"Every time I said to myself: I can’t take this anymore — I was wrong. The truth was that I could and did take it all — and I kept surviving. Surviving again and again made me less afraid of myself, of other people, of life.”
“You have been offered ‘the gift of crisis’. As Kathleen Norris reminds us, the Greek root of the word crisis is 'to sift', as in, to shake out the excesses and leave only what’s important. That’s what crises do. They shake things up until we are forced to hold on to only what matters most. The rest falls away.”
“Be messy and complicated and afraid and show up anyway.”
"Life has valleys and mountains and the people who won’t let themselves experience the agony of being in the valley also don’t get to experience the ecstasy of the mountains."
"The wounded become the healers. Your pain will not be wasted. Trust it. Be brave enough to be still in it and you’ll learn that your pain will NOT consume you. It will become the fire you burn to light and warm the world.”
“These things will be hard, but you can do hard things.”
“You are not supposed to be happy all the time. Life hurts and it’s hard. Not because you’re doing it wrong, but because it hurts for everybody. Don’t avoid the pain. You need it. It’s meant for you. Be still with it, let it come, let it go, let it leave you with the fuel you’ll burn to get your work done on this earth.”