Anything or anyone that asks you to be other than yourself is not holy, but is trying only to fill its own need.
Interpretation
Authenticity is essential; anything that demands you change who you are is not beneficial.
This quote emphasizes the importance of staying true to oneself and suggests that anything or anyone that pressures you to change your authentic self is not genuinely caring or significant. It highlights the idea that true holiness and value in relationships and experiences do not require you to compromise your identity for the sake of others' needs or expectations.
In practice
During a motivational speech about self-acceptance.
Four hundred year old trees, who draw aliveness from the earth like smoke from the heart of God, we come, not knowing you will hush our little want to be big; we come, not knowing that all the work is so much busyness of mind; all the worry, so much busyness of heart. As the sun warms anything near, being warms everything still and the great still things that outlast us make us crack like leaves of laurel releasing a fragrance that has always been.
Whatever difficulty you face, there are time-tried ways you can listen your way through. Because listening is the doorway to everything that matters. It enlivens the heart the way breathing enlivens the lungs. We listen to awaken our heart. We do this to stay vital and alive.
Let's be in awe which doesn't mean anything but the courage to gape like fish at the surface breaking around our mouths as we meet the air.
Water reflects everything it encounters. This is so commonplace that we think water is blue, when in fact it has no color.... But the water, the glorious water everywhere, has taught me that we are more than what we reflect or love. This is the work of compassion: to embrace everything clearly without imposing who we are and without losing who we are.
The further I wake into this life, the more I realize that God is everywhere and the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary. Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond, and music is in both the flowing violin and the water dripping from the drainage pipe. Yes, God is under the porch as well as on top of the mountain, and joy is in both the front row and the bleachers, if we are willing to be where we are.
We work so hard to get somewhere, to realize a dream, to arrive at some destination, that we often forget that though some satisfaction may be waiting at the end of our endurance and effort, there is great and irreplaceable aliveness in the steps along the way.
It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren't doing.
If we can keep at least a bit of the mind clear about temporality, we can mange complicated, even difficult, times with grace.
Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives, and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist.
Just when we most need to be clearheaded, in order to face the hard facts before us, there is all too frequently a very real inclination to give way to dangerous tendencies merely as an escape from realities.
You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will.
Really, every woman is an example to me, because as women we go through so much pain. We have to live this perfect life when we are messed up inside. We all go through trials and tribulations.
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