THOMAS MOORE
The problem is ambition. We are so ambitious. Ambitious to do so much and to know so much and to achieve. I think giving up some of those ambitions is a way of letting go some of the anxiety that's connected to them. What's the alternative, to just wallow in your life, in your problems? No, it's not that. I use the word “care” which is sort of half way between wallowing and being hyper-active. Caring is active and yet there is a soft activity in it. So we have to care for our lives all the time and not judge ourselves so much. I think a lot of anxiety comes from judging ourselves, saying we have to improve, we have to be different, we have to be like somebody else.
We so identify with a collective, with one group or another or the spirit of the times. This is especially true of people in spiritual practice, very identified, very collective. And these people can be very moralistic in their own way, thinking that everyone should eat the same way, or they should meditate or do this or that.
But from the soul point of view we trust the deep interior of the individual and that individuality may appear in a horrible diet, in a horrible as compared to a purer diet, in a horrible style of life that may seem terrible to somebody else. And I think that tolerating is the ultimate cure for anxiety. To trust yourself, even though it's very raw and you just want to act on everything, that it merges into consciousness.
But whatever comes up has value and validity, and that kind of trust and intimacy with oneself is the base for living without anxiety. That's how I would describe the openness of a life living close to soul.
JOHN O’DONOHUE
I believe a bit in a spirituality of radical non-interference. Where you let yourself alone and you trust the indirect oblique compass of your soul, for the simple reason that your soul knows the geography of your destiny better than your mind ever will and your soul will always bring you home to your true belonging.
DAVID WHYTE
We have tremendous preconceived notions about the way life should be. And much of our raising in life, you know by our parents and organizations and the form of educational systems and things reinforce it. Which is that I exist when everything is on the up and up and I am growing and I am successful and I am doing well in the world. And I don't exist when I'm fading away, when I am dying, when I am failing. This is true both in the way others see us and the way we see ourselves too. It’s as if we will only agree to go out at night when the moon is growing larger for the first half of the month and in the second half of the month we will not go out because it is fading away. And we will certainly not go out for those three nights of the month, when there is no moon at all. Just too frightening.
BERNIE SIEGEL
And this is something I often say to people now, when you don't want to be a victim, and you think you are going to be a victim, and that this is beyond you, what you do at that moment is say a prayer, and the prayer isn't, “God cure me,” or “God give me more money.” It's, “God show me.” And this hasn't got anything to do with religion; religion is a problem, okay, for a lot of people and the rules that go with it.
But you can say God, my collective conscious or whatever. Then you have a dream, or you run into someone you haven't seen in five years and they tell you something or you suddenly have a thought, that's what begins to happen. And what we have to do is just have faith in ourselves and listen to this inner voice and let it guide you.
JEAN HOUSTON
And it's somehow as if the universe begins to conspire with you to bring you home. And often there is in the nadir of this mythic world that is a part and parcel of our human equipment, often there is the finding of a beloved. And a sense of finding your ‘intellichy’, and that's an old Greek word which really means the dynamic unique purpose that is yours. It's the intellichy of an acorn to be an oak tree. It's the intellichy of a baby to be a grown up human being, it's the intellichy of you and me to be god knows who or what.
I believe that everybody has a kind of unique possibility. And once you find that, you wake up. The boom. The capacity.
The passionate sense of what you must do in life. And then you return to this world enriched, deeper and ready to take on the larger task. And you become a world server. Ready to continue the journey.
WAYNE MULLER
I think we bring great suffering for ourselves when we decide in early age as we said before, what our destiny or what our passion or what our trajectory is going to be. Whereas in point of fact, to be surprised by the teachings of unfamiliar country is part of what being awake and having our eyes wide open is about.
And so I think that the invitation always, always, always is to be attentive to what's been placed in front of us. And of course any kind of meditation, contemplation, reflection, Sabbath time, is this relentless water on the stone. Be awake in this moment. What it is that we've already been given. Can you play with this. Can you accept even this. Can even this be a practice. Can even this be a way to God. Can even this be a delight. Can even this feel like a blessing. And it seems as if it's like the waves on the shore of our body that keep offering up again and again and again. Can this feel like a blessing. Can this feel like a blessing. Can this feel like a blessing. And what an invitation to be willing to be stopped, to be willing to be surprised, by how luscious, how spacious, how unpredictably grace-filled it can be.
DAVID WHYTE
Part of the reason we have so much difficulty with these urges is our fear of failure around them, that you could lose everything. If you tried your life and it didn't work, where would you go. You see.
Although the actual experience is very different. It is this fear of failure, yet all the time, I feel like the universe is looking at us saying "Listen, fifteen billion years of evolution and there is no other creature exactly like you anywhere in the universe, there is no other human being who can fail exactly as you can fail, no one has the artistic ability to fail, to mess up, in the way you can mess up. No one can fall on their face the way you can fall on your face. No one can fail like you can fail. No other part of the world has the ability to fail the way you can fail and you are quibbling, quibbling between success and failure.
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