Our bodies experience life by feeling, thinking, and doing. Emotions are like a never ending parade which can be observed, appreciated, and allowed to pass.

Revelation happens by unlearning everything

Wisdom from  Rumi

ON DISCOMFORT:

The cure for pain is in the pain. 
You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens. 
What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle. 
Pain is a treasure, for it contains mercies.
These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.
If you desire healing, let yourself fall ill. 
The moment you accept what troubles you've been given the door will open.

This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief. 

God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites so that you will have two wings to fly, not one.

Run from what's comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I'll be mad. 


ON YOUR MAGNIFICENCE

Do you know what you are?
You are a manuscript of a divine letter.
You are a mirror reflecting a noble face. 
This universe is not outside of you. 
Look inside yourself;
everything that you want, 
you are already that. 

You wander from room to room
Hunting for the diamond necklace
That is already around your neck!

You are a volume in the divine book
A mirror to the power that created the universe
Whatever you want, ask it of yourself
Whatever you are looking for can only be found
Inside of you. 

Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as bird wings.

You suppose you are the trouble
But you are the cure
You suppose that you are the lock on the door
But you are the key that opens it
It's too bad that you want to be someone else
You don't see your own face, your own beauty
Yet, no face is more beautiful than yours.


ON SILENCE AND SURRENDER

Let silence take you to the core of life. 

In silence there is eloquence. Stop weaving and watch how the pattern improves.

Try something different. Surrender.

Look past your thoughts, so you may
drink the pure nectar of This Moment. 

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Only from the heart can you touch the sky.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are. 

Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field. I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
does not make sense any more. 

I am weary of personal worrying,
in love with the art of madness.

This book offers a new approach to translating the words of Jesus---filtering them through the imagistic worldview of the Aramaic language which Jesus himself spoke. Seen through this lens, familiar sayings such as "Blessed are the meek" come into vibrant contemporary focus as "Healthy are those who have softened what is rigid within."

In The Hidden Gospel, Douglas-Klotz decodes the spiritual and prophetic messages hidden within key words and concepts in the sayings and stories of Jesus. We learn to our delight, for instance, that when Jesus spoke of "goodness" he used a word which in Aramaic means "ripe" and refers to actions which are in time and tune with the Sacred Unity of all life.

For example, Chapter 9 begins this way:
Be complete: develop yourself to the fullest degree, just as the Source of All constantly bears fruit, completing all movements in Unity: Matthew 5:48 from the Aramaic (Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.)
THE IMAGERY OF INVITING ALL PARTS OF OURSELVES HOME, BACK TO THE TABLE LIKE THE PRODIGAL SON, LIES AT THE HEART OF THE ARAMAIC SENSE OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE PERFECT. In the passage above, the word for perfect (gmar) comes from a verb meaning to accomplish, fulfill oneself, or be complete. A secondary meaning is to be completely consumed, cease, or disappear. The Aramaic picture of the soul links these seeming opposites. When self-images held by the naphsha are no longer needed, when they have fulfilled their purpose, they fade away and are transformed as though in a rebirth.

Need I say more?

This process is being with others and understanding them,  not accomplishing.