The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

As we have discovered so many times, we have everything we need within us. This ability to listen inside is our oldest oar. You are the boat.

I ask myself every day, is which is more debilitating: to be cut off from love or to be scarred by the pain of being hurt?

Grateful and awake, ask what you need to know now. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now.

It all tightens until what others need is anticipated beyond what is real, and then, without any true need being voiced, an anxiety to respond builds that can only be relieved if something is offered or done. At the heart of this is the ever-present worry that unless doing something for another there is no possibility of being loved. So the needs o

In actuality, this moment of ecstasy, of holding nothing back, can be experienced not just during sex, but in the being and doing and truth telling of all our relationships—in the ecstatic moment when we allow ourselves to be completely revealed and held at the same time. In this daring and fragile moment, the heart rehearses all its gifts: being w

“The day is to be experienced, not understood!”

we all see the same wonder, all feel the same agony, though we all speak in a different voice.

When experiencing something troublesome, how many times do you go over it in your mind? Why? What would happen if you only went over it once?

Yet beneath all the talk of tragedy and grace, I have come to believe that we are destined to be opened by the living of our days, and whether we like it or not, whether we choose to participate or not, we will, in time, every one of us, wear the deeper part of who we are as a new skin.