“If you don't change things that we already feel we should change or we feel called to change, if you're holding onto our job too long or to a relationship that is toxic or to whatever, because we are afraid to change, then it becomes stronger and stronger. And when the tension is too big, then we call it crisis. Because then the system needs to rebalance itself through a painful process. But there's a conscious version of it too, which means we support each other in the change process and we create societies and environments that are actually supportive of change and create safety for change. And we can do that together if we invest in it.”

“So on the journey where you are having a beautiful idea first. The first step from bringing it to mind and to the world is one of disappointment, right? You're bringing it down from, you know, idea stage, electrical synapse, impulse image, cinema of the mind into reality. And you have to come into contact with the tangible, you know, materials, people, things, collaborators, paint, and suddenly the idea has to morph, you know, in disappointment. And then the next step after the disappointment is like, but now I'm making something that I didn't imagine. It's not going like I imagined, but it's going. And then when you finish the object, thing, book, then it has the power to take you on a journey that you never would have dreamt had you kept the idea in your interior museum. And then that shifts your imagination. You have more artwork that's collected in the interior museum. And then as you grow older as a maker, you see that distinction, right? The distinction between the beautiful interior museum and the museum in reality of things that you've actually made and done, and the stories attached to the making and doing that have changed your life.”

“But a life devoted to something larger than yourself is a life worth living. It's a life that is in recognition of life is given to us, it's given to us so that we can give it, we're blessed so that we can bless. We're born, I think, I can't prove this, but I've experienced it to make the contribution that's uniquely ours to make. And when you find that dharma, that discovers who you are, this is a match for what's wanted in the world. Oh my God. It's so thrilling that I wanted to do everything I could to make that available to people, because it's not only wonderful for you, the world needs us now. The world always did. But now the crises are so deep, so profound, so intense, so everywhere. So in every part of society, in every economic class, in every country, in every language, in every culture, that it's all hands on deck. And what a thrilling time to be alive when it's an all hands on deck moment.”

“Boundaries don't tell other people what to do. They tell other people what you are willing to do to take responsibility for your own needs and your own feelings and keep yourself safe and healthy. And they actually are, as we've discussed, a gift to your relationship, they make relationships better. And when you turn it around on its head like that, I think number one, that helps people understand all of the benefits to your relationship when each party does take responsibility for how they feel and for their needs. And it also gives you a sense of empowerment. I think people feel like, Oh, I can't set boundaries because what if the other person won't do it or doesn't say yes? And when I tell them, Oh no, no, no, your boundary cannot depend on somebody else. It is only dependent on what you are willing and able to do”

my childhood was a childhood in the closet. I had some good things. I had some bad things, like living in the closet is, you know, not always terrible. It's simply not the greatest expression of, of who we have the capacity to become, I think. Um, but for my parents, you know, as my father went along in my childhood, he became more and more withdrawn and kept trying to do the right thing, was closeted even to himself. This was a secret he was keeping even from himself for most of my childhood. But it made him kind of a lousy partner. Right. My mother's experience was just a very, very lonely experience. Her life looked on the outside exactly like it was supposed to look, we lived in a nice community. She was married to a lawyer, or, you know, we looked great on a Christmas card, but it felt cavernous, just vacant and left with so much time on her own. Um, she really struggled not to let her memory present her with things to work on. And that led her to be very depressed throughout my childhood.

“I’m trying to map the territory in the center world, just the way I did with families and the distinction that immediately leaped out was between parts that other systems would call inner children, which, you know, they're very, before they're hurt, they're delightful. They give us all kinds of joy and, and imagination and creativity and playfulness and so on. But once they feel, once you have an experience that leaves you feeling worthless or terrified or hurt, they're the ones that take that in the most, because they're the most sensitive parts of you. And then they get stuck with these, what I call burdens of worthlessness or pain or terror. And now we don't wanna be around them because they have the power to overwhelm us and make us feel all that again and bring us back into those scenes that they literally are living in still. And so we try to lock them away in inner basements, thinking we're just moving on from the memories, sensations and, and emotions of the trauma. Not realizing that we're actually leaving in the dust, the parts of us we love the most when they're not hurt, just cuz they got hurt.”

