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."

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

"Often, confusion is the tension of trying to make sense of things too soon, before enough of the inner players have learned their parts.  Often, experience is the way that the heart and mind and spirit practice what they need to play."  Mark Nepo

Institutions

"What happens when our institutions no longer serve us, no longer reflect the truth of our own experience? We sit on pews and feel a soul-stirring disconnect as we are preached sermons spoken from the dead. What we know is not what we hear. We mistake our confusion for guilt. Our hearts close. Our minds wander and we walk away. Inspiration returns when another voice is heard, one that recognizes that the past and the future are contemporary. How can we learn to speak in a language that is authentic,faithful to our hearts? The ceiling is raised by our imagination. Authentic acts reform.

-Terry Tempest Williams.
"Leap"

A Vase

I am always holding a priceless vase in my hands.
If you asked me about the deeper truths
of the the path and I told you
the answers,

It would be like handing sacred relics to you.

But most have their hands tied
behind their
back;

that is, most are not free of events their eyes have seen
and their ears have heard
and their bodies have felt.

Most cannot focus their abilities
in the present, and
might drop what I said.

So I'll wait; I don't mind waiting until
your love for all
makes luminous
the now. 

Spiritual Warrior

"When the spiritual warrior progresses on the path he paradoxically finds himself more alone.  He is like an island sitting alone in the middle of the lake...Although the warrior's life is dedicated to helping others, he realizes that he will never be able to completely share his experience with others.  The fullness of his experience is his own, and he must live with his own truth.  Yet he is more and more in love with the world.  That combination of love affair and loneliness is what enables the warrior to constantly reach out to help others.   By renouncing his private world the warrior discovers a greater universe and a fuller and fuller broken heart.   This is not something to feel bad about; it a cause for rejoicing."   Chogyam Trungpa

Contradiction

"When we discover the supreme happiness of unity within ourselves we reconcile what once seemed irreconcilable.  Opposites become partners.   Our longing for stability in a constantly changing world becomes humorous.  Our desires for connection and our troubles with intimacy become grist for the spiritual mill.  We allow diversity to flourish within the context of unity.   We understand that the unadulterated, pure, singleness of feeling we long for can be experienced only when we allow all feelings to live in peace within our hearts."  Elizabeth Lesser

Spiritual Maturity

"A growing surrender to the unknown is a sign of spiritual maturity and encourages us to give up illusions of immortality we still might have and to experience in a new way our total dependence on God's love, a dependence that does not take away our free selfhood but purifies and ennobles it...those who have learned through living that there is nothing and nobody in this life to cling to, are the really creative people.   The are free to move constantly away from the familiar, safe places and can keep moving forward to new, unexplored areas of life."  Inayat Khan

Living Life to the Full

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
-Oscar Wilde

Humanity and Growth

“Our humanity is not an attribute that we have received once and forever with our conception. It is a potentiality that we have to discover within us and progressively develop or destroy through our confrontation with the different experiences of suffering that will meet us through our life."
—Xavier Le Pichon

Risk

‎"Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far
they can go." (T.S. Elliot)

Change

Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life. Herbert Otto~~

Dark Night of the Soul

"Your dark night is liminal, an in-between place, and that explains in part why it is so uncomfortable.   It is neither here nor there.   It seems to take you out of life rather than further into it.   It becomes difficult to find words to describe your experience, and you may hesitate to describe it to friends because people usually want good news.   They don't know what's going on.   Nobody around knows what is happening to you.   But something is taking place, some deep process dissolving you and remaking you into something new."   Thomas Moore

Essence

‎"You are the sky. Everything else - it's just the weather." Pema Chondron

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

Life as Story

"As creatures of story, we long for story; not just wordiness but the quality of interaction story engages in us.  Ironically so many of us experience great loneliness as we jostle around each other on crowded streets, overhear each other on cell phone, or cruise the internet late at night.   As we practice the art of storycatching, we can look for opportunities to insert story space into our daily life when we pay attention, and when we are paid attention to, we learn to take our place in the story going on around us."  Christina Baldwin

Storycatchers

"Storycatcher's are intrigued with making -perhaps driven to make sense of experience."  Christina Baldwin

Story

"Our lives are our story, and our story is our life.   Story is the narrative thread of our experience - not what literally happens, but what we make out of what happens, what we tell each other and what we remember."  Christina Baldwin

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

Freedom from Attachment

"The less we are attached to life, the more alive we can become.   The less we have preferences about life, the more deeply we can experience and participate in life."   Rachel Naomi Remen