How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.
Interpretation
We often rush to solve problems without fully understanding ourselves or the situation.
In this quote, Thomas Moore reflects on our society's tendency to seek quick solutions and avoid the discomfort of introspection. He emphasizes that this eagerness to 'bottom-line' conflicts and challenges prevents us from engaging in deeper self-discovery and truly understanding our motivations and inner complexities.
In practice
During a workshop on personal growth, this quote can serve as a reminder to take time to reflect.
When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.
Humility, that low, sweet root, from which all heavenly virtues shoot.
Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames.
And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.
Bastard Freedom waves Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves.
Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.
The important thing is to know how to take all things quietly.
Although violence and the use of force may appear powerful and decisive, their benefits are short-lived. Violence can never bring a lasting and long term resolution to any problem, because it is unpredictable and for every problem it seems to solve, others are created. On the other hand, truth remains constant and will ultimately prevail.
He had mittens, Minjekahwun, Magic mittens made of deer-skin; When upon his hands he wore them, He could smite the rocks asunder, He could grind them into powder.
While most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen.
Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
Awakening self-compassion is often the greatest challenge people face on the spiritual path.
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