The Chronology of Water: A Memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch

All quotes from Lidia's book

Know land is made from you.

This is something I know: damaged women? we don't think we deserve kindness. In fact, when kindness happens to us, we go a little berserk.  It's threatening.  Deeply.  Because if I have to admit how profoundly I need kindness? I have to admit I hid the me who deserves it down a sadness well.

It is important to understand how damaged people don't always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them.  It's a shame we carry.  The shame of wanting something good.

Narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else.  The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it.  Each time they put it into language, it shifts.  The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves your past, creates a fiction you can live with.  It's what writers do.  Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things.

Healing Ceremonies by Carl A Hammerschlag and Howard D Silverman

All quotes from Carl & Howard's book

Even as a prisoner, whether of illness, financial problems, or other circumstances, you have the capacity to choose your attitude, to transcend suffering, and to find meaning in life.  Choice elevates the spirit by allowing you to exercise your responsibilities to yourself and your faith. 

Trusting and loving unconditionally – it’s the task of the beginning, and ultimately will be the task of the ending.

Rituals and ceremonies help orient us during crises.  They facilitate connections, helping us to reframe our experience in more functional ways. 

Staying connected with love is the best safeguard against the fear and hopelessness that can steal the spirit.

For a ceremony to be most effective, it must have a clear purpose.

Vulnerability is simply an opportunity for new learning.

You can approach contemporary diagnostic and therapeutic procedures as if they were an invitation to personal growth rather than something out of a medical textbook.  Ceremonializing “routine” medical procedures expands them into events that invite fuller participation in, and responsibility for, the healing process.

Growth has nothing to do with adding on; it has to do with letting go.

Ceremony is a way to reconnect with the dreams of our lives, to cleanse ourselves of old expectations, and to make new commitments.

It has become apparent that healing is complex and mysterious.  Pharmaceuticals, surgery, and incantations all have magical powers.  Each has a unique place in the healing mystery and none stands alone.

The Cultural Creatives by Paul H Ray and Sherry Ruth

All quotes from Paul & Sherry's book

Values are the best single predictor of real behavior.  

When you can hear the incessant humming of the dominant culture’s story, you step across the invisible threshold.

Shocks are necessary if any growth is to come.

We need elders for the children and their concerns.  We need them for the young people, who need initiations themselves.  And we need them for adults in the middle of their lives who, imagining there is nowhere further to go, stay in the middle age or try to be like the raw uninitiated, adolescents that they feel inside.

A Happy Pocket Full of Money by David Cameron Gikandi

All quotes from David's book

Being wealthy is an internal state.

Money is a shadow of value.

Gratitude is a statement of certainty.

Do not live by accident or by default.  Live by design.

Always set your goals higher than your present reality.

You get there in your mind first.

Life is images of the mind expressed.

If you wish for faster results, the right way to shorten time is to raise your certainty.

Time is the moving of your consciousness past pre-existing events in your space-time continuum.

When you don’t have what you would like, know that your thoughts are at fault, not the universe.  Accept full responsibility honestly and make amends.

Spend your money gladly, cheerfully, and with excitement.  Whether you are buying items or paying bills, be glad you are doing it. 

Learn to be aware, intuitive, detached, and creative instead of reactive.

Fear is in the world of ego.

Your spirit communicates to you through intuition and feelings.  It knows your future, and all possible combinations of it.  But it needs your consciousness to experience what it knows.

Health is an indication of agreement between your body, mind, and spirit.

You are who you say you are.

“I am”.  This is the new way of making statements. “I am.” The universe absolutely listens to whatever you place after the phrase “I am”. 

Become unstoppable by refusing to stop.

You are a soul with a body, not a body with a soul.

You are not your past, any of it, at all, unless you insist you are.

For everything you see around you, you are the cause.  Why then would you hate something around you now? If you don’t wish to have it around any more, ask yourself what part or aspect of yourself is causing it, and you will soon discover something about yourself that you will find beneficial to change.

Decide at all times not to worry, not to get frustrated, not to wish you were somewhere else doing something else, and not to fear.  All these are statements of not having, and they perpetuate the state of not having.

Question everything and rule out nothing.

