Urgency

"The doorway to our next step of growth is always behind the urgency of now.  Now more than ever, when all feels urgent, you must cut the strings to all events.  Now more than ever, when the weights you carry at your wrists, you must not run or flail.  Now more than ever, when each decision feels like the end, you must believe that each question is a beginning.   Now more than ever, when you fear that being who you are is a knife to those you love, you must be strong inside where no one has seen you, for loving from there can only make those you love grow.  Now more than ever, when feeling that you are the source and recipient of all pain, you must bow your head till the ancient channel from the sky to the heart can reopen, til you remember that you are a blessed piece of spirit-dust in spirit-wind. 

In this way, pray to know your place in the human family like you've never known it.  In this way, pray to have your True Self inch through your turmoil.  In this way, love yourself the way you love your children or your dog or your dearest friend, without reservation.  In this way, today with all it's hardships will spill into tomorrow, and decisions will become clear as streams thawing."  Mark Nepo

Addiction/Obsession

"Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it's about knowing who you are. It's about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you can't have it." Geneen Roth

Coming Down to Earth

"In the East and the West, there is a deeply rooted desire or need to transcend who we naturally are.  Some higher power, some God, finds us unacceptable as we are.  We've spent thousands of years learning the art of self-transcendence.   But life is a matter of of incarnation.  The soul is an entity that lives within our human body.  The problem is too many people in our culture try to skip over this step and go straight up into spirit.   Over-spiritualization is a real danger but usually the body starts to scream.   If we can learn to listen to our body's symptoms or to our addictions or to the symptoms of the planet, we can start coming down to earth again.  If you want to heal - heal your body and your soul - you have to surrender; you have to give up control; you have to stop trying to be perfect, because eventually you have to face the fact that you are not God and you cannot control your life."  Marion Woodman

Inner Work

"Real and abiding consciousness change doesn't just happen.  We have to work for it, in our own hearts and in the world.  I am just as impressed by the inner work that each one of us does as I am by the work we do in the world.   By inner work, by spiritual work, I mean living the examined life; watering the seeds of wisdom, confronting our shadowy parts, because I'm telling you, inside each one of us is our own little mean mini-Maciavilli.   It takes work to tame our mini-Maciavilli.  It takes spiritual work that quiets the reactivity of the mind and expands the heart in wider cirlces.  It takes psychological inquiry to heal our family wounds and uncoil our unconscious ego urges to dominate and punish.  Without this kind of inner work our primal, tribal reactivity waits in the wings and it takes over when crisis' loom.  I'm not saying the point is to become some egoless saint.  I'm just asking you to consider trying to change yourself even as you try to change the world because how we do what we do is as important as what we do."  Elizabeth Lesser

Self-Care

"Treat yourself like your only child."  Ondrea Levine

Adventure

"Instead of sacrificing a self I hardly knew or loved, I turned my attention to self-understanding and self-forgiveness.  Instead of accepting a straight-and-narrow route to someone else's concept of God, I set out on my own adventure."  Elizabeth Lesser

Courage

"I remember all the times that I have resented the climb, the amount of living needed to gain the precious understanding to know how to live well.   And how important it is in the struggle for freedom from the old ways not to be limited by self-expectation or to worry about what others may think.   To be willing to do the really important things any way you can, even three steps at a time."  Rachel Naomi Remen

Samsara

"Buddhists talk about Samsara, the world of illusion.   It is the place that most of us live.   Mistaking illusion for reality is said to be the root cause of suffering.   Yet in some immensely elegant way suffering itself can release us from illusion.   Often in times of crisis, when we reach for what we have considered our strength we stumble on our wholeness and our real power.   How we were before we fixed ourselves to win approval."  Rachel Naomi Remen

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

Holiness

"Over the years I have learned that 'cleaning up my act' may be far less important than consecrating one's life."  Rachel Naomi Remen

Slowing Down and Stopping

"Often we can't feel a sense of the Divine because we don't let ourselves alone.   I believe in a spirituality of radical non-self-interference.   If we can just let ourselves be then we will find that in that act of acceptance that there is something really subversive.  There is nothing as radical and subversive as an act of acceptance.   Sometimes when we call off our search and our hunger for God, it is then that we allow ourselves to be found by the Divine.   God is not lost from us.   It is rather that we are so often lost and exiled from ourselves and when we call a halt to that search then we find that unknown to ourselves we've already been resting in the tender embrace of God's lovely presence."  John O' Donahue

Self Esteem

"The lack of faith in who we are is embedded in the bones of the culture we have created.   We are surrounded by the assumption of our innate inadequacy, the notion of original sin made implicit in a secular culture preaching achievement, improvement, and change."  Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Self-Improvement

"There is no need for self-improvement.   We live our deepest desires not by intending to change who we are but by intending to be who we are."   Oriah

Self-Improvement

"The problem with self-improvement is that it implies there is something wrong with who we are.   Everyone wants to be someone else, but getting to know and love yourself means accepting who you are, complete with your inadequacies and irrationalities.   There is a difference between self-improvement and the unfolding of the soul.  In the latter we don't  take on an attitude of perfection; rather we draw closer to those things that we feel are imperfect and let them be the opening through which the potentiality of the soul enters into life."   Thomas Moore

Self-Improvement

"The problem with self-improvement is that it implies there is something wrong with who we are.   Everyone wants to be someone else, but getting to know and love yourself means accepting who you are, complete with your inadequacies and irrationalities.   There is a difference between self-improvement and the unfolding of the soul.   In the latter we didn't take an attitude of perfection; rather we draw closer to those things that we feel as imperfect and let them be the opening through which the potentiality of the soul enters into life."   Thomas Moore