Elizabeth lesser quotes

We need each other's ideas. Now, I'm not talking about racist ideas or misogynistic ideas or cruel or criminal ideas. I'm talking about most of us who have very varied experiences, needs and ideas. It's really about believing that it's an important part of healing America.

I have noticed if I pull from fear or despair about the state of the world, I get tired, ineffective, afraid and sometimes mean-spirited.

May you listen to the voice within the beat even when you are tired. When you feel yourself breaking down, may you break open instead. May every experience in life be a door that opens your heart, expands your understanding and leads you to freedom.

But when I learned about the dangers of rejection or attack, I thought, it's time to change this. What if we faced any pain we had caused each other and, instead of rejection or attack, could we listen? Could we forgive? Could we merge?

If humanity does not evolve spiritually - each one of us and collectively - our species won't make it. So following that back to each individual - every day you are faced with choices.

We don't need any more teachers. We don't. We need friends.

Fear is a sneaky thief, stealing away precious moments of your life.

Every day we're given a choice: We can relax and float in the direction that the water flows, or we can swim hard against it. If we go with the river, the energy of a thousand mountain streams will be with us . . . if we resist the river, we will feel rankled and tired as we tread water, stuck in the same place.

I would say to women, always question what you're empowering yourself for and what are you claiming power for.

I'm not naive. I know how hard it is to get along.

It's like you trade the virility of the body for the agility of the spirirt.

If family and society tell you its unfeminine, not really womanly, to be aggressive, to speak up, to have strong opinions, to take up space, then women won't trust their own voice, because to be heard and to be influential, you've got to have a way to sing out with passion and love and self-trust - to sing out your song for everyone to hear.

The part of me that is both a spiritual seeker and a social activist meet in this understanding of enlightened power coming from a deep, genuine well within each person.

We can be the one to take the first courageous step toward the other and to do something or to try to do something other than rejection or attack. We can do this with our siblings and our mates and our friends and our colleagues. We can do this with the disconnection and the discord all around us.

We'll never change everyone's minds. We're not supposed to.

Meditation practice is like piano scales, basketball drills, ballroom dance class. Practice requires discipline; it can be tedious; it is necessary. After you have practiced enough, you become more skilled at the art form itself. You do not practice to become a great scale player or drill champion. You practice to become a musician or athlete. Likewise, one does not practice meditation to become a great meditator. We meditate to wake up and live, to become skilled at the art of living.

Talking to each other instead of talking about each other is not some kind of nicey-nice (ph) idea. It's the difference between societies falling apart and societies getting something wonderful done.

Things do fall apart. It is in their nature to do so. When we try to protect ourselves from the inevitability of change, we are not listening to the soul. We are listening to our fear of life and death, our lack of faith, our smaller ego's will to prevail. To listen to the soul is to stop fighting with life-to stop fighting when things fall apart, when they don't go our way, when we get sick, when we are betrayed or mistreated or misunderstood. To listen to the soul is to slow down, to feel deeply, to see ourselves clearly, to surrender to discomfort and uncertainty, and to wait.

Our errors and failings are chinks in the heart's armor through which our true colors can shine.

Learn respect for the feeling function: Become aware of and undo some of your (improper) cultural training so that you grant the moods and messages of the heart the same respect that you give the thoughts and ideas of the mind.

When we slow down, quiet the mind, and allow ourselves to feel hungry for something that we do not understand, we are dipping into the abundant well of spiritual longing.

I don't enjoy the diminishing agility of the body!I had knee surgery and I no longer can go do three yoga classes and run. It's not as much fun, physically. But emotionally, it's way more fun. I am so much happier and contented and less agitated - I'm just calmer. So it's like everything in this human existence, it's a trade off - it's like you trade the virility of the body for the agility of the spirit. That's a good line. I have to remember that!

I'm deeply disturbed by the ways in which all of our cultures are demonizing the other. This is why I'm launching a new initiative, and it's to help all of us, myself included, to counteract the tendency to otherize.

When the fire is over, always, in the ashes, our opportunities to repair, to move forward without vengeance being required - that's kind of the way us humans seem to live. We make massive mistakes. We do stupid things. We do things to survive. And then there's an opportunity to learn from them and move forward with grace. And forgiveness and that gracefulness are very connected.

To be spiritual is to be genuine in everything you say and do, come what may.

I was just a kid when I started doing this,yoga, meditation, natural foods, acupuncture - things like were seen as practically voodoo. And today you can go into any hospital and they'll have massage, and Chinese medicine, and therapy, and a prayer room.

If men and women were equal, everybody would have the same values.Because at this point in time, many women feel compelled to care for the children, feel empathetically into another person's reality, more so than many men who often are on more of a straight-shooting path towards achievement come what may.

