Thomas Moore gets it

"I’m tempted to say that every illness is primarily a soul malady and only secondarily a physical problem. In sickness, the soul comes into the foreground. It asks for attention. If its wounds are addressed, then perhaps the physical manifestations will no longer be necessary. But care of the soul is not a surface activity; nor is it easy. It demands that you finally confront yourself and decide to live fully rather than halfheartedly. It asks that you learn to love with your whole heart and get over any self-pity or cynicism that may still remain in your heart. It asks that you transcend yourself in genuine concern for others and in a feeling of community that knows no boundaries. This is not an easy task, but it is the only way, finally, to health."
- Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul

Friday quotation (on a Sunday)

"What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing."
- Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

Friday quotation

"If we are open only to discoveries which will accord with what we know already, we may as well stay shut."
- Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Friday quotation (on a Sunday)

"The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see it."
- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Friday quotation

"When one is pretending the entire body revolts."
- Anaïs Nin

Friday quotation

"We tend to be particularly unaware that we are thinking virtually all the time. The incessant stream of thoughts flowing through our minds leaves us very little respite for inner quiet. And we leave precious little room for ourselves anyway just to be, without having to run around doing things all the time. Our actions are all too frequently driven rather than undertaken in awareness, driven by those perfectly ordinary thoughts and impulses that run through the mind like a coursing river, if not a waterfall. We get caught up in the torrent and it winds up submerging our lives as it carries us to places we may not wish to go and may not even realize we are headed for."
- Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are (Hyperion, 1994)

Friday quotation

"As I've watched as well as participated in this process, I've come to believe that virtually all illness, if not psychosomatic in foundation, has a definite psychosomatic component. Recent technological innovations have allowed us to examine the molecular basis of the emotions, and to begin to understand how the molecules of our emotions share intimate connections with, and are indeed inseparable from, our physiology. It is the emotions, I have come to see, that link mind and body."
- Candace Pert, Molecules of Emotion (Scribner, 1997)

Friday quotation

"The body-mind, as a dynamic field of energy, is inherently attuned to the larger patterns and flows of the universe. Out of this attunement emerge sudden and surprising insights, creative inspirations and discoveries, and larger, transpersonal qualities, such as clarit, compassion, joy, or spontaneity."
-- John Welwood, Towards a Psychology of Awakening (Shambala, 2002)