Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you – all of the expectations, all of the beliefs – and becoming who you are.
The secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.
Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.
Life offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not everyone learns.
The willingness to consider possibility requires a tolerance of uncertainty.
In the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you.
Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.
Goose bumps happen when your soul is close to you, breathing lightly on the back of your neck, and wakes you up.
The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen.
Most of us lead far more meaningful lives than we know. Often finding meaning is not about doing things differently; it is about seeing familiar things in new ways.
Our listening creates a sanctuary for the homeless parts within another person.
Grieving allows us to heal, to remember with love rather than pain. It is a sorting process. One by one you let go of the things that are gone and you mourn for them. One by one you take hold of the things that have become a part of who you are and build again.
When you listen generously to people they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time.
We are all born to be a blessing.
The choice people have to make is never between slavery and freedom. We will always have to choose between slavery and the unknown.
A blessing is not something that one person gives another. A blessing is a moment of meeting, a certain kind of relationship in which both people involved remember and acknowledge their true nature and worth, and strengthen what is whole in one another.
It has been said that sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live. p 374.