Michele Harper Quotes

A human being can never treat another person better than he treats himself.

God breaks the heart again and again and again until it stays open.

thank you to the ground that relentlessly rises up to meet us as long as we’re willing to take the next step.

It was worth creating good with the right person at the right time. I am worth being healthy with a person who also chooses health.

This devastation is a crossroads with a choice; to remain in the ashes or to forge ahead unburdened. Here is the chance to mold into a new nakedness, strengthened by the legacy of resilience to climb over the debris toward a different life.

After all, this is the only way oppression can function: It requires the buy-in of a certain percentage of those it actively oppresses in order to pit those groups of subjugated people against one another.

In practicing the Japanese art of Kintsukuroi, one repairs broken pottery by filling in the cracks with gold, silver, or platinum. The choice to highlight the breaks with precious metals not only acknowledges them, but also pays tribute to the vessel that has been torn apart by the mutability of life. The previously broken object is considered more beautiful for its imperfections. In life, too, even greater brilliance can be found after mending.

There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were. —HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN

Like everyone, I am in this world for only a brief time. And as for many, blessings abound in my life, and they abound amid the struggle, amid my struggle.

Being drunk never changes a person, but it does grant their shadow selves free rein to step forward.

Brokenness can be a remarkable gift. If we allow it, it can expand our space to transform - this potential space that is slight, humble, and unassuming. It may seem counterintuitive to claim the benefits of having been broken, but it is precisely when cracks appear in the bedrock of what we thought we knew that the gravity of what has fallen away becomes evident. When that bedrock is blown up by illness, a death, a breakup, a breakdown of any kind, we get the chance to look beyond the rubble to see a whole new way of life. The landscape that had been previously obscured by the towers of what we thought we knew for sure is suddenly revealed, showing us the limitations of the way things used to be.

Forgiveness condones nothing, but it does cast off the chains of anger, judgment, resentment, denial, and pain that choke growth. In this way, it allows for life, for freedom. So that’s what’s at stake when it comes to forgiveness: freedom. With this freedom we can feel better, be better, and choose better next time.

I got it, too, how good people can lose their way during life transitions. How they can behave in self-destructive ways until they master another pattern—should they ever choose another pattern

Plagued with doubt, I found myself having to reevaluate my life. Living through such changes was difficult; now I see those junctures, when everything I had counted on came to an abrupt end, as a privilege. They gave me the opportunity to be uncertain. And in that uncertainty grew opportunity

We had all been broken in that moment - broken open by shock and grief and anger and fear. I didn't know how or when, but this opening could lead to healing. After all, only an empty vessel can be filled by grace; but to get there, we had to help each other rise while we shed the same tears. We had to get up and start again.

What I’m really doing is finding someone to validate my low self-esteem...

Like everyone, I am in this world for only a brief time.

after letting go, there is forgiveness; after forgiveness, there is faith. My key now was a radical alignment with truth, a radical faith that in leaning into love and letting go of everything else, the path unfolds as it should.

how good people can lose their way during life transitions. How they can behave in self-destructive ways until they master another pattern—should they

There’s a macabre medical maxim that says that the good people get the worst diseases. If a person is generous of spirit and comes in with a nagging abdominal discomfort the week after she runs a marathon, we’ll discover she has stage-four ovarian cancer. The racist pedophile who drowns kittens on Sundays survives being struck by lightning and lung cancer as he chain-smokes into his nineties.

I cut these cords to support myself. I knew by then that it was only from that space that I could make my own assessments. It was only then that I could finally confront him about his abusive behavior. I told him that he had been a terrorist in our family, that he had so profoundly ruined some of its members’ lives that they struggled with substance abuse, that my mother still flinched at loud noises. I told him that if he ever wanted to communicate with me again, he would first have to acknowledge the truth of who he was. Instead of admitting that any of what I’d said had even occurred, he vanished. He made his choice.

was reminded, too, of Dr. Albert Kligman’s experiments on imprisoned men in Philadelphia from the 1950s to the 1970s. Kligman biopsied, burned, and deformed the bodies of prison inmates to study the effects of hundreds of experimental drugs. Men were subjected to such atrocities as inoculation with herpes, gonorrhea, and various carcinogens. Kligman went on to become a millionaire after co-developing the popular acne medication Retin-A via his studies on inmates, while many of his victims were left with chronic medical conditions that irrevocably damaged their organ systems.

