Top 21 Quotes & Sayings by Oriah Dreamer

What if the question is not why I am so infrequently the person I really want to be, but why do I so infrequently want to be the person I really am?

Not doing is not about immobility or giving up in despair. It is first and foremost about being able to be with, to accept fully, what is in this moment.

Loudly declaring our soul's desire can get the blood running and our passions blazing.

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living, I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

The world we live in is a co-creation, a manifestation of individual consciousness woven into a collective dream. How we are with each other as individuals, as groups, as nations and tribes, is what shapes that dream.

... It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself, and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

There is nowhere to go. What you are looking for is right here. Open the fist clenched in wanting and see what you already hold in your hand

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

The courage to go deeper is found by letting your desire grow larger than your fear.

Within each of us there is the heart of a lion, the courage to simply be who & what we are regardless of others opinions or our own fears. Sometimes this courage has been buried beneath years of shaming that may have been so implicit or insidious that we breathed it in, unaware of how it separated us from knowing our own beauty of being. May we each know our own beauty & right to be today. May we drop down into the heart of the lion within & say to shame, when it rears it's head, "Not today!"

It is hard to be with another's pain if we cannot be with our own. Since I was a child I have always felt a deep sense of responsibility to ease others' pain. But I have discovered that often, beneath this genuine and admirable desire, lies an inability to be with my own sorrow. Several years ago, watching a close friend suffer when a brain aneurysm took away her life as she knew it, I wrote in my journal, "I won't ask much. But if you would just let me save your life, perhaps it will not hurt so much to know I cannot save my own.

I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. .I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, . and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout . . . "Yes." .I want to know if you can get up . weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done. .I want to know what sustains you . when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can see beauty even when it's not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence.

When we surrender when we do not fight with life when it calls upon us we are lifted and the strength to do what needs to be done finds us.

We have been sold a lifestyle, when what our soul desired was life.

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know whether you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

Sometimes I think there are only two instructions we need to follow to develop and deepen our spiritual life: slow down and let go.

Tell me, can you see beauty? Can you let it renew your commitment to life, every day? I don't want to wait for death to be near to receive the beauty in my life. I want to be awed every day by the truth-pretty or painful-and let it open me to the beauty that surrounds me and draws me deeper and deeper into my own life.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”

What if becoming who and what we truly are happens not through striving and trying but by recognizing and receiving the people and places and practices that offer us the warmth of encouragement we need to unfold?

I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain!