Illness is a very unique kind of rite of passage—for unlike other passages that have clear “endings”, we often “return” from a healing journey with a great deal of uncertainty… When illness is our initiation path, our “return” often brings a fierce invitation to bring exquisite attention to what is absolutely essential and joyful in our lives for whatever time we have here. ~Laura Weaver
We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played. ~ Alan Watts
“At no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it.” ~ Yukio Mishima
“One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,
though the whole house began to tremble
and you felt the old tug at your ankles.
“Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers at the very foundations,
though their melancholy was terrible.
It was already late enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
But little by little, as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly recognized as your own,
that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do,
determined to save the only life you could save.”
~ Mary Oliver
“If you feel a little discouraged right now, that’s okay, that’s understandable. But give yourself permission to journey on. Keep moving. There is a positive result here.” – Neale Donald Walsch
“The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find.” ~ Phil Cousineau
Dr Bill Wooten 