Self-actualization is not a sudden happening or even the permanent result of long effort. The eleventh-century Tibetan Buddhist poet-saint Milarupa suggested: “Do not expect full realization; simply practice every day of your life.” A healthy person is not perfect but perfectible, not a done deal but a work in progress. Staying healthy takes discipline, work, and patience, which is why our life is a journey and perforce a heroic one.
David Richo, How to be an Adult in Relationships
One of the greatest disciplines of existence, especially as we grow older, is the discipline of innocence and of keeping the sense of wonder and enlargement and surprise alive in your own heart. And the moment that you stop, in a sense, living from your innocence is the moment where you start to feel besieged by existence and the moment you need defences and walls. And no matter how high you build these walls, the encroaching sea of existence will actually scour them away. And you will somehow be revealed. But because you lived in exile from what is innocent and real about yourself, what frightens you most in life is your own happiness. I think one of the most difficult things in life is claiming your own happiness.
David Whyte, The Creative Imperative
“I have arrived” is our practice. When we breathe in, we take refuge in our in-breath, and we say “I have arrived”. When we make a step, we take refuge in our step, and we say “I have arrived”. This is not a statement to yourself or to another person. “I have arrived” means I have stopped running, I have arrived in the present moment, because only the present moment contains life.
Stopping running is a very important practice . We have been running all our life: we believe that peace happiness and success are present in some other place and time. We don’t know that everything – peace happiness and stability – should be looked for in the here and now. This is the address of life – the intersection of here and now.
Thich Nhat Hahn, Happiness
With twenty-one words, carefully chosen and artfully woven, May Sarton evokes the quest for vocation – at least, my quest for vocation – with candor and precision:
Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people’s faces.
What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been! How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity – the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation.It is a strange gift, this birthright gift of self. Accepting it turns out to be even more demanding than attempting to become someone else!
Parker Palmer, Let your Life Speak
This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe to anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing is happening there. But if you have a sacred place, and use it, and take advantage of it, something eventually will happen….
Most of our action is economically or socially determined and does not come out of our life… the claims of the environment upon you are so great, that you hardly know where the hell you are! What is it you intended? You’re always doing things that are required of you; this minute, that minute, another minute! Where is your “bliss station”?” Try to find it! Put on the music that you really love… or the book you want to read. Get it done! And have a place in which to do it! There you’ll get the “thou” feeling of life. If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a track that has been there all the while, waiting for you. And the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth; Sacrifice and Bliss.
A multitude of forces in this world certainly conspires to divide us against ourselves, our power and authenticity, our voices, even our ability to simply listen to ourselves and believe what we hear…”Nature places a simple constraint on those who leave the flock and go their own way” say David Bayles and Ted Orland in Art and Fear. “They get eaten! In society it is a bit more complicated, but the admonition stands: Avoiding the unknown has considerable survival value. Society and nature…tend to produce guarded creatures” The upshot is that we often end up trading our authenticity for what we perceive as survival, terrified to swap security for our heart’s deep desires, which is the imperative of all callings and one of the dominant fears in responding to them. Saying yes to the calls tends to place you on a path that half of yourself thinks does not make a bit of sense, but the other half knows your life won’t make sense without.
George Michael Leroy, Calling: Finding and Following an Authentic Life
