"Healing comes in many guises. We're healed by just the touch of a friend. We're healed by the hug of a child. And healing does not imply that your life is suddenly going to lose all of the struggle, all of the challenge. What it does instead is it strengthens us for what is next. But to be open to healing means to be vulnerable. And I think if you look at me, you know I'm what they would call a vulnerable adult. The cat doesn't even listen to me here. I have no real sense of control anymore."

~ Bruce Kramer

"We cannot receive love, however, if we are not open to the raw and tender experience of wanting it. Suppressing or denying desire shuts down our openness to receiving nourishment, and thus only intensifies our hunger."

~ John Welwood

Nobody wants to learn new coping strategies from the people who they perceive to be orchestrating their immediate discomforts.

"A lot of the poetic discipline boils down to getting tired of yourself, and I really believe that. When you get tired of yourself, then you change." 

~ David Whyte

"That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember."

~ Ted Hughes

Caretake this moment.
Immerse yourself in its particulars.
Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed.

~ Epictetus

The simple act of honouring one’s need for time and space, between the competing parts of our day, is age old.

"What I propose is that we take the concept of physical fitness and just move it over wholesale into the realm of the benefits of meditation....It seems to me that now, with the way we understand the benefits of meditation, we're pretty much where we were in the 1960's with physical fitness."

~ Kenneth Folk

"Whatever is newly born needs a name and when we are more and more  welcomed by the silence, naming becomes our job. We have to notice, to bless with attention the beasts before us, both the rough and the smooth."

~ John Tarrant

Is food the enemy?

Someone explained once how the pieces of what we are
fall downwards at the same rate
as the Universe.
The atoms of us, falling towards the center

of whatever everything is. And we don't see it.
We only sense their slight drag in the lifting hand.
That's what weight is, that communal process of falling.

~ John Glenday

Without a clue, no place to go...

~ Lee van Laer

"The only way we’ll ever know what it’s like to be you is if you work your best at being you as often as you can, and keep reminding yourself: That’s where home is."

~ Bill Murray

nodus tollens

n. the realization that the plot of your life doesn't make sense to you anymore

How can we ever know the difference we make to the soul of the earth? Where the infinite stillness of the earth meets the passion of the human eye, invisible depths strain towards the mirror of the name.

In the word, the earth breaks silence. It has waited a long time for the word. Concealed beneath familiarity and silence, the earth holds back and it never occurs to us to wonder how the earth sees us. Is it not possible that a place could have huge affection for those who dwell there?

~ John O'Donohue

To live is to be
uncertain.
Certainty comes
at the end.

~ Erica Jong

yù yī - 玉衣 

n. the desire to see with fresh eyes, and feel things just as intensely as you did when you were younger—before expectations, before memory, before words.

"Structure, it's all imposed. We impose order and narrative on everything in order to understand it. Otherwise, there's nothing but chaos."

~ Julianne Moore

Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination.

~ Leslie Jamison

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you're in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

~ Mary Oliver