Teachers

WHO’S ON YOUR LIST?

"Boss, coworker, spouse, roommate, mother, father, child—who are the people you really dislike and wish would simply go away? Be grateful to them: they’re your own special gurus, showing up right on time to keep you honest. It’s the troublemakers in your life who cause you to see that you’ve shut down, that you’ve armored yourself, that you’ve hidden your head in the sand. If you didn’t get angry at them, if you didn’t get fed up with them, you would never be able to cultivate patience. If you didn’t envy them, if you weren’t jealous of them, you would never think to stretch beyond your mean-spiritedness and try to rejoice in their good fortune. If you never met your match, you might think you were better than everybody else and arrogantly criticize their neurotic behavior rather than do something about your own."

(Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change)   Pema Chodron 

Garden and Life

A Standing Ground by Wendell Berry

From his book New Collected Poems, 2012, p.133

However just and anxious I have been
I will stop and step back
from the crowd of those who may agree
with what I say, and be apart.
There is no earthly promise of life or peace
but where the roots branch and weave
their patient silent passages in the dark;
uprooted, I have been furious without an aim.
I am not bound for any public place,
but for ground of my own
where I have planted vines and orchard trees,
and in the heat of the day climbed up
into the healing shadow of the woods.
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn
and pick dew-wet berries in a cup.

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

by Naomi Shihab Nye from “Words Under the Words”

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

Shadow and Darkness

"When the sun disappears into the night, its light never dies. Our subconscius mind embraces what sunset represents in our lives. It is imperative that we attach ourselves to that notion firmly."   ~ Dodinsky

Darkness and Light

"Don't worry about being good.  Instead discover how both good and bad live within you.   Deeply accept the shadow even as you seek the light.  Believe in change.  Take full responsibility for  who you are and what you want.  And from such forthright wisdom your goodness with prevail and your kindness will blossom and your heart will heal."   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

Shadow Work

"Deep psychological work brings us into the shadowy world of the unconscious, where quick fixes and straight paths do not exist, but we have to go into the hidden places in the psyche before coming into the light by making the darkness conscious."  Elizabeth Lesser

Attitude

Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind
you.
~Maori Proverb

Inspiration

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Rilke
Book of Hours, I 59

Shadow Work

"Until we recognize the shadow, we project the problem out.   They manifest too in the heartbreak of recognizing that if we accept the old-fashioned projection, our relationship can continue.   If we reject it and bring shadow to consciousness, the relationship may break.   Most painful of all perhaps is facing our shadow in the person of our husband's mistress."   Marion Woodman

Owning your Shadow

"To own your own shadow is to reach a holy place - an inner center - not attainable any other way."  Robert A. Johnson

Care of the Soul

"Care of the soul speaks to the longing we feel and to the symptoms that drive us crazy, but it is not a path away from shadow or death.   A soulful personality is complicated is complicated, multifaceted, and shaped by both pain and pleasure, success and failure.   Life lived soulfully is not without its moments of darkness and periods foolishness.   Dropping the salvation fantasy frees us up to the possibility of self-knowledge and self-acceptance, which are the very foundations of soul."    Thomas Moore

Shadow Wisdom

a"Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call neurosis.  Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and confusion and therefore it doesn't do any good to try to get rid of our so-called negative aspects, because in the process we also get rid of our basic wonderfulness.   We can lead our lives so as to become more awake to who we are and what we're doing, to become more alert, more inquisitive, and curious about ourselves."  Pema Chondron

Shadow Work

"Now I know that 'right' without its shadow partner 'wrong', is a brittle and untested ideal.  Now I know that when we only show our light side to the world, our shadow grows restless, sucking into itself much of our energy and passion.   In order to release my trapped energy and awaken my best qualities, I had to engage my shadow.   I had to see how everything that I judged and feared in others was also in me.   I had to be broken open so fully that my whole self was laid out before me to own and forgive and love."  Elizabeth Lesser

Life

"The great epochs of life come when we gain the courage to re-christian our evil as what is best in us."  Nietzsche

Shadow work

"How odd that if we reject what is painful, we find only more pain, but if we embrace what is within us-if we peer fearlessly into the shadow- we stumble upon the light."   Elizabeth Lesser

Shadow work

"To face our shadow, the dragons and hags that we spent a lifetime running away from, is perhaps the most difficult journey we will ever take.   But it is there, in the shadow, that we retrieve our hidden/lost parts, learn our lessons, and give birth to the wise and mature self.   The difficulty of this dark journey is matched only by it's rewards.   Every single person in this whole world is offered-over and over- the chance to take the voyage from Once-born innocence to Twice-born wisdom."  Elizabeth Lesser

Shadow

"Each person has certain qualities or presences in their heart that are awkward, disturbing and negative.   One of your sacred duties is to exercise kindness toward them.    In a sense, you are called to be a loving parent to your delinquent qualities.   Your kindness will slowly poultice their negativity, alleviate their fear and help them to see that your soul is a home where there is no judgment or febrile hunger or fixed or limited identity.   The negative threatens us so powerfully precisely because it is an invitation to an art of compassion and self-enlargement that our small thinking utterly resists."   John O' Donahue