I contemplated my time with Mr. Spano and Joshua. I marveled that Mr. Spano who, once he’d learned that he wasn’t going to die that afternoon, found the prospect of remaining in the hospital so unsettling that he preferred to hobble out on a bloated, red leg and risk dying a few days later, although he wasn’t yet 30. I wondered what it must have felt like for him, without the haze of intoxication to blur the relationship between himself and the truth. What was so terrible to face that death would be preferable? How might his inner contract read that he would be consumed with such a compulsion? I am not healthy and cannot commit to healing. I am not strong enough to heal. I am fearful, so I must run. I am not worth fighting for. I am not worth healing for. I cannot endure the pain of facing my life. Because I am afraid, I cannot be here, sober. Besides, I cannot be helped. I do not love myself enough to take care of myself. I do not love myself enough to allow you to take care of me. I do not deserve wellness, so I return to what I deserve.

What struck me powerfully was that Mr. Spano had honored every word of his inner contract. Like everyone, he had this right of self determination. We do this when we select a partner who confirms our feelings of unworthiness. When we pick the job that pays us less than we deserve. It is all the same. It is all part of that contract, that even if we didn’t write it for ourselves, we certainly cosigned. I wondered too about my contract with myself. I wondered why the behavior of this self-hating man would rock me for even a second. I thought about how I needed to love myself enough to allow others to fulfill their contract with themselves. Be it Mr. Spano, my ex-husband, my father, my mother, Collin, the hospital administrators, or anyone else. Mr. Spano’s contract demanded that he act in ways that were dismissive of my attempts to help him. A human being can never treat another person better than he treats himself. So, if he says things that are disrespectful, this is his contract. His contract has nothing to do with mine, unless I allow it to. Unless I uncover a clause, in minuscule print on page five. A clause that I overlooked, that stipulates my need to be validated by the Mr. Spanos of the world in order to feel OK about myself. He was kind enough to prompt me to review that section again, to edit out that portion for good. In that way, he was an angel of the shift.

Being a healer is the powerful gift of bearing

witness in an authentic way that allows us to mindfully choose who we are. In this way, there is another path.

Even when everyone has the best of intentions, things can go terribly wrong.

In practicing the Japanese art of Kintsukuroi, one repairs broken pottery by filling in the cracks with gold, silver, or platinum. The choice to highlight the breaks with precious metals not only acknowledges them, but also pays tribute to the vessel that has been torn apart by the mutability of life. The previously broken object is considered more beautiful for its imperfections. In life, too, even greater brilliance can be found after the mending.

According to the 2003–2007 Workplace Safety Survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers in health care and social services are five times more likely to be victims of a nonfatal assault than average workers in all other industries combined.

(The same two friends later told me, independent of each other, that they would get divorced if only they had the energy to be single again, but they preferred to settle for an unhappy marriage as a means to ensure they could have a child before the “advanced maternal age” of thirty-five.)

would you expect an auto mechanic with a full schedule to stay on task with each new vehicle and at the same time help each client get directions home, coordinate vehicle pickup and child care, and schedule follow-up appointments? Of course not. Yes, these details fall under the category of “it’s not my job,” but that’s what doctors are often called to do, and it’s what makes it impossible for us to excel at what is actually our job.

Craig

It’s common practice for the fresher doctor to handle any new critical patient.

It was the very fact that Lauren felt comfortable assuming greater inherent wisdom on the part of the white, male physicians

this was why I always burned incense: for that instant of remembering the moment I returned home.

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.

we can concoct for ourselves a kind of piecemeal comprehension to get through somehow. But when a child is brought in with a critical illness, such as cancer or organ failure, we experience a different kind of suffering. Because we see them as both innocent and invincible—too young to justify the affliction and certainly too perfect to succumb to it—it is that much harder to wrestle with.

