Broken Open Quotes

“He said that in order to save the world you must serve the people in your life. “You gradually struggle less and less for an idea,” Merton wrote, “and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“the God that the Sufi poet Hafiz writes about: Not the God of names, Nor the God of don’ts, Nor the God who ever does Anything weird, But the God who only knows four words And keeps repeating them, saying: “Come dance with Me.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“Dante’s lines landed on my tongue, and I recited them aloud: “In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark woods, where the straight way was lost.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“When we practice dying, we are learning to identify less with Ego and more with Soul. —RAM DASS”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“If I can approach change with an understanding of the process and an openness to the pain, then my daily labors will be swift and fruitful.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“And the last thing to know about death is that the death of the body is the start of an adventure.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“from the moment we are born we are dying every day in all sorts of physical, emotional, and spiritual ways.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, “I am running away.” “If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“My first baby looked neither new nor old. He was otherworldly, like a pure ray of intelligence, like an innocent visitor from a more benevolent planet.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“Tale as old as time, Tune as old as song. Bittersweet and strange, Finding you can change, Learning you were wrong. —HOWARD ASHMAN AND ALAN”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“As I Walked Out One Evening,” W. H. Auden expresses in a few lines what to me is the essence of the Phoenix Process: O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart. 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

“It looked to her as if her own life would not survive the death of Geoff. “His death held up the mirror to my pain,” Sharon writes, “in a way that nothing else could have. A mirror of pain that reflected more pain—like a fun-house mirror, distorting everything, making it bigger, scarier.” In one way, Geoff’s death was Sharon’s death. But it also was her rebirth. It brought her into the shadows, where she retrieved the parts of herself she needed in order to live again. While some people recover from”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“There are three major hurdles to overcome in crisis: dealing with pain; working with your attitude; and using the crisis as a wake-up and a cleanup call.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“Rabbi Scnhuer Zalman said it clearly when he wrote: “A broken heart is not the same as sadness. Sadness occurs when the heart is stone cold and lifeless. On the contrary, there is an unbelievable amount of vitality in a broken heart.” In the middle of the mystery of pain, I harvested this precious jewel. I also harvested the love and beauty right here, in this world.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“In our sleep, pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. —AESCHYLUS”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“And he was telling me that behind everyone’s learned behaviors and odd eccentricities lurks a soul, ready to make contact if only coaxed out through a crack in the ego. Would that it take something less than fierce grace to break us open.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. —VICTOR FRANKL”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it. —ALBERT EINSTEIN”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“the same secret we will all know when death is just a breath away: 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

“What ensued will go down in the record of my heart as one of those rare times in life when you finally rest—when you put down the burden of striving and a sense of well-being spreads like honey into every corner of your consciousness. There was nowhere else to go, nothing to do, no one to be—just now, just this precious day, these shared breaths with a friend.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“I accept now that the point of life is not to reach perfection but to befriend the fact that human beings are works in progress.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“Drum sounds rise on the air, and with them, my heart. A voice inside the beat says, I know you are tired, but come. This is the way.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“Just sing me your song. Teach me the words. Tell me what you know.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart. A”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“too—I realized that my only hope was to give up the life that had been, in order to make room for the life that is. I call it my “choiceless choice.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“You are living for the deeper truth hidden in the pain of circumstance—your soul’s lessons packed in your chimidunchik.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“You have your soul—what Frankl called the last of the human freedoms, the freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.” At”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

“did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”
― Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow