Elizabeth Lesser Quotes - Page 3

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

First we love within, then we love the world.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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