Feeding Your Demons Quotes

“DEMONS OF FEAR Confess all your hidden faults! Approach that which you find repulsive! Whoever you think you cannot help, help them! Anything you are attached to, let go of it! Go to places that scare you, like cemeteries! Sentient beings are as limitless as the sky, Be aware! — Dampa Sangye”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“One ‘take me, eat me’ is worth a hundred thousand ‘protect me, save me’s’.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“Perhaps everything terrible in us is, in its deepest being, something helpless needing our help. — Rainer Maria Rilke”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“Machig merged the two into a single word, god-demon, indicating that gods and demons are two sides of the same coin, that our hopes and fears are inextricably locked together.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“Evil in the human psyche comes from a failure to bring together, to reconcile the pieces of our experience. When we embrace all that we are, even the evil, the evil is transformed. — Andrew Bard Schmookler”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“Although throughout this book I am most frequently using the term “demon” to describe what we need to transform, think also about your gods, your obsessive longings. Consider that our hopes and desires can be as problematic as our fears.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“What we call demons are not materially existing individuals with huge black forms, frightening and terrifying anyone who sees them. A demon means anything which hinders liberation.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“With a loving mind, cherish more than a child The hostile gods and demons of apparent existence, And tenderly surround yourself with them. — Machig Labdrön (1055–1145)”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“I needed the stories of women.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“the dragon is not slain or even fought against, but drawn out and fearlessly nurtured”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“We have raped the natural world, damming rivers and carelessly using up resources, polluting the atmosphere, and battling the nurturer, Mother Earth. Now nature fights back with a fury of natural disasters: hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, droughts, floods, and global warming. In response we fight climate change, seeking to stop it without addressing the underlying attitude that created the problem to begin with.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“There were many practices based on subduing, or cutting through the ego. Gradually, I realized this approach did not work well for me and as I began to teach, I saw it often did not work well for students either, especially women.

They responded more positively to nurturing their innate wisdom and buddha nature rather than to attempts to cut through their egos. Perhaps because they struggle more with self-esteem and self-hatred, the battle motif turns practice into another way to beat themselves up, another battle among many.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“Gegyen told us that the sound of the bell was the sounds of emptiness and represented feminine wisdom.

Leaning back and squinting so that his eyes practically disappeared, he said, "All that appears as solid is merely appearing and has no essential nature. What we think of as real is like the places and people we see in dreams."

Then he laughed, grinning toothlessly, and looked at us nodding, "Ok, let's do that again.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“ONE OF the traditional applications of Chöd in Tibet was working with outer demons of disease and epidemics. Those practicing Chöd would give form to demons by practicing the ritual in frightening places where there were diseased corpses, such as cemeteries and charnel grounds. Once they felt the terrifying demons had arrived, instead of fighting them, the practitioners would imagine their own bodies transformed into nectar that fed the demons until they were completely sated.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“Our hopes are our gods. Gods create struggles similar to our battles with demons, except they are attempts to get something rather than get away from something. Gods are involved with struggles of desire and longing rather than aversion. It is important to distinguish between an inspiration, which triggers positive energy and optimism without great attachment or tension involved, and a god, which is connected to longing for something, or being obsessed with a certain outcome.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“Hold it lightly.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“obsession with beauty (longing for beauty / fear of aging).”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“Gods can easily become demons and vice versa. For example, our lover might go from being a god to being a demon and back again. When she or he is doing what we want, we experience a god. When he or she brings up our fears, we see a demon. In a dysfunctional relationship, we cling with longing to the god even though the demon is what we are usually confronted with.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“In our culture we are taught that hopes are good. But really our hopes are often based on fears. Take a moment and think about your greatest hope. What do you really long for? Then think about your greatest fear. Aren’t they the opposite sides of the same coin, both of which generate tension? I hope for love, and I fear loneliness. I hope for success, and I fear poverty. I hope for praise, and I fear criticism.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“When working with an outer demon attached to a relationship, it can be helpful to imagine feeding the other person as well as feeding the demon created by our reaction to that person. When I fed my demon of fear of losing my son as part of my divorce, I also fed an imagined form of my husband.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“no one should assume the demon will manifest the same way each time.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“to record the five steps in as much detail as you can, along with whatever thoughts, associations, or memories are triggered by the demon.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“After imagining and summoning up these embodied aspects of himself, he asked them questions, after which he found they often produced an image, and then the disturbance disappeared.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“During the practice you transform your own body into nectar that feeds all beings,”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“my first book, Women of Wisdom.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“Offering”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict

“At first a yogi feels his mind Is tumbling like a waterfall; In midcourse, like the Ganges, It flows on slow and gentle; In the end, it is a great Vast ocean, where the lights Of child and mother merge in one. — The Song of Tilopa (988–1069)”
― Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict