Quotes About Connection

A prayer room is first and foremost a living room—a place where the Father waits for his children to come and climb into his arms.

The best bit of advice I ever received about how to pray was this: keep it simple, keep it real, keep it up.

The best way to start praying, therefore, is actually to stop praying. To pause. To be still. To put down your prayer list and surrender your own personal agenda. To stop talking at God long enough to focus on the wonder of who he actually is. To 'be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him'.

It's more important to know whom you are called to be with than what you are called to do.

Por eso esas palabras de Barth son reconfortantes: Lo que forja a un hombre de oración es que se presente delante de Dios con su petición. Las otras teorías de la oración pueden haber surgido de pensamientos muy profundos y pueden lucir muy bien, pero todas sufren de cierta artificialidad porque carecen de algo simple y concreto: se pierden en las alturas y profundidades donde no hay lugar para el hombre que realmente ora, que simplemente hace una petición.4

Rob's story reminds me that how we listen is sometimes (always?) more important than what is said. Maybe that's why Jesus was forever asking people if they had ears to hear what he was saying. And I suspect it's also why the very first word of the great Benedictine Rule, which has guided monastic communities for 1,500 years, is this one little word: listen. Fifteen centuries of successful community built on the power of mere listening.

He looked at her for a long moment, as if remembering unfinished conversations, and then went back to place some damp, slow-burning turf on the fire.

Human beings write stories, and read them, for the same good reason: to live

Reaches past her back and holds one of her hands. Silence

The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia

We connect through our dreams. Like we could be a thousand miles apart and I'd still know you were there.

Is it possible to have some kind of genetic memory of a place where you've never lived, but your ancestors have? Or am I just a sentimental fool, my judgement fuddled by nostalgia, Guinness, and the romance of the diaspora?

Participation - that's what's gonna save the human race.

I've never sung anywhere without giving the people listening to me a chance to join in - as a kid, as a lefty, as a man touring the U.S.A. and the world, as an oldster. I guess it's kind of a religion with me. Participation. That's what's going to save the human race.

It all boils down to what I would most like to do as a musician. Put songs on people's lips instead of just in their ears.

See me, feel meTouch me, heal me.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed meeting fans face to face. They're less scary when they aren't going nuts at a Who show. But then, so am I.

Judging by the faces of those around me, just the fact of Roger speaking to me meant that my life could very well change.

Some kid writes in to me and says, 'I've got all your records and I listen to your music all day long and I look at your pictures all the time and I write to you and all I get is a bleedin' autographed picture. You don't know how much time I spend thinkin' about you lot.' I write him back and say, 'You don't know how much time I spend looking at and thinking about teenagers.

Fully feeling people are also rewarded with increasing richness in their relationships – both with themselves and with others. Love manifests as a palpable warmth and excitement when it is grounded in the heart and body by feeling. Emotional love is so much more profound than the lightweight intellectual experiences of thought-bound people for whom love is often only an ideal, a dream, or a hungry expectation.

Feelings of abandonment commonly masquerade as the physiological sensations of hunger. Hunger pain soon after a big meal is rarely truly about food. Typically it is camouflaged emotional hunger and the longing for safe, nurturing connection. Food cannot satiate the hunger pain of abandonment. Only loving support can. Geneen Roth's book offers powerful self-help book on this subject.

Mutual commiseration also typically promotes a spontaneous opening into many levels of light-hearted and spontaneous connecting.

She never learns that real intimacy grows out of sharing all of her experience.

More and more research suggests that our ability to metabolize painful emotional states is enhanced by communicating with a safe enough other person.