檳榔嶼

- Love heals. When we are wounded in the place where we would know love, it is difficult to imagine that love really has the power to change everything. No matter what has happened in our past, when we open our hearts to love we can live as if born again, not forgetting the past but seeing it in a new way, letting it live inside us in a new way.
- James Baldwin, <Next Time> :
  - people cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.
- Growing up is, at heart, the process of learning to take responsiblity for whatever in your life. To choose growth is to embrace a love that heals.
- The healing power of mind and heart is always present because we have the capacity to enew our spirits endlessly, to restore the soul.
- At times we will all be confronted with suffering, an unexpected illness, a loss. That pain will come whether we choose it or not and not one of us can escape it. The presence of pain in our lives is not an indicator of dysfunction.
- In functional families individuals face conflict, contradictions, times of unhappiness, and suffering just like dysfunctional families do; the difference lies in how these issues are confronted and resolved, in how everyone copes in moments of crisis.
- John Bradshaw, <<A Revolutionary Way of Self-Discovery>>
  - A functional healthy family is one in which all the members are fully functional and all the relationships between the members are fully functional. As human beings,all family members have available to them the use of all their human power. They use these powers to cooperate, individuate and to get their collective and individual needs met. A functional family is the healthy soil out of which individuals can become mature human beings."
- We longed to be rescued because we did not know how to save ourselves.
- We could not choose healing because we were not sure we could ever mend, that the broken bits and pieces could ever be put together again.
  - We longed to be rescued because we did not know how to save ourselves.
  - No one could give an individual salvation, that we had to choose it for ourselves.
- Making the primal choice to be saved does not mean we do not need support and help with problems and difficulties. It is simply that the initial gesture of taking responsibility for our well-being, wherein we confess to our brokenness, our woundedness, and open ourselves to salvation, must be made by the individual. This act of opening the heart enables us to receive the healing offered us by those who care.
- Worship of individualism has in part led us to the unhealthy culture of narcissism that is so all pervasive in our society.
- Healing is an act of communion.
- Saint Teresa of Avila : "There is no need to go to heaven in order to speak with one's Eternal Father or find delight in Him. Nor is there any need to shout. However softly we speak, He is near enough to hear us.... All one need doo is go into solitude and look at Him within oneself, and not turn away from so good a Guest but with great humility speak to Him..."
  - Prayer is an exercise that strengthens the soul's power.
  - Prayer allows each person a private place of confession. Confession is good for the soul.
- In communion with divine spirit we can claim the space of accountability and renew our commitment to that transformation of spirit that opens the heart and prepares us to love.
- After we have made the choice to be healed in love, faith that transformation will come gives us the peace of mind and heart that is necessary when the soul seeks revolution. It is difficult to wait.
  - No doubt that that is why biblical scriptures urge the seeker to learn how to wait, for waiting renews our strength.
  - When we surrender to the "wait" we allow changes to emerge within us without anticipation or struggle.
  - In Buddhist terms this practice of surrender, of letting go, makes it possible for us to enter a space of compassion where we can feel sympathy for ourselves and others. That compassion awakens us to the healing power of service.
- Love in action is always about service, what we do to enhance spiritual growth. Serving others is as fruitful a path to the heart as any other therapeutic practice. To truly serve, we must always empty the ego so that space can exist for us to recognize the needs of others and be capable of fulfilling them.
- To know compassion fully is to engage in a process of forgiveness and recognition that enables us to release all the baggage we carry that serves as a barrier to healing. Compassion opens the way for individuals to feel empathy for others without judgement.
  - Judging others increases our alienation. When we judge we are less able to forgive. The absence of forgiveness keeps us mired in shame. Shame breaks and weakens us, keeping us away from the wholeness healing offers.
  - Embedded in our shame is always a sense of being unworthy.
- Without conscious forgiveness there can be no genuine reconciliation. Making amends both to ourselves and to others is the gift compassion and forgiveness offers us.
  - Casarjian, <<Forgiveness>> : "Even small acts of forgiveness always have significant ramifications at a personal level. Even small acts of forgiveness contribute to one's sense of trust in oneself and the potential of others; they contribute to a human spirit that is fundamentally about and optimistic rather than pessimistic or defeated; they contribute to knowing oneself and others as potentially power people who can choose to lovingly create, versus seeing humans as basically selfish, destructive and sinners."
- Without hope, we cannot return to love. Being positive, living in a permanent state of hopefulness, renews the spirit.
- Cynicism is the greatest barrier to love. It is rooted in doubt and despair. Fear intensifies our doubt.
  - There is no fear in love.
  - Perfect love casts our fear.
  - As one gives and receive love, fear is let go.
- The transformative power of love is not fully embraced in our society because we often wrongly believe that torment and anguish are our "natural" condition.
- As our cultural awareness of the ways we are seduced away from love, away from the knowledge that love heals gains recognition, our anguish intensifies.