Mexico, as it was in the 1970s—and isn’t now—was my Paris. With Mexicans, Europeans, and Americans I celebrated life and the journey, which took on qualities of a pilgrimage in which every moment was a movable feast and every place was a shrine...
God gave Adam and Eve that free will and choice. He gave them one warning: eat of any tree that is here, including the wonderful tree of life, but don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil…I wish Adam and Eve had thought more abou...
She was telling me that I had a life of disappointment before me if I continued to love him as I did. A love that is too strong can turn poisonous and bring great unhappiness. And then, what is the remedy? Can you unlearn your heart's desire? Can you...
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
I generally don’t become overexcited about things anyway, I’m just not one of those people.I’m not easily surprised by things either. I think it’s because I expect that anything can happen. That makes me sound like a believer and I’m not ne...
Perfectionist parents seem to operate under the illusion that if they can just get their children to be perfect, they will be a perfect family. They put the burden of stability on the child to avoid facing the fact that they, as parents, cannot provi...
Because you're exactly like me- you don't want your whole life planned out. You're tired of following Talon's rules, of not having any say in your future. You want to know who Talon really is, but it's even more than that, isn't it? You want to be fr...
Intuition is a sense of knowing how to act spontaneously, without needing to know why. The why question leads to indecision, anxiety, caution and self-limitation. There are all responses which originate in fear-based emotions.
When my father-in-law, Jan Vuijst, a Dutch Reformed minister, was on his deathbed, I had a deeply intimate conversation with him - as it turned out, my last conversation with him. He said to me, 'It was a privilege to have lived.' The soulful gratitu...
Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh ...
It is the quintessential story about perseverance but also about our humanness. We tend to regard ourselves as super-human, but the moment we detect a flaw we crash and lose confidence. We'd rather die than admit failure. Yet God compels us to dust o...
Intuition can also mean an instant recognition of a truth, sensing that you are doing the right thing in making a choice or decision even if it is not the immediately obvious option or an experience of knowing the probable outcome just as it is begin...
It is important to recognise that you may have dismissed intuitive experiences as pure chance when they occured. Now is the time to open your thoughts to the probability that you are far more intuitive than you ever realised.
It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.
Yes, yes, I see it all! — an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, museu...
We deny the parts of ourselves that we deem unacceptable rather than accepting the fact that we're all less than perfect.
Change blows through the branches of our existence. It fortifies the roots on which we stand, infuses crimson experience with autumn hues, dismantles Winter’s brittle leaves, and ushers Spring into our fertile environments. Seeds of evolution burst...
Meditation is both the symbol and expression of our intention to grow. Sitting still, alone with our thoughts and feelings, we can honor missed opportunities, passing desires, remembered disappointments, as well as our inner strength, personal wisdom...
Through knowing death we can hold a beacon of love for every moment that has just passed, for every friend who has lost a friend, for every child who has lost a parent, for every parent who has lost a child; for any suffering anywhere.
Even though we often mess up, most of us are doing the best that we know how with the circumstances that surround us.
You ironically have to have a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while.