Enlightenment

"Enlightenment is intimacy with all things." Jack Kornfield

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

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

Enlightenment

"Enlightenment is intimacy with all things." Jack Kornfield

Soulful Relationships

"A soulful relationship is not a simple gift; it asks for concentrated cultivation. Anyone can find vernacular sources of soul in the familiar world around them, but there is a spirit in our time that goes against the vernacular. It prefers the abstract, the general, and the numerically insignificant. This abstracting spirit trickles down to our relationships and shrinks the space necessary for the soul. It is a philosophy that finds comfort in knowing what the majority feels and thinks. It's also a moralism that tells us, based on majority opinion, how to be in relationship. But to live a vernactular life and find vernacular intimacy, one has to go against the tide and cherish the things that call out to us in particular, whether or not they are valued by the culture around us." Thomas Moore

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Risk

"Those who don't love themselves as they are rarely love life as it is either.   In avoiding all pain and seeking comfort at all cost, we may be left without intimacy or compassion; in rejecting change and risk we often cheat ourselves of the quest; in denying our suffering we may never know our strength or our greatness.   Or even that the love we have been given can be trusted."   Rachel Naomi Remen

Life

"Coherent, elegant, mysterious, Aesthetic...I would not have described life in this way.    But I was not on intimate terms with life then.   I had not seen the power of life force in everyone, met the will to live in all it's varied and subtle forms, recognized irrepressible love of life buried in the heart of every living thing.   I had not been used by life to fulfill itself or been caught unaware by it's strength in the midst of the most profound weakness.   I had no sense of awe.   I had thought that life was broken and that I, armed with powerful tools would fix it.   I had thought then that I was broken also.   But life has shown me otherwise."  Rachel Naomi Remen

Intimacy

"If, having met myself in the empty moments, I am willing and able to bring all of who I am to another; receiving all of who they are, then we are truly together."  Oriah

Intimacy

"When two who have intimacy with themselves are fully with each other - whether for a lifetime or for a moment - the world is held tenderly and fed by the image they create simply by being together.   They can be friends, lovers or life partners, or simply two strangers who's lives intersect for a moment."  Oriah

Receiving

"I have come to accept that no matter how much I am able to be with myself, no matter how much I like my own company, I still long to sit close to and at times merge with another in deep intimacy.   The completeness of self is found when we can be alone and when we can bring all of who we are to another, receiving and being received fully."  Oriah

Failure

When we cannot live with failure, we limit the intimacy in our lives.   People do not tell stories of failure to those who have no room in their hearts only for perfection."  Oriah

Play

"I play because it helps me lighten up without numbing out, stops me from taking myself too seriously, and reminds me that there is joy in what I do well AND in what I do poorly.   Those I choose to be with intimately are those who can appreciate the joy of both."  Oriah

Intimacy

"If we want to light the fire of intimacy we have to honor the soul of the other.  A relationship demands not that we surrender to another person, but that we acknowledge a soul in which the parties are mingled and respect it's unpredictable demands."   Thomas Moore

Friendship and Individuality

"Friendship entails a paradoxical blending of intimacy and individuality."   Thomas Moore

Friendship

"Friendship creates the cosmologies in which we live, and if we do not have a cultivated world made through the conversations and exchanges of friendship, we will necessarily feel detached, unmoored, and unplaced.   Friendship makes a major contribution to the process of soul-making.   Friendship offers the soul intimacy and relatedness."   Thomas Moore

The Masculine

"Because the masculine is oriented toward freedom of consciousness (rather than flow of love), it chooses purpose over relationship.   The masculine seeks freedom through accomplishing a mission.   Ultimately, this is the blissful freedom of open consciousness.   If you are a man with a masculine essence, then freedom - expressed through your devotion to your purpose - is your ultimate concern.   Your intimate relationship comes second.   Your woman may be the most important person in your life.  You may truly love her.  But if you deny your deepest purpose to spend time with her, your resentment will grow, despite your love."  David Deida

Love

"You are sent here to learn to love and to receive love.   The greatest gift of new love brings is the awakening to the hidden love within.   This makes you independent.   You are now able to come close to the other, not out of need or with the weary apparatus of projection, but out of genuine intimacy, affinity and belonging.   It is a freedom.   Love should make you free.   You become free of the hungry, blistering need with which you continually reach out to scrape affirmation, respect and significance for yourself from things and people outside yourself."  John O' Donahue

Solitude

"When you inhabit your solitude fully and experience its outer extremes of isolation and abandonment, you will find that at it's heart there is neither loneliness nor emptiness but intimacy and shelter."   John O' Donahue

Anam Cara

Anam Cara:

• Acts as a teacher, companion or spiritual guide
• You are understood as you are without mask or pretense
• A gift from God
• A soul bond that exists as a recognized and admired social construct
• A person to whom you could reveal the hidden intimacies of your life.
• An act of recognition and belonging
• Cuts across all catagory and convention and morality
• Joined in an ancient and eternal way
• Is not wounded or limited by separation or distance
• Half-truths of social acquaintance fall away; you can be who you really are.
• Allows understanding to dawn.  When you are understood you are home...understanding nourishes belonging.
• You feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person's soul
• Discloses the special and sacred identity of the other person
• The honesty and clarity of true friendship also brings out the real countour of your spirit.