We often forget our human connectedness. Throughout my life, I have felt the greatest beauty lies in this connection. It has been in the deepest connections with others that I have experienced the greatest degree of learning, healing and transformation. This connection is a powerful thing, with the ability to transform lives, and ultimately transform human experience.
All my life I'd been a believing Christian. ... But that instant in the ER--the instant Annette [his wife] died--I seemed to feel my religious faith die, too.As I thought more about it in the bleak days and weeks that followed, I decided the Bible had gotten it exactly backward. Maybe God hadn't created us in His image; maybe we'd created god in our image.
She wished he could make her somehow indelibly his; that they were still children so they could cut their fingers and mingle their blood and know this meant something. She longed for some transformation more lasting than that wrought by the law and his name, some visceral change he might effect in her so that anyone on the street with one glance would know she was his.
Transformation occurs when you open your mind to experience freedom. During the process, you transform your thoughts which enable you to leave behind old habits and negative thinking. You are then able to conquer your fears and remove self doubt. This irrevocable tranformation allows you to be seen in a new light. It reveals your unique characteristics and truthfulness.
It is true ayahuasca that has the potential to change everything and allow you to see the world in a different way. It's just that from within the perspective of the person undergoing the changes it's also hard to discern which bits are fantasy and which bits are oracular insight. That's part of what the shaman is supposed to be there to help you figure out.
It may take years of struggle and confession, battle and failure. The places in my life where I struggle with deadly sins are matters of a decade or more of focus, repentance, shame, and grace. I’ve traveled some long roads simply to lessen the depth of some of my failures and addictions — just to get to a place where I can receive fresh grace and encouragement.
It takes a few days for the transformation to be complete, depending on how much venom is in the bloodstream, how close the venom is to the heart. As long as the heart keeps beating, poison spreads, healing, changing the body as it moves through it. Eventually the heart stops, and the conversion is finished. But all the time, every minute of it, a victim would be wishing for death
Everybody in those days was a foreigner, no matter where they were born; as industrial modernization had its way with people and places, no one was native to the transformation of the United States from an agricultural economy to the foremost industrial power in the world--the factory being both the cause and the effect of an act of becoming, the likes of which nobody had ever seen before.
If you want to save the snow leopard, or the giant Redwoods, or the Okavango delta, or the Amazon, or the atmosphere, or the Earth, or those you love, or yourself, or the human race, this is the only path that can achieve that–so the truth is the sooner you support and adopt this path of transformation through understanding the better. The choice is self-destruction or self-discovery.
Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.
I believe the greatest pleasure in writing is in the progressive artistry of it. Each project is an attempt to do better than before - to produce a worthy work of art - something having meaning not only for the writer but also for those who may share the experience of it later. I treasure the hope of producing something that will make a difference in the world - some kind of positive change.
Most people in America, when they are exposed to the Christian faith, are not being transformed. They take one step into the door, and the journey ends. They are not being allowed, encouraged, or equipped to love or to think like Christ. Yet in many ways a focus on spiritual formation fits what a new generation is really seeking. Transformation is a process, a journey, not a one-time decision.
When we become aware of feeling low it can be a reason to rejoice. Why would we be distressed knowing that some unconscious negative belief is trying to get our attention. Let it surface. When we see what it is, it can be transformed into understanding and love.oops... yet another fearful belief has been set free. Now we can enjoy ourselves eagerly anticipating yet another great self-rediscovery.
I used to send my characters into a fire that necessarily consumed them, but I have learned, a little, how to send them through the fire to a new place. The characters who do not change — most notably Nakota in Cipher, Bibi in Skin, and Lena in Kink — are motivated by an essential selfishness or self-centeredness, an unwillingness to relinquish control to the process, a refusal to become.
There were people who went to sleep last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. And those dead folks would give anything at all for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of plowing. So you watch yourself about complaining. What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it.
