Relationship

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

Real Love

"A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home."  Rumi

Relationship

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

Waking Up

"The coming to consciousness is not a discovery of something new; it is a long and painful process to that which has always been."  Helen Luke

Paradox

"One of the great paradoxes of being is that each of us is born complete and yet we need contact with life in order to be whole. This, then, is the purpose of the stranger: to enliven what is dormant within us."  Mark Nepo

Wholeness

"Whether conscious of it or not, we are all engaged in the search for the unknown other who might complete us and join us to the Whole. And similar to pollination, we complete the world when, opening ourselves against great odds, some strange unknown partner inadvertently seeds our essence elsewhere." Mark Nepo

Surviving

"How does one survive cancer? Of course -- good doctors, good insurance, good luck. But the real healing comes from not being forgotten. From attention, from care, from love, from being surrounded by a community of those who demand information on your behalf, who advocate and stand up for you when you are in a weakened state, who sleep by your side, who refuse to let you give up, who bring you meals, who see you not as a patient or victim but as a precious human being, who create metaphors where you can imagine your survival. This is my medicine, and nothing less will suffice."  Eve Ensler

Resilience

"Despite early injury and all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, we bear the image of a definite individual character with some enduring traits."  James Hillman

Wholeness

"The path to human wholeness is the inner marriage of masculine and feminine values.   When each value system is held in equal esteem, when we love and respect both, harmony within the individual, health in the culture, and peace on the planet become attainable."   Elizabeth Lesser

Wholeness

"Most of us are dragged
toward wholeness
We do not understand
the breakdown of what has gone before.
We do not understand.
We cling to the familiar,
refuse to give up our habitual lives,
resist our growth.
We do not understand rebirth
do not accept the initiation rites.
Most of us are dragged toward wholeness."

Love

"When we live in a family, a community, a country where we know each other's true stories, we remember our capacity to lean in and love each other into wholeness."  Christina Baldwin

Listening

"There is a way of relating to others such that one deliberately listens for the hidden beauty in them.   The place of their beauty is often the place of their greatest integrity.  When you listen, the integrity and wholeness in others moves closer.  Your attention strengthens it and makes it easier for them to hear it for themselves.  In your presence, they can more easily inhabit that in them which is beyond their limitations, a place of greater freedom and sanctuary.  Eventually they may be able to live there."  Rachel Naomi Remen

Service

"We do not serve the weak or the broken.   What we serve is the wholeness in each other and the wholeness in life.   The part in you that I sense is the same part that is strengthened in me when I serve.   Unlike helping and fixing and rescuing, service is mutual."  Rachel Naomi Remen

Remembering Wholeness

"By making a place for wholeness within our relationships, we offer others the opportunity to be whole without shame and become a place of refuge from everything in them and around them that is not genuine.   We enable people to remember who they are."   Rachel Naomi Remen

Holiness

"Perhaps the wisdom lies not in the constant struggle to bring the sacred into daily life but the recognition that there may be no daily life, that life is committed and whole and despite appearances, we are always on sacred ground."  Rachel Naomi Remen

Change

"What I once saw as deficiency is simply the growing edge of things, the place where we need one another and can join together in becoming more whole."   Rachel Naomi Remen

Listening

"Listening is the oldest and perhaps the most powerful tool of healing.  It is often through the quality of our listening and not the wisdom of our words that we are able to effect the most profound changes in the people around us.   When we listen, we offer, with our attention an opportunity for wholeness.   Our listening creates sanctuary for the homeless parts within the other person.   That which has been denied, unloved, devalued by themselves and by others.  That which is hidden."   Rachel Naomi Remen

Wholeness

"We are all more than we know.   Wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten.   Integrity rarely means that we need to add something to ourselves: it is more an undoing than a doing, a freeing ourselves from beliefs we have about who we are and the ways we have been persuaded to 'fix' ourselves to know who we really are."  Rachel Naomi Remen

Wholeness

"With certain people we may get to try on a greater wholeness for a time, to actually experience being more.   These experiences are a sort of grace.   They help us to know not only the direction of our personal wholeness, but how it feels and even tastes.   Everyone's wholeness is unique.   Our wholeness will look different than theirs.   Our wholeness fits us better than theirs.   Our wholeness is much more attainable for us than theirs could ever be."   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