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]

Graduate-Level Course

Forgiveness, Growth, Healing 0

Forgiveness is a private process that we do for our own sakes, and there is no experience of hurt, loss, betrayal, or disappointment that is beyond our power to heal and resolve. When we forgive someone, we are saying that even though this experience of hurt (painful, difficult, unjust, abusive, and so on) has happened to us, we are going to completely release that pain and move forward without it. Even the most broken heart can be mended through forgiveness, and the steady practice of forgiveness throughout our lives will reframe for us the worst stories of our human journey. When we are wounded and suffering, an attitudinal choice lies right in front of us: will we feel and believe that we are victims of cruel fate, slogging through unrelenting and meaningless struggles? Or will we empower ourselves to take the opportunity to travel to higher ground, employing universal spiritual principles? In the hot laboratory of daily life, day by day and year by year — no matter how difficult it gets — each one of us has the power to transform our painful stories from those of a victim to those of a willing student of life. Like a master-in-training in a customized wisdom school, we can turn our wounds into wisdom as we complete each lesson of the graduate level course called Unconditional Forgiveness.

— Mary Hayes Grieco, Unconditional Forgiveness, p. 1-2

The More We Use, the More We Have

Acceptance, Growth, Peace 0

The accepted measurement of time allocates twenty-four hours for each day, and for now and the foreseeable future, that is it. Unable to convince the clock of the joys of generosity that could be experienced by its offering just a little bit more of its precious commodity, we alter our approach and try to squeeze just one more project into the day’s already bloated schedule.

The wonderful thing about patience, unlike time, is the more we use it, the more we have. Also, by its nature, patience creates a spaciousness that lets us feel as if we have more time than we have ever had. Thus, patience can alter our everyday experience from one of anxiety and deficiency to one of peace and plentitude.

— Allan Lokos, Patience, p. 18

Gifts from the Church

Community, Faith, Growth 0

I am not certain my change of heart would have occurred outside the context of the church. For as I sat on the town-square bench, my mind was filled with stories and examples of forgiveness I had learned at the church’s knee. While I belong to a number of organizations and institutions, only the church has given me the language of reconciliation and has concerned itself with my human growth and betterment. When I have been angry, it has taught me to forgive. When I have been lonely, the church has provided friendship. When I was happy, it celebrated with me. When I was sad, it shared my grief. When I was egotistical, thinking only of myself, the church corrected me and taught me to consider others. When I was stingy, it taught me generosity. And when I was fearful, it taught me courage. In short, the church let me practice what it meant to be human. Not just any kind of human, but the best human I could be.

It is also abundantly clear that what the church has provided for this Christian has also been provided to the Jew, the Muslim, the Buddhist, and others by their spiritual communities. All of them, in their own contexts, have been taught what it means to be human. To be sure, I and others have not consistently lived up to the ideals of our spiritual communities, but those ideals are no less important and imperative.

— Philip Gulley, The Evolution of Faith, p. 185-186

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

New Energy

Forgiveness, Healing 0

The experience of forgiveness is profound and refreshing. When we do the gritty, methodical work that goes into healing and resolving an old hurt, we dissolve the stagnant weight of resentment inside us, and our bodies are flooded with new energy. Forgiveness mends our tattered personal boundaries, improves our health and relationships, and empowers us to move forward with hope and creativity. As we release the past, we also release ourselves into the richness of the present and the possibilities of the future. We find ourselves on new ground, ready to walk forward into our goals and dreams.

— Mary Hayes Grieco, Unconditional Forgiveness, p. 1

Not Your Responsibility

Letting Go, Love, Marriage, Relationships 0

Your partner is responsible for his own well-being. Deeply loving women struggle with caring profoundly for partners who are not good for them. They care for them with a love and a sensitivity to their spirits that their partners are not giving themselves — and certainly are not offering in return. It is a challenge to find a way to fully honor a partner who is embroiled in addiction, or who is suffering emotionally in other ways, but who periodically is cruel to you. And it can be unimaginably painful to leave a partner you love who is self-destructing.

Your partner’s relationships with others, his spiritual path, and his inner life are his own. If he grows and changes, it will not be because you repaired his relationships, found a spiritual path for him, or learned the inner workings of his psyche. When — if — he changes, it will be because he did these things himself. You can lay out your requirements or even outline resources for him, but then you must step away.

— Lundy Bancroft, Should I Stay or Should I Go?

A Space for Us

Beauty, God, Joy 0

Could it be that the joy we pursue in life — whether the joy of playing an instrument or a sport, of chipping a sculpture from stone or building a business from the ground up — is the joy of knowing that there is a silence, a void, a space that waits for us to fill it? And could it be that God, the creator of both us and that void, is the witness, the audience, the Listener for whom we are always performing? And could it be that contemplation is the pause button that freezes time, so that we listen to the Listening and witness the Witness?

— Brian D. McLaren, Naked Spirituality, p. 228