“We have offered a model, the seven circles, that helps people to understand that it's not just food and fitness, which so many wellness practitioners purport. It's not just diet and exercise. It's not just the way that you look on the outside or the $90 yoga pants that you can afford, or the fancy studio class or the 25 ingredient smoothie that costs $25. You know, those are unfortunately the images that we have now when it comes to wellness. And that's why so many people continue to feel excluded and uninterested in wellness. It seems so superficial. And so what I hope is that we have incorporated all these other elements to show people that not only can they be a wellness person who participates or who practices wellness, but they are already. We are all on this journey to some degree already.”

“The thing is, the type of thinking where you can figure out how mechanical things work, it’s a different kind of intelligence. And I think it's hard for verbal thinkers to understand. And they kind of will look at the shop kids as a dumb kids. Now, fortunately, some states are starting to put it back in. We're having more and more infrastructure things falling apart, like this latest disaster with the water works breaking—you see, a visual thinker can see how it works and how to fix it. And you keep deferring maintenance. I mean, we got wires falling off of electric towers in California and starting fires because they deferred maintenance, but we need all of the different kinds of thinkers. And the first step is realizing that they exist and they need to work together as teams.”

“Well, what I'm positing is an ability to grapple with contradiction. So that's the paradox mindset that Wendy Smith, Maryanne Lewis, and other scholars have shown, that when we're able to sit with two conflicting things in our minds, for example that if we stick with the example in South Africa, it may be true that if I'm a student, that my parents and my grandparents participated in actively supporting apartheid and that they were also wonderful parents and grandparents, right? Those two things can be true, and being able to sit with that contradiction gives me the emotional limberness to kind of, you know, push my way through the emotional slog of this is awful. This is awful. And to sit with terrible things happened, that's the only way you can do it.”

“My other favorite thing about the confidence piece, as someone who can be very anxious and nervous, is that sometimes it's valuable not to be confident. And there is his piece in the book about how everyone would benefit if, when you're making decisions, you start off in an information gathering stage. And instead of being super confident, when you're trying to gather data, you turn down your confidence, be not confident at all, be confused, be concerned, be anxious, gather all the data from as many differing viewpoints as possible. Once you've figured out the right answer with all the humility that you could possibly have, you know,back up your confidence and then you execute. And this idea that confidence can be on a dial and there's value in not being confident sometimes is something that I was never taught. And it feels very reassuring to learn.”

“Well, I think of it like the metaphor of the ensemble in a great musical, like everybody has to know their part. Everybody has to give 2000% and everybody has to really cheer on the other people, doing their part or it just doesn't work. And the way I see the map to our soul, this astrological map, is we have free will. So we get to play it at whatever level we choose and certainly cultural influences and patriarchy and all kinds of stuff messes us up. But I firmly believe, and I've seen it over and over that if we get the help, we need to uncover our fullest expression, people are humming at their fullest best part, which then allows everyone else around them to rise up.”

“I've never really figured out how come we stop asking each other questions. You know, we always do that in the beginning of a relationship just to get to know somebody, but then once we get committed, once we get busy, we're busy, busy, then we think, okay, everything is cool over here. I don't need to put energy into it. I'll go to work. And our partners, meanwhile, and we are too, we are changing over time. We are changing with history, with politics. We are changing with our whole world as our kids get older. If we have kids as our career changes and we stop asking each other questions, you know, our days become this endless to-do list period. And the only question we ask is, did you call the plumber? Well, yes. Anything else you wanna know?”

“Sometimes you can't see the full path. And so you don't even venture into the unknown, you know, you're unhappy, you know you need to change, but you're afraid to take the next step because you can't see the whole path. And so what I learned that night in the dark on the trail in Jerusalem when I had left my first marriage and I was terrified of the unknown is that it's okay. I could see the next step. There was just enough light on the path to take one step at a time. And after I would take a step, I could see the next step. And that became a metaphor for me, for venturing, you know, breaking out of a stuck place and trusting uncertainty.”

