Quotes from Elizabeth Lesser

Emotional intelligence is learning how to decipher and channel the brilliance of your heart." 

People who are placed on a pedestal are expected to pose, perfectly. Then they get knocked off when they fuck it up. I regularly fuck it up. Consider me already knocked off. —Roxane Gay

Ch-ch-Changes, turn and face the strain, because I am trying to do just that.

the man was right: It was time for me to find out what I really wanted—not what my husband wanted, not what I thought my children needed, not what my parents expected, not what society said was good or bad. It was time for me to step boldly into the fullness of life, with all of its dangers and all of its promises. Remaining tight in a bud had become a kind of death. The time had come to blossom.

If you take steps to accomplish something, that action will have a result—either failure or success…. Trust is knowing that there will be a message. When you trust in those messages, the reflections of the phenomenal world, the world begins to seem like a bank, or reservoir, of richness.

I have gone back to sleep in order to resist the forces of change. And I have stayed awake and been broken open. Both ways are difficult, but one way brings with it the gift of a lifetime. If we can stay awake when our lives are changing, secrets will be revealed to us—secrets about ourselves, about the nature of life, and about the eternal source of happiness and peace that is always available, always renewable, already within us.

T. S. Eliot says, "The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

Everyone has a burden to bear, and no one else can carry it for us. It's our very own chimidunchik." "That

I do not wish upon anyone a descent into hell. But if your life has to be turned inside out in order for you to know yourself—if the shadow of a shaman crosses your path and you turn and follow it down—I pray that you use its force wisely. I hope that you take the ultimate responsibility for your actions and that you consecrate any destruction to the rebuilding of your higher self and a more radiant life.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing," he writes, "there is a field. I'll meet you there.

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive… so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL

Jung wrote, "Eros is a questionable fellow and will always remain so…. He belongs on one side to man's primordial animal nature, which will endure as long as man has an animal body. On the other side he is related to the highest forms of the spirit. But he thrives only when spirit and instinct are in right harmony.

Women are at the forefront of that kind of revolution now—a paradigm shift away from a gendered value system where the male experience is at the center of reality and all other ways of being, thinking, feeling, and doing are at the periphery.

We are in search of our most authentic, vital, generous, and wise self.

Just sing me your song. Teach me the words. Tell me what you know.

The last of the human freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. —VICTOR FRANKL

too—I realized that my only hope was to give up the life that had been, in order to make room for the life that is. I call it my "choiceless choice.

We're all bozos on the bus, so we might as well sit back and enjoy the ride. —WAVY GRAVY

Drum sounds rise on the air, and with them, my heart. A voice inside the beat says, I know you are tired, but come. This is the way.

As you enter positions of trust and power," Toni Morrison wrote, "dream a little before you think.

To trust who our child is, and not who we think he should be or what the world wants him to be—that perhaps is the single greatest gift a parent can give.

In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods Where the straight way was lost. —DANTE ALIGHIERI

Was I a dreamer, looking for an elusive happiness that real life could never deliver? Or were we meant to know the rapture of being alive, even at the cost of breaking the rules?

His grief at your leaving is also his fear of losing the power he has had for lifetimes. Those days are over for him, and he is in turmoil. But if you are to help him on his soul's quest, you will leave him. It is your job--your sacred contract--to free him, and to free yourself.