Broken Open Quotes

“Jung wrote, “Eros is a questionable fellow and will always remain so…. He belongs on one side to man’s primordial animal nature, which will endure as long as man has an animal body. On the other side he is related to the highest forms of the spirit. But he thrives only when spirit and instinct are in right harmony.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“I do not wish upon anyone a descent into hell. But if your life has to be turned inside out in order for you to know yourself—if the shadow of a shaman crosses your path and you turn and follow it down—I pray that you use its force wisely. I hope that you take the ultimate responsibility for your actions and that you consecrate any destruction to the rebuilding of your higher self and a more radiant life.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“Persephone left the floral world of her mother (some say willingly, others say through abduction) to be with Hades, the king of the underworld. There, she found missing parts of herself and became a woman. It is said that Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love, gained “Truth and the Art of Lovemaking” from her journey down below. Before she took the journey, many translations of the myth refer to Inanna as “the pure Inanna.” The pure Inanna descended into the shadows, lost her innocence, and emerged as the Goddess of Love. Dante’s pilgrim journeys through hell in search of his true love and his true life. Mark Musa, a translator and interpreter of Dante’s Inferno writes, “The only way to escape from the dark wood is to descend into Hell; the only way up that mountain lit by the ray of the sun is to go down. Man must first descend in humility before he can raise himself to God. Before man can hope to climb the mountain of salvation, he must first know what sin is. The purpose of the Pilgrim’s journey through Hell is precisely this: to learn all there is to know about sin, as a necessary preparation for the ascent to God.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“If only people realized what they had in life,” she told me one day, “they would not be able to contain their joy!”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“Marion Woodman—the great Jungian analyst and author—says that we come to the mythic Crossroads during “moments in our lives where the unconscious crosses consciousness; where the eternal crosses the transitory; where a higher will demands the surrender of our egos.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“So,” I asked again, “if mistakes provide the best opportunity for discovery and evolution, why do we go around trying to look so sure of ourselves all the time?” I invited the crowd of left-brain thinkers to put”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“I have gone back to sleep in order to resist the forces of change. And I have stayed awake and been broken open. Both ways are difficult, but one way brings with it the gift of a lifetime. If we can stay awake when our lives are changing, secrets will be revealed to us—secrets about ourselves, about the nature of life, and about the eternal source of happiness and peace that is always available, always renewable, already within us.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“the man was right: It was time for me to find out what I really wanted—not what my husband wanted, not what I thought my children needed, not what my parents expected, not what society said was good or bad. It was time for me to step boldly into the fullness of life, with all of its dangers and all of its promises. Remaining tight in a bud had become a kind of death. The time had come to blossom.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“The fruit of prayer is the realization that life is an eternal adventure, and that we are explorers, always changing, always learning, always breaking open into new vistas of clarity and peace.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“You always teach others what you most need to learn. You are your own worst student.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“If you take steps to accomplish something, that action will have a result—either failure or success…. Trust is knowing that there will be a message. When you trust in those messages, the reflections of the phenomenal world, the world begins to seem like a bank, or reservoir, of richness.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“Ch-ch-Changes, turn and face the strain, because I am trying to do just that.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“Everyone has a burden to bear, and no one else can carry it for us. It’s our very own chimidunchik.” “That”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“Some people realize that what must burn in the fire is their fear—fear of their own power, fear of change, fear of loss, fear of others. Some people name an inability to feel, a crippling cynicism, a sense of shame, a stance of anger. I”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“first tip of fearlessness, and the first sign of real warriorship.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“Going beyond fear begins when we examine our fear: our anxiety, nervousness, concern, and restlessness. If we look into our fear, if we look beneath the veneer, the first thing we find is sadness, beneath the nervousness. Nervousness is cranking up, vibrating all the time. When we slow down, when we relax with our fear, we find sadness, which is calm and gentle. Sadness hits you in your heart, and your body produces a tear. Before you cry, there is a feeling in your chest and then, after that, you produce tears in your eyes.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“Face your embarrassment at being human, and you’ll uncover a deep well of passion and compassion. It’s a great power, your Open Secret. When your heart is undefended, you make it safe for whomever you meet to put down his burden of hiding, and then you both can walk through the open door.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“HOW STRANGE THAT THE NATURE OF LIFE is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be. This”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How difficult times can help us grow

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive… so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“To trust who our child is, and not who we think he should be or what the world wants him to be—that perhaps is the single greatest gift a parent can give.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“A heart made crooked through loss and change is a heart that can love the world and its less than perfect people.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“In the end, what will matter is how much we loved—our children, our mates, our families, our friends, everyone we knew, everyone who traveled with us during our brief visit to this unbearably lovely place. What will matter is the good we did, not the good we expected others to do.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“Those with power never willingly concede their control.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“It’s easy to remain blind about ourselves when we stay within the safety zone—among people who are just like us, in a place that looks like home. We can trick ourselves into thinking that we are far more open-minded and bighearted than we really are. It’s when we must walk our talk in the complex landscape of a messy life that self-righteous ideals are whittled down into the honest truth.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“The Holy Longing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Tell a wise person, or else keep silent. Because the massman will mock it right away. I praise what is truly alive, what longs to be burned to death. In the calm water of the love-nights, where you were begotten, where you have begotten, a strange feeling comes over you when you see the silent candle burning. Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness, and a desire for higher lovemaking sweeps you upward. Distance does not make you falter, now, arriving in magic, flying, and finally, insane for the light, you are the butterfly and you are gone. And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“Wise people throughout the ages have talked about shadow energy, giving it the names and personalities of dark gods and goddesses, devils, and natural forces. From the Greek legends to the New Testament, we are told not to run from the evil forces that trouble our dreams or visit our lives. If we do, the exiled and dishonored shadow-self will triumph. Jung said that people tend to become what they ignore or oppose. He steered his patients away from resisting evil and toward transforming and redeeming it, or as he wrote, “putting the light of the superior functions at the service of the dark.” The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would call my dance with the Shaman Lover a “great epoch.” He says that the great epochs of life come when we gain the courage to re-christen our evil as what is best in us.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“Now I know that when we show only our light side to the world, our shadow grows restless, sucking into itself much of our energy and passion. In order to release my trapped energy and awaken my best qualities, I had to engage with my shadow. I had to see how everything that I judged and feared in others was also in me. I had to be broken open so fully that my whole self was laid out before me to own and to forgive and to love. Before I could participate freely in wonders of the world, I had to taste the dark fruit and leave the garden of my innocence.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“The only thing we can really ask for when we pray is the ability to trust in that greater purpose. We pray to have our hearts opened and our purpose revealed. We pray for gratitude when our life is good and for faith when it is not so good. We pray to trust that our pain is a gift with “a very, very specific purpose.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“She says, “You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden, but you will grow if you are sick, if you are in pain, if you experience losses, and if you do not put your head in the sand, but take the pain as a gift to you with a very, very specific purpose.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow