Elizabeth Lesser Quotes
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I love this life, because I am a human being and it sure would be nice, I think, to preserve it. But I don't even know if that's true, because God's mind is huge, and I don't really know what he's thinking.I can only do what I do with a spirit of humor, and faith and give the controls over to something else.
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Over and over, we are broken on the shore of life. Our stubborn egos are knocked around, and our frightened hearts are broken open—not once, and not in predictable patterns, but in surprising ways and for as long as we live.
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I was just a kid when I started doing this,yoga, meditation, natural foods, acupuncture - things like were seen as practically voodoo. And today you can go into any hospital and they'll have massage, and Chinese medicine, and therapy, and a prayer room.
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But grief is also a tonic. It is a healing elixir, made of tears that lubricate the heart.
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We don't need anymore empowered people who are all about the ego.
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When we descend all the way down to the bottom of loss, and dwell patiently, with an open heart, in the darkness and pain, we can bring back up with us the sweetness of life and the exhilaration of inner growth. When there is nothing left to lose, we find the true self - the self that is whole, the self that is enough, the self that no longer looks to others for definition, or completion, or anything but companionship on the journey.
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It is very, very rare where a slight that turns into a grudge that is in need of forgiveness is only about one of the parties. In most of our day-to-day situations - with colleagues at work, with your partner, with your children, with your friends - most of the time, if you really got down with each other and put aside your pride and your defensiveness and you had those hard conversations, you'd find a place where both people had something to ask for forgiveness from the other and to forgive the other.
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The part of me that is both a spiritual seeker and a social activist meet in this understanding of enlightened power coming from a deep, genuine well within each person.
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If men and women were equal, everybody would have the same values.Because at this point in time, many women feel compelled to care for the children, feel empathetically into another person's reality, more so than many men who often are on more of a straight-shooting path towards achievement come what may.
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We don't need any more teachers. We don't. We need friends.
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No one has the answer; only you know the way home.
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The person who takes the first step in a conflict toward the other, those are brave people.
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Rumi called his teacher "the friend." And that's what we need. We need friends.
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It's rare that you have a conflict and two people or two groups who are equally mature in their desire or capacity to get there. That doesn't mean it can't happen. What it means is that one person has to take the lead, has to be bigger. I call that kind of person the new first responder.
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Read any of the top-selling business books, all of them talk about moving away from a top down manner of leading to a more inclusive one. It's not happening over night, but if you read the winds of change in most of the democracies in the world we are moving toward shared levels of power.
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When women hear each other's stories, told from the heart, it gives us inspiration to keep on going.
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The real work of feminism is to empower a woman and to give her language to express a new value system for the world. The new feminism must create both the process by which we generate influence and the influence itself.
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My years as a mystic have made me question almost all my assumptions. They've made me a proud I-don't-know-it-all.
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Learn respect for the feeling function: Become aware of and undo some of your (improper) cultural training so that you grant the moods and messages of the heart the same respect that you give the thoughts and ideas of the mind.
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I think the main problem people have getting older, whether they know it or not, is that you're closer to dying. And we may fixate on not wanting to look a certain way, but it really is just the clock ticking, that it means, "Oh, I am not immortal!".
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If we do not suffer a loss all the way to the end, it will wait for us. It won’t just dissipate and disappear. Rather, it will fester, and we will experience its sorrow later, in stranger forms.
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I pull from a place within me that has ultimate faith in the meaningfulness and beauty of human life.
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I'm deeply disturbed by the ways in which all of our cultures are demonizing the other. This is why I'm launching a new initiative, and it's to help all of us, myself included, to counteract the tendency to otherize.
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I have noticed if I pull from fear or despair about the state of the world, I get tired, ineffective, afraid and sometimes mean-spirited.