Jeff Brown > Quotes

“Sometimes people walk away from love because it is so beautiful that it terrifies them. Sometimes they leave because the connection shines a bright light on their dark places and they are not ready to work them through. Sometimes they run away because they are not developmentally prepared to merge with another- they have more individuation work to do first. Sometimes they take off because love is not a priority in their lives- they have another path and purpose to walk first. Sometimes they end it because they prefer a relationship that is more practical than conscious, one that does not threaten the ways that they organize reality. Because so many of us carry shame, we have a tendency to personalize love's leavings, triggered by the rejection and feelings of abandonment. But this is not always true. Sometimes it has nothing to do with us. Sometimes the one who leaves is just not ready to hold it safe. Sometimes they know something we don't- they know their limits at that moment in time. Real love is no easy path- readiness is everything. May we grieve loss without personalizing it. May we learn to love ourselves in the absence of the lover.”
― Jeff Brown

“You don’t measure love in time. You measure love in transformation. Sometimes the longest connections yield very little growth, while the briefest of encounters change everything. The heart doesn’t wear a watch - it’s timeless. It doesn’t care how long you know someone. It doesn’t care if you had a 40 year anniversary if there is no juice in the connection. What the heart cares about is resonance. Resonance that opens it, resonance that enlivens it, resonance that calls it home. And when it finds it, the transformation begins…”
― Jeff Brown

“So called 'late-bloomers' get a bad rap. Sometimes the people with the greatest potential often take the longest to find their path because their sensitivity is a double edged sword- it lives at the heart of their brilliance, but it also makes them more susceptible to life's pains. Good thing we aren't being penalized for handing in our purpose late. The soul doesn't know a thing about deadlines.”
― Jeff Brown, Love It Forward

“To find your way, you will need courage. Lots of it. If you don’t have it, fake it until you make it. Soulshapers are artists, but they are also warriors. It is no easy feat to shape the inner world. You need the heart of a lion to overcome the odds. You need to fight for your right to the light.”
― Jeff Brown, Soulshaping: A Journey of Self-Creation

“Too many of us move through our lives with our true selves buried below layers of repressed emotion. With so much energy channeled toward sustaining the repression, there is little left over for the deeper questions. The consequences of our evasion are profound. Our stockpiles toxify into a cache of weapons that turn inward against the self: quick fix, long suffering. As Rumi said, “Most people guard against the fire, and so end up in it.” This is the power of then. If we don’t deal with our stuff, it deals with us.”
― Jeff Brown, Soulshaping: A Journey of Self-Creation

“Moving forward sometimes demands that we live lost, knowingly surrendering our attachment to who we think we are, voluntarily stumbling around in the dark with little to guide us.”
― Jeff Brown, Soulshaping: A Journey of Self-Creation

“That’s the thing about great love. It elevates everything around it. You walk through a forest together and it becomes a great temple. You eat a meal together and you sit at God’s banquet table. You merge your bodies and all heaven breaks loose. That’s why we can’t stop singing about love. Every verse is a cry for wholeness.”
― Jeff Brown, An Uncommon Bond

“Amazing how we push away what we most want to hold close. Humans.”
― Jeff Brown, An Uncommon Bond

“Listen my friend, if one person doesn’t want the relationship, then it’s simply not a fit. No sense trying to figure out why they don’t want it. No sense blaming it on their commitment issues. No sense waiting around for them to realize they wanted it after all. Because it doesn’t matter why they don’t want it. What matters is that you are met heart-on by a fully engaged partner. If they don’t want it, then you don’t want it, because you don’t want to be with someone who isn’t there for it fully.
That’s the thing about love relationship— it’s an agreement that has to be signed by both souls. If one doesn’t sign, then nothing has been lost. If it’s not a fit for them, it’s not a fit for you either.”
― Jeff Brown

“Sometimes love finds you when it’s ready. And when you’re ready too. How that happens is anybody’s guess. Love is the great mystery stew, its secrets well kept, its ingredients known to providence alone. While both people are being prepared, marinated, skewered,cooked to readiness in the fires of life, the cosmic alchemist is turning the pot, reverently preparing the base for the lovers who will meld into it. Only God knows when the stew is ready to be served. Divine timing, Divine dining…”
― Jeff Brown

“The universe presents us with endless opportunities to synchronize our path with our truth.”
― Jeff Brown, Soulshaping: A Journey of Self-Creation

“What seems like weakness to a survivalist is actually a sign of strength to a spiritual warrior who longs to be authentic at all costs.”
― Jeff Brown, Soulshaping: A Journey of Self-Creation

“There can be tremendous loneliness in the crossover to a soul-centered life. Walking through uncharted territory often means walking alone. This is particularly true in the transition stages before we find a conscious soulpod. It can be like primary school all over again—who will be my first real friends?”
― Jeff Brown, Soulshaping: A Journey of Self-Creation

“I had often wondered how a single human heart could hold great love—it is so tiny, and love so vast. The answer is simple: it doesn’t. It spills over. It becomes the everything.”
― Jeff Brown, An Uncommon Bond

