American author & co-founder of Omega Institute
I was just a kid when I started doing this--in my early 20s--and back then what we were talking about was seen as so on the fringe. Yoga, meditation, natural foods, acupuncture -- things like [that] were seen as practically voodoo. And now you can go into any hospital and they'll have massage, and Chinese medicine, and therapy, and a prayer room. And you can go into any little street in any-town, USA, and there will be a yoga center and things like that. So it certainly has infiltrated the culture, and I think that's a good sign.
ELIZABETH LESSER
"Conversation with Elizabeth Lesser", Feminist
Life is like a school; one can learn, one can graduate, one can skip a grade or stay behind.
ELIZABETH LESSER
The New American Spirituality: A Seeker's Guide
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
Spirituality is a brave search for the truth about existence, fearlessly peering into the mysterious nature of life.
ELIZABETH LESSER
The New American Spirituality
We have little control over the outer weather patterns as we make our way through the landscape of a life. But we can become masters of the inner landscape. We can use what happens on the outside to change the way we function on the inside.
ELIZABETH LESSER
Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
There's something in our makeup and in our bodies that really wants to luxuriate more in just the joy of being alive and not always consuming, creating, building. There's something inside of us that wants desperately to stop and experience and just be--not just always do.
ELIZABETH LESSER
"What's Possible: An Interview With Elizabeth Lesser", Omega, May 8, 2012
There is an art to grieving. To grieve well the loss of anyone or anything--a parent, a love, a child, an era, a home, a job--is a creative act. It takes attention and patience and courage. But many of us do not know how to grieve. We were never taught, and we don't see examples of full-bodied grieving around us. Our culture favors the fast-food model of mourning--get over it quick and get back to work; affix the bandage of "closure" and move on.
ELIZABETH LESSER
Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
We're all bozos on the bus, so we might as well sit back and enjoy the ride.
ELIZABETH LESSER
Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
Some will call my dance with the Shaman Lover just a clever name for an extramarital affair. Before I took the plunge with him, I would have had the same reaction. I would have been unsparing in my judgment of those who could be so deceitful, so morally lazy. I would have wondered if they knew the difference between right and wrong. Now I know that "right" without its shadow partner, "wrong," is a brittle and untested idea. 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 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
Fear is a sneaky thief, stealing away precious moments of your life.
ELIZABETH LESSER
Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
Whatever is happening, whatever is changing, whatever is going or not going according to my plans--I release my hold on all of it. I leave behind who I think I am, who I want to be, what I want the world to be. I come home to the great peace of the present moment.
ELIZABETH LESSER
Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
First we love within, then we love the world.
ELIZABETH LESSER
The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure
If we do not suffer a loss all the way to the end, it will wait for us. It won't just dissipate and disappear. Rather, it will fester, and we will experience its sorrow later, in stranger forms.
ELIZABETH LESSER
Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
Meditation practice is like piano scales, basketball drills, ballroom dance class. Practice requires discipline; it can be tedious; it is necessary. After you have practiced enough, you become more skilled at the art form itself. You do not practice to become a great scale player or drill champion. You practice to become a musician or athlete. Likewise, one does not practice meditation to become a great meditator. We meditate to wake up and live, to become skilled at the art of living.
ELIZABETH LESSER
The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure
One of the reasons I love prayer is that it is an antidote to guilt and blame. If we are unhappy with the way we have acted or been treated, instead of stewing in self-recrimination on the one hand, or harboring ill will toward someone else on the other, prayer gives us a way out of the circle of guilt and blame. We bring our painful feelings into the open and say, "I have done wrong," or "I have been wronged." And then we ask for a vaster view--one that contains within it all the forgiveness we need in order to move forward.
ELIZABETH LESSER
Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
Love is the secret you unmask yourself to find; it is the foundation of the spiritual life, the destination where all roads of the journey lead.
ELIZABETH LESSER
The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure
But grief is also a tonic. It is a healing elixir, made of tears that lubricate the heart.
ELIZABETH LESSER
Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
When you approach spirituality as an adventure of being alive, you start as you would any adventure--with a sense of mystery and not-knowing. Instead of searching for answers that make you feel safe, you set out into the vastness of life and death, with a willingness to continually grow. You open up to the possibility that your ordinary life is an extraordinary adventure, and that your joys and sorrows have meaning. Spiritual practice becomes your rudder, offering direction and insight and discretion as you venture into the unknown.
ELIZABETH LESSER
The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure
First we forgive ourselves, then we forgive others and life itself.
ELIZABETH LESSER
The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure
I accept that life is uncertain--that the goal is not to become more certain about anything but to relax more into the mystery of not knowing what will come next. And then, miracle of miracles, out there in the deep and uncertain water, I come into a peaceful knowing--a faithful wisdom that surpasses control and certainty.
ELIZABETH LESSER
Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow