Breaking the Silence

"I couldn't have the courage to say that I had been raped.  I'm the feminist, right?  I'm the strong woman, talking about other rapes but I was too scare and ashamed and embarrassed to say that I had been one too.  And that inner journey was so painful.  It is about another aspect of breaking the silence.  It is about breaking our own silence and I'm convinced each woman has her story.   I know you have grown up in the privileges of America but I am convinced that each woman has to do it." Zalnab Salbi

Being Love

"Being love means that you are responsible for gathering all the parts of your fractured self, the parts you have abandoned or become ashamed of, and carrying them tenderly to the alter of your heart for repair."  Maureen Moss

Wholeness

"Parts of ourselves which we may have hidden all our lives out of shame are often the source of our healing.   We make ourselves less whole.  It is only human to trade wholeness for approval.  Yet the parts we disown are not lost, they are just forgotten.   We can remember our wholeness at any time."  Rachel Naomi Remen

Tell me a Story

"Tell me a story of failure in your life, a time when you made a mistake.   Tell me with compassion for the child or man or woman you were.   Tell it with ruthless honesty and gentle acceptance.   We do not avoid shame be hiding mistakes.   The shame just becomes buried within us."   Oriah

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

Personal Authority

"As you come to know the difference between your desire to be desirable and your desire to make your own decisions, you will understand more clearly how to cope with the pressures that arise in yourself and others when you begin to take yourself seriously.   You will come to see that making claims for your own authority can sometimes lead to being seen as the hag-bitch, and you will learn how to conserve your authority in the face of challenges, attacks, and negative labels.   Holding on to your authority means breathing deeply and standing firmly behind your decisions without shame or blame."  Polly Young-Eisendrath

Honesty with Self

"Admitting who we are and what we want, recognizing our dependence and gratitude, puts us in a vulnerable position.   We learn that human strengths and abilities are always limited by weakness, tiredness, forgetfulness, bad habits and other imperfections.   These innate limitations awaken us to the ways we need others and compels us to appreciate how we are helped and sustained by our relationships.   Hiding from the truth leads only to the opposite; anxious self-protectiveness, isolation, fear and shame."  Polly Young-Eisendrath

Shame

"Shame is a force intended to put one outside all belonging.   The one who does the forbidden thing becomes the force for all the anger of those who would love to have done it too, but are afraid of the exclusion and shame.   Now your every move draws negative attention.   All the natural support around your presence is taken from you.   All the natural imagination with which others have considered the different aspects of your presence stops.   Everything about you is telescoped into a single view of this one thing.   A kind of psychological murdering is done.   The mystery of your life is reduced to that one thing."   John O' Donahue