All quotes from
Bill's book
We're being summoned
by the world itself to make many urgent changes to the human project, but most
central is a fundamental re-visioning and reshaping of ourselves, a shift in
consciousness.
There's
been insufficient tending to the process of becoming fully human.
When we
eliminate symptoms without cultivating wholeness, we still have an unwell,
unwhole, or fragmented psyche that will soon enough sprout new symptoms that
express, in yet another way, the lack of wholeness.
The goal
of individuation is wholeness, not perfection.
On the
path to cultivating special equanimity, universal compassion,
self-transcendence, and nondual awareness, there are a variety of challenges,
distractions, and pitfalls. In order to
stay on the path, we need a well-developed capacity to nurture ourselves in the
face of sometimes overwhelming emotions and memories, interpersonal antagonism and discord, the boredom that can
accompany contemplative practices, or our own wounded subpersonalities
screaming for their needs to be met or their addictions to be fed.
Innocence
implies and requires present-centeredness and receptivity - being here now,
fully and simply, in relationship to each thing wholly in the way it is sensed
and felt in the moment.... Innocence is the foundation of our ability to be in
relationship and to cooperate, and cooperation is essential to life-enhancing
societies.
Your
potential for creating meaning in your life, for discerning your way toward
your destiny, depends utterly on your capacity to be fully present with the chaos.
At some
point, before true healing is possible, we must be able to see how our demons
are actually our partners in the individuation process, how they hold the
missing segments of our path to wholeness.
Our
juvenile survival strategies of self-diminishment form the core of our most
self-defeating patterns: those that disparage our dreams, our potentials, and
our healthy wildness, or that aggravate low self-esteem and troubles with
intimacy. And, most irksome, these
strategies are often on automatic pilot, launched outside our awareness and
without our consent or control.
Rescuing
is common in egocentric society. In one
version, a person serves others with the hidden agenda of carving out a place
of acceptance and belonging for herself, a place where she'll be safe from abandonment. She
accomplishes this by making herself indispensable.
Your
belief in the story you've been living, no matter how wholesome of fulfilling,
must erode before you're able to glimpse the larger and deeper story of soul.
Our
psychological wounds provide portals into the very depths of our psyches. Our wounds are not merely -- or even
primarily - things to heal and overcome.
They're also, when we're developmentally prepared, something to re-open,
explore, learn from, and be transformed by.
Managed
emotions are not digested emotions, and emotional digestion is what we need in
order to continue developing psychologically.
The most
precise definition of depression is a bad case of suppressed emotions, emotions
that have been managed instead of being felt, digested, understood,
assimilated, and acted on in a way that preserves and improves our
relationships.
Attempting
to suppress or discount an emotion by calling it irrational reveals a lack of
self-compassion.
All
emotions are based on nondeliberated appraisals of our circumstances....
Sometimes our appraisals are mistaken, but this doesn't render our emotions
irrational?
We all
have a core wound. From a spiritual
perspective, this isn't an accident, nor is it unfortunate.
The
Shadow is whatever the Ego isn't. The
Shadow is what's true about who you really are, but you haven't a clue about
it.
Your
Shadow contains values, perspectives, and capacities needed to round out and
compete your adult personality. It
contains personal powers you'll need when you befriend or wrestle with the
inner and outer demons and angels encountered in the process of growing whole,
and it holds the powers you'll need in
order to embody the singular Soul gift you carry for the world.
The
resources warehoused in our Shadow are potent.
They can be used for good or for ill.
Our Shadow not only safeguards us from these powers but also defends our
communities from the damage we're capable of inflicting before we possess the
maturity and experience to employ these powers wisely.
