Stephen Cope Quotes

I understood that the attachment to myself and my image ... was actually taking me away from my self, away from this wonderful opportunity to just sit, just breathe, just feel the warm animal of my body, just feel the soft, sultry heat of June. The density of my attachment was making it impossible for me to have a truly satisfying experience of life in my body just as it was in the moment. When under the sway of this obsession, my mind's attention was always in the fantasized future, or the idealized or devalued past - never present to the reality of the moment.

Many of us ordinary folk have tasted these moments of "union" - on the ladder, in the pond, in the jungle, on the hospital bed. In the yogic view, it is in these moments that we know who we really are. We rest in our true nature and know beyond a doubt that everything is OK, and not just OK, but unutterably well. We know that there is nothing to accept and nothing to reject. Life just is as it is.

Know people who have been stuck in doubt their entire lifetime. Each of these unfortunate individuals - some of them my very own friends and family - came at some point to a crossroads. They came to this crossroads and found themselves rooted there, with one foot firmly planted on each side of the intersection. Alas, they never moved off the dime. They procrastinated. Dithered. Finally, they put a folding chair smack in the center of that crossroads and lived there for the rest of their lives. After a while, they forgot entirely that there even was a crossroads - forgot that there was a choice.

behind ourself, concealed - should startle most," wrote Emily Dickinson,

Women living in America in the mid-1800s were the legal property of their husbands. A married woman had no right to property, no right to buy and sell real estate in her own name, no right to bequeath any property whatsoever to an heir. A married woman of the time had no right even to her own children. And, needless to say, she had no right to the vote.

Donald Goellnicht. The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, 1984,

Longing for our idealized images of life separates us from our true selves and from our true callings.

Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.

2. Then (something else we usually forget) "listen for the response." It helps, says Bede, to "actively listen." To turn over every stone in your search for clues to the response. These responses usually come in subtle ways - through

The feminine comes to us in nature. Go outside. Look at the amazing waves of green, of lilacs, of blue mountains. We are in the presence of the manifestation right here. And she's reaching for you.

It is the night sea journey that allows us to free the energy trapped in these cast-off parts - trapped in what Marion would call "the shadow." The goal of this journey is to reunite us with ourselves. Such a homecoming can be surprisingly painful, even brutal. In order to undertake it, we must first agree to exile nothing.

Marion's view allowed her experience with cancer to be full of meaning, to be replete with possibility, and it enabled Death to bring her more deeply into Life. She got the initiation.

In monasteries of old, the monk's dharma, his purpose in life, was said to be this: to support the choir. In Latin, propter chorum. Literally, his life was lived "in support of the choir." He was not a soloist. He was not a diva. He was part of a magnificent whole.