Breathing

"Unlike the positioning of meditation in Eastern spiritual traditions, as a spiritual practice in and of itself, in Christianity, Word and silence form a sort of "breathing," which is at the heart of the Christian path to inner awakening. It is not an isolated activity, to be undertaken too far removed from the Word. ..."


"It is not 'unitive' simply in the sense of dissolving the multiplicity back into a One, but in the sense of seeing the One beautifully and radiantly illuminating the multiplicity, like light pouring through a stained-glass window, present in both the unity and the diversity. This is the particular genius of the Christian path: the ability to see--really see--the particularly and apparent duality of this world not as an illusion, but rather, as a crucible in which the most tender and intimate particularity of the divine heart becomes fully manifest."

"When word and silence are separated, the driveshaft grinds to a halt, and this deepening process is suspended. Severed from its nurturing ground in contemplative silence, word tends to become unduly analytical, linear, and dialectical. A vicious circle is set in motion. The farther one strays from the wellspring of spiritual awareness and the seeing that flows from them, the more one is dependent on the only other processing mode: ordinary awareness and the egoic identity that emerges from it."

Cynthia Bourgeault [67, 72-73]

Planting.

"What does growing some of your own food have to do with repairing your relationship to food and eating? Everything. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for your sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be fast, cheap, and easy; that food is a product of industry, not nature; that food is fuel rather than a form of communion with other people, and also with other species--with nature."

Michael Pollan, Rule #62

Eat wild foods, when you can.

"The fields and forests are crowded with plants containing higher levels of various phytochemicals then their domestic cousins. Why? Because these plants have to defend themselves against pests and diseases without any help from us... "

Michael Pollan, Rule 31

Impossible to sustain.

"If we do not grow beyond the attitude of spiritual materialism, it leaves us with some very difficult habits to unlearn. And if we really can't or won't leave the cataphatic safety zone, it will eventually limit the level of selfhood we are able to realize to the egoic self and make the unitive consciousness that we taste and yearn for impossible to sustain."


cynthia bourgeault

Cynthia Bourgeault on the Ego

""The ego abhors a vacuum." From the point of view of ordinary (or cataphatic) awareness, the apophatic will always appear to be a vacuum, and your ego will incessantly try to fill up this vacuum with content. If you grab onto an insight or illumination, or succumb to the temptation to pray for everyone then and there, what you have actually done is to allow yourself to be dragged out of the apophatic back into the cataphatic. Contemplative teaching--at least the most authentic and powerful of contemplative teach--emphasizes that this is never worth the price.

"Why? What lessons are the be learned by staying with the apophatic? ... By your willingness to stay with the apophatic at all costs during the time of this prayer, you are strengthening and deepening an attitude of soul that will protect you and carry you all the way: the attitude of spiritual non-possessiveness."

[45]
[Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening]

The Art of Loving on Fear

"Then one will also recognize that while one is consciously afraid of not being loved, the real, though usually unconscious fear is that of loving. To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love."

[118]

"To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on insight into the very nature of man."
Erich Fromm

Nina Garcia's Favorite Quotes

"Style is a simple way of saying complicated things."
[Jean Cocteau]

"We all need a splash of bad taste. No taste is what I am against."
[Diana Vreeland]

"Fragrance is the only thing that's about your being, your soul, and it's for people size zero to twenty-two, and ages twelve to ninety."
[Michael Kors]

"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore."
[André Gide]

"We are shaped and fashioned by what we love."
[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]

The Art of Loving on Concentration

"Concentration is by far more difficult to practice in our culture, in which everything seems to act against the ability to concentrate. The most important step in learning to concentrate is to learn to be alone with oneself without reading, listening to the radio, smoking or drinking. Indeed, to be able to concentrate means to be able to be alone with oneself--and this ability is precisely a condition for the ability to love. If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own feet, he or she may be a lifesaver, but the relationship is not one of love. Paradoxically, the abiltiy to be alone is the condition of the ability to love. Anyone who tries to be alone with himself will discover how difficult it is."

[103]

"To be concentrated in relation to others means primarily to be able to listen. Most people listen to others, or even give advice, without really listening. They do not take the other person's talk seriously, they do not take their own answers seriously either. As a result, the talk makes them tired. They are under the illusion that they would be even more tired if they listened with concentration. But the opposite is true. Any activity, if done in a concentrated fashion, makes one more awake, while every unconcentrated activity makes one sleepy--while at the same time it makes it difficult to fall asleep at the end of the day."

[105-106]
[This could have been written last night, not 1956!]

"To be concentrated means to live fully in the present ... Needless to say, that concentration must be practiced most of the day by people who love each other. They must learn to be close to each other without running away in the many ways in which this is customarily done. The beginning of the practice of concentration will be difficult; it will appear as if one could never achieve this aim. That this implies the necessity to have patience need hardly be said. If one does not know that everything has its time, and wants to force things, then indeed one will never succeed in becoming concentrated--nor in the art of loving. To have an idea of what patience is one need only watch a child learning to walk.  It falls, falls again, and falls again, and yet it goes on trying, improving, until one day it walks without falling. What could the grown-up person achieve if he had the child's patience and its concentration in the pursuits which are important to him!"

[106]

Erich Fromm

The Art of Loving My Ex-boyfriends!

"These are men who have never been weaned as it were from mother. These men still feel like children; they want mother's protection, love, warmth, care, and admiration; they want mother's unconditional love, a love which is given for no other reason than that they need it, that they are mother's child, that they are helpless. Such men frequently are quite affectionate and charming if they try to induce a woman to ove them, and even after they have succeeded in this. But their relationship to the woman (as, in fact, to all other people) remains superficial and irresponsible. Their aim is to be loved, not to love. There is usually a good deal of vanity in this type of man, more or less hidden grandiose ideas. If they have found the right woman, they feel secure, on top of the world, and can display a great deal of affection and charm, and this is the reason why these men are often so deceptive. But when, after a while, the woman does not continue to live up to their phantastic expectations, conflicts and resentment start to develop. If the woman is not always admiring them, if she makes claims for a life of her own, if she wants to be loved and protected herself, and in extreme cases, if she is not willing to condone his love affairs with other women (or even have an admiring interest in them), the man feels deeply hurt and disappointed, and usually rationalizes this feeling with the idea that the woman 'does not love him, is selfish, or is domineering.' Anything short of the attitude of a loving mother toward a charming child is taken as proof of a lack of love. These men usually confuse their affectionate behavior, their wish to please, with genuine love and thus arrive at the conclusion that they are being treated quite unfairly; they imagine themselves to be the great lovers and complain bitterly about the ingratitude of their love partner."

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
[89]

The Art of Loving

"Without Night, the nature of Man would receive no income, so there would be nothing for Day to spend."

Rumi
[33]

The Art of Loving on Maturity

"Eventually, the mature person has come to the point where he is his own mother and his own father. He has, as it were, a motherly and fatherly conscience. Motherly conscience says: "There is no misdeed, no crime which could deprive you of my love, of my wish for your life and happiness." Fatherly conscience says: "You did wrong, you cannot avoid accepting certain consequences of your wrongdoing and most of all you must change your ways if I am going to like you." The mature person has become free from the outside mother and father figures, and has built them up inside."

Erich Fromm
[41]

The Art of Loving

"The religious task of man is not to think right, but to act right ... "

Erich Fromm
[73]

Something Other

"What do people really want when they think about UFOs? What are they yearning for at the thought of something extraterrestrial? Why, they wants something bigger than themselves. They want to know that, in the entire, wild, extraordinary Kosmos, there is something other than their meager egos.

"Well, there is."

kw
[173]

Treya on Humility

"What I'm discovering through all this is how I'm not different, how my issues are archetypal issues that other humans have been working with for centuries. And the feeling that comes from that is a new kind of humility, a new level of acceptance of things as they are, a new sense of okayness about things being as they are. And--which is nice--a greater sense of connectedness with others, like we're all parts of one being working on these issues and growing through that process. Like I'm not different also means I'm not separate."

[161]

Treya on Feminity

"This is also a shift in my feelings about my femininity that opens up new possibilities, possibilities I once condemned. I am realizing more and more how much I adopted my father's values--production and contributing and all that--and I see now that his shoes don't actually fit me too well, much as I admire them. This combines with the new dimension I feel feminism taking, away from imitating men or proving we can do what they can do, toward valuing, defining, bringing forth, making visible the special kinds of work that women do. The work that doesn't have a title or a hierarchy of professional advancement."

Treya Wilber
[208]

G&G on Pain

"Pain is not a punishment, death is not a failure, life is not a reward."

Treya Wilber
[276]

G&G on Bad Plans

"I think most of my generation believes that 'honesty is the best policy' and that spouses should discuss every single thing that bothers them with the other spouse. Bad plan."

Ken Wilber
[359]

G&G on Comfort

"Instead of leading me to rant and rave about the state of things, or start a crusade to correct them, it helps me accept the way things are. But this doesn't lead to passivity since the emphasis is always on right effort while freeing oneself from craving and from aversion. In fact, for me effort becomes easier, almost paradoxically, because I find myself less attached to results, more involved in investigating what's happening than in setting goals, striving to reach them, and being disappointed if I don't. ... There it is, and all the reacting in the world won't change the truth of that present moment."

Treya Wilber
[281-282]

G&G on Listening

"I remind myself that I don't have to give concrete ideas or advice to be of help. Listening is helping. Listening is giving."

[251]

G&G on Society

"We are all, thankfully, part of a much larger whole. I like being aware of this, even though it means I have less control. We are all too interconnected, both with each other and with our environment--life is too wonderfully complex--for a simple statement like 'you create your own reality' to be simply true."

[250]

G&G on Fear

"And I know what's beneath it. Fear. Fear of being dependent. Fear of being rebuffed if I were to ask. Fear of being turned down if I showed my need. Fear of being needy. ... I didn't ask for help much. ... 'He will most likely be able to experience intimacy only when he is caring for someone else. This is safe. To be loved and cared for, however, results in emotional discomfort, an uneasiness that is easily detected.'"

[237]

Treya on being Brave & Vulnerable

Another thing is writing, crafting words, an early love quelled, pure and simple, by fear. This one is still the scariest of them all, the most public, revealing the inner workings of my mind and soul, afraid I'll be judged superficial, juvenile, boring, etc., etc. But I'm determined to write this book ...

[216]

Treya Wilber on Anger

"A friend congratulated me on how well I was handling it. ... I'm sure all this will be good for me, thank you, but I don't like it one bit. The only part of this acknowledgement I could accept was the part about being authentic. I am being authentic. I am being authentically pissed. I trust my anger, it feels healthy and appropriate. I'm not going to falsely put on a happy face about this. I suppose my feeling is that will come more completely and more deeply later if I go through the anger; or I may stay somewhat angry always about it. I don't know what will happen, but I do know that I need to stay with the anger for now and let it evolve."

Treya Wilber
[205]

Grace and Grit

"Look at my body! I have no head hair, no pubic hair, no right breast. Sort of like a plucked chicken! I have a body, but I am not my body! Thank God for small favors."

Treya Wilber
[135]