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."

Choice

"Countless times in our days, we find ourselves faced with the almost imperceptible choice to enable trust or distrust, to affirm directness or indirectness, to empower anonymous judgment or the courage to stand in one's truth without judging others."  Mark Nepo

Blame

"Placing the blame or judgment on someone else leaves you powerless to change your experience; taking responsibility for your beliefs and judgments gives you the power to change them"
— Byron Katie

Listening

"One of the greatest steps we can make on the spiritual path is to learn to stop before we judge experience and give it a chance to tell us something about reality - to impart news about ourselves about the seeds we have sown, about the nature of life.  If we can intercept the reactive nature of the mind and the habitual defensiveness of the heart, then we will find ourselves in a world that never runs out of messages."  Elizabeth Lesser

Shadow

"We see the shadow most indirectly in distasteful traits and actions of other people, OUT THERE, where it is safe to observe it.   When we react intensely to a quality in another individual or group - such as laziness or stupidity, sensuality or spirituality - and our reaction overtakes us with great loathing or admiration, this may be our shadow showing.  We project by attributing this quality to the other person in an unconscious effort to banish it from ourselves, to keep ourselves from seeing it within."  Zweig and Abrams

Projection

"Taking back projections is the act of seeing yourself truthfully in relationship to others.  It involves taking responsibility for your difficulties instead of blaming others.  You no long3er rush to condemn another, nor do you put people on pedestals.  You see yourself and others clearly.  You are more willing to admit your own faults.  You are also better able to take credit for your talents and achievements.  Therefore, you develop an instinct  of when to give ground and when to stand firm."  Elizabeth Lesser

Projection

"The impurity of my associates is but the manifestation of the hidden wrong within me."  Gandhi

Judgment

"Moralistic judgments are always based in anxiety.  They sound high and righteous, but they come from a small, worried, and barely concealed desperation."  Unknown

Gift Me

 GIFT ME

Gift me with your presence
Show up fully, but only when you really want to
Not out of obligation or fear of disappointing.

Gift me with your stories
Of joy and pain, for through them you grow
To love life and learn wisdom
And in hearing them from you, I deepen too.
Tell it all, every detail...
What was said, felt and discovered
And how it changed you

Gift me with honesty
Tell me when I hurt or disappoint you
When I make you proud or just that you love me.
Tell me the truth, as you see it,
In me, the world and life
As the unfolding Mystery


Gift me with forgiveness
An honest attempt to give
Not only me, but all you meet
The benefit of the doubt
That even in my faults and frailties
You see the inherent worth and Light of God
Most of all...

Gift me with a chosen silence
When it would be easier to judge
Or you feel you can't resist the urge
To share with another the latest amusing, confusing
Insane thing you saw me do...or refrain from
For time has a way, of bringing all things full circle

Gift me with a compassionate, listening ear
When I seek a witness to my life and experience
And open your heart even wider,
That it may take it ALL in
And love me even more when I most confuse you

Gift me with a place at your table
A phone call just because
An invitation to adventure
And the assurance that
Not a day goes by without a smile lifting your lips
In fondness for memories we have yet to create

Gift me with patience
As time slows my steps
And mind's edges dull
Allow me the dignity and freedom of which I am capable,
But if the time comes that I am not safe or sane enough,
Care for me, as I tried to do for you
when you still fit in my arms
And needed a shoulder to sleep on.

Valerie Wilkins Alder  

Wisdom

"Wisdom comes most easily to those who have the courage to embrace life without judgment and are willing to not know, sometimes for a very long time.   It requires us to be more fully and simply alive than we have been taught to be.  It may require us to suffer.   But ultimately we will be more that we were when we began."

Recognition

"We are often fooled by someone's appearance, their age or illness or anger, or meanness or just too busy to recognize that there is in everyone a place of goodness and integrity, no matter how deeply buried.   We are too hurried or distracted to stop and bear witness to it.   When we recognize the spark of God in others, we blow on it, no matter how deeply it has been buried or for how long.   When we bless someone, we touch the unborn goodness in them and wish it well."  Rachel Naomi Remen

Judgment

"The life in us is diminished by judgment far more frequently than by disease.   Our own self-judgment or the judgment of other people can stifle our life force, it's spontaneous and natural expression."  Rachel Naomi Remen

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

Divine Truth

"You need never be ashamed of anything that is within you when you're in the presence of God.  You need never feel inferior.  You need never feel guilty about anything you've done that you shouldn't do.  You need never feel guilty about what you haven't done that you should have done.  And you should never feel in any way judged by the loving tenderness and intimacy of the Divine Presence because any Divine Presence  that could judge or see  according to the smallness of our narrow ways of viewing wouldn't be worthy of the name of the Divine.  There's a graciousness in the Divine that is beyond all the smallness of our limitations."  John O' Donahue

Integrity

"Integrity does not mean a moral judgment.  It simply means to live from the place in you that has the greatest truth."  Rachel Naomi Remen

State of Being

"People are where they are because that's exactly where they really want to be...whether they'll admit it or not."  Earl Nightingale 

Teachers

"When you've met your match you've found your teacher."  Pema Chondron

Troublemakers

"If we were to come up with one word about each of the troublemakers in our lives, we would find ourselves with a list of descriptions of our own rejected qualities which we project onto the outside world.   The people who repel us unwittingly show us aspects of ourselves we find unacceptable, which others can't see.   They mirror us and give us the chance to befriend all of that ancient stuff that we carry around like a backpack full of granite boulders."   Pema Chondron

Inspiration

"Inspiration is not garnered from the recitation of our flaws."   Paul Hawkens

Morality and Religion

"The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to
any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the
authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action."  Einstein