Quotes from Elizabeth Lesser

And he was telling me that behind everyone's learned behaviors and odd eccentricities lurks a soul, ready to make contact if only coaxed out through a crack in the ego. Would that it take something less than fierce grace to break us open.

Rabbi Scnhuer Zalman said it clearly when he wrote: "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." In the middle of the mystery of pain, I harvested this precious jewel. I also harvested the love and beauty right here, in this world.

She says, "You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden, but you will grow if you are sick, if you are in pain, if you experience losses, and if you do not put your head in the sand, but take the pain as a gift to you with a very, very specific purpose.

The only thing we can really ask for when we pray is the ability to trust in that greater purpose. We pray to have our hearts opened and our purpose revealed. We pray for gratitude when our life is good and for faith when it is not so good. We pray to trust that our pain is a gift with "a very, very specific purpose.

He was training people to become "sacred warriors"—not so that they could do battle with others but so that they could develop the kind of courage one needs to be kind and happy and radically alive in the midst of the world.

There is no dry land, he said; there is only fearlessness, which is to be found in the heart. This is the path to freedom. At

logotherapy," which, in a nutshell, is about searching for the meaning packed in one's baggage, something

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. —RUMI

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

Frankl said that he wrote the book "to convey to the reader by way of concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.

Discovering fearlessness comes from working with the softness of the human heart. I

What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment." At

You have your soul—what Frankl called the last of the human freedoms, the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.

Those with power never willingly concede their control.

No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

You are living for the deeper truth hidden in the pain of circumstance—your soul's lessons packed in your chimidunchik.

O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart. A

the God that the Sufi poet Hafiz writes about: Not the God of names, Nor the God of don'ts, Nor the God who ever does Anything weird, But the God who only knows four words And keeps repeating them, saying: "Come dance with Me.

the same secret we will all know when death is just a breath away: In the end, what will matter is how much we loved—our children, our mates, our families, our friends, everyone we knew, everyone who traveled with us during our brief visit to this unbearably lovely place. What will matter is the good we did, not the good we expected others to do.

My first baby looked neither new nor old. He was otherworldly, like a pure ray of intelligence, like an innocent visitor from a more benevolent planet.

Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, "I am running away." "If you run away," said his mother, "I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.

He said that in order to save the world you must serve the people in your life. "You gradually struggle less and less for an idea," Merton wrote, "and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

I've realized that aging is the younger cousin of dying. ... How much time do I have left? We become aware that we're on the downside of the mountain, coasting toward our final days.

Spirituality is a brave search for the truth about existence, fearlessly peering into the mysterious nature of life.