Spiritual Path Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Spiritual Path. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty -- it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.
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Mother Teresa (A Simple Path: Mother Teresa)
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Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.
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BrenΓ© Brown (Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead)
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I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We're here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don't have time to carry grudges; you don't have time to cling to the need to be right.
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Anne Lamott
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One thing: you have to walk, and create the way by your walking; you will not find a ready-made path. It is not so cheap, to reach to the ultimate realization of truth. You will have to create the path by walking yourself; the path is not ready-made, lying there and waiting for you. It is just like the sky: the birds fly, but they don't leave any footprints. You cannot follow them; there are no footprints left behind.
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Osho
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The moon will guide you through the night with her brightness, but she will always dwell in the darkness, in order to be seen.
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Shannon L. Alder
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If you find no one to support you on the spiritual path, walk alone. There is no companionship with the immature.
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Gautama Buddha (The Dhammapada)
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Your life is your spiritual path. It's what's right in front of you. You can't live anyone else's life. The task is to live yours and stop trying to copy one you think looks better.
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Sandy Nathan (Stepping Off the Edge: Learning & Living Spiritual Practice)
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There is strange comfort in knowing that no matter what happens today, the Sun will rise again tomorrow.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don't bother to brush it off. Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humor saves you.
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Joseph Campbell
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Attachment to views is the greatest impediment to the spiritual path.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha)
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For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
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Hermann Hesse (BΓ€ume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte)
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She remembered who she was and the game changed.
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Lalah Delia
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Love is proved the moment you let go of someone because they need you to.
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Shannon L. Alder
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The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.
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Ram Dass
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The struggles we endure today will be the β€˜good old days’ we laugh about tomorrow.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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TRIPPING OVER JOY What is the difference Between your experience of Existence And that of a saint? The saint knows That the spiritual path Is a sublime chess game with God And that the Beloved Has just made such a Fantastic Move That the saint is now continually Tripping over Joy And bursting out in Laughter And saying, β€œI Surrender!” Whereas, my dear, I am afraid you still think You have a thousand serious moves.
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I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy
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In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me.
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Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
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We are all butterflies. Earth is our chrysalis.
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LeeAnn Taylor
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Small good decisions will lead you to the glorious path of success.
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Zain Hashmi (A Blessed Olive Tree: A Spiritual Journey in Twenty Short Stories)
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Leap, and the net will appear.
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Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
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You do not need to work to become spiritual. You are spiritual; you need only to remember that fact. Spirit is within you. God is within you. (67)
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Julia Cameron (God is No Laughing Matter: Observations and Objections on the Spiritual Path)
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It's in those quiet little towns, at the edge of the world, that you will find the salt of the earth people who make you feel right at home.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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Life's trials will test you, and shape you, but don’t let them change who you are.” ~ Aaron Lauritsen, β€˜100 Days Drive
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.
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Richard J. Foster (Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth)
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Let go of the battle. Breathe quietly and let it be. Let your body relax and your heart soften. Open to whatever you experience without fighting.
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Jack Kornfield (A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life)
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Pray to catch the bus, then run as fast as you can.
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Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
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But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano / act / paint / write a decent play?" Yes . . . the same age you will be if you don't.
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Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
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True friends don't come with conditions.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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Without struggle, success has no value.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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There are two types of seeds in the mind: those that create anger, fear, frustration, jealousy, hatred and those that create love, compassion, equanimity and joy. Spirituality is germination and sprouting of the second group and transforming the first group.
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Amit Ray (Walking the Path of Compassion)
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No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.
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Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
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Serious art is born from serious play.
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Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
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The path of peace is not a passive journey. It takes incredible strength not to open a can of 'whoop-ass', justifiably, when ones button is pushed.
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T.F. Hodge (From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence)
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All of us prepare our own lunch. If we don't like our jobs, if we don't like the state of our relationships, if we don't like what's happening to our spiritual lives - we have no one to blame but ourselves. Because God has given us free will.
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Bo SΓ‘nchez (You Have The Power to Create Love: Take Another Step on the Simple Path to Happiness)
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Not only is there often a right and wrong, but what goes around does come around, Karma exists, chickens do come home to roost, and as my mother, Phyllis, liked to say, β€œThere is always a day of reckoning.” The good among the great understand that every choice we make adds to the strength or weakness of our spiritsβ€”ourselves, or to use an old fashioned word for the same idea, our souls. That is every human’s life work: to construct an identity bit by bit, to walk a path step by step, to live a life that is worthy of something higher, lighter, more fulfilling, and maybe even everlasting.
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Donald Van de Mark (The Good Among the Great: 19 Traits of the Most Admirable, Creative, and Joyous People)
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From this point forward, you don’t even know how to quit in life.” ~ Aaron Lauritsen, β€˜100 Days Drive
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Aaron Lauritsen
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You are not limited to this body, to this mind, or to this realityβ€”you are a limitless ocean of Consciousness, imbued with infinite potential. You are existence itself.
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Joseph P. Kauffman (The Answer Is YOU: A Guide to Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Freedom)
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Let the people talk, let people doubt, and let people question you, but never allow yourself to quit walking your path. Their path is their own and the path you walk is that of your own. Sweet child of mine, be the brave child of mine.
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Forrest Curran (Purple Buddha Project: Purple Book of Self-Love)
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Forget what hurt you in the past, but never forget what it taught you. However, if it taught you to hold onto grudges, seek revenge, not forgive or show compassion, to categorize people as good or bad, to distrust and be guarded with your feelings then you didn’t learn a thing. God doesn’t bring you lessons to close your heart. He brings you lessons to open it, by developing compassion, learning to listen, seeking to understand instead of speculating, practicing empathy and developing conflict resolution through communication. If he brought you perfect people, how would you ever learn to spiritually evolve?
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Shannon L. Alder
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Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness
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Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
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Nothing that happens on the surface of the sea can alter the calm of its depths
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Andrew Harvey (The Direct Path: Creating a Personal Journey to the Divine Using the World's Spiritual Traditions)
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The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
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Albert Einstein
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Progress, not perfection, is what we should be asking of ourselves.
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Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
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God always gives us choices to make, our path or His path for our own sake.
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Carolyn Cutler Hughes (Through God's Eye)
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Not every sky will be blue and not every day is springtime. So on the spiritual path a person learns to find this kind of happiness without needing nice things to happen on the outside. Rather, you find happiness by being who you really are. This isn't mystical. Young children are happy being who they are. The trick is to regain such a state when you are grown and have seen the light and dark sides of life.
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Deepak Chopra (Spiritual Solutions: Answers to Life's Greatest Challenges)
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This life is a test-it is only a test. If it had been an actual life, you would have received further instructions on where to go and what to do. Remember, this life is only a test.
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Jack Kornfield (A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life)
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When the pain of being the same becomes greater than the pain of being different, you change.
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Deepak Chopra (Why Is God Laughing?: The Path to Joy and Spiritual Optimism)
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there is no path to peace, but peace itself is the path.
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Richard Rohr (Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality)
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Survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention...the capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.
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Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
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Those who achieve the extraordinary are usually the most ordinary because they have nothing to prove to anybody. Be Humble.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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At some point, you just gotta forgive the past, your happiness hinges on it.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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Landscape Isn't it plain the sheets of moss, except that they have no tongues, could lecture all day if they wanted about spiritual patience? Isn't it clear the black oaks along the path are standing as though they were the most fragile of flowers? Every morning I walk like this around the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead. Every morning, so far, I'm alive. And now the crows break off from the rest of the darkness and burst up into the skyβ€”as though all night they had thought of what they would like their lives to be, and imagined their strong, thick wings.
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Mary Oliver (Dream Work)
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Your life is your practice. Your spiritual practice does not occur someplace other than in your life right now, and your life is nowhere other than where you are. You are looking for answers, insight, and wisdom that you already possess. Live the life in front of you, be the life you are, and see what you find out for yourself.
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Karen Maezen Miller (Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood)
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Shapeshifting requires the ability to transcend your attachments, in particular your ego attachments to identity and who you are. If you can get over your attachment to labeling yourself and your cherishing of your identity, you can be virtually anybody. You can slip in and out of different shells, even different animal forms or deity forms.
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Zeena Schreck
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If I were really asked to define myself, I wouldn’t start with race; I wouldn’t start with blackness; I wouldn’t start with gender; I wouldn’t start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that I’m a seeker on the path. I think of feminism, and I think of anti-racist struggles as part of it. But where I stand spiritually is, steadfastly, on a path about love.
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bell hooks
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Creativity occurs in the moment, and in the moment we are timeless.
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Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
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We must look at ourselves over and over again in order to learn to love, to discover what has kept our hearts closed, and what it means to allow our hearts to open.
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Jack Kornfield (A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life)
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Explore, Experience, Then Push Beyond.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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Everyone loses their class when they travel through hell, but only a few will regain it if they remain humble and accept the part they played in their own misery.
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Shannon L. Alder
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Feelings are for the soul what food is for the body.
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Rudolf Steiner (How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation (Classics in Anthroposophy))
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*Only if you reject all the other paths can you discover your own path.
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U.G. Krishnamurti (Mind Is a Myth)
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As we encounter new experiences with a mindful and wise attention, we discover that one of three things will happen to our new experience: it will go away, it will stay the same, or it will get more intense. whatever happens does not really matter.
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Jack Kornfield (A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life)
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We need to bridge our sense of loneliness and disconnection with a sense of community and continuity even if we must manufacture it from our time on the Web and our use of calling cards to connect long distance. We must β€œlog on” somewhere, and if it is only in cyberspace, that is still far better than nowhere at all. (264)
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Julia Cameron (God is No Laughing Matter: Observations and Objections on the Spiritual Path)
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Art is born in attention.
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Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
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When we let go of our battles and open our heart to things as they are, then we come to rest in the present moment. This is the beginning and the end of spiritual practice. Only in this moment can we discover that which is timeless. Only here can we find the love that we seek. Love in the past is simply memory, and love in the future is fantasy. Only in the reality of the present can we love, can we awaken, can we find peace and understanding and connection with ourselves and the world.
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Jack Kornfield (A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life)
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How little we understand of the gifts we have been given or the shape of the path we took to reach our salvation.
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Harley King (What I Was Meant To Forget)
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The way to Elfin is found on the path That weaves through the Misty Forest That lives between the Mountain of Vision And the River of Reality
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The Silver Elves (The Magical Elven Love Letters, Volume 1)
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We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like.' ...It is time to awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick.
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Richard J. Foster (Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth)
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There comes a time in your life when you can no longer put off choosing. You have to choose one path or the other. You can live safe and be protected by people just like you, or you can stand up and be a leader for what is right. Always, remember this: People never remember the crowd; they remember the one person that had the courage to say and do what no one would do.
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Shannon L. Alder
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What you are, and who you are should provide greater clarity about where you have been and where you are headed. Although one distinguishes spiritual from physical nature, the ultimate unification of the two is the consequence of the struggle for internal, external and eternal – peace.
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T.F. Hodge (From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence)
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There are two paths of which one may choose in the walk of life; one we are born with, and the one we consciously blaze. One is naturally true, while the other is a perceptive illusion. Choose wisely at each fork in the road.
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T.F. Hodge (From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence)
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God descends to earth like fresh spring rain, and at every level his grace is received differently. For some it feels like love, for others like salvation. It feels like safety and warmth at one level, like coming home at another.
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Deepak Chopra (Why Is God Laughing?: The Path to Joy and Spiritual Optimism)
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Many people try to find a spiritual path where they do not have to face themselves but where they can still liberate themselves--liberate themselves from themselves, in fact. In truth, this is impossible. We cannot do that. We have to be honest with ourselves. We have to see our gut, our real shit, our most undesirable parts. We have to see that. That is the foundation of warriorship and the basis of conquering fear. We have to face our fear; we have to look at it, study it, work with it, and practice meditation with it.
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ChΓΆgyam Trungpa (Smile at Fear: Awakening the True Heart of Bravery)
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Although at times you might want to detract from the path, realize that how you treat yourself becomes the foundation as to how you treat others; although we may want to resort to violence in words during conflict, understand that how you speak to others becomes the basis of how you speak to yourself; although we may want to give up; do not be fooled in the idea that ease and comfort is where your true path lies.
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Forrest Curran (Purple Buddha Project: Purple Book of Self-Love)
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Sacrifice is a terribly difficult thing to do, of which you will be asked to do many times along your path. Only with genuine love will you be able to make these sacrifices because often times you will simply want to refuse the sacrifices that the universe asks of you to make. When you close one door, another opens; that is how the universe works and through sacrifice we are given the keys to the next door in life.
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Forrest Curran (Purple Buddha Project: Purple Book of Self-Love)
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In the hero stories, the call to go on a journey takes the form of a loss, an error, a wound, an unexplainable longing, or a sense of a mission. When any of these happens to us, we are being summoned to make a transition. It will always mean leaving something behind,...The paradox here is that loss is a path to gain.
