Loving kindness towards ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. It means we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.
“In sterquiliniis invenitur”—in filth it will be found. This is perhaps the prime “alchemical” dictum. What you need most is always to be found where you least wish to look.
The familiar Hebrew word shalom, usually translated as “peace,” means more than the absence of quarreling. Shalom means wholeness, everything fitting together, nothing missing and nothing broken. Just as peace on the world scene means no fighting between nations, no quarreling with other people, shalom for you as an individual means no fighting with yourself, no quarreling between two halves of a divided soul. To wish someone shalom is to with [them] the blessing of wholeness and integrity.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
You liberate in me my feminine being, my most obscure and most hidden being. You make me soft (humanize, feminize,
animalize) like fur.
People act according to the way they experience the world. If you can understand their experience, you can understand their behavior.
A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.
Want something to chase you? Run.
It is well known, for example, that if a tree is turned upside down, with its roots in the air and its boughs and branches planted in the ground, the former will sprout leaves, buds and flowers, and the latter will become roots.
Still, a great deal of light falls on everything.
סלומה 