At every moment and in every situation, with every thought and action, ask yourself two questions: Is this the greatest version of the grandest vision I have ever had of myself? What would love do?

For you to enjoy and use prosperity and wealth wisely and fruitfully, you must replace the idea of ownership with the idea of temporary custodianship – having the use of something, keeping something, of taking care of something.

Your self, your spirit, or your soul, whatever you call it, is the real you.  the rest of you is just a set of tools.

People attract what they are, not what they want.

The following statement is wrong: a person is poor because of certain conditions around him or her.  The following statement is right: Conditions of poverty are around a person because the person’s Self and thoughts are of poverty consciousness.

Wealth is first a state of being, which is then experienced.

Conditionality is an illusion.  Conditions are created to create an environment that matches your thoughts.  In other words, conditionality is an illusion that follows thought to fulfill and manifest thought into experience of the thought.

Suffering indicates an error in thinking.

Face all financial and other difficulties calmly and without worry.  Even before they occurred, they have been resolved.

Make all conditions serve you; for that is what they are here to do. They are an experiential field created wholly for your enjoyment, self-discovery, and learning.

Conditionality does not exist. It is created…. What you call a condition is not a condition; it is just another one of infinite possible existences, and it does not exclude you from having another existence.

Things get better when you get better.

Everything is possible to the extent that you are certain.

The fastest way to create is simply to be, right now, whatever you wish to create.  Then do not negate it by thought.  Do not think about it.  Just be.  All your thoughts, words, and actions after that should be of the new state you chose to be.

Be wealth.  Do not try to get wealth.

Trust the Process by Shaun McNiff

All quotes from Shaun's book

The discipline of creation is a mix of surrender and initiative.  We let go of inhibitions, which breed rigidity, and we cultivate responsiveness to what is taking shape in the immediate situation. 

The creative person, like the energy of creation, is always moving.  There is an understanding that the process must keep changing.

Creativity is an intelligence that is broader than the experience of an individual person acting alone.

There is a value to doing things wholeheartedly without being attached to what you do.

Trusting the process is based on the realization that creation is a complex interaction of many elements that collectively shape the future.

Creativity cannot flourish and reach its deepest potential without the participation of its demons as well as its angels.

It is always hard to see that doubt, fear, and indirectness are eternal aspects of the creative path.

Transformation occurs when we lose our way and find a new way to return.

Trusting the process is based on a belief that something valuable will emerge when we step into the unknown.

Mistakes break the continuities of intention with slips and distortions.

The mistake is a message that calls for attention.

If you view your life as an ongoing invention, mistakes shed their onerous nature. The only serious deficit involves the inability to respond.

Mistaken moves and slips of intention reveal that creation involves more than single-mindedness.

The idea of mistaken gestures begins to vanish when every movement is viewed as expressive in its own right.

Once we realize that artists are themselves expressions  of every conceivable way of living, we can begin to appreciate variations of creative types.

The unusual mannerisms of prominent artists tend to obscure the fact that many of history's greatest creators, and the vast majority of people who express themselves creatively each day, live ordinary lives and work at relatively mainstream jobs.  It is possible to create at the highest levels of quality while still working in a bank, teaching school, painting houses, or toiling in a factory.

As I reflect on my life, no matter how busy I am, the time is usually there for creation, but I may choose to do other things.

The opportunities available to the creator are as varied as life itself.  This way of looking at creation establishes strong bridges with spirituality, especially traditions like Tibetan Buddhism and Native American religion, in which every aspect of the physical world is both an expression of the creative spirit and an opening to its contemplation.

We are all expert at something, and the extent to which we do something unusual with this ability is largely a matter of commitment.

The idea of ritual reinforces simplicity, ordinariness, sanctity, heightened concentration, and the sense that something important is happening.

What disturbs you the most may have the most to offer.

The most fundamental skill of the creative person is the ability to constantly re-vision the world. Everything is subject to reconstruction and renewal.  The "re" factor is the basis of resurrecting, reshaping, regenerating, reviving, and rejuvenating.

The creative way of looking at the world assumes multiple truths and interactions among them. 

The creative person is comfortable with contradictory truths and constant changes because there is an underlying faith in an all-enveloping process which embraces paradox and movement.

