Oriah Mountain Dreamer is a Canadian poet, storyteller, and spiritual teacher facilitating personal growth and self-inquiry, most famous for her prose poem “The Invitation.”
CLEAR ALL
Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships.
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Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run, but it will never make you less afraid.
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The best apologies are short, and don’t go on to include explanations that run the risk of undoing them. An apology isn’t the only chance you ever get to address the underlying issue. The apology is the chance you get to establish the ground for future communication.
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Resolve to do the things you find to be difficult. That’s what confident people do. They tackle those things that are scary and they get addicted to doing it.
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Feeling angry signals a problem, venting anger does not solve it. Venting anger may serve to maintain, and even rigidify, the old rules and patterns in a relationship, thus ensuring that change does not occur.
Positive energy is your priceless life force. Protect it. Don’t allow people to draw from your reserves; select friends who recharge your energies. . . I’m not asking you to cut people out of your life, but I am asking you to invest your time with people who will push you to be your best.
The strongest relationships are between two people who can live without each other but don’t want to.
Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.
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He who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.
The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. The door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked, the marriage that failed. Or that lovely poem that didn’t get written because someone knocked on the door.