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David Richo (How to Be an Adult: A Handbook for Psychological and Spiritual Integration)
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To travel a circle is to journey over the same ground time and time again. To travel a circle wisely is to journey over the same ground for the first time. In this way, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the circle, a path to where you wish to be. And when you notice at last that the path has circled back into itself, you realize that where you wish to be is where you have already been ... and always were.
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Neale Donald Walsch
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I love to walk. Walking is a spiritual journey and a reflection of living. Each of us must determine which path to take and how far to walk; we must find our own way, what is right for one may not be for another. There is no single right way to deal with late stage cancer, to live life or approach death, or to walk an old mission trail.
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Edie Littlefield Sundby (The Mission Walker: I was given three months to live...)
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If we constantly focus only on the stones in our mortal path, we will almost surely miss the beautiful flower or cool stream provided by the loving Father who outlined our journey. Each day can bring more joy than sorrow when our mortal and spiritual eyes are open to God's goodness. Joy in the gospel is not something that begins only in the next life. It is our privilege now, this very day. We must never allow our burdens to obscure our blessings. There will always be more blessings than burdens--even if some days it doesn't seem so. Jesus said, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." Enjoy those blessings right now. They are yours and always will be.
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Jeffrey R. Holland
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The source to low self-esteem is the lack of control you feel you have in your life. If you spend your life competing with others, trying to make right the wrongs done to you, or waste your time trying to look right, you will never achieve contentment and emotional balance. People you encounter in life can’t be controlled by you. You only have control of yourself. Build your life around a relationship with a higher power and achieving what you’re passionate about. When you let go of what you can’t control, true peace can then enter your life. This is the path to achieving emotional balance.
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Shannon L. Alder
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When flowing water...meets with obstacles on its path, a blockage in its journey, it pauses. It increases in volume and strength, filling up in front of the obstacle and eventually spilling past it... Do not turn and run, for there is nowhere worthwhile for you to go. Do not attempt to push ahead into the danger... emulate the example of the water: Pause and build up your strength until the obstacle no longer represents a blockage.
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Thomas Cleary (I Ching: The Book of Change (Shambhala Pocket Classics))
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Your mind can be your enemy or friend. If you always follow your heart, your mind will feel neglected. If you follow only your mind, your heart will never forgive you. Never ignore your conscience, yet always be conscious of reason. Make your heart and mind friends and you will have peace of mind throughout life's seasons.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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Friendship, then, like the other natural loves, is unable to save itself. In reality, because it is spiritual and therefore faces a subtler enemy, it must, even more wholeheartedly than they, invoke the divine protection if it hopes to remain sweet. For consider how narrow its true path is. Is must not become what the people call a "mutual admiration society"; yet if it is not full of mutual admiration, of Appreciative love, it is not Friendship at all.
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C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)
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We should write because it is human nature to write. Writing claims our world. It makes it directly and specifically our own. We should write because humans are spiritual beings and writing is a powerful form of prayer and meditation, connecting us both to our own insights and to a higher and deeper level of inner guidance. We should write because writing brings clarity and passion to the act of living. Writing is sensual, experiential, grounding. We should write because writing is good for the soul. We should write because writing yields us a body of work, a felt path through the world we live in. We should write, above all, because we are writers, whether we call ourselves that or not.
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Julia Cameron (The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation Into the Writing Life)
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I am more afraid that this people have so much confidence in their leaders that they will not inquire for themselves of God whether they are led by him. I am fearful they settle down in a state of blind self security. Let every man and woman know, by the whispering of the Spirit of God to themselves, whether their leaders are walking in the path the Lord dictates, or not.
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Brigham Young
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Love, not anger, brought Jesus to the cross. Golgotha came as a result of God's great desire to forgive, not his reluctance. Jesus knew that by his vicarious suffering he could actually absorb all the evil of humanity and so heal it, forgive it, redeem it.
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Richard J. Foster (Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth)
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A farmer is helpless to grow grain; all he can do is provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then the natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain...This is the way it is with the Spiritual Disciplines - they are a way of sowing to the Spirit... By themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done.
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Richard J. Foster (Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth)
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Getting sober never felt like I had pulled myself up by my own spiritual bootstraps. It felt instead like I was on one path toward destruction and God pulled me off of it by the scruff of my collar, me hopelessly kicking and flailing and saying, 'Screw you. I’ll take the destruction please.' God looked at tiny, little red-faced me and said, 'that’s adorable,' and then plunked me down on an entirely different path.
