29 Quotes by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Every act I live while I am fully awake can not help but be both prayer and lovemaking.

What if the task is simply to unfold, to become who you already are in your essential nature – gentle, compassionate, and capable of living fully and passionately present? How would this affect how you feel when you wake up in the morning?

Loudly declaring our soul’s desire can get the blood running and our passions blazing.

A wound not fully felt consumes from the inside. We must run very hard if we want to stay one step ahead of this pain. Exhausted, we try to bury it with drugs, alcohol, overwork, television, physical activity. We are a very creative species – we can use just about anything to anesthetize ourselves. But in doing so, we also remove ourselves from feeling the joy.

What if becoming who and what we truly are happens not through striving and trying but by recognizing and receiving the people and places and practices that offer us the warmth of encouragement we need to unfold?

I want to live with deep intimacy every day of my life. I am guided, sometimes driven, by an ache to take the necessary risks that will let me live close to what is within and around me. And I am sometimes afraid that it will be too much, that I will not have, or be connected to, whatever it takes to be with it all, to bear the exquisite beauty and bone-wrenching sorrow of being fully alive.

If I want to live my ability to be fully present and compassionate, my ability to be with it all – the joy and the sorrow – I must find the ways, the people, the places, the practices that support me in being all I truly am. I must cultivate ways of being that let me feel the warmth of encouragement against my heart when it is weary.

I have faith in longing, wherever it finds me. And often it finds me at unpredictable and inconvenient moments. It’s like a door that suddenly opens. I am never prepared. There is no preparation for the way it takes me and leaves me, for the fierceness of the ache. It is the voice of the parts of myself I have left behind in the deals I have tried to make with life, trying to trade pieces of my dreams for promises of safety.

Show me how you take care of business without letting business determine who you are. When the children are fed but still the voices within and around us shout that soul’s desires have too high a price, let us remind each other that it is never about the money.