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Ashland Spirit

Spirit – Non-Dual – Awakening – Nature – Community – Life

Talent, Ashland, Medford, Southern Oregon & Beyond

For the many of us who don’t have a sense of ‘the village’ in our own lives, the very mention of “community” can feel like that oasis of hope that disappears the moment we get close to it. We speak about it yearningly, like a fairy tale we ache to find ourselves in. And its absence has a great presence in our lives.

But instead of always asking, “Where do I belong?”— a question that is based in shortage — consider reversing your definition of the word from a noun to a verb, so that belonging becomes a practice of generosity, as in “I belong to that which I love.” A wise teacher once told me that the greatest spiritual practice he knows is to “discover what you are most missing in your life — and then give that thing away.”

Belong yourself to those who need you. Find the ones, human and other than human, who are drifting to the fringes, who are the least valued or most unexpected to have something to offer; look for those without a voice, and draw them in closer.

Rendered from Belonging: Remembering Home, by Toko-pa Turner

This website is a contribution towards new possibilities of human relationship and community.

Community

Our longing for community and purpose is so powerful that it can drive us to join groups, relationships, or systems of belief that, to our diminished or divided self, gives the false impression of belonging…

Emptiness

What we call the Self is not a soul-like thing, and not a state, it is the uninterrupted flow of life. We cannot apprehend it with the faculties we use every day, such as impressions, feelings or memory…

Life

It soon becomes clear that we cannot readily save anyone, much less ourselves, from the heart’s response to the pain of this world. If we are to remain open to life and capable of engaging with our world…

Correspondence

Sufi mystics say: There are three ways to relate to the Divine: One is through Prayer, a step up from that is Meditation or Self Abidance, and a step up from that is Sohbet…

Dialogues

We must be willing to be completely ordinary people, which means accepting ourselves as we are without trying to become greater, purer, more spiritual, more insightful. If we can accept our imperfections…

Commons

All are tending to one and the same goal, at least all aspire to the same goal, from the wise man to the lowest murderer, but only by different ways. It is an old truth, but there is this new in it…

Poetry

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner — what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke.

Short Quotes

We must remember that the feminine works in a non-linear fashion, so while many are impatiently looking to new-age checklists and dream dictionaries for a bottom-line, the final answer, they rarely find anything enduring. This is because there is a greater genius at work which we could never integrate all at once. Instead we must follow a mysterious…

“Paradoxically, it is in your capitulation to the mystery that mastery is cultivated.”
~Toko-pa Turner~

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
~Carl Jung~

“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can begin to grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them, making it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.”
~Rainer Maria Rilke~

“There is some kind of a sweet innocence in being human- in not having to be just happy or just sad- in the nature of being able to be both broken and whole, at the same time.”
~C. JoyBell C.~

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
~Anais Nin~

“What you truly have to give will not be born in the desperation to save the world but in the relinquishing of it.”
~Jeannie Zandi~

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
~Mary Oliver~

“Happiness, not in another place but this place…not for another hour, but this hour.”
~Walt Whitman~

“I don’t want a spiritual awakening. I’d rather have an instinctual remembering. I don’t want to spend my time on earth trying to transcend the fact that I’m here. I’d rather spend my time being more fully in relationship to the here and now.”
~Emily Athena Abrahams~

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
~Carl Jung~

“Waking up is a continuing process. No one wakes up once and for all. There is no limit to wakefulness, just as there is no limit to aliveness….The surprise within the surprise of every new discovery is that there is ever more to be discovered.”
~Brother David Steindl-Rast~

“But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face.”
~W.B.Yeats~

“I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time – waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God – it changes me.”
~C. S. Lewis~

“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”
~Herman Hesse~

“We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
~Marcel Proust~

“…believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
~Rainer Maria Rilke~

“The moment a woman comes home to herself, the moment she knows that she has become a person of influence, an artist of her life, a sculptor of her universe, a person with rights and responsibilities who is respected and recognized, the resurrection of the world begins.”
~Joan Chittister~

“Commitment isn’t simply promising to not leave someone or something. It’s to do the opposite of leaving. The word’s Latin roots mean to send forth fully. Commitment isn’t about sticking with something. It’s about moving towards it with your entire being.”
~David Burns~