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Nadia Bolz-Weber (Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint)
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When people want to win they will go to desperate extremes. However, anyone that has already won in life has come to the conclusion that there is no game. There is nothing but learning in this life and it is the only thing we take with us to the graveβ€”knowledge. If you only understood that concept then your heart wouldn’t break so bad. Jealousy or revenge wouldn’t be your ambition. Stepping on others to raise yourself up wouldn’t be a goal. Competition would be left on the playing field, and your freedom from what other people think about you would light the pathway out of hell.
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Shannon L. Alder
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Deep within, there is something profoundly known, not consciously, but subconsciously. A quiet truth, that is not a version of something, but an original knowing. What this, absolute, truth [identity] is may be none of our business…but it is there, guiding us along the path of greater becoming; a true awareness. It is so self-sustaining that our recognition of it is not required. We are offspring’s of such a powerfully divine force – Creator of all things known and unknown.
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T.F. Hodge (From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence)
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Continually trying to look on the bright side interferes with our finding the wisdom that lies in the fruitful darkness. Continually striving upward toward the light means we never grow downward into our own feet, never become firmly rooted on the earth, never explore the darkness within and around us, a darkness without whose existence the light would have no meaning.
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Stephen Harrod Buhner (The Fasting Path: For Spiritual, Emotional, and Physical Healing and Renewal)
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When the stories of our life no longer bind us, we discover within them something greater. We discover that within the very limitations of form, of our maleness and femaleness, of our parenthood and our childhood, of gravity on the earth and the changing of the seasons, is the freedom and harmony we have sought for so long. Our individual life is an expression of the whole mystery, and in it we can rest in the center of the movement, the center of all worlds.
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Jack Kornfield (A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life)
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The material world is all feminine. The feminine engergy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even men (are of the feminine energy). We have to relinquish our ideas of gender in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with energy. So feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything (is feminine energy). The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.
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Zeena Schreck
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Always remember, wherever you are, whether near or far, you had a mother who really, really loved you. The original mother. Once you've found your true inner guru you can never again be divided. Perfect union with the divine, through the grace of your real teacher, transcends time, space, death and all worldly limitations. Your real teacher is the original mother - regardless in which manifest or non-manifest form, or gender, she appears. The one who nurtures you and the one who also, out of wisdom and compassion, corrects you if you are misguided.
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Zeena Schreck
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The criers of the Mysteries speak again, bidding all men welcome to the House of Light. The great institution of materiality has failed. The false civilization built by man has turned, and like the monster of Frankenstein, is destroying its creator. Religion wanders aimlessly in the maze of theological speculation. Science batters itself impotently against the barriers of the unknown. Only transcendental philosophy knows the path. Only the illumined reason can carry the understanding part of man upward to the light. Only philosophy can teach man to be born well, to live well, to die well, and in perfect measure be born again. Into this band of the elect--those who have chosen the life of knowledge, of virtue, and of utility--the philosophers of the ages invite YOU.
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Manly P. Hall (The Secret Teachings of All Ages)
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Every Warrior of the Light has felt afraid of going into battle. Every Warrior of the Light has, at some time in the past, lied or betrayed someone. Every Warrior of the Light has trodden a path that was not his. Every Warrior of the Light has suffered for the most trivial of reasons. Every Warrior of the Light has, at least once, believed he was not a Warrior of the Light. Every Warrior of the Light has failed in his spiritual duties. Every Warrior of the Light has said β€˜yes’ when he wanted to say β€˜no.’ Every Warrior of the Light has hurt someone he loved. That is why he is a Warrior of the Light, because he has been through all this and yet has never lost hope of being better than he is.
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Paulo Coelho
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When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman, and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing--a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of the path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place. In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees. After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, 'Let the children come!' and they ran from the trees toward her. Let your mothers hear you laugh,' she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling. Then 'Let the grown men come,' she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees. Let your wives and your children see you dance,' she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet. Finally she called the women to her. 'Cry,' she told them. 'For the living and the dead. Just cry.' And without covering their eyes the women let loose. It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart. She did not tell them to clean up their lives or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. Here,' she said, 'in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard...
