“But the beauty is in the walking -- we are betrayed by destinations.”

― Gwyn Thomas

Parenting

"Accept the children the way we accept trees—with gratitude, because they are a blessing—but do not have expectations or desires. You don’t expect trees to change, you love them as they are." ~ Isabel Allende ♥

Imperfection

Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight... When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.
-   Helen Keller

Silence

"If you could only keep quiet, clear of memories and expectations, you would be able to discern the beautiful pattern of events. Its your restlessness that causes chaos."   Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

Searching

"The critical step on the spiritual path, and one that we will take over and over, is to let ourselves experience spiritual hunger long enough and deep enough to follow it to it's source.   Unless we do that, we will never get the chance to taste the true nourishment that is indeed available, closer to us than we think."  Elizabeth Lesser

Expectation

"Expect your every need to be met, expect the answer to every problem, expect abundance on every level, expect to grow spiritually."  Eileen Caddy

Living Life to the Full

“When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.” ~ Paulo Coelho

Expectation and the Moment

"When you drop your expectations that a person, a situation, a place, or
an object should fulfill you, it's easier to be present in this moment
because you're no longer looking to the next one. Most people want to
get what they want, whereas the secret is to want what you get at this
moment." Eckhart Tolle

Women's Friendships

"How might your life have been different, if as a young woman, there had been a place for you, a place where you could go to be with women? A place where you could be received as you strove to order your moments and your days.

A place where you could learn a quiet centeredness...to help ground yourself in daily patterns that would nurture you through their gentle rhythms...and after the fires were lighted and the drumming and the silence, you heard for the very first time...each woman slowly speaking into the stillness, sharing her feelings of how she saw her life and what she wished to say of it...weaving the threads of her life into a fabric to be given and named.

And as the shadows of the day lengthened into dusk and you leaned your head against your mother's shoulder, you pondered in your heart a different sense of a woman's life.

If someone had been able to see that you were taking the first tiny baby steps toward feeling your own feelings, of knowing that you saw life differently than those around you. If you had been helped to experience your own uniqueness, to feel the excitement of sensing, for the very first time, your own awareness of life. What if someone had helped you to own all of this...to own your own life.

And the women helped you to go inside yourself and consider all the experiences of your life and to reflect on them...if the women had helped you draw your thoughts and feelings together and to weigh them...so that you could come to a clearer knowing of what your life was about. And if the women had listened as you told them of your whole life and the meaning that it held for you.

And at the end of that process...the oldest women in the lodge had come and sat in a circle and you saw that they had left an empty place....a place for you. And you softly and timidly made your way to the empty space and quietly claimed your wisdom. The wisdom of your soul.........How might your life have been different?"

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."

Belief

"When you become aware that your thinking has a life of its own, you will never make a prison of your own perception."

"When your thinking is locked in false certainty or negativity it puts so many interesting and vital areas of life out of your reach. You live impoverished in the midst of your own abundance."

"Belief should liberate your life. The reduction of the wild eternity of your life into a harsh divine project is a blasphemy against the call of your soul."

"Expectation is resentment waiting to happen."

"When you look at the different conflicts in your life, you will find that they are placed where the contradictions cross each other, the nail where two intimate, but conflicting realities criss-cross."

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." 

Forgiveness

Please do not believe me
if ever I should say that you've upset me.
Sometimes I forget the true source of my feelings.

You cannot make me sad,
impatient,
angry,
or otherwise dis-eased.
Only a hope or expectation of you on my part,
which you have not fulfilled,
can move me thus.

Yet I am much too human
to be without hopes and expectations,
and I am also much too human
to live always in the knowing
that my hopes and expectations
have no claim upon your being.

So if I say that you've upset me,
please forgive me for attempting
to disinherit my own self's creation of my pain.
And please do not ignore my deeper message:
I care enough about you
to include you in my hopes and expectations.
~Noel McInnis

Joy

"Joy seems to be part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations.   Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there."  Rachel Naomi Remen

Belief

"What we believe about ourselves can hold us hostage.   A belief is more than an idea - it seems to shift the way in which we actually experience ourselves and our lives."  Rachel Naomi Remen

Labeling

"We put labels on life all the time.   "Right, wrong, success, failure, lucky" may be as limiting a way of seeing things as "diabetic, epileptic, manic-depressive".  Labeling sets up expectation of life that is so compelling we can no longer see things as they really are.   We are in relationship with our expectations and not with life itself."  Rachel Naomi Remen

Stillness

"When we avoid the emptiness, when we fill the stillness with too much doing, we are often trying to outrun our sometimes unconscious conviction that who we are will never be enough."   Rachel Naomi Remen

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

Parenting from Individuality

"When we honor individuality, we are preparing a nest for the soul, an entryway.   Norms, conventions and traditional expectations serve some other interest and are foreign to the soul's unique experiments.   Soulfulness and individuality go together, one to fortify the other."   Thomas Moore

Friendship

"Friendship begins in a soulful way through the workings of fate.  It is as though souls recognize the hidden treasures in each other and forge the alliance while the conscious mind goes on with it's intentions, hopes and expectations."   Thomas Moore