Imagine A Woman

Imagine a woman who believes it is right and good she is a woman.
A woman who honors her experience and tells her stories.
Who refuses to carry the sins of others within her body and life.

Imagine a woman who trusts and respects herself.
A woman who listens to her needs and desires.
Who meets them with tenderness and grace.

Imagine a woman who acknowledges the past's influence on the present.
A woman who has walked through her past.
Who has healed into the present.

Imagine a woman who authors her own life.
A woman who exerts, initiates, and moves on her own behalf.
Who refuses to surrender except to her truest self and wisest voice.

Imagine a woman who names her own gods.
A woman who imagines the divine in her image and likeness.
Who designs a personal spirituality to inform her daily life.

Imagine a woman in love with her own body.
A woman who believes her body is enough, just as it is.
Who celebrates its rhythms and cycles as an exquisite resource.

Imagine a woman who honors the body of the Goddess in her changing body.
A woman who celebrates the accumulation of her years and her wisdom.
Who refuses to use her life-energy disguising the changes in her body and life.

Imagine a woman who values the women in her life.
A woman who sits in circles of women.
Who is reminded of the truth about herself when she forgets.

Imagine yourself as this woman.
- Patricia Lynn Reilly

Soulmate

A soulmate is the one person whose love is powerful enough to motivate you to meet your soul, to do the emotional work of self-discovery, of awakening.
~Kenny Loggins

Waking Up

"The rewards of "birthing" are "birthing" itself -knowing that through divine grace you are becoming more and more of an instrument of divine love and justice, feeling the divine working more and more intimately within you, seeing and knowing the Divine inspiring more and more of your wants, growing wilder and calmer, more and more heartbroken and blissful, watching the Divine manifest more and more richly and playfully in your mind and heart and body and soul and relationships and surroundings.  No external glory or fame or success could ever approximate the ecstacy that such awareness will bring you or awaken in you such depths of gratitude; no external failure can ever take its joy from you."  Andrew Harvey

Awakening Soul

"Once the soul has been able to feel itself, its own life, independently of its garb, it begins to have confidence in life."  Inayat Khan

Oneness

"What we reach for may be different, but what makes us reach is the same."  Mark Nepo

Waking Up

"The coming to consciousness is not a discovery of something new; it is a long and painful process to that which has always been."  Helen Luke

Human

"I feel more today
than one being should
and can't tell
if I'm in trouble
or on holy ground"  

Mark Nepo

Human Body

‎"It's also helpful to realize that this very body that we have, that is sitting right here right now... with its aches and pleasures... is exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive." ~Pema Chödrön

Transformation

"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." ~ Nelson Mandela

Dark Night of the Soul

"The traditional  rite of passage approach is to see life as a series of transformations in which you become a person with new capacities and talents.   Each of these steps might have it's own dark night.   To be a person means that you are always becoming, and a dark night is one sign that you are alive."  Thomas Moore

Change

"To keep the unfolding self alive, you have to open yourself to change every step of the way."  Thomas Moore

Born in Soul

"To be born in soul again and again is a positive experience, but it also involves pain.   It means entering a new kind of life just when the old one might have grown comfortable.   Familiarity can bring tranquility, but you also need the sting and chaos of the new.   To be alive entails both of these qualities, the yin and yang of peace and pain."  Thomas Moore

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."

Life

"Life offers it's wisdom generously.   Everything teaches.  Not everyone learns.   Life asks of us the same things we have been asked in every class.  "Stay awake.  Pay attention."   But paying attention is no simple matter.  It requires us not to be distracted by expectation, past experiences, labels and masks.   It asks that we not jump to early conclusions and that we remain open to surprise." 

Ritual

"Life can become habit, something done without thinking.  Living life in this way does not awaken us.  Yet any of our daily habits can awaken us.  All of life can become ritual.  When it does, our experience of life changes radically and the ordinary becomes consecrated.   Ritual doesn't make mystery happen.  It helps us see and experience something which is already real.   It does not create the sacred, it only describes what is there and has always been there, deeply hidden in the obvious."   Rachel Naomi Remen

Awakening

"Over the years I have seen the power of taking an unconditional relationship to life.   I am surprised to have found a sort of willingness to show up for whatever life may offer and meet with it rather than wishing to edit and change the inevitable.   When people begin to take such an attitude they seem to become intensely alive, intensely present."   Rachel Naomi Remen

Words Awakening...by "Me"

Sweet, Innocent One
Eyes wide, heart open
Your fragile and growing dream eggs
Gestating
All in one hopeful, well-chosen (or so you thought) basket.

In such a hurry
Born of boredom
And weary of waiting
So much, so long held back
Bursting at the seams of your someday.

What you only see now
Is how many of those dreams
Were lovingly chosen
By well-meaning others.

You filled your plate
Your cup runneth 'ore
You graciously and anxiously accepted
Grateful at last to have found your place.

You busied yourself warming eggs
And unknowingly feeding others hatching baby dreams
Unaware you held inside
Your own embryos of joy
Growing; patiently waiting
Wondering if you'd ever stop long enough to listen.

He was raised as a sheep
At least that is what he was always told
But deep inside the fangs and fur,
Of a wolf were growing
They more suited his spirit and fed the feelings of aliveness he craved.

Told bedtime stories of lives lived happily-ever-after
Grazing on grass
With the guidance and protection of shepherds. 

Sometimes his tongue caught the sharp edge of a canine
Other times he struggled to push down the urge to run free
Way faster than he had been told sheep could run.

It concerned him, but he never quite dare
Untie the string he'd discovered
Holding the cloak of soft, white wool around and over him.


You, were raised as a shepherd girl.
It suited you.
Spending your days tending to others
Occupying your mind with their safety and happiness.
It sort of helped, but inside the little girl longed
To abandon the bonnet
And take off running
Not caring where it took you. 

He picked you as his Shepherd.
Hoping you could make him happy in the rolling hills of green
When wandering and hunting were slowly
Boiling in his blood

Both innocent actors
Playing parts
Wearing costumes
Long ago assigned,
But growing tighter by the day.

Both awaking confused
At yoke-covered whiskers
Your mysteriously closing heart
At the sight of your missing eggs
But afraid to look for explanations
Not wanting....but wanting...the play to end.
After all, sheep don't eat eggs or have whiskers
And Shepherds don't abandon their flock.

Only recently
Through spectacles of hindsight
Have you dared really look back
And stare at the set
That was your life
And compassionately embrace
The broken hearts
The deep, mutual disappointments
The missing eggs
The dissatisfaction of subsiding
On a diet of grass
And living life in one pasture
With only one basket of dreams
Meant to keep it all together

In the end, the curtain descended
The wolf took off the cloak and took the blame
But also deserves the credit.

For in eating your eggs
And life hiding your basket
You were left
Perfectly poised
To take center stage
In the starring role
As yourself. 

Valerie Wilkins Alder 2008

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

Broken Open

"It is in times of brokenness that the soul sings its most wise and eternal song.   I cannot hum you a tune or tell you the lyrics; each person's soul has it's own cadence.   You will recognize it's music though, by the way you feel when you are listening; awake, calm, and suddenly relieved of the burden of control."  Elizabeth Lesser

It's about Love

"For the moment we all seemed to know something that God knows:  that we are sent here to love each other and to help each other - that our lives are about each other.   All of our other plans fly out the window in such moments of awakening.  Plans for great things are replaced by the greatest thing of all, which turns out to be love, in it's most tender, most personal form."   Elizabeth Lesser