If spirituality is not religion or cynicism or sentimentality or narcissism, then what is it?... we can confidently say... that spirituality is fearlessness. It is a way of looking boldly at this life we have been given, here, now, on earth, as this human being.

It seems to be almost a law of physics, that the winds of change awaken fear and fundamentalism.

There is an art to grieving. To grieve well the loss of anyone or anything--a parent, a love, a child, an era, a home, a job--is a creative act. It takes attention and patience and courage. But many of us do not know how to grieve. We were never taught, and we don't see examples of full-bodied grieving around us. Our culture favors the fast-food model of mourning--get over it quick and get back to work; affix the bandage of "closure" and move on.

There's something in our makeup and in our bodies that really wants to luxuriate more in just the joy of being alive and not always consuming, creating, building. There's something inside of us that wants desperately to stop and experience and just be - not just always do.

One of the reasons I love prayer is that it is an antidote to guilt and blame. If we are unhappy with the way we have acted or been treated, instead of stewing in self-recrimination on the one hand, or harboring ill will toward someone else on the other, prayer gives us a way out of the circle of guilt and blame. We bring our painful feelings into the open and say, "I have done wrong," or "I have been wronged." And then we ask for a vaster view--one that contains within it all the forgiveness we need in order to move forward.

We have little control over the outer weather patterns as we make our way through the landscape of a life. But we can become masters of the inner landscape. We can use what happens on the outside to change the way we function on the inside.

I actually don't think we're more divided than we were.

I accept that life is uncertain--that the goal is not to become more certain about anything but to relax more into the mystery of not knowing what will come next. And then, miracle of miracles, out there in the deep and uncertain water, I come into a peaceful knowing--a faithful wisdom that surpasses control and certainty.

Even if your difficult time comes at you out of the blue - like cancer - even those times, opens your heart to the magic and power of life, and gives you this inner commitment to live every moment.

Many people don't wake up. They fight against a difficult time, shut the window and become more bitter. Fortunately or unfortunately, however you see it, we are served up those opportunities over and over in our life. So if you've shut the window, don't worry, another hard time is going to come around the corner - to give you that chance all over again.

What wants to live in you may be waiting...at the end of a long loneliness.

When women hear each other's stories, told from the heart, it gives us inspiration to keep on going.

How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.

We must pay attention to the voice that calls us out of the safety zone.

If it's not as easy as we thought it was, for women to speak our truth, to even know our truth, then the missing ingredient is some sort of inner courage. To first of all, believe in the validity of who we are. And then to speak from it. It takes inner courage. As a leader in a large organization, I've often been the only woman working with powerful men, especially when I was younger.

...approach change with an understanding of the process and an openness to the pain.

Each one of us regardless of our situation, is in our search of our most authentic, vital, generous and wise self.

One does not practice meditation to become a great meditator. We meditate to wake up and live, to become skilled at the art of living.

I do think in general, women have a value system. And it's that value system that I think is feminism. Not "men are bad, women are good, let's get women empowered" - it's let's get this value system, which is about the capacity to feel and empathize with life, and therefore to protect it.

I think if you asked people "what's the biggest problem in your life?" They'd say, "I just don't have time for anything!" And at our fingertips, if it isn't e-mail, it's our Blackberry, and it's our iPods and telephones - we never stop. We never take those moments to stop the stimulus to find out "what's going on in there? What's really happening?" And then things start to build up. And then we are almost afraid to slow down.

I'm very much a family person, and that's always my first priority.

Every day we have the opportunity to make our relationships be on the outside what they really are on a spiritual level.

I think it's better that people actually are saying what they feel. Especially, people are saying, I'm not heard. I don't have a voice in America.

I think that life is a friggin' magic carpet ride - it's amazing. Everything about life is mysterious and beautiful and touching and tragic and lovely and mystical.

Read any of the top-selling business books, all of them talk about moving away from a top down manner of leading to a more inclusive one. It's not happening over night, but if you read the winds of change in most of the democracies in the world we are moving toward shared levels of power.

If you're interested in the door to the heavens opening, start with the door to your own secret self.

Forgiveness doesn't mean being a wimp. It doesn't mean being weak. It doesn't mean having no principles and no values. Sometimes we have to stand firm for what we believe and make really hard decisions.

Beautiful quality that women have, which is we like to get together and gab. It's time to elevate that aspect of being a woman.

The person who takes the first step in a conflict toward the other, those are brave people.

When you approach spirituality as an adventure of being alive, you start as you would any adventure--with a sense of mystery and not-knowing. Instead of searching for answers that make you feel safe, you set out into the vastness of life and death, with a willingness to continually grow. You open up to the possibility that your ordinary life is an extraordinary adventure, and that your joys and sorrows have meaning. Spiritual practice becomes your rudder, offering direction and insight and discretion as you venture into the unknown.

If we do not suffer a loss all the way to the end, it will wait for us. It won’t just dissipate and disappear. Rather, it will fester, and we will experience its sorrow later, in stranger forms.