“The Mother of the Universe refuses to let me worship her outside myself anymore. She has withdrawn inside me and tells me if I want to know her I have to come inside, too, which is the last place I want to be. Although she’s been telling me for years, she’s never gone to this extreme before – of actually hiding inside me. If I want to love her, I can only do it by loving myself now.”
~Cassia Berman~

“You must be clear about the nature of your desire. Do not let second-hand information influence you. There is only love and in this love the man and woman sometimes appear. “
~Jean Klein~

“The practice above all practices is to relinquish the immature desire to be taken care of in false belonging and to parent our own originality. Again and again, our dreams demand leadership from us, calling our life’s vision forward into the world, step by tenderbrave step.”
~Toko-pa Turner~

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? “
~John Keats~

“Between pure Awareness and Awareness reflected as consciousness there is a gap which the mind cannot cross. The reflection of the sun in a drop of dew is not the sun itself.”
~JRamesh Balsekar~

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
~Albert Camus~

“The voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls”
~Friedrich Nietzsche~

“Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it.”
~Maya Angelou~

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
~Rainer Maria Rilke~

“Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere – on water and land.”
~Walt Whitman~

“But the heart has its own memory, and I have forgotten nothing”
~Albert Camus~

“There’s courage involved if you want to become truth”
~Rumi~

“But isn’t everything fragile when it’s born?”
~Pádraig Ó Tuama~

“In order to find magic we must first believe in its existence. Emerson implies that our decision is the catalyst that ignites the forces of the Universe to partner with us in our chosen endeavor, to collaborate… to become our playmate in a creative life.”
~Kasey Ford~

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”
~Henry David Thoreau~

“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
~Maya Angelou~

“No holy place existed without us then,
no woodland, no dance, no sound.
Beyond all hope, I prayed those timeless
days we spent might be made twice as long.
I prayed one word: I want.
Someone, I tell you, will remember us,
even in another time.”
~Sappho~

“I am always doing things I can’t do, that’s how I get to do them.”
~Pablo Picasso~

“She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.”
~Edna O’Brien~

“Man is the creature with a mystery in his heart that is bigger than himself.”
~Hans Urs von Balthasar~

“When you walk a path of love there is something deeper calling you forward on it, like a beautiful question that can never be answered.”
~Toko-Pa Turner~

“Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.”
~Thomas Merton~

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
~Carl Jung~

“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”
~Pablo Picasso~

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
~J.R.R. Tolkien~

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
~Anne Frank~

“If you’re really listening, if you’re awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders.”
~Andrew Harvey~

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
~Dr. Freud (and the Rabbit)~

“Change knelt down beside me in the wilderness, and in the gentlest voice I’ve ever heard, she said ‘I love being the reason for all of your beginnings.’ Then she kissed the tears from my eyes, stood up, and reached for my hand.”
~Heather K O’Hara~

“Those who undertake the full journey into their grief come back carrying medicine for the world.”
~Francis Weller~

“Silence is the language of God,
all else is poor translation.”
~ Rumi ~

“Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with herself.
If the soul attend for a moment to its own infinity,
then and there IS silence.
She is audible to all men, at all times, in all places, and if we will,
we may always hearken to her admonitions.”
~ Henry David Thoreau ~

“There is something greater and purer than what the mouth utters. Silence illuminates our souls, whispers to our hearts, and brings them together. Silence joins us with ourselves, makes us sail the firmament of spirit, and brings us closer to heaven.”
~ Kahlil Gibran ~

“The deepest medicine for someone in spiritual deconstruction is to have another person say, ‘You’re not a failure, you’re not doing it wrong, this is an initiation,’ and to really get it, to not try to fix you, to just be with you. And it’s so rare.”
~ Jeannie Zandi ~

“Rational thinking does not suffice to solve the problems of our social life. The intellect has a sharp eye for methods and tools, but is blind to ends and values. It cannot lead, it can only serve. We must begin with the heart.”
~ Albert Einstein ~

“Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.”
~ M. C. Escher ~

“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.”
~ Wendell Berry ~

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