With total discipline we can solve all problems.
How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded.
Love always requires courage and involves risk.
The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action.
Falling in love is not an extension of one’s limits or boundaries; it is a partial and temporary collapse of them.
But I already saw no great difference between the psyche and spirituality. To amass knowledge without becoming wise is not my idea of progress in therapy.
Jesus was lonely and sorrowful and scared-an unbelievably real person.
The denial of suffering is, in fact a better definition of illness than its acceptance.
I’ve had all kinds of experiences with God in terms of revelation through a still, small voice or dreams or coincidences.
Although I was raised in a profoundly secular home, I had a belief, an awareness of God, from as far back as I can remember.
Falling in love is not an act of will. It is not a conscious choice. No matter how open to or eager for it we may be, the experience may still elude us. Contrarily, the experience may capture us at times when we are definitely not seeking it, when it is inconvenient and undesirable.
Not only do self-love and love of others go hand in hand but ultimately they are indistinguishable.
The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort.
How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others... But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.
The problem of unmet expectations in marriage is primarily a problem of stereotyping. Each and every human being on this planet is a unique person. Since marriage is inevitably a relationship between two unique people, no one marriage is going to be exactly like any other. Yet we tend to wed with explicit visions of what a “good” marriage ought to be like. Then we suffer enormously from trying to force the relationship to fit the stereotype and from the neurotic guilt and anger we experience when we fail to pull it off.
This inclination to ignore problems is once again a simple manifestation of an unwillingness to delay gratification. Confronting problems is, as I have said, painful. To willingly confront a problem early, before we are forced to confront it by circumstances, means to put aside something pleasant or less painful for something more painful. It is choosing to suffer now in the hope of future gratification rather than choosing to continue present gratification in the hope that future suffering will not be necessary.
Those things that hurt, instruct.
Another characteristic of human nature – perhaps the one that makes us most human – is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.
Similarly, loving spouses must repeatedly confront each other if the marriage relationship is to serve the function of promoting the spiritual growth of the partners. No marriage can be judged truly successful unless husband and wife are each other’s best critics.
Self-discipline is self-caring.