Two Instructions
Sometimes I think there are only two instructions we need to follow to develop and deepen our spiritual life: slow down and let go.
— Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance
Category: Growth
10 Posts
Courage
“When you are born,” the golem said softly, “your courage is new and clean. You are brave enough for anything: crawling off of staircases, saying your first words without fearing that someone will think you are foolish, putting strange things in your mouth. But as you get older, your courage attracts gunk and crusty things and dirt and fear and knowing how bad things can get and what pain feels like. By the time you’re half-grown, your courage barely moves at all, it’s so grunged up with living. So every once in a while, you have to scrub it up and get the works going or else you’ll never be brave again. Unfortunately, there are not so many facilities in your world that provide the kind of services we do. So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.”
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, p. 60
Unfolding
The soul’s joy is in unfolding, in becoming known to the self and being able to live from a deeper and deeper connection with who we really are. While this is an introspective task we have to do for ourselves, there can be no doubt that being seen and known and loved by another offers us the warm light of encouragement that softens our hearts to ourselves when we are discouraged about our human failings.
— Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance, p. 150
Win-Win
Distress stemming from our verbal communication could be markedly alleviated, even with those we presently find difficult, if we were more mindful of our words. If you wait for the other person to speak more skillfully you may have a long wait. You can only control you. If the other person responds favorably to your kinder words, that’s great. If not, then you get to practice patience. When viewed from an egoless perspective, it is a win-win situation.
— Allan Lokos, Patience, p. 108
All the More Sweet
You can’t go back. You can’t go forward. You can’t stay here or stay put. When fire and brimstone are falling down upon your head, you can’t take the time to figure out anything, especially where it all went wrong.
As Milton foretold, what happened is “all hell broke loose.” But Reader, trust me: This experience is essential. It will make our new life all the more sweet when we find our way back. And we will find our way back.
— Sarah Ban Breathnach, Peace and Plenty, p. 19
Letting Go of “Should”
People often substitute “I should” for “I want.” I call this the beginning of internal civil war. The minute you say, “I should,” you have created division within yourself. “I should” always comes from others. Parents, rules, religious teachings, and cultural norms give us our shoulds. Not that this is necessarily bad. We do need to learn how to function in society in a helpful way. At some point along the road to adulthood, though, we need to internalize those ideas or discard them for good. If you say “I should,” it means some part of you doesn’t want to. Honor those parts! They have precious information for you. Let them speak to you fully, like a good council. Hear everyone’s opinion, and then make your singular decision.
If you can say “I want,” then you are coming from a more integrated place inside yourself. Try it for a moment: “I should clean the kitchen.” Doesn’t that just tighten your stomach and make you feel as though you don’t want to? Now say “I want to clean the kitchen!” How does that feel different? When we say “I want to,” we are taking complete ownership of our situation. No excuses, no resistance, no blame.
— Susan Pease Banitt, The Trauma Toolkit, p. 8-9
Learning to Fail
It turns out the Christian story is a good story in which to learn to fail. As the ethicist Samuel Wells has written, some stories feature heroes and some stories feature saints and the difference between them matters: “Stories . . . told with . . . heroes at the centre of them . . . are told to laud the virtues of the heroes — for if the hero failed, all would be lost. By contrast, a saint can fail in a way that the hero can’t, because the failure of the saint reveals the forgiveness and the new possibilities made in God, and the saint is just a small character in a story that’s always fundamentally about God.”
I am not a saint. I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God.
— Lauren F. Winner, Still, p. 193-194
Learning As We Go
The notion that we can become all that we’re meant to be, all at the same time, all instantly, all at once, without bungling along as we go, is pure fantasy. Or to put it another way, the notion that we can make great life decisions once and for all without learning as we go is pure naiveté. Life is not a paint-by-numbers game.
— Joan Chittister, Following the Path, p. 86
Resilience
The world shifts, and lives change. Without warning or reason, someone who was healthy becomes sick and dies. An onslaught of sorrow, regret, anger, and fear buries those of us left behind. Hopelessness and helplessness follow. But then the world shifts again — rolling on as it does — and with it, lives change again. A new day comes, offering all kinds of possibilities. Even with the experience of pain and sorrow set deep within me and never to be forgotten, I recognize the potent offerings of my unknown future. I live in a “weird world,” shifting and unpredictable, but also bountiful and surprising. There is joy in acknowledging that both the weirdness and the world roll on, but even more, there is resilience.
— Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, p. 60
The Insidious Power of Blame
It often takes time for the partners of verbal abusers to realize that the abuser is the one with the problem. Most women who are verbally abused spend time focused inward, soul-searching, taking inventory, trying to identify their “sins,” trying to find out what they did wrong. Because they have been blamed for their pain, they look inside for solutions. With no place even to turn their anger, unless against themselves, they have nowhere to go and no one who would understand. So they believe the lie. “There must be something I can do.”
Looking back on their lives, survivors have wondered why they spent any time at all in the situations they were in. Was it just low self-esteem? I don’t think so. I believe that never knowing quite what was wrong because they were always being blamed did much more than erode their self-esteem. It so totally denied their experience and invalidated them that eventually there was nothing they felt they could know for certain, nothing on which to base action. Being blamed is one of the most common experiences of the partner of an abuser and may do more than any other abuse to disempower the partner….
Sadly, many women go through their lives in pain and confusion trying to find out what is wrong while their culture tells them “nothing is wrong.” Women who went to many sources looking for help were told to try harder, as if the abuse was their fault and their suffering the norm. For them the whole world was crazymaking.
Once a woman is aware of the ways she is blamed by her culture (“What did you do to provoke him?”), she finds it easier to look outside herself. In a verbally abusive relationship, this is essential. She must come to realize that the abuse has nothing to do with her. It is very difficult for anyone, including the partner of the abuser, to grasp that a person who seems to get along quite well in the world, as many verbal abusers do, could suddenly lash out unprovoked at his partner for no apparent reason. Yet this is exactly what happens.
— Patricia Evans, Verbal Abuse Survivors Speak Out, p. 77-78