Wiser and Stronger Each Day

Beauty, Core Value, Growth, Healing, Redemption, Relationships, Truth 0

As you choose your path and how you will use your time in the present, you are actively creating an increasingly more satisfying future. You are also dissolving the imprint and impact of any verbal abuse you’ve heard. Any negative definition of who you are by anyone in any time or place has no meaning or reality. While you may have been the target, like a drive-by shooting, the comments were not your fault.

You are infinitely more deserving of love and care than any negative comments would say. They are simply little synapses that flew out of someone’s mind. They are less meaningful than the chirping of a bird. Knowing this you are wiser and stronger each day. Knowing this you can choose to do what is best and right for your highest self this week and in the weeks to come.

— Patricia Evans, Victory Over Verbal Abuse, p. 176

Our Own Music

Community, Core Value, Creativity, Joy, Life 0

If we cannot hear the music of our own sweet nature calling to us, if we cannot remember that the intention is to live who we really are, it’s hard to know how to move, where to begin, how to dance. That’s why it’s not always a good idea to start shouting enthusiastically about what we are going to do, how we are going to live our soul’s longing, no matter how strongly this longing is felt in the moment. Sometimes we need to just stand quietly together, hand in hand, until one of us hears the music and begins to dance.

— Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance, p. 15

Song Lines

Core Value, Growth, Joy, Life 0

If I want to live my ability to be fully present and compassionate, my ability to be with it all — the joy and the sorrow — I must find the ways, the people, the places, the practices that support me in being all I truly am. I must cultivate ways of being that let me feel the warmth of encouragement against my heart when it is weary. I must be fiercely and compassionately honest with myself about those choices and actions that are inconsistent with my deepest nature and soul’s desires. I must find the song lines that run through my life, the melodies that remind me of what I really am and call me gently back to acting on this knowing. I must learn how to dance.

— Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance, p. 13

The Truth Shall Make You Free

Core Value, Healing, Letting Go, Truth 0

Resolve to focus on what you know to be true. If anyone defined you, told you who you are, what you want, think, or feel, they were lying to you. You don’t have to prove they were wrong. In fact, trying to prove they were wrong, or trying to convince them they were wrong about you, diverts all your energy away from your own development, from rediscovering what is true about you. That is what counts. You count.

When you tell someone to stop defining you, you act from truth….

When you act on your truth, the universe supports you in such a way that sometimes obstacles are later seen as stepping-stones.

— Patricia Evans, Victory Over Verbal Abuse, p. 132

[Photo: Waterside Inn, Chincoteague, October 22, 2016]

Be Who We Are

Core Value, Growth, Letting Go, Life 0

We live our deepest soul’s desires not by intending to change who we are but by intending to be who we are. And clearly our intention — to change or to be who we are — profoundly shapes how we live, what we believe we must do to learn, whether we feel we must ceaselessly push ourselves to reach higher or simply find the courage and confidence to allow who we are to unfold. The latter view calls for choices that support and expand our essentially compassionate nature, while the former aims to reshape our essentially flawed nature with heroic efforts of endless trying.

— Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance, p. 8

Celebrating Our Worthiness

Core Value, Joy, Letting Go 0

Reaching a state of well-being that isn’t reliant on anyone else’s actions is what we all hope for and what most of us strive for. Celebrating our worthiness, regardless of how others might be responding to us, isn’t a natural act. We seem to be far too dependent on others telling us that we are okay, either through words or deeds. The joy of experiencing a moment, now and then, when we simply know we are fine regardless of what others are doing or saying is so much appreciated.

— Karen Casey, Let Go Now, p. 45

Proud Survivors

Beauty, Core Value, Gratitude, Growth, Healing, Life, Trials 0

Nothing can erase what happened to you; you can’t go back. And, even if you could, there are gifts you have gained that you would likely not want to trade. What we survivors know makes us uniquely equipped to live full, vibrant, courageous lives. Our experiences have given us an exquisite, and sometimes painful, sensitivity. We are stronger, wiser, more compassionate, more appreciative, and more real because of what we have endured. We have acquired the ability to see things more clearly and more beautifully, to live more fully and more meaningfully. We are a proud tribe.

— Alicia Salzer, MD, Back to Life, p. 250-251