Spiritual Quotes and Gems

Fear is just a liar running out of breath...

- Hillsong

This is a bit longer than a quote, but I thought of here when I read it and it felt like it belonged here.

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THE TURBULENCE OF HEALING

Healing from trauma - which I am defining here as chronically suppressed emotion - can sometimes feel like going through severe turbulence on a night flight. When your squished-down grief, terror, shame and rage decide to break through the ego’s defences and surge into conscious awareness, when you start to un-freeze and contact the raw and inconvenient truth of what’s inside you, it can feel really disorienting, uncomfortable, can feel unsafe and unnatural, can feel like you’ve lost control, can feel like it will never end and you’ll be stuck in darkness forever. But the turbulence is perfectly safe, and normal, and healthy! And it will pass, and your flight WILL arrive at its destination, and you WILL heal.

In the midst of the turbulence of emotion, it’s easy to get lost in thinking and fantasy, in fast-forwarding the movie, leaving the present and imagining the future. “This is too much”. “It’s going to get worse”. “I’m going to die”. “Something is going horribly wrong”. “I am broken”. “I need to get off this damn flight...”

But emotional turbulence is not a sign of your failure or brokenness, just as actual turbulence on a flight is not a sign that you have gone off course, or the pilot has lost control, or the airplane is broken, or the destination is now impossible to reach.

Emotion is always safe, even if it sometimes feels unsafe in its intensity. The body can be trusted absolutely. Intensity is not inherently dangerous. Planes are built to withstand even the most extreme turbulence. And so you learn to breathe through the discomfort, and lean in to the rawness of the moment, and this is how even the deepest trauma is ultimately healed. Through love. Through deep acceptance. Through faith. Through penetrating even our most profound discomfort with a loving awareness. Through coming out of our minds, out of our futures, and into our present bodies...

Trust the turbulence, friend; it means you’re already soaring.

- Jeff Foster (at 37,000 feet )

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Wikiquote

Skeezyks, I hope you won't mind my addressing this to you, but I've been thinking about this quote. (Promise, no laughing!)

I have this thing that happens every time I say to myself, "I think I'd like to do that." (Whatever THAT is). Immediately comes this adamant little voice that says, "You CAN'T do that. You'll never be able to do that." So I start out in a state of discouragement and quickly lose steam, and sure enough, I can't do it.

I kept thinking I could get rid of that voice some day, but lately as I've tried to work with it I've realized that it is pretty tenacious and will probably be a (totally unwanted) part of me until I shuffle off this mortal coil.

Tell me, do you think this would qualify as one of those inner demons to embrace?

Thanks for your time, Skeezyks. I always enjoy your posts.

No matter how tall or short a person may be, her legs are always precisely long enough to reach the ground.

Yes!

Follow the breath. Breathing is the path to you and me the way we always have been.

Author unknown

Everything you need, your courage, strength, compassion and love; everything you need is already within you

"There is a divine beauty in learning. To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps" — elie weisel

Good things come to those who Believe, Better things come to those who are Patient, and the best Things come to those who Don't Give up

Yes!!