Fred Leland

“Reflection is a process whereby we examine the past to learn from our actions and behaviors. It provides an opportunity to view ourselves as the subject, removed from the immediacy of the moment, and pick apart our thoughts about our previous decisions, actions, and behaviors. In an ongoing conscious transaction with the past, reflective thought involves contemplating both into the past and into the future to determine if past experiences and perceptions align with current reality and future desires.”
― Joe Byerly, My Green Notebook: "Know Thyself" Before Changing Jobs

“In the world that lies ahead, religious pluralism is going to penetrate all cultures. How we live together with different points of view is going to become more and more important. I don’t know whether we can make progress in such a project without a contemplative practice that alerts us to our own biases, prejudices, and self-centered programs for happiness, especially when they trample on other people’s rights and needs.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“How should we handle these afflictive emotions? By facing them, by feeling them. Feelings that have been repressed have to be allowed to pass through our awareness once again in order to be left behind for good. Most of the time, they don’t need psychotherapy; they just need to be evacuated. We might say that we are suffering from acute psychic indigestion, a nausea of a psychological character that is interfering with our mental health and all our relationships.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“The false self is looking for fame, power, wealth, and prestige. The unconscious is very powerful until the divine light of the Holy Spirit penetrates to its depths and reveals its dynamics. Here is where the great teaching of the dark nights of St. John of the Cross corresponds to depth psychology, only the work of the Holy Spirit goes far deeper. Instead of trying to free us from what interferes with our ordinary human life, the Spirit calls us to transformation of our inmost being, and indeed of all our faculties, into the divine way of being and acting.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation