Deborah Adele Quotes

I have found three ways of thinking that shift me out of a feeling of powerlessness: practicing gratitude, trust in the moment, and thinking about others.

Balance is like this. Spreading ourselves thin looks impressive, but in the end, we are the first to lose.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to be afraid without being paralyzed.

We are captured in a culture where our very identity is tied up with our accomplishments. We wear all we have to do like a badge on our shirt for all to see. In this rush to get to the next thing, we have left no time for ourselves to digest and assimilate our lives; this may be our biggest theft of all. We need time to catch up with ourselves. We need time to chew and ponder and allow the experiences of life to integrate within us. We need time to rest and to reflect and to contemplate.

Living the life that cries to be lived from the depth of our being frees up a lot of energy and vitality. The juices flow. Everyone around us benefits from the aliveness that we feel. On the other hand, suppressing that life, for whatever reason, takes a lot of our life energy just in the managing of the pretending.

Carl Jung understood the fluidity of truth when he made the statement that what is true at one time for us, at some point no longer serves us, and eventually becomes a lie. He understood that truth changes over time;

When we don’t know what we want or we don’t have the courage to pursue it, everything that everyone else is doing looks tempting to us. We begin to lust after others’ accomplishments and others’ possessions. We get sidetracked from our own dreams and our own realness.

When we expect the world to meet our needs, we turn outside of ourselves to find sustenance and completion. We expect our partners to fulfill us, our jobs to meet our needs, and success to solve all of our problems. And when it doesn’t, we continue to play the “if only” game, looking for that one more thing. Or we play the “planning” and “regretting” game. We let our contentment be managed by all these uncontrollable variables. As long as we think satisfaction comes from an external source, we can never be content. Looking outward for fulfillment will always disappoint us and keep contentment one step out of reach.

Feeling powerless leads to outward aggression in the form of frustration and anger, or withdrawal inward into depression and victimization.

We can’t save people, or fix them. All we can do is model, and that points the finger back at us.

I often hear people say, “I just don’t know what to do.” I think more often than not, we do know what to do; the cost of our realness just seems too high at the time.

Yogiraj Achala reminds us, “What are you not seeing because you are seeing what you are seeing?

I think more often than not, we do know what to do; the cost of our realness just seems too high at the time.

Discontentment is the illusion that there can be something else in the moment.

and grow gentle eyes that are not afraid to see reality as it is. We learn compassion as we stop living in our heads, where we can neatly arrange things, and ground ourselves in our bodies, where things might not be so neat.

Worry is another way violence gets masked as caring. Worry is a lack of faith in the other and cannot exist simultaneously with love. Either we have faith in the other person to do their best, or we don’t. Worry says I don’t trust you to do your life right. Worry comes from a place of arrogance that I know better what should be happening in your life. Worry says I don’t trust your journey, or your answers, or your timing. Worry is fear that hasn’t grown up yet; it is a misuse of our imagination. We both devalue and insult others when we worry about them.

When we run from life, try to manage life, or leave our energy scattered here and there, we feel differently than when our whole self shows up with our thoughts, words, and actions congruent and unified. When we are centered in the moment, we can fully meet the ordinariness of life as well as the challenges of life.

Like the body, the mind and soul need time to digest and assimilate. Like the body, the mind and soul need time to rest. We create this rest by allowing space that we can breathe in. Not more clutter, but more space, space to reflect, space to journal, space for closure, space for imagination, and space to feel the calling of the life force within us.

Being an audience for God also means we have to get off center stage. We don’t need to be the center of attention and activity all the time. I think it might surprise us to realize how much crazy activity we create in our days just so we can feel important. We wear our busyness like a badge, like our busyness would somehow impress the rest of the world, or impress ourselves. How many of us go to bed with a sense of accomplishment because we checked a lot of things off our task list or someone told us how “great” we were, or we “helped” others? What if walked off stage altogether and put God there instead. Maybe then we could go to sleep at night, not with a sense of accomplishment, but with a sense of wonder, because all day we had been an attentive audience to the divine play.

There is a Chinese proverb which states, “People in the West are always getting ready to live.” There is a remarkable truth to this proverb. When we are little we can’t wait to get big, when we are big, we can’t wait to get out of the house, then we can’t wait to get through college and get a job, then we can’t wait until our vacations, and finally, we can’t wait until retirement. As the Chinese proverb states, we never really live, we just get ready.

There is a Japanese proverb that states, “The noise does not disturb you, you disturb the noise.” I admit, as a lover of silence, I had to think about this for a long time. I have always viewed loud noises as disturbances of my “calm, peaceful” nature. What this proverb so brilliantly taught me is the reality that when I am upset by noise, I am the one who is disturbing the flow of life, not the noise! There is no escape; we can always trace our emotional disturbances back to ourselves. We keep ourselves out of contentment.