Health and social well-being are envisioned as a life-affirming interplay between the varied elements of the world, and the dominance of a single position threatens the well-being of the whole.  Addictions and obsessions occur when we lose the healthy interplay, when we don't respect different ways of looking at the world.

Experiment with reframing by contemplating your most elementary daily habits.

I look for the greatest weaknesses in my life, in another person's life, or the culture of an organization, with the belief that these areas are most receptive to creative alchemization.  There is a power of reversal in extreme conditions that does not exist within the stable center.

Symptoms are signs of opportunity, indications that other ways of operating may be needed.

Successful relationships require ongoing attunement.

There is an unrealized creative power that exist on the peripheries of our lives and in the small things we do within our personal environments. 

Loss awakens intimacy.

Difficulties are the unavoidable ingredients of life in the world.

Physical change is not in itself a lasting solution to the soul's discontents.

Creators want to be in situations where they are challenged, where unexpected things are presented to them, and where they must instinctively respond in new ways.

Loss and longing are preconditions of creation.

Visions…are shaped incrementally through the total range of our life experiences.  The vision doesn't simply arrive one day, from above, and without connections to our previous experiences with the world  just as dreams are shaped by our engagements with the physical world, our visions are directions that emerge from experience. 

The most accessible way of becoming more involved with the creative process is re-visioning what you already do.

One of the first steps in the practice of creating is to identify areas in your life where the artistic consciousness is already at work but not fully appreciated.

Everything depends upon the quality of attention you bring to experience.

Rather than try to rid your life of tension, consider doing something more creative with it.  Creative transformation of stress gives you the opportunity to move out of the victim role that we often impose on ourselves.

Can the disturbing thing be the messenger that suggests another way of living?

Childhood imagination creates intimate relationships with what appear to be insignificant places and objects.  Although children have a limited ability to travel alone through the world, they compensate with a special aptitude to journey through the imagination. 

Everything significant about the soul's ultimate journey is imprinted in its childhood formation. 

Creativity is a force moving through us, and only through practice do we learn how to cooperate with it.  The "process" is like a muscle.  It needs to be exercised in order to function effortlessly. 

Practice enables us to act and not act at the same time.  

Creation is a response to life that gives something back to the source.

Giving up is also part of the process.  Surrendering, quitting the chase.

Miracles Now by Gabrielle Bernstein

All quotes from Gabrielle's book

Without clear direction, people can feel misaligned with their purpose, their relationships, and their overall connection to the world.

The ego is a shrewd eraser of the truth.

You don’t need to find your purpose. Your purpose will find you.

Underneath every limiting believe, negative pattern, attack thought, and fear of the world lives a feeling that hasn’t come to the surface for healing.

Our job is to be at peace with the chaos.

The secret to getting more done is simply to slow down.

Give more of what you want to receive.

When people insist on living in fear, our job isn’t to transform them.

If peace is your intention, let peace be your response.

As we defend against the attacks of others we invest in their attack.

Often people say to me, “I don’t have time to meditate”, or “I don’t have time to pray.” My response is, “Do you have time to feel like shit?”

See the tormentor as the mentor.

In many cases we use our bad habit to avoid dealing with something much more difficult.

Happy people don’t post rude comments on the web.

Remember the strangeness is a good sign.  Regardless of how uncomfortable you feel, take this powerful action in the right direction and step outside your comfort zone.

When we feel stuck it’s because we choose to perceive our situation with fear rather than love.

What we think, we feel, and what we feel, we attract.

Worry is a prayer for chaos.

The way we experience the world around us is a direct reflection of the world within us.  If our thoughts and energy are not supportive then our life won’t be supported.

When you act on [fear], you create chaos in your life.

[Witness] how you’ve chosen fear over happiness.

If you want to live a miraculous life, you must be willing to look at your behavior and take responsibility for the life you’ve created up until now.

Retrain yourself to choose happiness over fear.

Your practice is crucial in the awakening of the world.

Your 3 Best Super Powers by Sonia Choquette

All quotes from Sonia's book

Intuition is not a faculty of your brain.  It is a function of your heart, the feeling and sensing part of your nature.

