Jean Houston Quotes

The world would be a safer place, If someone had a plan, Before exploring outer space, To find the inner man.

Sometimes you have to lose everything in order to gain yourself.

In the beginning it was always the same. But. I kept trying. Then one day I accidentally moved as the shutter clicked. A shadow appeared. The next time I saw the outline of my face, and a few weeks later my face itself. It was the opposite of disappearing.

We are still a pioneer culture in some ways. A pioneer culture has to put all of its muscle into surviving on the frontier and pushing back the wilderness. So when you start to talk about imagination, inner space, and the structures of the psyche, that becomes scary.

Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.

Growth is a detox process, as our weakest, darkest places are sucked up to the surface in order to be released...often, it is not a change in partners but rather a change in perception that delivers us to the love we seek.

Each place along the way is somewhere you had to be in order to be here.

I always knew that I could go deep. How deep? I don't know. But it always seems that with each character I take on, I'm challenged to go deeper than the last time, and then again deeper than the last time. This is the deepest I've ever been asked to dive. And to see how deep I actually went for this, and that I wasn't afraid to go there in order to give Tyler exactly what he envisioned for the character, which was pretty deep, that's what I discovered about myself.

Does a man shrink from change? Why, what can come into being save by change?

Change doesn’t happen overnight. It starts with the desire, then one small step in the right direction.

Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place.

Yoga is existential, experiential, experimental. No belief is required, no faith is needed - only courage to experience. And that's what's lacking. You can believe easily because in belief you are not going to be transformed. Belief is something added to you, something superficial. Your being is not changed; you are not passing through some mutation.

Self-love, in a well-regulated breast, is as the steward of the household, superintending the expenditure, and seeing that benevolence herself should be prudential, in order to be permanent, by providing that the reservoir which feeds should also be fed.

The soul needs more space than the body.

Words can fertilize space now and then; don't deny yourself becoming enriched.

Life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty.

Sometimes you have to give yourself to somebody in order to see who you are. Sometimes you have to unravel things to get to the core

In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not.

Nature will not let us stay in any one place for too long. She will let us stay just long enough to gather the experience necessary to the unfolding and advancement of the soul. This is a wise provision, for should we stay there too long, we would become too set, too rigid, too inflexible. Nature demands change in order that we may advance.

People with intelligence must use their intelligence, people with eyes must use their eyes, people with the capacity to love have the impulse to love and the need to love in order to feel healthy. Capacities clamor to be used, and cease their clamor only when they are used sufficiently. That is to say, capacities are needs, and therefore are intrinsic values as well.

What interests me is the opportunity for all of us to become something different from what we are, by constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are.

We went to the Moon as technicians; we returned as humanitarians.

Positive change always encounters resistance, conflict, and obstacles. We must embrace difficult and heated situations in life, for that is the method of igniting our reactions in order to transform them.

When energy speeds up there is no space for playing small, and nothing can remain hidden.

But again and again, we should reflect back to the darkness of the cocoon. In order to inspire ourselves forward, we must look back to see the contrast with the place we came from. You see, we cannot reject the world of the cocoon - which out which we may create a new cocoon. When we see the suffering that occured in the old cocoon, that inspires us to go forward in our journey of warriorship. It is a journey that is unfolding within us.