We think that maybe feminism isn't appropriate anymore, since Western women have really made enormous strides. But check out the rest of the world if you'd like to not be able to sleep tonight.

Life actually is this mystery and gift. And every moment of it can be full of real radical joy and wakefulness. And for some reason in our most difficult times, we have the best chance to wake up. Many people will tell you that their divorce or illness or loss of job was the wake up call.

When you feel yourself breaking down, may you break open instead.

I heard the term "mamisma" when describing Speaker of the House [Nancy] Pelosi, how she was speaking from that place which is kind of like a strong mother. Like when your mom says like, "put that down!" you know that is coming from a place of both love and strength. And at this critical stage in human history we need both action and caring.

It isn't so much that God is the unified state of consciousness that each of us came from and will return to, but more so that God is the creative energy flowing between all states of consciousness. God is in the land beyond the mountains, but God is also in the mountains and in the valley of illusions cradled within the mountains. God is not one thing or another, rather God flows between and through all things.

Diversity is good. We need each other's ideas.

Many women hear the word "feminine" and feel like it's a noose around their neck. "Don't hold me to a mode of behavior because I'm a woman and you think this is how a woman should act," kind of thing.

Your path is your own, but you must walk side by side with others, with compassion and generosity as your beacons. If anything is required it is this: fearlessness in your examination of life and death; Willingness to continually grow; and openness to the possibility that the ordinary is extraordinary, and that your joys and your sorrows have meaning and mystery

Don't persuade, defend or interrupt. Be curious, be conversational, be real. And listen.

I pull from a place within me that has ultimate faith in the meaningfulness and beauty of human life.

I'm interested in helping women become courageous in being exactly who they are. Because the only way to change anything is to do it from your genuine self.

Rumi called his teacher "the friend." And that's what we need. We need friends.

How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change

First we love within, then we love the world.

My years as a mystic have made me question almost all my assumptions. They've made me a proud I-don't-know-it-all.

Agree to these ground rules: Be curious, conversational and real. Don't persuade or interrupt. Listen, listen, listen.

As humans try to evolve out of greed, let's put aside some wild places, protected lands, protected farms, things like that, since we may not evolve fast enough to protect nature.

If we want liberation, we must rewrite the Sleeping Beauty myth. No one is coming and no one else is to blame.

A broken heart is not the same as sadness. Sadness occurs when the heart is stone cold and lifeless. On the contrary, there is an unbelievable amount of vitality in a broken heart.

If I pull from places of faith, joy and gratitude, then I have the wind of creativity behind me. And, my work in the world is much more effective.

If you have fathered a child, if you have given birth, if sex is a source of healthy pleasure, thank your pelvis and your reproductive organs for allowing you to feel the creative rhythms of life.

Grief is an expression that you loved well.

I believe that educating people to awaken into full consciousness is the most important thing we can do.

It's not always about survival, this life we are given; it's usually so much easier than that. It's about trusting the eternal life force that is flowing within us-letting that force lead the way through all of the inevitable changes we will face across the span of our time here on Earth.

It's rare that you have a conflict and two people or two groups who are equally mature in their desire or capacity to get there. That doesn't mean it can't happen. What it means is that one person has to take the lead, has to be bigger. I call that kind of person the new first responder.

We need to claim our power for something beautiful, something harmonious and something globally healthy.

I actually don't think we're more divided than we were. I think it's more evident. It's more evident because of the internet.

I think as women and men become more conscious, the terms "woman/man" begin to lose meaning.

What mothers do - they act with love, at least good mothers do! They have a spirit of strong, fierce, protective energy - the way a mother would put her life on the line for her children - we need to put our life on the line for each other.

What will matter is the good we did, not the good we expected others to do.

I hope this is the lesson we women really commit to memory - we learned that it doesn't work to try be someone other than who you really are.

If we can stay awake when our lives are changing, secrets will be revealed to us-secrets about ourselves, about the nature of life, and about the eternal source of happiness and peace that is always available, always renewable, already within us.

We are able to choose what we want - you don't have to accept one thing from one tradition. It's a melting pot.

It is such a teaching in itself for us, all of us, every moment when we're with anyone.

Some people, who are deeply involved in an organized, traditional religion, find it very difficult to accept that their way isn't the only way. And that their sacred text isn't the only text and it must be taken literally.

The great loneliness- like the loneliness a caterpillar endures when she wraps herself in a silky shroud and begins the long transformation from chrysalis to butterfly. It seems we too must go through such a time, when life as we have known it is over- when being a caterpillar feels somehow false and yet we don’t know who we are supposed to become. All we know is that something bigger is calling us to change. And though we must make the journey alone, and even if suffering is our only companion, soon enough we will become a butterfly, soon enough we will taste the rapture of being alive.

The soul is the river of energy that animates who we are.

