Love Expands

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.

Powerful is our need to be known, really known by ourselves and others, even if only for a moment.

The only person who cannot be helped is that person who blames others.

Most of us consist of two separated parts, trying desperately to bring themselves together into an integrated soma, where the distinctions between mind and body, feelings and intellect, would be obliterated.

Loneliness is a barrier that prevents one from uniting with the inner self.

Growth occurs when individuals confront problems, struggle to master them, and through that struggle develop new aspects of their skills, capacities, views about life.

If the time comes when our culture tires of the endless homicidal feuds, despairs of the use of force and war as a means of bringing peace, becomes discontent with the half-lives that its members are living – only then will our culture seriously look for alternatives.

With the price of life these days, you’ve got to get everything for free you can.

It is a direction not a destination.

Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed.

One of the most revolutionary concepts to grow out of our clinical experience is the growing recognition that innermost core of man’s nature – the deepest layers of his personality, the base of his ‘animal nature’ – is basically socialized, forward-moving, rational and realistic… He is realistically able to control himself, and he is incorrigibly socialized in his desires. There is no beast in man, there is only man in man.

The elements in a relationship which seem impossible to share, the secretly disturbing, dissatisfying elements, are the most rewarding to share. This is a hard, risky, frightening thing to learn, and it needs to be re-learned over and over.

The only reality I can possibly know is the world as I perceive it at this moment. The only reality you can possibly know is the world as you see it at this moment. And the only certainty is that those perceived realities are different. There are as many real worlds as there are people!

Over the years, however, the research evidence keeps piling up, and it points strongly to the conclusion that a high degree of empathy in a relationship is possibly the most potent and certainly one of the most potent factors in bringing about change and learning.

What you are to be, you are now becoming.

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.

You know that I don’t believe that anyone has ever taught anything to anyone. I question that efficacy of teaching. The only thing that I know is that anyone who wants to learn will learn. And maybe a teacher is a facilitator, a person who puts things down and shows people how exciting and wonderful it is and asks them to eat.

In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?

I hear the words, the thoughts, the feeling tones, the personal meaning, even the meaning that is below the conscious intent of the speaker. Sometimes too, in a message which superficially is not very important, I hear a deep human cry that lies buried and unknown far below the surface of the person.So I have learned to ask myself, can I hear the sounds and sense the shape of this other person’s inner world? Can I resonate to what he is saying so deeply that I sense the meanings he is afraid of, yet would like to communicate, as well as those he knows?

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.