... It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself, and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living, I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain!

Sometimes I think there are only two instructions we need to follow to develop and deepen our spiritual life: slow down and let go.

It is hard to be with another's pain if we cannot be with our own. Since I was a child I have always felt a deep sense of responsibility to ease others' pain. But I have discovered that often, beneath this genuine and admirable desire, lies an inability to be with my own sorrow. Several years ago, watching a close friend suffer when a brain aneurysm took away her life as she knew it, I wrote in my journal, "I won't ask much. But if you would just let me save your life, perhaps it will not hurt so much to know I cannot save my own.

I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. .I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, . and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout . . . "Yes." .I want to know if you can get up . weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done. .I want to know what sustains you . when all else falls away.

What if the question is not why I am so infrequently the person I really want to be, but why do I so infrequently want to be the person I really am?