12Sisera was informed that Barak son of Abinoam had gone up to Mount Tabor. 13So Sisera ordered all his chariots—nine hundred iron chariots—and all the troops he had to move from Harosheth-goiim to the Wadi Kishon. 14Then Deborah said to Barak, “Up! This is the day on which the Lord will deliver Sisera into your hands: the Lord is marching before you.” Barak charged down Mount Tabor, followed by the ten thousand men, 15and the Lord threw Sisera and all his chariots and army into a panic *before the onslaught of Barak.-c

It is anti-cultural to claim any space that is simply space, or to move with any kind of lingering, or to take time for closure. We are bombarded and we bombard ourselves.

Seeking out people and experiences we would normally avoid provides a fertile place to learn new things about ourselves and about life.

Thinking we know what is better for others becomes a subtle way we do violence. When we take it upon ourselves to “help” the other we whittle away at their sense of autonomy. Nonviolence asks us to trust the other’s ability to find the answer they are seeking. It asks us to have faith in the other, not feel sorry for them.

Week Four: For this whole week, pretend you are complete. There is no need to expect anything from yourself or to criticize or judge or change anything about you. No need to compete with anyone, no need to be more than you are (or less than you are). Note your experience. Notice how much pleasure, kindness, and patience you can allow yourself to have with yourself.

Seeking out people and experiences we would normally avoid provides a fertile place to learn new things about ourselves and about life. Even those we might call enemies have much to teach us. People we have previously avoided will open up new ways of thinking and will give us pieces of ourselves.

We seem far from grasping the concept of “enough.

Gaining the skill to choose our attitude, to choose what we think, and to choose what we do, may be the grandest adventure we can take as a human being.

Nice is an illusion, a cloak hiding lies. It is an imposed image of what one thinks they should be. It is a packaging of self in a presentable box, imposed by an outer authority.

when the process of our self-expression is imposed on for whatever reason, we can easily turn towards self-indulgence.

In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Jung writes, “Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning – for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

we as a culture have constructed barriers to tame reality.

The fewer attachments we carry with us, the more we are free to enjoy and engage and live every moment before us to the fullest. The more breath we let go of, the more room there is in our body for the fullness of the next inhalation. The more we generously share and give away, the more expansive and light we become. The journey of life is towards freedom. A bird cannot hold its perch and fly. Neither can we grasp anything and be free.

Any kind of holding too long or grasping too far forward in an effort to maintain a sense of security is deadly to our spiritual growth and the natural unfolding of our lives.

People who are “nice” hold truth inside until they reach a breaking point and then they become dangerously inappropriate; I know because I used to be such a person.

It is only our minds that have created the turmoil in our gut and kept us hostage to the possibility of our own lives.

Rather than experiencing contentment, we can find ourselves busy getting ready for the next thing, tossed about by our preferences for what we like and what we don’t like, and riding the waves of annoying disturbances.

Anything that puts our pleasure at risk we see as repulsive and to be guarded against. We think we are free but in truth we spend huge amounts of our energy maneuvering ourselves and manipulating others so that our days will be filled with what we like and be void of what we don’t like.

The Buddhists speak of developing an abiding calm. A centeredness that is unshakeable. Like a tall tree so rooted in the earth that great winds cannot topple it. This for me is the image of contentment. It means not riding the waves of the ups and downs of life.

The paradox of not seeking contentment, allows us to appreciate what we have. Swami Rama stated it this way, “Contentment is falling in love with your life.

Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.” Whether we react to this perceived offense with a verbal explosion, silence and withdrawal, confiding in someone else, or saving the offense until six months later when no one else remembers, emotional disturbance is an inappropriate and wasteful use of energy.

The noise does not disturb you, you disturb the noise.

In any way that we hold on to past wounds, we injure ourselves and keep ourselves from the ability to be pure with what is current in our lives.

we often enter an experience with the clutter of scattered thoughts and leave the experience with even more cluttered thoughts. It is like we are living on the leftovers of where we have been or the preparations of where we are going. Because we have not taken the time to “catch up” with ourselves, we are everywhere but the present moment.

All demands and expectations that we place on ourselves steal from our own enthusiasm. All self-sabotage, lack of belief in ourselves, low self-esteem, judgments, criticisms, and demands for perfection are forms of self-abuse in which we destroy the very essence of our vitality. All the ways we live in the past or future steal from ourselves. And all the ways we put up fences, whether real or imagined, around our physical belongings or around our mental idealisms, we put up barriers that steal from the full expansion of our own lives.

I think life is like this. It gives us tasks, that should we succeed, grow us into the kind of people that life can trust with important things.

A colander is an excellent example of adikara. We may seek something so earnestly and yet, if we are full of holes like the colander, what we want will always elude us. Building our adikara is plugging our holes by growing our competency in the area of our desires. Building our competency takes practice and learning.

Every woman has her own answer. Every woman has her own timing. Every woman has her own path.

Every human being walking this earth has painful stories tucked in the corners of their hearts. If we could remember this truth, perhaps we could see with the eyes of compassion rather than the eyes of our own judgments and preferences.

Ultimately we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.

As we purify ourselves from the heaviness and clutter of toxins, distractions, and scatteredness, we gain clarity to meet each moment with integrity and freshness. We become more pure in our relationship with each moment.