... 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 to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know whether you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

Loudly declaring our soul's desire can get the blood running and our passions blazing.

Not doing is not about immobility or giving up in despair. It is first and foremost about being able to be with, to accept fully, what is in this moment.

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?

There is nowhere to go. What you are looking for is right here. Open the fist clenched in wanting and see what you already hold in your hand

Within each of us there is the heart of a lion, the courage to simply be who & what we are regardless of others opinions or our own fears. Sometimes this courage has been buried beneath years of shaming that may have been so implicit or insidious that we breathed it in, unaware of how it separated us from knowing our own beauty of being. May we each know our own beauty & right to be today. May we drop down into the heart of the lion within & say to shame, when it rears it's head, "Not today!"