“Oh Great Spirit whose voice I hear in the winds, I come to you as one of your many children. I need your strength and your wisdom. Make me strong not to be superior to my brother, but to be able to fight my greatest enemy: Myself.” — Chief Dan George, Coast Salish, 1899-1981
“A spiritual retreat is medicine for soul starvation” — David Cooper, Silence, Simplicity, and Solitude
“Imagine what can happen when I stop. When I rest in a sense of trust. When I cease my incessant chatter and finally listen. Then I hear the music of my soul, the truth of nature, the insight available only to those who let their bodies become a conduit for spiritual understanding.” — Carmen Renee Berry, Coming Home to Your Body
“I learn by going where I have to go.” — Theodore Roethke
“The truth is we are all so very, very vulnerable. Life is as it is. We don’t even have control over the health of our children. The only thing we can control is our attitude. We have the choice of life or death, love or fear, in each moment. And we bear the responsibility for that choice in each moment. Nowhere is this more apparent than when we embark on a regular yoga practice. We set out to be better ourselves, only to find legions of reasons to break our commitment to our health. We say it is too difficult to make the hard choice today. And yet the obstacles in our path are the path. Every time we stretch beyond our resistance and our fear, we make a choice for life. And every time we choose life, we find that fear loses its grip on us. We all know more than we think we do, and we are stronger than we believe ourselves to be. We come to our mats, and to our lives, to learn by going where we have to go.” — Rolf Gates, Meditations from the Mat
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