“Where in your life where you're not saying yes, but there's a, yes that wants to be said. Where there's some desire for self expression or creativity or way of being that you're stifling because you're trying to stay in an attachment relationship rather than being yourself. So where are you still choosing attachment over authenticity? If the two are in conflict now, ideally we will form relationships with partners and spouses and families and friends where we can have both authenticity and attachment. But if that's not possible, this is the challenge for all of us. What are we gonna choose? Are we still gonna choose the attachment or we're gonna go for authenticity. And I'll tell you, health-wise, we pay a huge price. If we go for the attachment by stranding authenticity. And so, as we say in the book, the loss of authenticity inauthenticity, it may not have been a choice to the child. It's not like they had a choice in a matter, but authenticity can be a choice to the adult.”

“I think we all have these stories, you know, whether they come through bereavements or betrayals or, or whatever, we, we all have these losses…There's something about having been immersed in this bittersweet tradition and understanding the pain of separation and understanding the desire for a union and understanding that the loves that we lose, that we might lose particular loves, but that we never lose love itself. I think that's like the real thing that's really made me come to a place of peace.”

“There seems to be this basic idea that if you make a system, including a human life, more efficient, capable of processing, more inputs to put it in like abstract general terms. Well, if that supply of inputs is infinite, all that's gonna happen is that you attract more of them into the system and you end up busier, right? This is Parkinson's law. It's induced demand with the way when they widen freeways to ease the congestion, it makes the route more appealing to more drivers. So more cars come and fill the lane and then the congestion gets back to what it was before. There's all these different ways in which trying to get on top of something that you can't actually get on top of is futile. And technology seems to offer us that promise, and of course it does help us do lots and lots of really useful things, but it doesn't help us get to the state of peace of mind with respect to our limited natures. It's never going to break through that barrier.”

“What I know is that no one is alone. There's no sense of isolation or sadness or disconnection that I think at times we mistakenly feel here because we get very stuck in the fact that we're in these physical bodies, right? And sometimes we're physically isolated or sometimes I think some of us are so distanced from our own truths and our own inner voice, our own inner wisdom that we get very confused on our life path. And then we feel spiritually distanced from being connected to this great fabric and grid of light that's here. Right? So I think the answer is for all of us here on earth to go deep within, to access our highest path, our true purpose, the connection that's always there. And we can really call upon those on the other side to help us do that because they're still working with us and for us and so forth.”

“I tear up at the drop of a hat, but like we tell the youth, the soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears. And so whenever any of the youth tear up, or any of the adults, we take the tears and we rub it on the drum so that the tears don't go to waste. They reverberate, you know, when we hit the drum. So a lot of it's about dealing with your feelings, like Meade says, and others, if you don't deal with your wound, you will continue to wound others. So it's about them identifying how they've been wounded, but then also it's that wound that drives.”

“There are two things I think are really important. One is we all need to learn history because research shows that the more you understand the history of discrimination in the past, the more you're able to perceive it in the present. But additionally, and this is really important and related to your work on patriarchy, it's also really important that we see examples of places and times when the toxic patterns that we have today were not present, because I think this can give us the courage and the creativity to imagine, and to create a time after bias a time after prejudice.”

“I now have so much more perspective, but at the time, even I felt people who have already had so much adversity in their life. That's a big precursor to how people get behind bars. And then when they're there, I feel like that's the time to heal, but we have such a different mindset in our country, and other countries do the same, and such a punitive one. And that's not how I am organized inside. That's not what feels right in me. And so right away, I saw how things could be different, but I also saw the power of this tool in people's hands who were really starving to understand what was wrong in their lives and thinking there was something wrong with them. I think my approach to the Enneagram is that there's nothing wrong with any of us. Enneagram is a map to show us what's so right about us. And it felt like the, the most profound place to be, figuring out how to teach it.”