Cynicism means the conduit to the soul has a great kink in it, like a garden hose in which nothing flows in either direction.
Interpretation
Cynicism obstructs the flow of genuine emotion and connection, hindering personal growth and understanding.
In this quote, Clarissa Pinkola Estes uses the metaphor of a kinked garden hose to illustrate how cynicism acts as a blockage to the soul. Just as water cannot flow through a damaged hose, authentic emotions and connections cannot thrive when one adopts a cynical viewpoint. This perspective limits our ability to experience life fully and to engage meaningfully with others, ultimately stifling personal and communal growth.
In practice
During a speech about personal growth at a community event.
Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation- in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.
Tears are a river that takes you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.
Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success.
Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen.
There's a reason poets often say, 'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.
To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.
POVERTY, n. A file provided for the teeth of the rats of reform. Its victims are distinguished by possession of all the virtues and by their faith in leaders seeking to conduct them into a prosperity where they believe these to be unknown.
In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble.
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.
For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in a stream of stars - pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across the eternal seas of space and time.
To think justly, we must understand what others mean. To know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds.
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