Quotes from Elizabeth Lesser

Everything gets sorted out in the Great Silence.

The secret in life is enjoying the passage of time. —RICHIE HAVENS

you are going to pray, then don't worry. And if you are going to worry, then don't bother praying.

Rumi tells us that moment we accept what troubles we've been given, the door will open.

We stood in silence, and then the long-haired man repeated, "You are in pain. Do you know why?" "No, why?" I asked, even though I certainly did know why. "Because you are afraid." "Afraid of what?" "Afraid of yourself," the man said, placing his hand on his chest and patting his heart. "You are afraid to feel your real feelings. You are afraid to want what you really want. What do you want?

Grief is the proof of our love, a demonstration of how deeply we have allowed another to touch us.

Being true to that self involves sifting through the layers of bad advice and unreasonable expectations of others. It requires seeing through your own delusions of grandeur or your fear of failure or your impostor syndrome or your conviction that there is something uniquely and obviously screwed up about your particular self.

That's why we tell the stories. To ease the anxiety of being soft-skinned mortals. To inspire the soul to fathom eternity. To give order to what feels out of control. To guide, to blame, to warn, to shame. To make some kind of sense out of why people do what they do, why things happen the way they happen, and how we might all meet each other and daily life with less turmoil and more stability. That's why we cling to the old stories.

So," I asked again, "if mistakes provide the best opportunity for discovery and evolution, why do we go around trying to look so sure of ourselves all the time?" I invited the crowd of left-brain thinkers to put

Some people realize that what must burn in the fire is their fear—fear of their own power, fear of change, fear of loss, fear of others. Some people name an inability to feel, a crippling cynicism, a sense of shame, a stance of anger. I

From bars and bleachers to media panels and the halls of government, it's men who do more of the talking. This has been going on for a long, long time—women being accused of talking too much, even as men often dominate conversations, interrupt, mansplain, and do more of the sum total of all human talking.

What if our myths and teaching tales had purposely led humanity to believe that it was the ultimate sign of strength to nurture and love? What if the urge to care for children and nature and each other had been chosen as the most important tasks of any society? What if care as opposed to conquest had been the marker of virility? What if resources were granted to the people most skilled at peace making, healing, creating and opposed to those with brute strength and a pension for violence?

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. This

It's important to understand the significance of how our society's origin story is based in blame. It's good to contemplate what our culture would be like if the first woman had not been branded as "second born, first to sin." How would things be different if humankind's first big mistake wasn't to follow the lead of the woman? And if Eden's punishment hadn't been subservience to Adam?

So much of the sorry state of our world hangs on the excess of the so-called masculine virtues in our guiding storylines.

I have come to trust the power of a few well-chosen words to reveal to the world something I cannot say, or don't want to say, or didn't even know I needed to say until I saw it spelled out in front of me in the prophetic hand of the poet.

Marion Woodman—the great Jungian analyst and author—says that we come to the mythic Crossroads during "moments in our lives where the unconscious crosses consciousness; where the eternal crosses the transitory; where a higher will demands the surrender of our egos.

The fruit of prayer is the realization that life is an eternal adventure, and that we are explorers, always changing, always learning, always breaking open into new vistas of clarity and peace.

If only people realized what they had in life," she told me one day, "they would not be able to contain their joy!

first tip of fearlessness, and the first sign of real warriorship.

Face your embarrassment at being human, and you'll uncover a deep well of passion and compassion. It's a great power, your Open Secret. When your heart is undefended, you make it safe for whomever you meet to put down his burden of hiding, and then you both can walk through the open door.

The basic belief of feminism is not that women are right and men are wrong; It is merely that women are people and therefor their voices matter, their values matter and their stories matter. It's time for women to tell their versions of what it means to be fully human. It is time for men to respect those insights and it is time for all of us to integrate them into a new story of power.

When it no longer would destroy a boy to be likened to a girl, when a girl feels vital doing the things she values, when it's considered as brave to be womanly as it is to be manly, than boys and girls, man and women can break out of the boxes that constrain us all

Let's put aside the goal of doing it perfectly, and replace it with the trust that we can do it differently.