Dr Fluid

If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortions; your own light and beauty will become blurred, awkward, and ugly.

Your sense of inner beauty has to remain a very private thing. The secret and the sacred are sisters. Our times suffer from such a loss of the sacred because our respect for the secret has completely vanished.

Our modern technology of information is one of the great destroyers of privacy. We need to shelter that which is deep and reserved within us.

This is why there is such hunger in modern life for the language of the soul. The soul is a shy presence. The hunger for the language of the soul shows that the soul has been forced to recede to private areas; only there can it mind its own texture and rhythm.

The modern world, by trumpeting the doctrine of self-sufficiency, has denied the soul and forced it to eke out its existence on the margins.

- John O'Donohue (Anam Cara)

Photo credit: Chris (pexels.com)

Negative introspection damages the soul. It holds many people trapped for years and years, and ironically, it never allows them to change.

It is wise to allow the soul to carry on its secret work in the night side of your life.

You might not see anything stirring for a long time. You might have only the slightest intimations of the secret growth that is happening within you, but these intimations are sufficient.

We should be fulfilled and satisfied with them. You cannot dredge the depths of the soul with the meagre light of self-analysis.

The inner world never reveals itself cheaply. Perhaps analysis is the wrong way to approach our inner dark.

- John O'Donohue (Anam Cara)

Photo credit: (willyswilderness.org)

It is a lonely experience to be at the deathbed of someone who is full of regret;

to hear him say how he would love another year to do the things his heart had always dreamed of but believed he could never do until he retired. He had always postponed the dream of his heart.

There are many people who do not live the lives they desire. Many of the things that hold them back from inhabiting their destiny are false. These are only images in their minds. They are not real barriers at all.

We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny.

- John O'Donohue (Anam Cara)

Photo credit: Alex Green (pexels.com)