Sit with a trusted loved one and take turns: Name one defining trait of who you are that distinguishes you from others. Name one defining trait of who you are that you have in common with others. Disc...
Originally, the word power meant able to be. In time, it was contracted to mean to be able. We suffer the difference. Iwas waiting for a plane when I overheard two businessmen. One was sharing the goo...
Anything or anyone that asks you to be other than yourself is not holy, but is trying only to fill its own need.
Now I want to stand naked before every wind; and though I'm still frightened I will break, I somehow know it's all a part—even the fright—of the rhythm of being alive.
So what does it mean to be a spiritual warrior? It is far from being a soldier, but more the sincerity with which a soul faces itself in a daily way. It is this courage to be authentic that keeps us s...
Let Go of the Rice In a world that lives like a fist mercy is no more than waking with your hands open. So much more can happen with our hands open. In fact, closing and stubbornly maintaining our gri...
We can go below our hardened ways to the soft impulses that birth them. Instead of breaking the bone of our stubbornness, we can nourish the marrow of our feeling unheard. Instead of breaking the bone...
When feeling badly about ourselves, we often try on other skins rather than understand and care for our own.
Regardless of subject matter, this is the only thing worth teaching: how to uncover that original center and how to live there once it is restored. We call the filming over a deadening of heart, and t...
Reflex or Response I did not survive to be untouched. The emotional patterns of our lives are very strong. They often come into being because we've needed them to survive. But sooner or later, we all...
Of course, there will always be times that we need to find our very precise way. But more often than not, our image of a destination is only a starting point that we cling to needlessly. When we can f...
Living is a conversation with no end, a dance with no steps, a song with no words, a reason too big for any mind.
And then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk to bloom. —ANAÏS NIN
We are broken open, or we willfully shed.
To know God without being God-like is like trying to swim without entering water. —OREST BEDRIJ
The inner life of any great thing will be incomprehensible to me until I develop and deepen an inner life of my own.
The Chick Being Born Every crack is also an opening. When in the midst of great change, it is helpful to remember how a chick is born. From the view of the chick, it is a terrifying struggle. Confined...
So long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth. —GOETHE
Reframing what happens to us can be a healthy way to survive terrible things, or it can become a veil of denial that keeps us from moving on. Often, we simply have to trust that we will see the truth...
No matter how dark, the hand always knows the way to the mouth.