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!

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

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.

The world we live in is a co-creation, a manifestation of individual consciousness woven into a collective dream. How we are with each other as individuals, as groups, as nations and tribes, is what shapes that dream.

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

When we surrender when we do not fight with life when it calls upon us we are lifted and the strength to do what needs to be done finds us.

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?