“Pain is the clarion of aliveness trumpeting that you are living in the marvelous tender cause of life!”— Bryant McGill
“Just living is not always living. Look at your life. Can you call it a blessing? Can you call it a gift? A present of existence? Would you want this life to be given to you again and again?”— Osho
“When negative feelings move upon you, reflect, and recognize the danger of feeding those feelings and keeping them alive.”— Bryant McGill
“Your pain is reminding you that the gift of life is tender and precious. Suffering cuts to the quick of aliveness.”— Bryant McGill
“I synonymously felt my heart beat rapaciously, the heart which was once void of anything alive and well. Now the heart was rasping and knocking on my ribcage as if it was demanding to come out, take its root and grow.”— Diyar Harraz
“Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.”— Jhumpa Lahiri
“When we move in a direction that touches our heart, we add to the momentum of deeper purpose that makes us feel more alive.”— Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone
“Grief is an element of aliveness and the answer to the denial the market demands of us. It is an index of our humanity. It is proof of the presence of our relatedness to each other. It is a communal practice that recognizes that choosing the wilderness of vulnerability, mystery, and anxiety was a good and life-affirming choice.”— Walter Brueggemann
“John O’Donohue gave voice to the connection between beauty and those edges of life—thresholds was the word he loved—where the fullness of reality becomes more stark and more clear. If you go back to the etymology of the word “threshold,” it comes from “threshing,” which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness. There are huge thresholds in every life. You know that, for instance, if you are in the middle of your life in a busy evening, fifty things to do and you get a phone call that somebody you love is suddenly dying, it takes ten seconds to communicate that information. But when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world. Suddenly everything that seems so important before is all gone and now you are thinking of this. So the given world that we think is there and the solid ground we are on is so tentative. And a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit, and very often how we cross is the key thing.”— Krista Tippett
“To trust in your own aliveness, in your own ability to sustain and be sustained – there are times when there is no greater act of defiance.”— Jessica Fechtor