Quotes About Transformation

When we disburden ourselves of old unresolved traumas, energy wasted holding the past at bay becomes available for celebrating daily life.

Neuroplasticity means that the brain can grow and change throughout our life. Old self-destructive neural pathways can be diminished and new healthier ones can replace them.

Pain is excess energy crying out for release." – Gerald Heard

Cognitive recovery work aims to make your brain user friendly. It focuses on recognizing and eliminating the destructive thoughts and thinking processes you were indoctrinated with in childhood.

And the day came When the risk to remain Closed tightly in a bud Became more painful Than the risk it took to blossom. – Author unknown

I sometimes recommend that readers view the table of contents and start with whatever headings most strike a chord. Although the book is laid out in a somewhat linear fashion, everyone's journey of recovering is different, and journeys can be initiated in a variety of ways.

Grieving is necessary to help us release and work through our pain about the terrible losses of our childhoods. These losses are like deaths of parts of our selves, and grieving can often initiate their rebirth.

Man cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor. – Alexis Canell

Trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods.

Recently, a young Iraq veteran took issue with calling his combat anguish PTSD and, instead, poignantly referred to his pain and suffering as PTSI—the "I" designating "injury." What he wisely discerned is that trauma is an injury, not a disorder like diabetes, which can be managed but not healed. In contrast, posttraumatic stress injury is an emotional wound, amenable to healing attention and transformation.

Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence. Not only can trauma be healed, but with appropriate guidance and support, it can be transformative.

The third noble truth holds that suffering can be transformed and healed.

Thus, we need the Bible as the guide to enable us to transform and purify our hermeneutical principles. The circle from the Bible to systematic theology to hermeneutics to the Bible is not a vicious circle, but a spiral of growth and progress, guided by the work of the Holy Spirit in illumination.

Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds.

I have liv'd long enough for others, like the Dog in the Wheel, and it is now the Season to begin for myself: I cannot change that Thing call'd Time, but I can alter its Posture and, as Boys do turn a looking-glass against the Sunne, so I will dazzle you all.

Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.

The key to creating or transforming community, then, is to see the power in the small but important elements of being with others. The shift we seek needs to be embodied in each invitation we make, each relationship we encounter, and each meeting we attend. For at the most operational and practical level, after all the thinking about policy, strategy, mission, and milestones, it gets down to this: How are we going to be when we gather together?

We decide to move far enough to the edge of the culture to see it clearly. What is the norm and normal does not serve us well. Many of us have tried hard to live a "normal" life, and how is it going?

The essential challenge is to transform the isolation and self-interest within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole.

In summary, (1) one gets complete with the past, which takes it out of the future (being complete with the past is not to forget the past); (2) in the room that is now available in the future when one's being and action are no longer shaped by the past, one creates a future (a future that moves, touches, and inspires one); (3) that future starts to shape one's being and actions in the present so that they are consistent with realizing that future.

In his book Lincoln at Gettysburg: Words That Remade America, Garry Wills (2006) argues that it was Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address who transformed America's individualism-oriented Constitution, with all its checks and balances, into a vision of the common good. Lincoln is the de facto godfather of the common good.

Individual transformation is the more popular conversation, and the choice not to focus on it [in this book] is because we have already learned that the transformation of large numbers of individuals does not result in the transformation of communities. If we continue to invest in individuals as the primary target of change, we will spend our primary energy on this and never fully invest in communities. In this way, individual transformation comes at the cost of community.

change. Each of us has a free will at our core, so like it or not, others will choose to change more readily from the example set by our own transformation than by any demand we make of them.

If there is no transformation inside of us, all the structural change in the world will have impact on our institutions.