Quotes from Elizabeth Lesser

How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change

My years as a mystic have made me question almost all my assumptions. They've made me a proud I-don't-know-it-all.

Adversity is a natural part of being human. It is the height of arrogance to prescribe a moral code or health regimen or spiritual practice as an amulet to keep things from falling apart.

I can only do what I do with a spirit of humor, and faith and give the controls over to something else.

How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.

What will matter is the good we did, not the good we expected others to do.

Meditation practice is like piano scales, basketball drills, ballroom dance class. Practice requires discipline; it can be tedious; it is necessary. After you have practiced enough, you become more skilled at the art form itself. You do not practice to become a great scale player or drill champion. You practice to become a musician or athlete. Likewise, one does not practice meditation to become a great meditator. We meditate to wake up and live, to become skilled at the art of living.

I recently heard a great writer say that an essential element in the life of a writer is to have been an outsider in childhood, to have been given the gift of not belonging.

Whatever is happening, whatever is changing, whatever is going or not going according to my plans—I release my hold on all of it. I leave behind who I think I am, who I want to be, what I want the world to be. I come home to the great peace of the present moment

It is the acceptance of death that has finally allowed me to choose life.

A broken heart is not the same as sadness. Sadness occurs when the heart is stone cold and lifeless. On the contrary, there is an unbelievable amount of vitality in a broken heart.

If we do not suffer a loss all the way to the end, it will wait for us. It won't just dissipate and disappear. Rather, it will fester, and we will experience its sorrow later, in stranger forms.

How quickly I judge, and therefore diminish their humanity.

When there is nothing left to lose, we find the true self—the self that is whole, the self that is enough, the self that no longer looks to others for definition, or completion, or anything but companionship on the journey.

The world wold have been different - and better - if women had had an equal say in the development of literature, medicine, chemistry, physics, peace and economics. Better, not because women are better, but because they are more than half of humanity, representing more than half of what it means to be human.

Over and over, we are broken on the shore of life. Our stubborn egos are knocked around, and our frightened hearts are broken open—not once, and not in predictable patterns, but in surprising ways and for as long as we live.

If there is one thing that has made a difference in my life, it is the courage to turn and face what wants to change within me.

So much of what we do each day is a diversion from what our lives are really about. A traumatic event is like a knife slicing through our diversionary tactics and exposing the vein of truth—the truth of what we really want, of how we really feel, of the wrongs we have visited upon each other, of the love we crave from each other.

The Persian poet Rumi says, The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want.

It is our birthright to uncover the soul—to remove the layers of fear or shame or apathy or cynicism that conceal it.

what feels like such a painful loss now will become something beautiful later on. You cannot escape your destiny. You can certainly try. People do so every day. They hold on tight, and the river just dries up.

Your lesson in this lifetime is to find and trust your own precious voice.

To turn back is one kind of death; to go forward is another.

To banish the Hideous Damsel's darkness is to sterilize one's chance at the evolution she brings.