Spiritual Practices Quotes

“The moments of satisfaction you experience are not in a subject/‌object relationship where you can say “I am free, I am happy.” These moments without thought, dream or representation are our true nature, fullness, which cannot be projected. It is an experience encountered where there is neither somebody experiencing nor a thing experienced. Only this reality is spiritual. All other states, “highs,” whether brought about by techniques, experiences or drugs, even the so often exalted samadhi, are phenomena‌—‌and carry with them traces of objectivity. In other words, as what you are is not a state, it is a waste of time and energy chasing more and more experiences in the hope of coming closer to the non-experience.”
― Jean Klein, I Am

“Observation and expansion are two elements of meditation. While a teacher may guide you to have the right posture and give instruction on following the breath, no one can teach you about the experience. It comes through practice and patience.”
― Debra Moffitt, Garden of Bliss: Cultivating the Inner Landscape for Self-Discovery

“Anything can become a spiritual practice once you are willing to approach it that way—once you let it bring you to your knees and show you what is real, including who you really are, who other people are, and how near God can be when you have lost your way.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

“People in the West need to know that most of the spiritual, intellectual, and cultural products of South Asia are tainted by Brahmanism. What may have offered you liberation and healing also causes caste-oppressed people to suffer. You don't have to give up those practices or concepts, but the call is to be intentional and acknowledge the caste harm. Your faith is bound to the violence it sanctions. For practitioners of Brahminical traditions, this reckoning may be painful. It's hard to admit the gulf between your values and the history of your spiritual practice, but if you do not wish to be complicit in the suffering of others, then you must confront these truths. When we exalt some aspects of spiritual practices, we cannot be fully aware and present. People enter spiritual practices and surrender everything without critical judgment and informed consent. Any faith is a practice of teachings that come from an ego, and those can then be interpreted by bad actors. To my mind, part of being a seeker is to interrogate all teachings and practices, to stay soft and flexible as opposed to rigid and dogmatic, to move slowly enough to be able to see when we're being blinded to the truth.”
― Thenmozhi Soundararajan, The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition

“To experience the richness of life in God's kingdom, we must reorder our lives. We need to see through the shallow promises of our culture, and we need rhythms, signposts, and practices that reorient us to another world.”
― Mike Cosper, Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World

“As spiritual students, we need to be careful that the influence we have on other people in our conversations is for good only. We also need to be careful about what we allow into our own thoughts. We become conscious of what we do and say, and of what we see and hear. We do not engage in idle or intentional gossip which undermines someone else’s integrity or which spreads the seeds of fear by talking unthinkingly about illness, disasters, and all the other fears that run rampant in the world. We may talk lightly but never carelessly and we constantly keep at bay the flow of common, ignorant thought which runs its damaging course through the pathways of ordinary human conversation. Whenever there is an opportunity, our conversation seeks to validate, in some humble way, the beauty and love which constantly upholds us all.”
― Donna Goddard, The Love of Being Loving

“For the community's quieter members, the call to humble listening is, seemingly paradoxically, a call to speak up. If others build an auditorium for you, you do them a disservice if you fail to sing. As we noted above, humble listening must declare itself: you are simply not listening well if you don't talk back. When your peers speak, they need to hear from you. At the very least, they need to know that they have been properly understood, and they often need to receive your comments and criticisms so that they can improve their ideas and arguments. The same is true when you speak up. In his "Prayer Before Study," Aquinas reminds us that we have been born into the "twofold darkness" of "sin and ignorance." As limited creatures who are prone to error, we all need to hear from others.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“Your daily routine has a worldview It orients your body to the world and primes you to experience in specific ways.”
― Mike Cosper, Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World

“Each moment of our days--our meals, our conversations with friends, our escapes, obsessions, romances, and distractions--is what we make of our lives. Our habits and rhythms of life are formative not only of who we are but how we know the world, including whether we know it to be a place where God is present or absent.”
― Mike Cosper, Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World

“To come to live in the kingdom of God, or to seek to live in a world other than our disenchanted milieu, requires a wholesale reordering of our habits and commitments.”
― Mike Cosper, Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World

“One of the first serious spiritual practices I learned in my early twenties was to watch what I was talking about. It is unfortunate but not surprising that most people have no idea what they are saying, to whom, and the consequences of that on themselves and others. If we want to be happy; don’t gossip, don’t spread hate, don’t talk about other people, don’t spread fear, don’t complain, don’t relay stories which are detrimental to the well-being of those around us. That will cut out the vast majority of most people’s conversations. There is a time for honest, well-intentioned directness but it is not found in common conversation and it is a learned skill. Be a bringer of peace and healing. It’s a discipline, for sure, but one that will transform our lives.”
― Donna Goddard, The Love of Being Loving

