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.
Those who wait for God are pilgrim souls that have no tie that will hold them when the definite command is issued; no prejudices that will paralyze their effort when in some strange coming of the light they are commanded to take a pathway entirely different to that which was theirs before; having no interests either temporal or eternal, either material or mental or spiritual, that will conflict with the will of God when that will is made known.
Your skin is prickly from fatigue and pain and there is a hissing in your ears. Time passes and the pills are taking hold like a glowing white planet coming into view. A reverse eclipse. And you watch with your eyes closed. The white planet is half exposed, it grips your heart in its light and seems to be pulling you forward and now you feel that you are falling. You are awake but dreaming. "The earth is not beautiful but the universe is," you say.
I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.
But, alas! what poor Woman is ever taught that she should have a higher Design than to get her a Husband?
The measure of every man’s virtue is best revealed in time of adversity - adversity that does not weaken a man but rather shows what he is.
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