110 Quotes by Michael Meade

To be purposeful is not to be goal oriented, but to seek to reconnect to the source of one’s life.

Everyone who enters the world comes in with hidden gold, it’s called your natural gifts. The job of a person is to find the hidden gold and give it. It turns out that when you give it you get more than when you hold on to it, that’s the economy of the soul.

When a culture simply shrugs about what happens to people in war, it breaks the fragile sequence, the bond between all people.

Wisdom can reveal the light hidden in dark times; but it requires that we face the darkness in ourselves. People may desire pearls of wisdom, yet most are unwilling to descend to the depths where the pearls wait to be found. Wisdom involves a necessary descent into the depths of life, for that alone can produce ‘lived knowledge’ and a unified vision.

Searching outside oneself for what can only be found within can lead to a life lived in the wrong direction and sacrifices made for the wrong reasons. People can wind up alienated from themselves even if they achieve lofty goals set by others.

As a culture, we turn away from people just when they are in times of change. That’s when most communities used to embrace people, so the individual and the culture both benefited.

Our job is not to comprehend or control everything, but to learn which story we are in and which of the many things calling out in the world is calling to us. Our job is to be fully alive in the life we have, to pick up the invisible thread of our own story and follow where it leads. Our job is to find the thread of our own dream and live it all the way to the end.

The human soul is a living paradox – neither a predetermined personality nor a completely open possibility. The point in this life is not simply to “become somebody,” but to become who we were each intended to be when we first entered this world. For each of us has the most to give and contributes most meaningfully when we become who we were intended to be from the beginning. That is the inside story and the hidden message that has been etched upon each soul.

Fear is an old word that derives from the same roots that give us “fare,” as in “thoroughfare.” Although it often causes people to run away from troubling situations, at a deeper level, fear means “to go through it.” The hidden purpose of fear involves bringing us closer to natural instincts for survival, but also for awakening inner resources and sharpening our intelligence when faced with true danger and the basic need to change.