The Desire Map by Danielle LaPorte

All quotes from Danielle's book

You're not chasing the goal, you're chasing a feeling you hope reaching the goal will give you.

We have the procedures of achievement upside down.  We go after the stuff we want to have and accomplish outside of ourselves, and we hope and pray that we'll feel great when we get there.

We wrote out a bunch of positive feelings, and then we asked ourselves, "So what can we do to feel that way?"

Knowing how you actually want to feel is the most potent form of clarity that you can have.  Generating those feelings is the most powerfully creative thing you can do with your life.

You have a say in your life.  There is so much that we can intentionally select in creating our reality.  What comes into our cupboards and closets, what goes into our bodies, the people with whom we spend our free time, the gifts we give, how we worship, the thoughts we focus on.  Clutter is a choice.  Anger is a choice.  Resentment is a choice.  So are spaciousness, flexibility, laughter, compassion, tenderness, and resilience.

Empowered choices are "whole choices" that take your mind, body, and Soul into consideration.

You're choosing whom to invite in, how to react, what to give, where to go, how to move, how and what you'll worship.

You're not chasing the goal itself -- you're chasing the feelings that you hope attaining those goals will give you.

When you get clear on how you want to feel, the pursuit itself will become more satisfying.

The essence of your desire is a feeling.

Desire is at the root of our divine impulse to evolve.

Life can disappear on us just like a cup of coffee consumed on autopilot.  In other words, to really experience life itself, as opposed to just more thinking about life, we need to remember we're having an experience.

Everything we do is driven by the desire to feel a certain way.

Awareness is realizing that our life could always be better. Growth is doing what it takes to make it better.

When we choose the positive over the negative, liberation over repression, truth over illusion, we become real creators.

Feelings are neither the facts of what actually happened nor of a shared reality.  They are indicators of your personal reality.

The soul always desires that which will most reveal its true nature.

The surest sign that you're working with the life-affirming kind of discipline, rather than the spirit-depressing kind, is that you don't complain very much about doing what it takes.

Your Soul is the destination -- and your feelings are the road signs directing you to it. Your feelings lead you home by giving you moment-by-moment signals. 

You can't always choose what happens to you, but you can always choose how you feel about it. 

With clear desire, you can say yes to the right opportunities.  

To feel the way you want to feel as often as possible, you just need to do easy things to help you feel that way every day. 

Bitch if you need to.  Get it out.  Just don't let it end with that.  Do whatever you have to do to get your thoughts back on a positive creative track so that you're in line with your Soul. This is the good, hard work of grown-up awareness.  Don't judge how you want to feel.

The ways in which you get your needs met will evolve. 

We create wellness or dysfunction in our lives by how we go about getting our needs met. 

If we're condemning it, we're creating stuckness. 

Every unwanted emotion and experience you encounter is a wish for something better.

Upping our willingness to feel the full range of our feelings is a surer way to create healing. 

To be whole is to make space for the full range of human emotion.

Feeling good increases your flexibility, resiliency, effectiveness, and magnetism.

Trust is crucial to creating goals with Soul.  Without numbers and targets to hold on to,  your heart becomes the pilot.

When you honor your limits-- rather than act like they don't exist -- you decrease the stress that is sure to creep in when your goals start to test your reality. 

Life is full of circumstantial desires that don't easily mesh.  How we organize those conflicting wants is the act of designing our lives.

The guilt associated with following your heart is a weight you can bear if your desires are strong enough.  It's the price of admission to fulfillment.

The cosmos doesn't measure sweat and hours for reward.  The cosmos deals in the currency of emotion.  When we feel good, goodness flows.

Spiritual maturity includes the capacity to acknowledge our fears while maintaining our confidence and faith.

Healthy entitlement believes that everyone is entitled and that there's enough to go around. It's rooted in self-worth and love.  Unhealthy entitlement usually comes from a place of lack and fear.  These folks want more than they're willing to give up front. ... Unhealthy entitlement makes people frantic below the surface because they don't trust they can nourish and nurture themselves. 

There's a beautiful twist that happens when you assume your worth: you value other people more.  Because when you're operating from a place of wholeness and value, you see value in other people and you reinforce the belief that there's enough to go around for all of us.  So in this sense, your self-worth is a service to humanity.

