Fear is the friction in all transitions.
At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity.
It has been my experience that presence is a more powerful catalyst for change than analysis.
Belief traps or frees us.
It is not that we have a soul, but that we are a soul.
When we listen, we offer with our attention an opportunity for wholeness.
Suffering shapes the life force, sometimes into anger, sometimes into blame and self-pity. Eventually it may show us the wisdom of embracing and loving life.
Our purpose in life is to grow in wisdom and in love.
I think that people get experiences, and out of those experiences come meaning and ideas. It’s like watching a rose bush grow.
I think ideas only lead to change for intellectual people; and not even them. What really leads to change is experience. Life itself is the teacher.
Cancer changes your whole life.
All natural processes are long processes and they last.
I spent the first forty years of my life making major interventions into other people’s lives, and I have an idea of the limitations of that method. I see a major event as rather like major surgery. It is a moment, but whether people use it, whether people go with it, needs to be seen.
People are waking up in their homes – without conferences. They’re waking up because life is waking them up, not because of some conference called “Body and Soul.”
Wounding and healing are not opposites. They’re part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people. It is our loneliness that helps us to to find other people or to even know they’re alone with an illness. I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of.
In avoiding all pain and seeking comfort at all cost, we may be left without intimacy or compassion; in rejecting change and risk we often cheat ourselves of the quest; in denying our suffering we may never know our strength or our greatness.
The places in which we are seen and heard are holy places. They remind us of our value as human beings. They give us the strength to go on.
Perhaps we are no longer a kind people. More and more, we seem to have become numb to the suffering of others and ashamed of our own suffering. Yet suffering is one of the universal conditions of being alive. We all suffer. We have become terribly vulnerable, not because we suffer but because we have separated ourselves from each other.
Most of the things that give life its depth, meaning, and value are impervious to science.
I have learned that the things that divide us are far less important than those that connect us.