“Sometimes I feel crazy being this dramatic about a love that only lasted a few months and...” She interrupted me. “Nothing crazy about it. You don’t measure love like that. You measure it by its effects. It doesn’t matter how long it lasted. It’s how much it grows you that matters.”
― Jeff Brown, An Uncommon Bond

“If there is any need that is perpetually unmet on this planet, it is the need to feel seen. To feel seen in our humanity, in our vulnerability, in our beautiful imperfection. When we are held safe in that, a key turns inside of our hearts, freeing us from our isolation, transforming our inner world. If there is anything we can offer each other, it is the gift of sight. “I see you”-perhaps the most important words we can utter to another. I see you…”
― Jeff Brown

“At some point, a wave of repressed emotion broke through my armor, demanding expression and release. As I plumbed the depths of my despair, I shed one layer of pain after another. My inner world was like a series of reservoirs, each holding a different wave of emotional memory behind them. When one reservoir burst, another soon appeared. This phase went on for many months—the first of many essential release phases.”
― Jeff Brown, An Uncommon Bond

“There was no question in my mind. This state of complete and utter love is our collective birthright, the state we are born to inhabit, the way of being that is eagerly awaiting humanity at the end of a long, perilous journey. We either walk toward love as a way of being, or we walk away from it. There are only two directions. This decision shapes our life and our world.”
― Jeff Brown, An Uncommon Bond

“Society was built on a foundation of fear, not authenticity. I get too numb when I join the world. I lose my openness, my access to the divine.”
― Jeff Brown, An Uncommon Bond

“We get more compassionate as we evolve. More humble. More subtle. More aware of how little we know. We don’t get superior. We don’t form cults of personality. We don’t think we have it all worked out. If we imagine ourselves ‘all that’, then we have actually devolved. I trust the ones who know a little something but don’t know a whole lot, more than the ones who ‘know it all’. I trust the ones who realize how far they have yet to travel. We have so much more to learn. All of us. Let’s walk together, side by side.”
― Jeff Brown

“There is beauty outside of beauty and there is hope within hopelessness.”
― Jeff Brown, An Uncommon Bond

“There are few things more confusing than going to war with parents who are diminishing you, particularly when you are very young. If you fight for your dignity, you risk losing the love you need from them to develop. If you don’t fight back, you lose your self-respect”
― Jeff Brown, An Uncommon Bond

“You don’t measure love in time. You measure love in transformation.”
― Jeff Brown, An Uncommon Bond

“The Unavailable Available Pattern.” It’s where you convince yourself (and others) that you are available for relationship, but you always find a way to stop short. That stopping short can manifest in many ways: choosing unavailable people, looking for excuses to run, focusing on a lover’s imperfections rather than their appealing qualities, getting lost in the excitement of ecstatic possibility until the first glimpse of real vulnerability sends you packing. It’s the addiction to possibility and the fear of intimacy all rolled into one.”
― Jeff Brown, An Uncommon Bond

“I look forward to the day when we can meet one another in our true nakedness, stripped free of unresolved emotions, pain-induced projections, the distortions of duality. For too long we have been on opposite sides of the river, the bridge between our hearts washed away by a flood of pain. But the time has come to construct a new bridge, one that comes into being with each step we take, one that is fortified with benevolent intentions and authentic self-revealing. As we walk toward one”
― Jeff Brown, Love It Forward

“So many of us know the moment when a love connection is over, but few of us stop then. I am not talking about reactive endings. I am talking about the deep intuitive knowing that it is time to move on. Yet we are either too afraid, or too stubborn, or too concerned about the other’s feelings to make our move. But it is perilous to delay, both because we suffer in the wrong connection, and because we hold two souls back from finding the next step on their individual paths. Whether there is another love waiting around the next corner, or whether it is simply time to be alone, no one benefits by staying in an outgrown union. We have to notice the moment of ending and take it to heart. Everyone’s expansion depends on it.”
― Jeff Brown, Love It Forward

“With one gaze into her eyes, all words fell away. And it didn’t matter at all. In this place of hearticulation, there was no need for words. This love spoke a language all its own, a grammarless lexicon of longing and union. Who needs syllables when you can hear each other’s souls?”
― Jeff Brown, An Uncommon Bond

“Unconscious consumerism preys on the uncentered. Once we lose touch with our center, we don’t know who we are anymore, and marketers fill the void by telling us who we ought to be.”
― Jeff Brown, Soulshaping: A Journey of Self-Creation

“Excessive analysis perpetuates emotional paralysis. Knowing our issues is not the same as healing our issues. In fact, knowing is often a willful act, entirely incongruent with the experience of surrender required to heal. I have known many people who could name their patterns and issues with great insight, but their actions didn’t change a bit. The key to the transformation of challenging patterns and wounds is to heal them from the inside out. Not to analyze them, not to dissociate and dishonor them by calling them the ‘pain body’, not to watch them like an astronomer staring at a faraway planet through a telescope, but to jump right into the heart of them, encouraging their expression and release, stitching them into new possibilities with the thread of love. You want to transform your issues and patterns? Heal your heart.”
― Jeff Brown, Love It Forward

“Look, I told you before—you can’t heal your heart with your mind. You can only heal your heart with your heart.”
― Jeff Brown, An Uncommon Bond