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Many women hear the word "feminine" and feel like it's a noose around their neck. "Don't hold me to a mode of behavior because I'm a woman and you think this is how a woman should act," kind of thing.
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The conversation people need to have is no longer about women assuming positions of leadership within the existing power structure, it's about the power structures themselves, it's about how to go about assuming power, how to change the structures.
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We are able to choose what we want - you don't have to accept one thing from one tradition. It's a melting pot.
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I'm calling my initiative take the other to lunch. If you are a Republican, you can take a Democrat to lunch or if you're a Democrat, think of it as taking a Republican to lunch because there is no shortage of the other right in your own neighborhood, maybe that person who worships at the mosque or the church or the synagogue down the street or someone from the other side of the abortion conflict - or maybe your brother-in-law who doesn't believe in global warming.
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Your path is your own, but you must walk side by side with others, with compassion and generosity as your beacons. If anything is required it is this: fearlessness in your examination of life and death; Willingness to continually grow; and openness to the possibility that the ordinary is extraordinary, and that your joys and your sorrows have meaning and mystery.
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Look for a way to lift someone up. If that's all you do, it's enough.
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I really knew how to speak - from my female voice, that "different voice" that Carol Gilligan so presciently described many years ago in her groundbreaking book. Because if we try to speak in a voice that isn't ours, we lose our power.
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A broken heart is not the same as sadness. Sadness occurs when the heart is stone cold and lifeless. On the contrary, there is an unbelievable amount of vitality in a broken heart.
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Every day we're given a choice: We can relax and float in the direction that the water flows, or we can swim hard against it. If we go with the river, the energy of a thousand mountain streams will be with us . . . if we resist the river, we will feel rankled and tired as we tread water, stuck in the same place.
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I have built up so much stuff , I am afraid I would cry forever, or have to go to sleep for weeks, or I would want to make some changes, and it is all just so overwhelming that we just keep going and going and going. It's a problem. It creates all kinds of illnesses of the physical and mental kind.
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If spirituality is not religion or cynicism or sentimentality or narcissism, then what is it?... we can confidently say... that spirituality is fearlessness. It is a way of looking boldly at this life we have been given, here, now, on earth, as this human being.
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I believe that educating people to awaken into full consciousness is the most important thing we can do.
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We must pay attention to the voice that calls us out of the safety zone.
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Even if your difficult time comes at you out of the blue - like cancer - even those times, opens your heart to the magic and power of life, and gives you this inner commitment to live every moment.
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Instead of fixating on the physical aspects of aging, it's good to contemplate the deeper source of our anxiety. That can be liberating.
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Meditation practice is like piano scales, basketball drills, ballroom dance class. Practice requires discipline; it can be tedious; it is necessary. After you have practiced enough, you become more skilled at the art form itself. You do not practice to become a great scale player or drill champion. You practice to become a musician or athlete. Likewise, one does not practice meditation to become a great meditator. We meditate to wake up and live, to become skilled at the art of living.
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I know that if we allow ourselves into the gridlock of tribalism, we're in trouble.
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I think it's better that people actually are saying what they feel. Especially, people are saying, I'm not heard. I don't have a voice in America.
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I hope this is the lesson we women really commit to memory - we learned that it doesn't work to try be someone other than who you really are.
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Not only must we follow the golden thread towards spiritual freedom, but we must also unravel the garden-variety twine that is wrapped tightly around our hearts and minds.
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How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change.
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What wants to live in you may be waiting...at the end of a long loneliness.
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I accept that life is uncertain--that the goal is not to become more certain about anything but to relax more into the mystery of not knowing what will come next. And then, miracle of miracles, out there in the deep and uncertain water, I come into a peaceful knowing--a faithful wisdom that surpasses control and certainty.
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Things do fall apart. It is in their nature to do so. When we try to protect ourselves from the inevitability of change, we are not listening to the soul. We are listening to our fear of life and death, our lack of faith, our smaller ego's will to prevail. To listen to the soul is to stop fighting with life-to stop fighting when things fall apart, when they don't go our way, when we get sick, when we are betrayed or mistreated or misunderstood. To listen to the soul is to slow down, to feel deeply, to see ourselves clearly, to surrender to discomfort and uncertainty, and to wait.