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Toni Morrison (Beloved)
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You can trust everyone to be human, with all the quirks and inconsistencies we humans display, including disloyalty, dishonesty and downright treachery. We are all capable of the entire range of human behavior, given the circumstances, from absolute saintliness to abject depravity. Trusting someone to limit their sphere of action to one narrow band on the spectrum is idealistic and will inevitably lead to disappointment. On the other hand, you can decide to trust that everyone is doing their best according to their particular stage of development, and to give everyone their appropriate berth. For this to work, you have to trust yourself to make and have made the right choices that will lead you on the path to your healthy growth. You have to trust yourself to come through every experience safely and enriched. But don’t trust what I am saying. Listen and then decide for yourself. Does this information sit easily in your belly? You know when you trust yourself around someone because your belly feels settled and your heart feels warm.
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Stephen Russell (Barefoot Doctor's Guide to the Tao: A Spiritual Handbook for the Urban Warrior)
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This is not to say that the point of the hard way is that we must be heroic. The attitude of "heroism" is based upon the assumption that we are bad, impure, that we are not worthy, are not ready for spiritual understanding. We must reform ourselves, be different from what we are. For instance, if we are middle class Americans, we must give up our jobs or drop out of college, move out of our suburban homes, let our hair grow, perhaps try drugs. If we are hippies, we must give up drugs, cut our hair short, throw away our torn jeans. We think that we are special, heroic, that we are turning away from temptation. We become vegetarians and we become this and that. There are so many things to become. We think our path is spiritual because it is literally against the flow of what we used to be, but it is merely the way of false heroism, and the only one who is heroic in this way is ego.
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ChΓΆgyam Trungpa (Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism)
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On the first day of November last year, sacred to many religious calendars but especially the Celtic, I went for a walk among bare oaks and birch. Nothing much was going on. Scarlet sumac had passed and the bees were dead. The pond had slicked overnight into that shiny and deceptive glaze of delusion, first ice. It made me remember sakes and conjure a vision of myself skimming backward on one foot, the other extended; the arms become wings. Minnesota girls know that this is not a difficult maneuver if one's limber and practices even a little after school before the boys claim the rink for hockey. I think I can still do it - one thinks many foolish things when November's bright sun skips over the entrancing first freeze. A flock of sparrows reels through the air looking more like a flying net than seventy conscious birds, a black veil thrown on the wind. When one sparrow dodges, the whole net swerves, dips: one mind. Am I part of anything like that? Maybe not. The last few years of my life have been characterized by stripping away, one by one, loves and communities that sustain the soul. A young colleague, new to my English department, recently asked me who I hang around with at school. "Nobody," I had to say, feeling briefly ashamed. This solitude is one of the surprises of middle age, especially if one's youth has been rich in love and friendship and children. If you do your job right, children leave home; few communities can stand an individual's most pitiful, amateur truth telling. So the soul must stand in her own meager feathers and learn to fly - or simply take hopeful jumps into the wind. In the Christian calendar, November 1 is the Feast of All Saints, a day honoring not only those who are known and recognized as enlightened souls, but more especially the unknowns, saints who walk beside us unrecognized down the millennia. In Buddhism, we honor the bodhisattvas - saints - who refuse enlightenment and return willingly to the wheel of karma to help other beings. Similarly, in Judaism, anonymous holy men pray the world from its well-merited destruction. We never know who is walking beside us, who is our spiritual teacher. That one - who annoys you so - pretends for a day that he's the one, your personal Obi Wan Kenobi. The first of November is a splendid, subversive holiday. Imagine a hectic procession of revelers - the half-mad bag lady; a mumbling, scarred janitor whose ravaged face made the children turn away; the austere, unsmiling mother superior who seemed with great focus and clarity to do harm; a haunted music teacher, survivor of Auschwitz. I bring them before my mind's eye, these old firends of my soul, awakening to dance their day. Crazy saints; but who knows what was home in the heart? This is the feast of those who tried to take the path, so clumsily that no one knew or notice, the feast, indeed, of most of us. It's an ugly woods, I was saying to myself, padding along a trail where other walkers had broken ground before me. And then I found an extraordinary bouquet. Someone had bound an offering of dry seed pods, yew, lyme grass, red berries, and brown fern and laid it on the path: "nothing special," as Buddhists say, meaning "everything." Gathered to formality, each dry stalk proclaimed a slant, an attitude, infinite shades of neutral. All contemplative acts, silences, poems, honor the world this way. Brought together by the eye of love, a milkweed pod, a twig, allow us to see how things have been all along. A feast of being.
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Mary Rose O'Reilley (The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd)