A crisis is always a chance not only to scrape away the film of your defaults but to see that life is inviting you to develop, to move in the direction of your own creative aliveness, to become more of who you are. In this way, pain is the initiator of great change, and crisis is definitely an opportunity. Indeed, it is an unsolicited chance to become more of yourself, more than you ever have been.
— Daphne Rose Kingma, The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart, p. 41
We live in a culture that’s afraid of grieving; we don’t know how to cry. When our lives fall apart in one way or another, we usually try to take control of things and solve them, forget them, or deny them — rather than experience them, accept them, or see the meaning they may hold for us. That’s because underlying many of our responses to difficulty is the unstated assumption that we should be able to engage in life, liberty, and the unbridled pursuit of happiness without ever having to grieve — over anything. It’s almost as if we believe that pain, suffering, and challenge are bad and should never be a part of our path.
The truth is that pain is one of our greatest teachers, hurt can be a birth, and our sufferings are the portals to change. This being true, we need to know how to grieve, to mourn, to shed our tears, because grief is the cure for the pain of loss. Tears are the medicine of grieving.
When life is hard, when you’re in a crisis, you should cry not because you’re weak but because crying holds the power of healing. Tears, in fact, are the vehicle for transformation. When you cry, your loss moves through you to the point of exit. What was holding you up and eating you up, what was stuck inside your body, gets released and moves outside your body. Your physical structure is quite literally cleansed and, like a blackboard sponged clean, is available to receive the imprint of whatever wants to come next. That’s why, when you have cried, you will be reborn, free to begin again.
— Daphne Rose Kingma, The Ten things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart, p. 4-5
Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don’t waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success. Listen, learn, go on. That is what we are doing with this tale. We are listening to its ancient message. We are learning about deteriorative patterns so we can go on with the strength of one who can sense the traps and cages and baits before we are upon them or caught in them.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD, Women Who Run With the Wolves, p. 237
The Bible was telling me that people who simply pursue duty and follow the rules often miss the party. And the biggest thing they miss out on is the relationship. . . .
In all of these stories, I was impressed by the prominent role that emotions played. Not only that, but these stories were about emotion — how people could taste the vibrant life they saw in Jesus. Everyone who encountered Jesus began to feel.
And even more, these stories were about people like me — people who were stuck in their lives of obedience and duty — and how duty, while good in its own way, is not sufficient. The rich young ruler and Zacchaeus and Mary all wanted something more — the promise of the passion they saw in Jesus.
— Matthew Elliott, Feel: The Power of Listening to Your Heart, p. 21-22
Most of us Christians don’t know how to wait in pain — at least not in the contemplative, creative way that opens us to newness and growth. We’re told to “turn it over to Jesus” and — presto! — things should be okay.
But inside things usually aren’t okay. So on top of everything else, we feel guilty because obviously we didn’t really turn our pain over or else it wouldn’t still be with us. Or we decide that God wasn’t listening and can’t be trusted to deliver on divine promises.
How did we ever get the idea that God would supply us on demand with quick fixes, that God is merely a rescuer and not a midwife?
— Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits, p. 28
When it comes to religion today, we tend to be long on butterflies and short on cocoons. Somehow we’re going to have to relearn that the deep things of God don’t come suddenly. It’s as if we imagine that all of our spiritual growth potential is dehydrated contents to which we need only add some holy water to make it instantly and easily appear.
I received a letter recently from someone who was feeling impatient about taking the long way round. She wrote, “Pole vaulting is so much more alluring than crawling.”
— Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits, p. 26
The presence of pain is the promise of change. That’s because it hurts to suffer, and when we’re suffering we’re far more inclined to take risks, to take action, to fall on our knees, to break out of bad habits, to break out of the box in order to get beyond the pain that we’re in. Suffering, therefore, is always an invitation to change, to get into alignment with what is most true and beautiful in life, with our deepest and most expansive feelings, with Love itself.
It may not feel this way right now, but just as the oak tree, folded and invisible, lies whole within the acorn, so everything you need to live through this current anguish is within you. You are blessed. Your life is designed. If this crisis weren’t meant to be part of your life, it would not be happening. This is the moment and these are precisely the experiences through which your emotional body is being healed, your soul is being refined and enlarged, and your life itself is taking on a new meaning.
— Daphne Rose Kingma, The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart, p. xviii-xix
Just to be clear, forgiving someone doesn’t mean you have to keep that individual in your life. Some people are simply going to have a toxic effect on you if you allow them to stay, and you will have to move away from them. It is how you end those relationships that will affect your spiritual progress. If you can love them, forgive them, and release them in a way that wishes them only healing, you will make excellent progress.
— Kathleen McGowan, The Source of Miracles, p. 137
Christ is our righteousness, not that we should escape punishment, still less that we should escape being righteous, but as the live potent creator of righteousness in us.
— George MacDonald, Wisdom to Live By, p. 45
The inability, or reluctance, to forgive is our greatest failing. It is the cause of the majority of personal strife as well as global war. When you hold on to your anger, resentment, or disappointment in other people, you sabotage your own happiness. You use your precious spiritual energy on those negative emotions, when you could be using that power to live a joyous life, attract abundance, and improve the conditions of the world around you. An inability or unwillingness to forgive constricts you, draws you inward, whereas forgiveness gives you the opportunity to expand and open the channels of abundance in your life.
— Kathleen McGowan, The Source of Miracles, p. 125-126