A woman must be careful not to allow over-responsibility (or over-respectability) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she “should” be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves, p. 333
The secret of contentment, as I’ve come at last to know, is not in getting what I want. It’s not about being in the perfect place or having just the right sort of life. Contentment and grace may just be two sides of the same coin. And they are both mine whenever I remember to stop, look around, and appreciate where I already am and what I already have.
— Katrina Kenison, The Gift of an Ordinary Day, p. 269
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
Surprisingly, the solution to stress is to begin to lower our tolerance to stress. This is the opposite of what most of us have been taught, but it is the truth. Lowering our tolerance to stress is based on the simple principle that our level of internal stress will always be exactly equal to our current tolerance. This is why people who can handle lots of stress always have to do just that.
People with extremely high levels of stress tolerance might end up with a stress-related heart attack before they begin to pay attention to what the stress is telling them. Others may end their marriage or find themselves in a recovery center for alcohol or drugs. People with lower tolerance might begin paying attention to their stress earlier, when their job first begins to seem overwhelming or when they find themselves snapping at their children. Still others, who can’t tolerate stress at all, sense that it’s time to slow down and regain perspective when they start merely having negative thoughts about their friends or family.
The lower our tolerance is for stress, the better off we are psychologically. When our goal is to feel our stress as early as possible, we can “nip stress in the bud” earlier, and return more quickly to a positive feeling state. We have choices; in fact, we have a series of “choice points,” in any situation. The longer we wait to disregard the stressful thoughts, the more difficult it becomes to bring ourselves back to our natural state of mind. Eventually, with practice, any of us can get to the point where we are aware of our negative thoughts before they pull us off track.
— Richard Carlson, PhD, You Can Be Happy No Matter What, p. 105
Now, we’re in a different place and a different time, and I need to become a different kind of mother. A mother who knows how to back off. A mother whose gaze is not quite so intently focused on her own two endlessly absorbing children, but who is engaged instead in a rich, full life of her own. A mother who cares a good deal less than she used to about what time people in her household go to bed, what they eat for breakfast, whether they wear coats or not, and what they choose to do, or not do, with their own time. A mother who, though her protective, maternal instincts run as fierce and deep as ever, manages, in all buextreme moments, to keep those instincts in check. A mother who trusts in who her children are, even if they aren’t exactly who she thinks they ought to be. Who keeps faith in their futures, even when the things they do, and the words they say, give her pause in the present. A mother who remembers, above all else, that the greatest gift she can give to her own two wildly different, nearly grown sons is the knowledge that, no matter what, she loves them both absolutely, just exactly as they are.
— Katrina Kenison, The Gift of an Ordinary Day, p. 265
If you want to be impressed, note how often God’s people seem to be waiting….
I came to the parable Jesus told about the ten maidens waiting for the bridegroom…. I’d always thought that the point of the story was that we should be prepared. But in my reading after the retreat, it seemed to be just as much about waiting. Waiting through the dark night. The idea is that waiting precedes celebration. If you don’t show up prepared to wait, you may miss the transcendent when it happens.
Most stunning to me was the picture I began to get of God waiting. The parable of the prodigal son would be more aptly named the parable of the waiting father. It tells us much more about God than anything else — a God who watches and waits with a full heart for us to make our homecoming.
— Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits, p. 28-29
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
Because love is what we are created for; it is the reason for our existence. Love is our destiny. Love God and love one another — these are the two great commands upon the human race. The secret to life is this — we are here in order to learn how to love.
It is really quite an epiphany when the truth finally strikes home. It might be the most liberating realization we ever come to. We are here in order to learn how to love. It is our greatest mission of all, our destiny.
— John and Stasi Eldredge, Love and War, p. 195
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
Living by duty to please God just doesn’t work. It didn’t work for the rich young ruler, so why do we think it will work for us? And even more important, God is not pleased with our efforts. He wants so much more for us, his precious children. As he said through his prophet Ezekiel, “I will give them singleness of heart and put a new spirit within them. I will take away their stony, stubborn heart and give them a tender, responsive heart.”
So put off the shackles of duty, legalism, and your attempts to be perfect. Jesus didn’t call you to a life like that. Take on a life of delighting in God and loving him….
Jesus calls you now to unshakable love, to unspeakable joy, to hope in sorrow, and ultimate delight as you dwell in his presence. Lift your voice with me now and let’s cry out to God that he would open our hearts to all the abundance in life he longs to give….
Stop struggling to keep your emotions in check, and start living in and through and with them. Emotion is the only motivation that is able to propel us toward a radically obedient and abundant life.
— Matthew Elliott, Feel, p. 46-47