How we relate to people is how we relate to life.

We need to get real about what's not working, so that we can change it.

Set out to do three or four things that year with gusto and excellence, rather than doing a dozen things just sufficiently.

Look in the mirror and tell the truth: I’m scared.  I really want this to go well.  I most desire to feel energized, creative, leadership, and love.  State some beliefs: I believe in the goodness of humanity.  I believe that I’ve got what it takes.  I’ve got the best intentions and I’m full of creative bliss.  Recall your successes: I nailed this last time.  I won the debate competition.  The team raved about my last round of ideas.  Give voice to what you’re doing that’s working in your life right now: I see that I am already living this in my relationship with my best friend.  I am courageous with my husband.  I’ve been having my most creative ideas ever this week.

Pour on the desire: I want this job.  I really want to feel at ease. 

State your intention: I am going to give this my all.

Illumination by Alberto Villoldo

All quotes from Alberto's book

Once you make your vows of love, you may never go back to your old ways.  The price you pay for doing so is death – whether the loss of your life or of a relationship you were not fully ready to commit to.

Genuine power lies in the ability to practice peace when confronted by someone else’s fury.

When we give in to anger we continue to foster the situations that feed the rage.

Peace may cost you, but it’s the price of war that bankrupts the soul.

We don’t have to live in a world of competition, accumulation, and scorekeeping.

A creator doesn’t crush opponents.

It’s our purity of intent that attracts emotionally healthy partners.  To practice purity of intent is to have a willingness to trust, and to enter partnership with truthfulness and curiosity.

We all love to be on the inside track of the latest bit of gossip, but be mindful:  even listening to gossip is participating in an act of violence against the person you are hearing about.

When you practice temperance, you don’t squander your energy – or overload your credit card.  You find creative and more sustainable ways to operate.  You recognize when the party has stopped being fun and turned ugly.

Humility conquers pride.  The two extremes of self-absorption – too much focus on your individuality and lack of self-awareness – disappear.

In the rite of marriage, integrating your old single self with your new partnered self and taking the plunge into deep intimacy are the tests you face.

If you see that you’re an essential, indispensable part of creation, you understand that you’re responsible for creating your experience in this life.

Wishing for world peace is no excuse for being inconsiderate to your neighbours.

If you resist initiation, the universe will conspire to bring you face to face with the end of a stage in your life in some other way.  Resistance is futile.

We discover that although it is very difficult to change the world, it is not difficult to change our own world.

Life will drag us kicking and screaming to our destiny if we try to escape it. Our choice is to be delivered in grace and beauty, which happens when we say yes to our initiation.

To understand the role of emotions, it’s useful to distinguish them from feelings.  When someone cuts in front of you on the highway, you get upset at that driver.  Your spontaneous reaction of anger is a feeling that passes because your nervous system resets itself. … Feelings are authentic.  By contrast, emotions are like viruses infecting our primitive neurocomputer.  If you’re still angry days or years after an upsetting incident, what you are experiencing isn’t a feeling but an emotion stored in your neural network.  You rationalize this emotion, and you come to believe, for example, that your spiteful behaviour toward your boss is justified and feel you have a right to be angry and wrathful.

You are the author of the dream or nightmare you are living.

In higher organisms, evolution favors the most cooperative.

Humans as a species have yet to discover what bees know: that survival of the individual depends on the well-being of the hive.

Paradise is a brain state, not a place.

Make peace a conscious choice.

The only person who can serve as your programmer is you.  But first you must change the notion of God as the ultimate rescuer who can be wooed, appeased, and coaxed into saving you from suffering.  In fact, you must drop the notion of God altogether, because it is a uniquely human creation.

The shaman recognizes that like everyone, she has a spark of the Divine but is not the fire itself.

We find the courage to be generous when we know that if there seems to be a shortage of something in our lives – whether money, love or time – it’s our perception that’s flawed.

The human brain is made up of four anatomically different subcomputers that developed over millions of years of evolution.

Once you free yourself from your primitive brain’s limited perceptions of what you can accomplish, you discover your greatness.  You realize that you’re both an immaterial speck and an all-important element of the universe.

We think that we’re much too valuable to have our identity and all that we’ve worked for swept away.