Seven Stages Of The Ego
Rumi, as told by Elif Shafak
The first stage is the Depraved Ego (Nafs), the most primitive and common state of being, when the soul is entrapped in worldly pursuits. Most human beings are stuck there, struggling and suffering in...
Everything Is Waiting For You
David Whyte
Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel aban...
Listening As An Act Of Transformation
Doug Lipman
Two villagers came to a rabbi with a dispute. When the rabbi invited them to sit down and talk about it, they glowered at each other as though to say, “If you sit down at this table, then I won&...
What Happens When We Wonder?
Katie Steedly
When I think about wonder I think about waterfalls, newborn babies, and whales. I think about seeds, snowflakes, and rainbows. I think about lightening, skyscrapers, and silk. Wonder defies descriptio...
The Difficult People In Your Life
Sally Kempton
We don’t always know why difficult people show up in our lives. There are some good theories about it, of course. Jungians, along with most contemporary spiritual teachers, tell us that AL...
What You Do Afterwards
Keith Sawyer
Creativity is all about what you do afterwards. I’m thinking about something that Miles Davis said about jazz improvisation: "It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note...
Do A Nice Thing For Your Future Self
Elizabeth Gilbert
I grew up on a small family farm, with plants and animals needing care in every direction, so vacations were rare. But one summer my parents convinced a neighboring farmer to tend to our goats and chi...
Wisdom Of Grieving
Terry Patten
Not only is grieving a stage of the spiritual activist’s journey, but the grieving process itself often unfolds in stages, which can be described using Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s famous five ...
Living In The Freshest Chamber Of The Heart
Mark Nepo
Our ability to find something to love, and to love again for the first time depends greatly on how we resolve and integrate where we've been before. A great model for us exists in the chambered na...
Deep Ecological Awareness Is Spiritual Awareness
Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi
The sense in which we use the term "ecological" is associated with a specific philosophical school, founded in the early 1970s by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1912-2009) with the di...
What Breaks Your Heart?
Maria Shriver
What breaks your heart? What does your soul long for? And, how is that connected to how you are living your life now? I love this question because it’s made me think about my passion and purp...
Spiritual Activism
Michael Singer
I'm an environmentalist and I'm very much into cars that get high mileage and don't pollute, and I see that somebody's driving a Hummer. It's a classic example, somebody's driv...