Relationship

"I don't need you for my wholeness.  I want you for my joy."  Unknown

Life.....

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
~ Louise Erdrich

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."

What if our religion was each other


If our practice was our life

If prayer, our words.

What if the temple was the earth

If forests were our church......

If holy water - the rivers, lakes, and oceans

What if meditation was our relationships

If the Teacher was life

If wisdom was self-knowledge

If love was the center of our being



~ Ganga White

and you tried to change didn’t you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.

Warsan Shire

Relationships and Truth

"In a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for truth and have begun striving for ourselves". ~ Abraham J Heschel

Self-Compassion

“To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else’s eyes.”

-Pema Chödrön

What Matters Most

"Having without possessing is part of the supreme virtue.   The things that matter most most can be touched but not forced to linger."  Lao Tzu

Facing Suffering

" Facing, feeling, and accepting our own suffering keeps us from reenacting it on others."  Mark Nepo

No more Swatting

"We all suffer the uncertainty of being hurt by the life that surrounds us, and we all have a changing ring of safety beyond which we are likely to hurt other living things in the guise of self-defense.  How often we imagine things are dangerous when they are only doing what comes naturally.  This is too much like the dance we do with strangers and loved ones alike.  How often we murder parts of ourselves by not letting things advance or come close.  How often we let fear and the swat rule our emotional lives.  How often we kill or chase away everything that moves.  I think of Francis of Assisi, who held so still the birds landed on his branchlike arms, and we wonder why we are so lonely when we won't let anything full of life come near.   If we could only see the bee, or the bird, or our enemy as a brief living center like ourselves, we could let them go on their way without pulling us into opposition."   Mark Nepo

I Love You

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this.”
― Pablo Neruda

Trails of Life

"Isn't the trail of our relationships the time it takes for the heart to practice it's part in the movement we call Love?  Isn't the trail of our honest questions the time it takes for the mind to practice it's part in the movement we call Wisdom?  Isn't the trail of our changing beliefs the time it takes for the spirit to practice it's part in the movement called God?  Isn't the trail of our Oneness, those brief moments when everything comes together, isn't this the time it takes for Love and Wisdom and God to bring the common place in us alive?" Mark Nepo

Hurt

"The worm is one of the only creatures that grows from bing cut.  Mysteriously, if you cut a worm in two, each half becomes whole, and you have two worms.

What is it in how the worm lives that allows it to grow from its pain, and how might we translate that to being human  It lives in humus -the soil- inside and out. 

Perhaps the secret to growing from our wounds is to live close to the earth, to live with our hearts and minds and bellies always in touch -both inside and out - with that which is larger than we are. 

Perhaps, when cut in two, it is a life of humility, of risking to be at one with the soil of our experience, that allows us to heal into something entirely new."  Mark Nepo

Opposition

"Withstanding the tension between opposites until we know it is "enough" releases us from the swing between one extreme and the other."   Helen Luke

Spiritual Partners

The new female and the new male are partners on a journey of spiritual partners on a journey of spiritual growth. They want to make the journey. Their love and trust keep them together. Their intuition guides them. They consult with each other. They are friends. They laugh a lot. They are equals. That is what a spiritual partnership is: a partnership between equals for the purpose of spiritual growth.
~Gary Zukav

Relationships

The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one’s relationship has a glowing depth, beauty, and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing, it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of Divine accident.
~Sir Hugh Walpole

Soulmate

Rather than being about excitement and lust, a soul mate relationship is characterized by such things as a shared life path, a sense of comfort and ease, and a genuine liking of each other.
~Katherine Woodward Thomas

Soulmate

Most people have more than one soul mate. You may already be in several soul mate relationships with friends and loved ones. A soul mate can come in the form of a life partner, treasured friend, child, or lover. A soul mate can be someone with whom you share a spiritual path, a joint work in the world, or a commitment to be parents to certain souls. It can be someone whose growth you are sponsoring, such as a child.
~Sanaya Roman

Soulmates

If you want to attract a life partner as your soul mate, there are several illusions you will need to relinquish. One is that your soul mate is someone you will be with for the rest of your life. You can have a soul mate relationship that lasts a few weeks, months, or years. Time has nothing to do with the quality of your connection and its importance in your life.
~Sanaya Roman

Soulmate

A soulmate is the one person whose love is powerful enough to motivate you to meet your soul, to do the emotional work of self-discovery, of awakening.
~Kenny Loggins