That will be the easy part. Compared to what invariably follows, this will be the sweet phase of the process. The next phase will be bitter and prolonged; even unpalatable to the point of insufferable when you’re back at home. “It’s the other parts,” I continued, “the mental, emotional, and spiritual parts, that are harder because these are the parts that you have to do. Not only do you have to begin this healing while you’re here, but you now have to accomplish it without the old crutch of the alcohol. Sure, alcohol can ruin your life in the long run, but it served the purpose of being a pretty powerful coping mechanism for a very long time. It was an aid that helped you survive. Now you take the alcohol away and you deal with your life sober. All that stuff that was drowned out by the alcohol when you were little, before you went to war, when you went to war, when you came back from war—now you face that stuff without the drink. We are here to help, but even with the therapists, social workers, groups, and medications, it will be challenging—but worth it. You’re a strong man, and you’ll get beyond this to be stronger than you’ve ever been, stronger than most people will ever be in their entire lives. You’ll get beyond this so you can be happy, so you can have a job that fulfills you, so you can be the father you want to be to your son, so you can tell the story of your survival and your victory. This is the story that will save your life and the lives of many others, so it is truly all well worth it. And you’ll need to remember this end goal every hour of every day because this will likely be the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life. And you can do this.

Both these patients had let go in their own ways as they moved toward health. And isn’t that how healing usually happens? In these ordinary times, in these everyday moments, people open themselves to what serves them most.

It was for this reason that I found yoga soon after I moved to Philadelphia; it was for this reason that I’ve stayed with it. There is a saying that every new yogi finds her way to the mat in order to heal an injury. Sometimes the injury is sports-related, though most times it’s psychic—perhaps it’s a divorce, addiction, or sexual trauma that takes her out of her body as a way to cope when the trauma is too much to bear.

On some level I already knew, or sensed, what had happened. I also knew that the other part of the atrocity was the silencing. Some would say that the even greater part of the crime was forcing the survivor to hold that trauma alone, knowing that revelation would risk exposing her to blame, judgment, and additional consequences. It was as unfair as it was invalid to blame a victim for the criminal acts of an assailant.

What we have, in all its glory, to hug and hold, to caress and learn, to feel and grow, is simply right here and right now. If we are lucky, the bond holds in the moment—and the experience of it shines and breathes and expands. Then our story can change in an instant, and we may never be given the gift of why.

...this is not a book about romance or a chronicle of loss. It is a story of love rebuilt better; the story of a butterfly birthed from goo; the story of newly grown wings that beat to a higher vibration to soar in a place of unconditional love because the truest part of me has always known and just now understands that this is where healing happens and this is where healers abide.

America bears not just scars, but many layers of racial wounds, both chronic and acute. In order to move beyond them, we need to look at them for what they are, diagnose them, treat them, heal them, and then take care not to pick at the scabs, reopening the old wounds and creating new ones.

Perhaps what bothers me most is the raw realization that I care more deeply for the welfare of another human being than he cares for himself

In keeping with my indoctrination, I closed the door firmly to seal the secrets inside.

I suppose it's a matter of faith whether or not we choose our starting ground before we're born into this life. Some begin the journey on flat, grassy meadows and others at the base of a very steep mountain. One path, seemingly smooth, can make it nearly impossible for us to see the ditches and gullies along the way. The other, while painfully tough, can deliver what it promises: If you can navigate that path, you've developed the skills to scale Everest. It isn't fair on many accounts; it simply is. And assuredly, both paths include uncertain terrain ahead.

Or maybe I could start by telling him that I was finally figuring out that all bodies ache with a wisdom that wants to be appreciated. And that if I were still enough to listen, if I were brave enough to be vulnerable and courageous enough to have faith in the potential of this life, I would see that I was already healed.

What a critical life lesson: to learn to distinguish enabling from helping, codependence from love, attachment to reenacting the grief of childhood loss from allowing for the sweetness of self-determination.

So,

We are not yet at a time in America when the attributed or perceived actions of a brown or black or queer or Muslim “wrongdoer” are considered singular. Instead, such accused are seen as emblematic of an entire demographic, one labeled guilty before charged. And yet, the overwhelming majority of spree killers from the most notable mass shootings in U.S. history are male and white.