“Mediumship is not a dog and pony show aimed at applause or viewer ratings. It is a spiritual endeavor that seeks to validate, console, heal and uplift. It's a blessing from beyond...like a phone call from God.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

“Guides will give various practices, but rarely do Murids perform them and even more rarely with any kind of consistency. Many people run around from Sheikh to Sheikh or therapist to therapist, trying to get answers. Often the problem is that these people never truly put into effect the answers they have already been given. Rather than always looking for more, more, more, they should use what they have already been given.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis

“The contemplative is on the journey to wholeness, autonomy, freedom - the freedom to love, to care, to transfigure the earth. Ultimately contemplation is related to our vocation - to what we are to do in the world. God gives us not only an incomplete self; God gives us an incomplete world. In contemplative prayer we participate in God's nature, we are in touch with our own divinity.”
― Elizabeth O'Connor OCSO

“I doubt very much that there is any creativity in the world apart from contemplation. In contemplation we catch a vision of not only what is, but what can be. We find our place in salvation history.

Contrary to what we have thought, contemplatives are the great doers. Contemplatives return from times of withdrawal with inner clarity and with direction. In their return from the silence, they take up the work of giving from to the liberating truths that have been given to them in flashes of insight and vision. They are also the great enablers of others. They evoke spirit in those they meet. Because they have been present to themselves, they are able to be present to others in a way that awakens, enlivens, gives courage. In them we see more clearly a way of existence that combines both being and doing.”
― Elizabeth O'Connor, Search for Silence

“Silence will put us in touch with yearnings, anxieties, pain, despair, envy, competition, and a host of other feelings that need to be put into words if we are to move toward a place of centeredness and come into possession of our lives. The fact is that most of us have an incredible amount of unfaced suffering in our histories that has to be looked at and worked through.”
― Elizabeth O'Connor, Search for Silence

“It is a strange and frightening discovery to find that the sacrificial life that Jesus is talking about is the giving up of our chains - to discover that what binds us is also what gives us comfort and a measure of feeling safe. Change, while it has promise, will take from us something we have found sweet. The image we have of ourselves may keep us from wholeness, but it has some very satisfying compensations. ...

Not only does change threaten something deep in us and call into being all kinds of resistance, it also threatens our friends. They, too, prefer the status quo. They may find us difficult to put up with at times, but something in them is also threatened at the prospect of the real change in us. They would be glad to have us give upa few irritating habits, provided we stay essentially as we are.”
― Elizabeth O'Connor, Search for Silence

“Celebrate yourself. Confess the person whom you are becoming in Christ. This is the confession of your light side. Many people find it easier to dig and probe the dark dimension of life than to come to grips with the resources that are theirs. When we do not recognize our gifts and strengths, our lives fail to sound notes of gratitude. the whole growth process is blocked. We are responsible and free only when we acknowledge our resources and the fact that light has actually penetrated our darkness and made us children of light. Where sin did abound, grace does much more abound.

Our fundamental confession is who we are in Christ. the deepest confession anyone will ever make is this: I am a person in Christ Jesus. He has confronted me. His power has begun to flow into my life. I am a changed and changing creation. I am his, and I can witness to his grace and power, and to the strength and possibilities that are mine because of him.”
― Elizabeth O'Connor, Search for Silence

“One day, you won’t need to do spiritual practices because you will have become the very thing that you have practised for years. You will look at the elements and not see them as outside of you. You will look at the master and not see him as a person other than you. You will look at those you love and see them as part of your own life-fibre.”
― Donna Goddard, Prana

“The body is the holder of our life force. Protect it, value it, and use it, but don’t think it is an end in itself.”
― Donna Goddard, Touched by Love

“While being mentored by a Shaman, a major teaching that they deeply instilled in me is how to routinely spiritually protect myself.”
― Robin S. Baker

“Like people, places have their own unique energy. If we understand and respect that, we can use them for our growth.”
― Donna Goddard, Love Matters

“Dissolving our problems requires a lot of going into our emotions, memories, and pain. It is called by different names—burning karma, riding out emotions, going into oneself, dissolving memories. It means allowing angry, sad, and fearful thoughts to come up and be clearly seen so they can dissolve.”
― Donna Goddard, Love Matters