Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.
Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Thought is cause: experience is effect. If you don't like the effects in your life, you have to change the nature of your thinking.
In that realm you will know at last the good news: that your "devil" does not exist, that you are who you always thought you were--goodness and love. Your idea that you might be something else has come from an insane outer world, causing you to act insanely. An outer world of judgment and condemnation. Others have judged you, and from their judgments you have judged yourself. Now you want God to judge you, and I will not do it.
We cannot give what we do not have: We cannot bring peace to the world if we ourselves are not peaceful. We cannot bring love to the world if we ourselves are not loving. Our true gift to ourselves and others lies not in what we have but in who we are.
Very often when I haven't faith in my faith, I have to have faith in His faith. He makes me believe in myself and my possibilities, when I simply can't. I have to rise to His faith in me. A woman who was inwardly collapsed said to me, "Well, I have no faith of my own, but I do have faith in your faith." "Good," I replied, "take faith in my faith as a first step, and then you will go on to something infinitely better-faith in His faith." With faith in His faith you can do anything- anything that ought to be done. There is a passage which touches your need. "For the Eternal . . . will not let you go." Faith is not merely your holding on to God; it is God holding on to you. He will not let you go! As Walt Whitman puts it, "Not until the sun refuses to shine, do I refuse you." Then keep saying to your soul, "In quietness and in confidence shall be your faith." (Isaiah 30:15). Then repeat to your soul these words: "To say what ought to be cannot be is a brief and complete statement of atheism." It is. Say to yourself, "What ought to be can be, and I will make it so." And you will. And will go beyond yourself.
In cultivating compassion we draw from the wholeness of our experience - our suffering, our empathy, as well as our cruelty and terror. It has to be that way. Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.
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