Life is like a school; one can learn, one can graduate, one can skip a grade or stay behind.

We don't need anymore empowered people who are all about the ego.

When we descend all the way down to the bottom of loss, and dwell patiently, with an open heart, in the darkness and pain, we can bring back up with us the sweetness of life and the exhilaration of inner growth. When there is nothing left to lose, we find the true self - the self that is whole, the self that is enough, the self that no longer looks to others for definition, or completion, or anything but companionship on the journey.

If you're interested in opening the doors to the heavens, start with the door to your own secret self. See what happens when you offer to another a glimpse of who you truly are. When your heart is undefended, you make it safe for whomever you meet to put down his burden of hiding, and then you both can walk through the open door.

Grief is good...it is a sign of how well we have loved.

Whatever is happening, whatever is changing, whatever is going or not going according to my plans - I release my hold on all of it. I leave behind who I think I am, who I want to be, what I want the world to be. I come home to the great peace of the present moment.

Over and over, we are broken on the shore of life. Our stubborn egos are knocked around, and our frightened hearts are broken open—not once, and not in predictable patterns, but in surprising ways and for as long as we live.

I pray that each one of us stays awake as we fall. I pray that we choose to go into the abyss willingly and that our fall is cushioned by faith--faith that at the bottom we will be caught and taught and turned toward the light. I pray that we don't waste precious energy feeling ashamed of our mistakes, or embarrassed by our flaws. After years of teaching, I know only a few things for sure. One of them is this: We are chunks of dense matter that need to be cracked open. Our errors and failings are chinks in the heart's armor through which our true colors can shine.

Love is the secret you unmask yourself to find; it is the foundation of the spiritual life, the destination where all roads of the journey lead.

It is very, very rare where a slight that turns into a grudge that is in need of forgiveness is only about one of the parties. In most of our day-to-day situations - with colleagues at work, with your partner, with your children, with your friends - most of the time, if you really got down with each other and put aside your pride and your defensiveness and you had those hard conversations, you'd find a place where both people had something to ask for forgiveness from the other and to forgive the other.

I think the gender story will become less fraught with hard edges - and not that we'll have androgyny, but that men and women will move more fluidly into each other's domains.

I'm calling my initiative take the other to lunch. If you are a Republican, you can take a Democrat to lunch or if you're a Democrat, think of it as taking a Republican to lunch because there is no shortage of the other right in your own neighborhood, maybe that person who worships at the mosque or the church or the synagogue down the street or someone from the other side of the abortion conflict - or maybe your brother-in-law who doesn't believe in global warming.

I'm very committed to my family and my town. My biggest local commitment are my children, my husband, my home and my grandchildren.

To me the purpose of life is to enjoy it! It's to enjoy the gift, and to make sure that other people have an opportunity to enjoy the gift.

To be human is to be lost in the woods.

I know that if we allow ourselves into the gridlock of tribalism, we're in trouble.

What do you want in your life? What do you want in your relationships? And if you say, I'd like them to be harmonious; I'd like them to be free; I'd like not to be in a state of blame all the time or shame. If you answer like that, then I would say, look at what's unforgiven. Look at where you know you did wrong and you would like to go to that person and say - I'm sorry. Can we start over? If you want to have a happier life, I would say, practice forgiveness.

Spirituality is a brave search for the truth about existence, fearlessly peering into the mysterious nature of life.

No one has the answer; only you know the way home.

My understanding of God is an experience. God is. That's all I know. In the Biblical tradition, it would be expressed as, "Be still and know that I am God." God is the "I am" energy. Something huge is at play here - cosmic creativity, consciousness, God, whatever you want to call it. I do believe that it's a guided ride. We're on a guided tour of the universe.

The conversation people need to have is no longer about women assuming positions of leadership within the existing power structure, it's about the power structures themselves, it's about how to go about assuming power, how to change the structures.

First we forgive ourselves, then we forgive others and life itself.

I hope we have learned throughout centuries of revolution and reaction that it's really a shift in consciousness that we need. And I think there is a shift in consciousness among our human species. I think the human species is evolving, spiritually.

Look for a way to lift someone up. If that's all you do, it's enough.

See what's happening to our sisters around the world. I'm very interested in the protection of women globally.

Anyone whose lifestyle may frighten you or whose point of view makes smoke come out of your ears.

I really knew how to speak - from my female voice, that "different voice" that Carol Gilligan so presciently described many years ago in her groundbreaking book. Because if we try to speak in a voice that isn't ours, we lose our power.

The real work of feminism is to empower a woman and to give her language to express a new value system for the world. The new feminism must create both the process by which we generate influence and the influence itself.

In the true spirit of the holidays, let the darkness of your moods lead you back up to the light, and when New Year's rolls around, your resolution will be tinged with new authenticity and power.

Life's always changing. We always are being called to adapt.