Top 89 Quotes & Sayings by Jean Houston

At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.

I firmly believe that all human beings have access to extraordinary energies and powers. Judging from accounts of mystical experience, heightened creativity, or exceptional performance by athletes and artists, we harbor a greater life than we know.

Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to the unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity.

We all have the extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be released.

I don't think that any great issue ever gets resolved. I think we outgrow them.

Laughter is the loaded latency given us by nature as part of our native equipment to break up the stalemates of our lives and urge us on to deeper and more complex forms of knowing.

No matter the situation, never let your emotions overpower your intelligence.

Women are rising slowly but steadily into full partnership with men all over the world. This is going to change everything. When the rich mind- style of women is available - with an emphasis on process, rather than on end-product, and on making things cohere, grow and interlink - - then it changes the way we educate, it changes the way we govern, it changes the way we worship.

We are the love, the lover, the loving, and the love. It is the Supreme. It is the deepest force in our lives.

Change the story and you change perception; change perception and you change the world.

I believe that we are stewards of a time that is upon us - but often we need the encouragement of each other to be able to wake up to this extraordinary time and possibility.

What happens is that you discover you're carrying so much weight that 90 percent of what you thought yesterday you are thinking about today and will think about again tomorrow. Your mind doesn't change because you are carrying too large a load. So the mind is caught. It's seized by its own structures. It can't consider different ways of thinking or doing or being or relating. It's all you can do with your psychic energy to keep pulling yourself along with this huge bag that you are dragging behind you.

Bangladesh is a world of metaphor, of high and low theater, of great poetry and music. You talk to a rice farmer and you find a poet. You get to know a sweeper of the streets and you find a remarkable singer.

The illuminated ones can take any form -- a man, a woman, a child, an elder, or even a dog. It is not inconsequential that the English language allows for the dyslexia of the spelling of the word dog: God spelled backward.

When a culture is not mythologically instructed, not instructed in story that gives us a call, then we start looking for quasi-stories, little toxic stories that keep our selves alerted and spared until we find another story.

Just as you would not neglect seeds that you planted with hope that they will bear vegetables and fruits and flowers, so must you attend to nourish the garden of your becoming.

The tendrils of a new, deeper form of spirituality are growing. It's the greening under the surface crust of consciousness and social paradigm.

Time has driven out sex and money as the central issues. Now if it could only drive out the issue of power we would be somewhere!

The more you love, the more loving you become. That's just the way it works. It is a generosity of spirit.

Laughter lifts our spirits, surprises and sometime shocks our expectations, allows us to cross boundaries, reorders our priorities, and gives us access to ideas and associations we rarely ever thought to have.

Wth subtly developed body awareness, it is possible for the individual to become the conscious orchestrator of health.

As you allow the beloved to grow within you, you will discover a steadfastness to the spiritual journey.

Each person is a really a great treasure house of capacities, possibilities, energies.

The world needs the sense that we are all in it together.

Love to me is - the final lines in Dante's Paradiso, when he says, "The love that moves the Sun and all the stars" - it's what draws us together, it's why we have leaky margins with each other. It is that sumptuous, sensuous, sensitive quickening that happens when we really know ourselves as love and see ourselves as loving.

Development involves giving up a smaller story in order to wake up to a larger story.

I often wonder if you wrote your memoir today, if your life story would be lived on the edge of possibility, if you held wonder in one hand and courage in the other and truly believed that anything was possible.

Now is the time when we must renew ourselves and live as if we and all of life is sacred, and as if everything we do makes a difference.

We compensate for what we don't do internally by projecting and allowing our minds to be marinated in chronic fantasy.

In our time we have come to the stage where the real work of humanity begins. It is the time where we partner Creation in the creation of ourselves, in the restoration of the biosphere, the regenesis of society and in the assuming of a new type of culture; the culture of Kindness. Herein, we live daily life reconnected and recharged by the Source, so as to become liberated and engaged in the world and in our tasks.

Stories are living and dynamic. Stories exist to be exchanged. They are the currency of Human Growth.

We cannot embrace the New Mind by just sitting around and talking about it. It demands that we alter not just our thinking, but our way of living down to the smallest details.

Sometimes my life has been Odyssean - landing on strange islands of consciousness and reality and meeting very curious monsters who turn out to be very great teachers. Sometimes my life has been a quest for a grail of knowledge and education. Like Parsifal, my life has been a quest to pierce the veil, stumbling along but eventually finding it.

Human connections are deeply nurtured in the field of shared story.

A normal person is someone that you don't know very well.

I think of spirit as that which evokes us - the lure of becoming that keeps calling. And I think of soul as that which gets us through the cartography of everyday life.

We are still a pioneer culture in some ways. A pioneer culture has to put all of its muscle into surviving on the frontier and pushing back the wilderness. So when you start to talk about imagination, inner space, and the structures of the psyche, that becomes scary.

It would be wonderful if people could grow together in groups, teaching and learning communities where they empower, evoke, explore the enormous capacities of the human condition.

The soul is the lure of our becoming.

Occasionally we will be overwhelmed, but mostly we will be enchanted.

Engaging it produces an intense force, which in turn produces a mutation in consciousness. You become who you really are.

What I often do in my work is to take a great story, such as the Odyssey, the search for the Grail, the story of Jesus, or the story of the great peacemaker who helped create the Iroquois Confederacy in the 15th century. I then use these tales as templates upon which to weave psychological and spiritual exercises which allow us to open ourselves up to the larger venue of a story.

Certainly one is brought to the brink of one's sense of who one is, what one has to do, why me, why now, why in this time in history? I am really driven, believe it or not, am awakened by a sense of being in this powerful axis, this turning point in human history.

You are not an encapsulated bag of skin dragging around a dreary little ego. You are an evolutionary wonder, a trillion cells singing together in a vast chorale, an organism – environment, a symbiosis of cell and soul.

If you keep telling the same sad small story. You will keep living the same sad small life.

There is something else that is trying to come through - that lure of becoming - and it does come from the realm of spirit, it does come from the quantum universe, it does come from the great spark that is the threshold of time and history trying to emerge and electrify us.

I find that all over the world, not only is there an acceleration of just about everything, but that many of the old patterns are deconstructing. New ones are arising. It's tremendously exciting, challenging, and also sometimes, well, scary.

You've had a whole lot of experience, but everything is also radically new at each moment, and you have to bring a kind of childlike second-level innocence to bear upon all situations, if you are going to be of use and you are going to really learn from the situation or the people.

We tend to think of the Faustian man, the one who fabricates, manipulates, seduces and ends up destroying. But the new image will be man the creator, the artist, the player.

Try to spend a few moments each day holding a picture of your body and your mind in a state of splendid health.

In a world such as ours, where we have to cross the great divide of otherness or we will not survive, love is perhaps the most critical aspect that is there in our humanity, to both activate and to practice.

The ecological crisis is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done - challenging us to a realization of a new humanity.

Your brain has one function-to do exactly what you tell it to do.

I am ready for the rest of my life to rise.

A myth is something that never was but that is always happening.

You are not a passive observer in the cosmos. The entire universe is expressing itself through you at this very moment.

My prayer is, let me be a blessing to someone or something today.

Education and the process of educating is a total integral, contextual situation which includes students, teachers, parents, administration and environment.

We needed a "psychenaut" program to be the opposite of the astronaut program in order to explore the enormous domains and dimensions of inner space. We need inner space exploration. We need to have access to more capacities in order to be adequate stewards of this most incredible process of transformation in human history.

Ironically, we are all too often educated out of rather than in to an awareness of the body.