Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
Interpretation
The quote encourages introspection and self-awareness, urging individuals to connect with their inner selves.
Anne Sexton emphasizes the importance of listening to one's own inner voice and understanding the depths of one's soul. This act of deep reflection can lead to greater self-awareness and authenticity in life, suggesting that true wisdom comes from within rather than from external sources.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a mindfulness workshop to encourage participants to reflect on their inner thoughts.
The Witch's Life" When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her.
Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.
Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.
Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.
I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...
Two thoughts cannot coexist at the same time: if the clear light of mindfulness is present, there is no room for mental twilight.
Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.
I release all control to the Universe. I am at peace with myself and with life.
When we are motivated by compassion and wisdom, the results of our actions benefit everyone, not just our individual selves.
We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone.
Some people do really find fault like there's a reward for it.
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