Wayne Muller > Quotes

“Adults who were hurt as children inevitably exhibit a peculiar strength, a profound inner wisdom, and a remarkable creativity and insight. Deep within them - just beneath the wound - lies a profound spiritual vitality, a quiet knowing, a way of perceiving what is beautiful, right, and true. Since their early experiences were so dark and painful, they have spent much of their lives in search of the gentleness, love, and peace they have only imagined in the privacy of their own hearts.”
― Wayne Muller, Legacy of the Heart: The Spiritual Advantage of a Painful Childhood

“In that inevitable, excruciatingly human moment, we are offered a powerful choice. This choice is perhaps one of the most vitally important choices we will ever make, and it determines the course of our lives from that moment forward. The choice is this: Will we interpret this loss as so unjust, unfair, and devastating that we feel punished, angry, forever and fatally wounded-- or, as our heart, torn apart, bleeds its anguish of sheer, wordless grief, will we somehow feel this loss as an opportunity to become more tender, more open, more passionately alive, more grateful for what remains?”
― Wayne Muller, A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough

“When we live without listening to the timing of things, when we live and work in twenty-four-hour shifts without rest – we are on war time, mobilized for battle. Yes, we are strong and capable people, we can work without stopping, faster and faster, electric lights making artificial day so the whole machine can labor without ceasing. But remember: No living thing lives like this. There are greater rhythms, seasons and hormonal cycles and sunsets and moonrises and great movements of seas and stars. We are part of the creation story, subject to all its laws and rhythms.”
― Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives

“Some of us have a hard time believing that we are actually able to face our own pain. We have convinced ourselves that our pain is too deep, too frightening, something to avoid at all costs. Yet if we finally allow ourselves to feel the depth of that sadness and gently let it break our hearts, we may come to feel a great freedom, a genuine sense of release and peace, because we have finally stopped running away from ourselves and from the pain that lives within us.”
― Wayne Muller, Legacy of the Heart: The Spiritual Advantage of a Painful Childhood

“Your life is not a problem to be solved but a gift to be opened.”
― Wayne Muller

“All life requires a rhythm of rest. . .
There is a rhythm in the way day dissolves into night, and night into morning. There is a rhythm as the active growth of spring and summer is quieted by the necessary dormancy of fall and winter. There is a tidal rhythm, a deep, eternal conversation between the land and the great sea. ”
― Wayne Muller

“If busyness can become a kind of violence, we do not have to stretch our perception very far to see that Sabbath time – effortless, nourishing rest – can invite a healing of this violence. When we consecrate a time to listen to the still, small voices, we remember the root of inner wisdom that makes work fruitful. We remember from where we are most deeply nourished, and see more clearly the shape and texture of the people and things before us.”
― Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives

“Sabbath requires surrender. If we only stop when we are finished with all our work, we will never stop, because our work is never completely done. With every accomplishment there arises a new responsibility... Sabbath dissolves the artificial urgency of our days, because it liberates us from the need to be finished.”
― Wayne Muller

“Like a path through the forest, Sabbath creates a marker for ourselves so, if we are lost, we can find our way back to our center."
— Wayne Muller (Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives)”
― Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives

“If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath - our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us.”
― Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives

“All life has emptiness at it's core it is the quiet hollow reed through which the wind of God blows and makes the music that is our life.”
― Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives

“Just because we are working hard does not mean we are making anything happen.”
― Wayne Muller

“Sabbath is more than the absence of work; it is not just a day off, when we catch up on television or errands. It is the presence of something that arises when we consecrate a period of time to listen to what is most deeply beautiful, nourishing, or true. It is time consecrated with our attention, our mindfulness, honoring those quiet forces of grace or spirit that sustain and heal us.”
― Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives

“Like a path through the forest, Sabbath creates a marker for ourselves so, if we are lost, we can find our way back to our center.”
― Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives

“If we believe that this particular pain is the one that will push the baby out of the womb and into our arms, we somehow try to make a place for that pain in our heart. Pain is still there: excruciating, terrible pain. But at the moment of birth, we rarely feel betrayal or rage; we somehow feel that this is simply pain that has come with life.”
― Wayne Muller, Legacy of the Heart: The Spiritual Advantage of a Painful Childhood

“Emptiness is the pregnant void out of which all creation springs. But many of us fear emptiness. We prefer to remain...surrounded by things...we imagine are subject to our control.”
― Wayne Muller

“Mark Nepo calls “experience greed”—namely, an insidious grasping not so much for material possessions but rather for a seemingly benign cacophony of socially active networks, service opportunities, ecological adventures, community activities, helpful organizations, sacred gatherings, and spiritual experiences.”
― Wayne Muller, A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough

“A "successful" life has become a violent enterprise. We make war on our own bodies, pushing them beyond their limits; war on our children, because we cannot find enough time to be with them when they are hurt and afraid and need our company; war on our spirit, because we are too preoccupied to listen to the quiet voices that seek to nourish and refresh us; war on our communities, because we are fearfully protecting what we have, and do not feel safe enough to be kind and generous; war on the earth, because we cannot take the time to place our feet on the ground and allow it to feed us, to taste its blessings and give thanks.”
― Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives

“There is more to life,” said Gandhi, “than increasing its speed.”
― Wayne Muller, A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough

“Mother Teresa who said, “We can do no great things, only small things, with great love.”
― Wayne Muller, A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough

“Accepting who we are is a practice of non-harming. Sadly, much self-help literature contains seeds of harm: We are urged to remake ourselves into someone who will be spiritually or psychologically acceptable, and that acceptance is conditional on our performance in the areas of therapy, growth, or meditation. We are still not accepting ourselves unconditionally, just as we are in this moment, with a full and joyful heart. A more merciful practice begins with acceptance. It begins with the assumption that we were never broken, never defective. By surrendering into a deep acceptance of our own nature—rather than by tearing apart who we are—we actually make more room for genuine, rich, merciful, playful growth and change. If we feel our fundamental strength, creativity, and wisdom, then change is not frightening at all. Things simply fall away when they are ready, making room for the rich harvest underneath.”
― Wayne Muller, How Then, Shall We Live?: Four Simple Questions That Reveal the Beauty and Meaning of Our Lives

“We equate choice with freedom, but they are not the same.”
― Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives

“Our culture confuses the pain of isolation with some impossible ideal of “self-sufficiency,” and then celebrates it.”
― Wayne Muller, A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough

“Life is not a problem to be solved, it is a gift to be opened.”
― Wayne Muller, A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough

“The more spacious and larger our fundamental nature, the more bearable the pains in living.”
― Wayne Muller

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― Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives

“We are called to be strong companions and clear mirrors to one another...”
― Wayne Muller