Courage

"Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous, is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on. Whether we stay or whether we go - to be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made."  David Whyte

Mystery

"Mystery is a way of seeing.  A moment when the mask of habit that makes things familiar falls away and we can catch a glimpse of life itself.  Mystery does not require us to do anything.  Mystery may simply require us to see familiar things in new ways and remember the wonder.  People who wonder rarely burn out.   Maybe we all need to know a little less and wonder a little more."  Rachel Naomi Remen

Dark Times

"Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am."
Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

Rilke

Darkness

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Rilke 

Life Questions

"Confidence, like art, never comes from having all the answers; it comes from being open to all the questions."  Earl Gray Stevens

Spiritual Adventure

"The spiritual path is the process of fearlessly peering into the mysterious nature of life and relaxing our mental and emotional grip on our own place within it.   Learning how to do this opens the way to a kind of wisdom that answers our own questions and touches the deepest strands of our longing."   Elizabeth Lesser

The Mystery

"The wisest, sanest, and happiest of people are not those who profess a complicated and rigid spiritual doctrine.   Rather, I have gained the most from those who's paths lead them and their students gently, humorously, and fearlessly into the Mystery.   The most useful spiritual techniques are those that have taught me how to relax into the Mystery.  Once there, the path home lights up from within."  Elizabeth Lesser

Longing

"To give voice to our longings is to reveal a side of ourselves that we have become skilled at hiding.  With the first pangs of hunger we rush to fill the empty spaces with something, anything, rather than float quietly on our backs in the mysterious waters where our soul lives.   We may be ashamed to admit that we feel a kind of helplessness - a need for something we cannot even describe."  Elizabeth Lesser

Becoming Human

"It took me a long time to decide to become a human being, and look within my own flawed nature for salvation.   It took mistakes, dark nights of the soul, hard work and help from teachers and friends to fashion a spirituality that respected both my divinity and my humanity, my radiance and my shadow.   It took my own combination of religion and psychology, meditation and physical healing, mysticism and science to forge a path that felt genuine and effective."   Elizabeth Lesser

Dark Night of the Soul

"You sense in your body and in the fullness of your own emotion a great rupture in the world you have known, an irrevocable emptiness that is not just to be felt but completely absorbed if you are to go on.   A genuine dark night of the soul takes you to this crossroad place, this bardo place, where you have the opportunity, extremely hard won, to live in a different world."  Thomas Moore

Change

"Profound shifts in the condition of your soul don't happen easily.   They are always mysterious and happen in spite of your efforts."

New Beginnings

"It can be helpful to distinguish between depression and the sense of existential emptying.  You are beyond emotion.  You are sensing your reality and your personhood.   The emptiness you sense may not be yours, not even personal.  It may the the vacuum of life.  You may be standing at the edge of your atmosphere, looking out on the empty space of your unknown world, as though you were in a space station looking out into the universe."  Thomas Moore

Life Questions

"Note that the question is not, what do you want, but rather what is wanted at a level beyond and beneath your consciousness."   Thomas Moore

Pain

"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the winters your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility:

For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
and the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears."

Negative Capability

John Keats introduced the concept in 1871, describing it as "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason." He believed that "great people have the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved" and that "the truths found in imagination access holy authority". He believed that authority could not otherwise be understood and writes, "This place of uncertainty is a place between the mundane, ready reality and the multiple potentials of a more fully understood existence. It is a state of intentional openmindedness".

Individual Sprituality

"I grew up and healed through a crisis of faith.   Rather than developing more certainty about God, my renewed faith has made me more comfortable with less certainty and more mystery.   God is ineffable and knowable only through the love we share on the journey."  Joan Boryshenko

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."

Story

"At the heart of every story is Mystery.   The reasons we attribute to events may be far different from their true cause.   Often our first interpretation of events is quite different from our last reading of them."  Rachel Naomi Remen

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

Prayer

"Prayer is a movement from Mastery to Mystery."  Rachel Naomi Remen