Pagan Portals - Spirituality Without Structure Quotes

“A spiritual experience gives a person a feeling of profound connection with something beyond themselves. That something doesn’t have to be a god. It could be a place, a person, a tradition, or an idea. Anything, potentially, can be connected with. The spiritual experience breaks down the isolation of self, deepening a feeling of involvement, it gives an emotional sense of meaning, significance or elevation.”
― Nimue Brown, Pagan Portals - Spirituality Without Structure: The Power of Finding Your Own Path

“It is human to be afraid, and uncertain, and to wish that the universe loved you. It is not the aim of spirituality to somehow become something that is not human. However flawed I may imagine myself to be, I am unequivocally human, my urges are human, and it is precisely that flawed, urge-laden humanity that sets us seeking spirituality in the first place.”
― Nimue Brown, Pagan Portals - Spirituality Without Structure: The Power of Finding Your Own Path

“We are what we do, what we think, how we live and we are everything we feel. When we do things that feel most right to us, we also feel most like ourselves…If we do that which feels wrong and we become less like ourselves and less able to see what our right path would be and so forth until all is confusion and unhappiness.”
― Nimue Brown, Pagan Portals - Spirituality Without Structure: The Power of Finding Your Own Path

“As we stand at the rock face of existential crisis, we can start to add more personal questions to the list of things to shout. Who am I? How much of what I want and feel is really me? How do I tell the difference?”
― Nimue Brown, Pagan Portals - Spirituality Without Structure: The Power of Finding Your Own Path

“We cannot have answers to the most important questions, and no matter how disquieting we find it, the only thing to do is face the not-knowing, and accept it.
In not having answers but asking the questions anyway, we bring ourselves to the absolute reality of what it is to be alive.”
― Nimue Brown, Pagan Portals - Spirituality Without Structure: The Power of Finding Your Own Path

“The incessant ‘why’ of the inner child takes us head on into the unanswerable, the impossible, and the profound discomfort of not knowing.”
― Nimue Brown, Pagan Portals - Spirituality Without Structure: The Power of Finding Your Own Path

“No matter how solitary your path, when it comes to the quest for meaning it is useful to remember that other people are doing it too, and it’s not your sole responsibility to sort everything out. You do what you can, no one can do more than that.”
― Nimue Brown, Pagan Portals - Spirituality Without Structure: The Power of Finding Your Own Path

“Today’s one true way is frequently much removed from the one true way carried forth in the same name a thousand years ago. Once you acknowledge that religious structures can and do change, all suggestion of their divine perfection must be called into question. The influence of people, politics and immediate need are clearly visible in the histories of all religions. If they were only ever expressions of the divine, what need would there be to ever change them? It is precisely the human aspects that create change. If we can take this onboard and hold religious systems more lightly, recognizing them as ideas and traditions, not hard truths, they can become more human and more compassionate as well as being more practically functional.”
― Nimue Brown, Pagan Portals - Spirituality Without Structure: The Power of Finding Your Own Path

“Uncertainty allows us to explore widely, to trust personal experience, reject authority, be pragmatic and flexible when we need to. Not having anything that must be clung to as a certainty, we are free to let go of whatever doesn’t work,”
― Nimue Brown, Pagan Portals - Spirituality Without Structure: The Power of Finding Your Own Path

“…keep your relationship with ideas as flexible as you can. They are just ideas, after all, not ultimate truths.”
― Nimue Brown, Pagan Portals - Spirituality Without Structure: The Power of Finding Your Own Path

“Part of the trick to making your own path effective, is to hold that flexibility. If you replace external systems with equally rigid internal ones, there’s a lot of work for little gain.”
― Nimue Brown, Pagan Portals - Spirituality Without Structure: The Power of Finding Your Own Path

“Do not abdicate your power and responsibility for the illusion of ease and comfort. Think. Ask questions.”
― Nimue Brown, Pagan Portals - Spirituality Without Structure: The Power of Finding Your Own Path

“In choosing what to ask, we choose the path we will walk.”
― Nimue Brown, Pagan Portals - Spirituality Without Structure: The Power of Finding Your Own Path

“Ask who you are and what you want. Keep asking, day after day, and pay attention to your own responses. Ask what really makes you happy and what leeches the good stuff out of life. Dare to ask what would make the world a better place and what your part in that could be. Ask how to tell right from wrong, how to judge others and how to act fairly. The only person who can give you answers, is yourself.”
― Nimue Brown, Pagan Portals - Spirituality Without Structure: The Power of Finding Your Own Path

“Every time we default to what is normal, expected, or habitual, we quietly reject a whole universe of other possibilities.”
― Nimue Brown, Pagan Portals - Spirituality Without Structure: The Power of Finding Your Own Path

“Philosophy is the rational, thinking aspect of your path. It is the considered way in which you make sense of the world and your place in it, working out how to live.”
― Nimue Brown, Pagan Portals - Spirituality Without Structure: The Power of Finding Your Own Path