David Richo Quotes - Page 2

There is a natural and inviolable tendency in things to bloom into whatever they truly are in the core of their being. All we have to do is align ourselves with what wants to happen naturally and put in the effort that is our part in helping it happen.

The human heart holds much more love than it can ever disburse in one lifetime.

It is not that practice makes perfect but that practice is perfect, combining effort with an openness to grace.

Mindful grief means mourning and letting go of the past without expectation, fear, censure, blame, shame, control and so forth. Without such mindful grief, neither past nor person can be laid to rest.

We can actually reconstruct our past by examining what we think, say, feel, expect, believe, and do in an intimate relationship now.

I see that mankind still survives after all its attempts to destroy itself and so I surmise that it is the law of love that rules mankind.

When we feel unsafe with someone and still stay with him, we damage our ability to discern trustworthiness in those we will meet in the future.

The challenge is to find our destiny in exactly what we are refusing to engage in.

When we notice a connection between our present fears and their origins in early life, we are finding out how much of our identity is designed by fear. Is fear the architect of me?

In a true you-and-I relationship, we are present mindfully, nonintrusively, the way we are present with things in nature.We do not tell a birch tree it should be more like an elm. We face it with no agenda, only an appreciation that becomes participation: 'I love looking at this birch' becomes 'I am this birch' and then 'I and this birch are opening to a mystery that transcends and holds us both.

In mindful grief, we become the landing strip that allows any feelings to arrive. Some crash, some land softly. Some harm us, but none harm us in a lasting way. We remain as they taxi away or as their wreckage is cleared away. We can trust that we will survive.

Evoke one good memory for each bad one from now on.

We all recall the cruel stepmother in fairy tales. That archetype is often a necessary element in a fairy tale so that the heroine/hero can become a person of character and power. Stories of heroes and heroines often begin with a wound or loss or injustice and end with heroic acts of restoration.

The opposite of interpersonal trust is not mistrust. It is despair. This is because we have given up on believing that trustworthiness and fulfillment are possible from others. We have lost our hope in our fellow humans.

The most exciting part of finding out who we are is discovering our own uniqueness, who we are outside the box, beyond the categories in a Psychology 101 textbook. In our inimitable singularity, there is an infinite range of possibility that cannot be tied to any one description of what it means to be human or healthy.

Relationships are not about how two people can survive each other but about how the whole world becomes more capable of love, with all its dim anguish and glowing rapture.

Love is the possibility of possibilities. Its farthest reach is beyond us, no matter how long we love or how much. It will always remain the mute mystery to whose ecstasy and ache we can only surrender with a yes.

Just as our fingerprints are one-of-a-kind, so is our identity. Each of us is a once-only articulation of what humans can be. We are rare, unmatched, mysterious. This is why the quality of openness is so crucial to our self-discovery. We cannot know ourselves by who we think we are, who others take us to be, or what our driver's license may say. We are fields of potential, some now actualized, most not yet.

Our tears are precious, necessary, and part of what make us such endearing creatures.

Synchronicity is a term used by Carl Jung to describe coincidences that are related by meaningfulness rather than by cause and effect.

Fate often allows a future to take shape with no regard for our expectation, plan, or readiness. Fate's skillful editing of our life choices is like the careful grooming of lads on their first day of school: combed, polished, scrubbed, newly dressed, and glowing too. This is how we become ready for our life lessons.

Mindfulness is both a state of being and a daily spiritual practice, a form of meditation.