniture of thought. When your inner senses are blurred, you can see nothing in or of yourself; you become a respectable prisoner of received images. On this journey, you begin to see how the sides of your heart that seemed awkward, contradictory and uneven are the places where your treasure lies hidden. You begin to become truer to yourself. The journey shows you that from this inner dedication you can reconstruct your own values and action. You develop from your own self-compassion a great compassion for others. You are no longer caught in the false game of judgment , comparison and assumption. More naked now than ever , you begin to feel truly alive. You begin to trust the music of your own soul; you have inherited treasure that no one will ever be able to take from you. At the deepest level, this adventure of growth is in fact a trans-figurative conversation with your own death. And when the time comes for you to leave, the view from your death bed will show a life of growth that gladdens the heart and takes away all fear."

Change

"People say they are dying to change.  They say they want to change.  So they end up changing their partner, where they work or where they live, and often all they end up doing is becoming more the same than they were before.  I think the primary, radical, subversive way to change is to change the way you think.  John O' Donahue

Laughter

"There should be great dollups of wild laughter among believers.  And that laughter in it's sense of irony should be a recognition of the helplessness and smallness of their own little projects compared to the graciousness and dignity and the wonder of the great divine calling.   Because more often than not, it's when humans really try to make it work out and get it together that they make the greatest disaster out of the whole thing.   I'm sure if we could listen to the music of the spheres that we would hear deep within it the divine laughter at the attempts of the little humans to work out all of their miriad projects which are so serious and solomn to them but in the context of the great and touching divine graciousness are very small indeed."   John O' Donahue

Image

"We try to fix or control that which is beyond us with images that are too poor and that are ultimately inadequate."  John O' Donahue

Image of God and Man

"The most profound way to stand or sit in the human presence and in the Divine presence is without any image whatsoever."  John O' Donahue

God

"God is only our name for it.   And the closer we get to it, it is then that we deeply realize that it is so unlike what we actually call God.   An awful lot of the time what we call the Divine is simply a projection of our own need or fear or hunger."   John O' Donahue

God

"When we cage, domesticate or control God then we are no longer dealing with a living God but we are dealing with an ideal of our own making.    Part of the Western traditions in the presence of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche has been a relentless attack on the way that we have reduced the magnificent, hospitable Divine Presence to a safe, human idol of our own projection."   John O' Donahue

Sensuality

"If we come home to our own sensuality and if we let go of all the awful, brutalizing notions of sin and guilt with which we were inflicted and we recognize and recover the lyrical innocence of our own bodies then we will come into the sacred within us.   It will also in another way relieve us of the crass, harsh brutality the modern idea of Eros, which is very voyeuristic and driven and lacks the textured gentleness of loving sensuality."  John O' Donahue

Celtic Spirituality

"One of the things that has haunted and destroyed religion and damaged our relationship to the Divine and exiled us and marooned us away from the lovely presence of God is dualism.   Dualism splits soul from body, spirit from matter, time from eternity and space from spiritual space.   The miracle of Celtic Spirituality is that there is no dualism in it."  John O' Donahue

Celtic Spirituality

"Celtic Spirituality and the ancient Irish faith never forced anyone.  Never drove people through the tracks of programs with the intention of reaching the cold destination of perfection.   It never tried to unriddle the mind of it's gracious contradictions.   And it never tried to make the world safe or certain for people.   It constantly called people back to the source of their own originality."     John O' Donahue

Perfection

"Perfection is a deadly kind of thing.  It is sterile and cold.  Whereas what God calls each of us to is to the transfiguration of our own imperfections.   If you journey with your own imperfections; you speak with them, you converse with them, you ask them to show you what they really want to tell you then you'll find out everything that you need to know about the incredible mystery of your own soul that you didn't invent but was graciously given to you.   You will also find out wonderful news and a wonderful meaning to the depth of your own calling that you didn't invent either."  John O' Donahue

Faith

"In a lot of old religion and spirituality there was a great struggle.   There was great effort and great weariness.   And people often exile themselves from the warmth of their own hearts and pushed their lives into a cold perfect place because the thought that that was the place where the Divine was actually waiting for them.   Nothing could be further from the truth.   There is nothing coercive in God.    If you go for a naive, monolithic notion of the divine will then you can work in a fundamental way.   But if you go for the gracious hospitality and warmth and passion of the Divine Imagination then you'll never be forced.   But you'll be continually drawn and invited.   Faith then is a response to the Divine Presence.  It isn't about pushing yourself, but faith is about helplessness of being in love with the Divine.   Faith is really primal, ancient attraction to the Divine." 

Slowing Down and Stopping

"Often we can't feel a sense of the Divine because we don't let ourselves alone.   I believe in a spirituality of radical non-self-interference.   If we can just let ourselves be then we will find that in that act of acceptance that there is something really subversive.  There is nothing as radical and subversive as an act of acceptance.   Sometimes when we call off our search and our hunger for God, it is then that we allow ourselves to be found by the Divine.   God is not lost from us.   It is rather that we are so often lost and exiled from ourselves and when we call a halt to that search then we find that unknown to ourselves we've already been resting in the tender embrace of God's lovely presence."  John O' Donahue

Awakening

"If we could but allow ourselves to fully awaken to the image of Divine spontaneity we'd really have magical lives.   We would rescue our time from being reduced to routine and we would come fully into the secret eternity that waits within time to help us live divinely and majestically."  John O' Donahue

The Divine

"The Divine never wants to limit you.  And the Divine never sets limits.   Any limit that we feel between the Divine and ourselves are limits that we set.  There are never limits that the Divine sets."  John O' Donahue

Living Life to the Full

"You're here to live your life to the full.   And when you bring to life everything that calls you from within and without then the time will come for you to journey home to that nest with the great divine circle, bringing back the fruits of a life that didn't allow itself to be limited by fear or smallness or negativity, but dared to believe in the grandeur of it's own possibility."   John O' Donahue

God

"So much of our language and thought about God is dry, dead and boring.  Anytime you hear boring language about the Divine you know that you're in the presence of a dead God rather than a living God."  John O' Donahue

Dance Your LIfe

"When you enter in fully and awaken all the dimensions of your heart and live out of the robustness of the divine difference that is in you and dance your life you're really on sacred ground."  John O' Donahue

Image of God

"There is no need for any of us to be afraid of God because God is no judge and all our images of God as a judge and as being perfect and watching us so negatively are all projections of our own fear and have nothing at all to do with the incredible generosity and beauty and dignity of the Divine Presence around us."  John O' Donanhue