Jennifer > Recent Status Updates

Some of this is just really basic for someone that has dealt with this. The checklist on page 48 is heart rending merely for what it is.

So there is an unnecessary brain tumor joke on page 10. Awesome guys thanks for that.

"Then the warrior realizes that these repeated experiences have but one aim: to teach him what he has not yet learned. He always finds a different solution for each repeated battle, and he does not consider his failures to be mistakes but, rather, as steps along the path to a meeting with himself."

"A warrior of light often finds that certain moments repeat themselves. He is often faced by the same problems and situations and, seeing these difficult situations return, he grows depressed, thinking that he is incapable of making any progress in life.
'I've been through all this before,' he says to his heart.
'Yes, you have been through all this before,' replies his heart. 'But you have never been beyond it.'

"...in ancient times the word virgin(i) had a different meaning than it does now. It didn't mean being chaste or physically untouched. Rather, being a virgin meant belonging to oneself."

"A woman of power becomes a genius in desperate situations; she is an improvisational artist. Rather than bypassing or shrinking from situations where her consciousness is needed, she speaks and acts, relying on something inside herself. All improvisational artists know that you must trust yourself. To improvise you must value your own knowing."

"No longer must we be either mystics or prophets: now we can and must claim our experience both of God/ess and of the call to bring about justice as two interweaving threads of one common experience, the experience of the mystic/prophet. An introverted mysticism is a truncated mysticism, and a mere social reformer is no prophet at all."

"Ultimately our experience needs to become a force for compassion and justice in the world. We must bear witness to what we have experienced."

There is still a tone of ownership I am uncomfortable with on this page - a cultural disconnect, I feel. I'm not sure how else to describe it.

"What we need is a potent, forceful power, yes, but one that is also compassionate, that enables others as well."

"First we need to find this soul of our own. We must wake up, journey, name, challenge, shed, reclaim, ground, and heal. We need to follow our Big Wisdom, the thread that spins out of our feminine core. And then, then(i) we find the means - the authority, the solidity, the internal coagulation - that allows us to voice this soul."

"Three things, she said: something to say, the ability to express it, and, finally, the courage to express it at all." ~Maya Angelou on what it takes to be a writer.

"...the offender, and the suffering, and rising to a higher love. It is an act of letting go so that we ourselves can go on."

"Perhaps it's possible to forgive in one grand swoop, but I didn't experience it that way. I did it in bits and pieces, one stage at a time. The dance began the process.
You forgive what you can, when you can. That's all you can do.
To forgive does not mean overlooking the offense and pretending it never happened. Forgiveness means releasing our rage and our need to retaliate, no longer dwelling on the offense,..."

"What is ultimately needed is balance-divine symbols that reflect masculine and feminine and a genuine marriage of the masculine and feminine in each of us. Meinrad Craighead in her book 'The Mother's Song' refers to this. Her Catholic heritage and her deep foundation in God the Mother came together, she says. "The two movements are not in conflict, they simply water different layers of my soul."^60..."

"Outrage is love's wild and unacknowledged sister. She is the one who recognizes feminine injury, stands on the roof, and announces it if she has to, then jumps into the fray to change it. She is the one grappling with her life, reconfiguring it, struggling to find liberating ways of relating. She is the one who never bores God or Goddess."

"The transfiguration of anger is a movement from rage to outrage. Rage implies an internalized emotion, a tempest within. Rage, or what might be called untransfigured anger, can become a calcified bitterness. What rage wants and needs is to move outward toward positive social purpose, to become a creative force or energy that changes the conditions that created it. It needs to become out-rage."

"Either way, it was only now as we made our journeys back to authentic feminine ground that we could appreciate and forgive their wounds and deficits, their aches and struggles to be themselves in a culture that was arranged against them."

"Others of us had not experienced such devastating relationships with our mothers while growing up, but instead, seeing the autonomy that was the prerogative of males, we had identified with our fathers and disidentified with our mothers."

"...will have to redefine the feminine."

"Some of the women's experiences with their mothers were so decimating that these women had had terrible difficulty embracing the notion of a Divine Mother. As they told their stories, it became clear that when the idea of the feminine is mediated to daughters through mothers who uphold patriarchal values, who are severed from their own feminine ground, and who are driven by their own inner bishops, the daughters..."

"Everyone has known something in lovemaking of the great lovemaking of the universe. Everyone who has ever had one tender orgasm with someone else has known something of the divine. The divine is in everything foaming around everywhere. We're all in connection with it, but we've not been given permission...We've not been taught how to understand our glimpses and how to follow them." (Closet Mystic, Andrew Harvey 94).

"The only way I have ever understood, broken free, emerged, healed, forgiven, flourished, and grown powerful is by asking the hardest questions and then living the answers through opening up to my own terror and transmuting it into creativity. I have gotten nowhere by retreating into hand-me-down sureties or resisting the tensions that truth ignited."

"When a woman crosses a threshold, she knows that something inside her has shifted, if only slightly. She knows that she is on a different trajectory."

"I mourned the gaping holes. During those isolated days I sometimes stood before the mirror, inwardly saying the first of many goodbyes to the woman I had been."

"But first, before the reshaping, the re-creation, there is the blank, stunned space of feeling stripped and peeled. We are not who we used to be and not who we will become. We are in the terrain of "unmeaning." And we are alone in it."

"[Women] have to come to understand ourselves as central, not peripheral, before anything real can happen. We have to depend on ourselves....This cannot be done against(i) men, and that's the real problem....It cannot be woman against(i) man. It has to be woman finding her true self with or without man, but not against man.citation61" Citation: May Sarton, The House by the Sea, 224-25.

But then we get to the final sentence of the chapter: "Someone brought a little bit of the rice paddy to the South Bronx and explained to her the miracle of meaningful work." O_o I mean, which group to even be offended for first? Phrasing!

Ok, from page 313-315 I take serious issue with the author's phrasing. First, he suggests struggling American students can succeed - if simply pushed as hard as South Koreans with a similar number of school days (paraphrasing), and then he adds a quote about the Korean pilots (earlier chapter) ditching cultural constraints...how do you have both of those in one conclusion?