Quote

This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down.

Elizabeth Gilbert

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Elizabeth Gilbert
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: July 18
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Waterbury
Connecticut
Forever
Trauma
Spiritual
Ceremony
Feelings
Ritual
Order
Complicated
Ceremonies
Place
Beings
Weighing
Around
Safe
Haul
Human
Joy
Rituals
Humans
Create
Resting

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To my taste, the men in Rome are ridiculously, hurtfully, stupidly beautiful. More beautiful even than Roman women, to be honest. Italian men are beautiful in the same way as French women, which is to say-- no detail spared in the quest for perfection. They’re like show poodles. Sometimes they look so good I want to applaud.
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Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.
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Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope
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I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now - it's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. Oh, so Jesus, what a thought! You know that's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to go there.
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I think that if you can roast a chicken, you can get whatever you want out of a woman.
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We set up one rule in our house, which is, 'Guests of guests cannot bring guests.' That rule was required because that happened one weekend, and we finally said, 'Okay, you know what? That's a little too much.'
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Who amongst us lives without sacrifice?
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in stillness, I watched myselfget eaten by mosquitoes... the itch was maddening at first but eventually it just melded into a general burning feeling and i rode that heat to a mld euphoria. I allowed the pain to lose its specific associations and become pure sensation... and that eventually lifted me out of myself and into meditation.
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I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.
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Moss is inconceivably strong. Moss eats stone scarcely anything, in return, eats moss. Moss dines upon boulders, slowly but devastatingly, in a meal that lasts for centuries. Given enough time, a colony of moss can turn a cliff into gravel, and turn that gravel into topsoil.
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I equal parts loved him and could not stand him. I couldn't wake him to share in my distress.
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If something is rubbing so hard against you, you can be sure it's working on you.
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Keep showing up for your side of the job and give genius a chance to do its part.
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The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.
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Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don't need to show me thier badges. I know these guys very well.
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Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.
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Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it's what you want before you commit.
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It has never been easy for me to understand why people work so hard to create something beautiful, but then refuse to share it with anyone, for fear of criticism.
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library is a beautiful old thing
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What Richard is talking about is instead admitting to the existence of negative thoughts, understanding where they came from and why they arrived, and then - with great forgiveness and fortitude - dismissing them.
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