Thomas a Kempis Quotes

Spiritual progress is like detoxification. Things have to come up in order to be released. Once we have asked to be healed, then our unhealed places are forced to the surface.

The most important healing - realizing who you are. The healing on the outer level is fine, but it's not the essence of healing.

If people would get in touch with their spirits, they would be able to heal, emotionally and physically.

Music enables me to cleanse and shed the things that I feel are holding me back from growing, or growing up.

It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble, how hopeless the outlook how muddled the tangle, how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all.

We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of power. But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary. So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort.

We have within us, a power that is greater than anything we shall ever contact in the outer, a power that can overcome every obstacle in our life and set us safe, satisfied and at peace, healed and prosperous, in a new light, and in a new life.

Spiritual growth-looking inward-is replacing the pursuit of external power-reaching outward to manipulate and control-as the cure for the insecurity at the core of human experience.

That daydreaming seemed important at the time, but when I asked my teacher Katagiri Roshi about it, he said, "Oh, it's just laziness. Get to work." But as for discipline, I don't even use that word. I think more about passion or love. What I've really learned is the way the mind moves, and how the mind works. Rather than discipline, I know how to seduce my mind.

Be surprised at nothing. Let peace and stillness flood through you and envelop you completely in its cloak. Put on the whole armor of love - and yet feel, feel very deeply. Let tears flow, washing away impurities until you feel clean within and clean without. Become like an empty vessel ready to be filled with life's nectar.

All I have to tell you about is what I have heard and seen of Jesus, how He is helping me find freedom, to occasionally love other people, and even accept myself with all my mixed motives.

My identity shifted when I got into recovery. That's who I am now, and it actually gives me greater pleasure to have that identity than to be a musician or anything else, because it keeps me in a manageable size. When I'm down on the ground with my disease-which I'm happy to have-it gets me in tune. It gives me a spiritual anchor. Don't ask me to explain.

I said that love heals from inside.

Catharsis is about cleansing and healing at one and the same time - healing memories and attitudes, healing the spirit and the heart.

Because of Jesus Christ, peace can replace guilt. Healthy relationships can be restored. Addictions can be overcome.

Each of us has a genuine capacity for love, forgiveness, wisdom and compassion. Meditation awakens these qualities so that we can discover for ourselves the unique happiness that is our birthright.

A wound in the soul, coming from the rending of the spiritual body, strange as it may seem, gradually closes like a physical wound. And once a deep wound heals over and the edges seem to have knit, a wound in the soul, like a physical wound, can be healed only by the force of life pushing up from inside. This was the way Natasha's wound healed. She thought her life was over. But suddenly her love for her mother showed her that the essence of life - love - was still alive in her. Love awoke, and life awoke.

So many of us start along the spiritual path because we are suffering. But you must realize that for real healing to occur, there must first be deep compassion for yourself, especially the parts of yourself you dislike or consider ugly.

The mind creates the abyss. The heart crosses over it. Love is the bridge.

God knows we have our own demons to be cast out, our own uncleanness to be cleansed. Neurotic anxiety happens to be my own particular demon, a floating sense of doom that has ruined many of what could have been, should have been, the happiest days of my life, and more than a few times in my life I have been raised from such ruins, which is another way of saying that more than a few times in my life I have been raised from death - death of the spirit anyway, death of the heart - by the healing power that Jesus calls us both to heal with and to be healed by.

Do not be afraid of Confession! One who is in line to confess himself feels all these things - even shame - but then, when he finishes confessing, he leaves free, great, beautiful, forgiven, [...] happy. And this is the beauty of Confession... Jesus is there...and He receives you with so much love.

Darkness can only be scattered by light, hatred can only be conquered by love.

Thought impregnated with love becomes invincible. (Charles Haanel)

truth outlives pain, as the soul does life.

Those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the flame of their fervor cannot always be seen.