Spiritual growth involves giving up the stories of your past so the universe can write a new one.

We shouldn't come up with a pseudo-spiritual excuse for turning away from the pain of the world.

Allowing the pain of personal growth to be a crucible of your spirit-the alchemical grail through which the metal of your former self turns into gold-is one of the highest callings of life. Pain can burn you up and destroy you, or burn you up and redeem you. It can deliver you to an entrenched despair, or deliver you to your higher self. At midlife we decide, consciously or unconsciously, the path of the victim or the path of the phoenix when it is rising up at last.

Pleasure can be used to enslave a people just as effectively as pain.

What the ego doesn't want us to see is that our pain doesn't come from the love we weren't given in the past, but from the love we ourselves aren't giving in the present.

If you did something in 1975 that you deeply regret and that you now can recognize as having been profoundly irresponsible, for example, the only way to be lifted out of deep regret and the pain over it is through atonement - through the kind of remorse that leads to genuine atonement, the making of amends, and forgiveness of self and others.

It can take years of tears to melt the hardness that develops in this world, covering our tender, gentler inner selves. Tears for every devastating loss, tears for every humiliating failure, tears for every repeated mistake. Those who honor those tears, and even honor them, are not failures at love but rather its true initiates. First the pain and then the power. First the heart breaks and then it soars.

The pain itself is a product or a reflection of how I am interpreting whatever it is that is causing me pain.

When the heart is pierced, there is pain, yes, but also an invitation to a greater becoming.