Wayne Muller famous quotes

When we come close to those things that break us down, we touch those things that also break us open. And in that breaking open, we uncover our true nature.
-- Wayne Muller

#Loss #Break

What if the healing of the world utterly depends on the ten-thousand invisible kindnesses we offer simply and quietly throughout the pilgrimage of each human life?
-- Wayne Muller

#Kindness #Healing #What If

For thousands of years we have gathered in circle--around fires, around bodies, around altars--because we can't do this alone.
-- Wayne Muller

#Circles #Fire #Years

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

#Powerful #Grief #Grateful

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

#Strong #Stars #War

We are called to be strong companions and clear mirrors to one another, to seek those who reflect with compassion and a keen eye how we are doing, whether we seem centered or off course ... we need the nourishing company of others to create the circle needed for growth, freedom and healing.
-- Wayne Muller

#Strong #Eye #Healing

The last place we tend to look for healing is within ourselves.
-- Wayne Muller

#Healing #Lasts #Looks

What we love and what captures our curiosity draws us forward into some place of great destiny.
-- Wayne Muller

#Destiny #Curiosity #Capture

Because we do not rest we lose our way...Poisoned by the hypnotic belief that good things come only through unceasing determination and tireless effort, we never truly rest. And for want of rest, our lives are in danger.
-- Wayne Muller

#Determination #Effort #Want

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

#Cancer #Heart #Pneumonia

Meditation helps me feel the shape, the texture of my inner life. Here, in the quiet, I can begin to taste what Buddhists would call my true nature, what Jews call the still, small voice, what Christians call the holy spirit.
-- Wayne Muller

#Christian #Buddhist #Voice

To pray is no small thing. It is nothing less than a sacred pilgrimage into the heart of the whole world.
-- Wayne Muller

#Prayer #Heart #World

Gratitude invites a sense of sufficiency.
-- Wayne Muller

#Gratitude #Sufficiency

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

#Running #Pain #Believe

As Gandhi wisely points out, even as we serve others we are working on ourselves; every act, every word, every gesture of genuine compassion naturally nourishes our own hearts as well. It is not a question of who is healed first. When we attend to ourselves with compassion and mercy, more healing is made available for others. And when we serve others with an open and generous heart, great healing comes to us.
-- Wayne Muller

#Healing #Heart #Compassion

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

#Way #Path #Forests

Can it then be that what we call the 'self' is fluid and elastic? It evolves, strikes a different balance with every new breath.
-- Wayne Muller

#Self #Balance #Different

As we explore the nature of our gift, our goal is to move toward this kind of giving: cheerful giving that flows gently and easily, kingly giving that flows surely from who we are. As we encounter the questions—Who are we ? What do we love ?—the gift we bring will be easy, because our gift naturally emerges from who we are. The offering we bring is ourselves, just as we are. Our gift is our true nature. There can be no greater gift than this.
-- Wayne Muller

#Moving #Offering #Giving

With every breath, the possibility of a new aspect of self arises.
-- Wayne Muller

#Self #Possibility #Aspect

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

#Summer #Morning #Spring

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

#Pain #Fundamentals #Bearable

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

#Spring #Void #Emptiness

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

#Responsibility #Accomplishment #Done

When we do what we love, again and again, our life comes to hold the fragrance of that thing.
-- Wayne Muller

#Fragrance #Ritual

Effortlessness is the ability to slow down and listen for the spaces between the joints... Deep within all things there is a natural rhythm, a music of opening and closing, expansion and contraction.
-- Wayne Muller

#Space #Down And #Joints

What is at the center of your life? Carefully examine where you spend your attention, your time. Look at your appointment book, your daily scheduleÂ…. This is what receives your care and attention--an by definition, your love.
-- Wayne Muller

#Book #Schedules #Care

The greatest barrier to own own healing is not the pain, sorrow or violence inflicted upon us as children. Our greatest hindrance is our ongoing capacity to judge, to criticize, and to bring tremendous harm to ourselves. If we can harden our heart against ourselves and meet our most tender feelings with anger and condemnation, we simultaneously armor our heart against the possibility of gentleness, love and healing.
-- Wayne Muller

#Pain #Children #Heart

The heart of most spiritual practices is simply this: Remember who you are. Remember what you love. Remember what is sacred. Remember what is true. Remember that you will die and that this day is a gift. Remember how you wish to live.
-- Wayne Muller

#Spiritual #Heart #Practice

Even in the middle of a hurricane, the bottom of the sea is calm. As the storm rages and the winds howl, the deep waters sway in gentle rhythm, a light movement of fish and plant life. Below there is no storm.
-- Wayne Muller

#Wind #Sea #Light

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

#Healing #Voice #Roots

Every single choice we make, no matter how small, is the ground where who we are meets what is in the world. And the fruits of that essential relationship- the intimate, fertile conversation between our own heart's wisdom and the way the world has emerged before us- becomes a lifelong practice of deep and sacred listening for the next right thing we are required to do. We make the only choice that feels authentic and honest, necessary and true in that moment.
-- Wayne Muller

#Heart #Practice #Choices

In the soil of the quick fix is the seed of a new problem, because our quiet wisdom is unavailable.
-- Wayne Muller

#Soil #Quiet #Problem

Just because we are working hard does not mean we are making anything happen.
-- Wayne Muller

#Mean #Doe #Things Happen

All life has emptiness at its core; it is the quiet hollow reed through which the wind of God blows and makes the music that is our life.
-- Wayne Muller

#Blow #Wind #Reeds