Jean Shinoda Bolen: The Soulful Opportunities Of Our Lifetimes

Jean Shinoda Bolen has been among my many teachers. I first came across her work many years ago and have heard her speak and have read several of her books. There is so much invaluable wisdom that is available and needed for our growth, consciousness, and evolution in these dark times. May we all be lifelong seekers of love, compassion, truth, and wisdom. May we choose our teachers carefully. ― Molly

 Beautiful and Powerful Wisdom From

Jean Shinoda Bolen

You have the need and the right to spend part of your life caring for your soul. It is not easy. You have to resist the demands of the work-oriented, often defensive, element in your psyche that measures life only in terms of output — how much you produce — not in terms of the quality of your life experiences.

To be a soulful person means to go against all the pervasive, prove-yourself values of our culture and instead treasure what is unique and internal and valuable in yourself and your own personal evolution.

To know how to choose a path with heart is to learn how to follow intuitive feeling. Logic can tell you superficially where a path might lead to, but it cannot judge whether your heart will be in it.

Whatever has crowded out growth needs to be recognized and removed. 

I think that whenever soul is present, it's because what you're doing, whom you're with, where you are, evokes love without your thinking about it. You are totally absorbed in the place of person or event, without ego and without judgment.

I believe that the thought that women together can change the world is emerging into the minds and hearts of many of us, and that the vessel for personal and planetary evolution is the circle with a spiritual center.

Listening, witnessing, role modeling, reacting, deepening, mirroring, laughing, crying, grieving, drawing upon experience, and sharing the wisdom of experience, women in circles support each other and discover themselves, through talk. Circles of women supporting each other, healing circles, wisdom circles, soul sister circles, circles of wisewomen, of clan mothers, of grandmothers. Circles of crones, circles of pre-crones, lifetime circles and ad hoc circles, even circles of women in cyberspace and the business place, circles are forming everywhere. 

Compassion and anger come together for terrorized, abused, helpless, and neglected people, whose plight is considered of little importance because they have no power or value in a world where greed and power over others rather than concern for others is the ruling principle. Crones are not naïve or in denial about reality. When something in particular is an outrage, and doing something about it is a choice, a moment of truth occurs in which activists are born. The suffering of others or the feeling of Enough is enough! radicalizes older women. 

There is a potential heroine in every woman. [And man.]

We usually do pay attention to our outer appearance, typically noticing whatever part of our bodies we are unhappy about. It behooves us, however, to get on very good terms with more than just the surface of our bodies as we grow older; for if we don't listen to our bodies and pay attention to our physical needs and pleasures, this vehicle that we need to be running well to take us into a long and comfortable life, will limit what we can do and who we become. 

I feel that one must deliberate then act, must scan every life choice with rational thinking but then base the decision on whether one’s heart will be in it. 

Before you can do something that you’ve never done, you have to be able to imagine it is possible. 

When you recover or discover something that nourishes your soul and brings joy, care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life. 

To voice something you're feeling and put observations into words with another person who is totally present is a creative act embodying soul and love.

Whenever I experience something beautiful, I am with Soul. That moment of inward breath, that pause and awareness of "how beautiful this is" is a prayer of appreciation, a moment of gratitude in which I behold beauty and am one with it. 

When we enter a forest phase in our lives we enter a period of wandering and a time of potential soul growth. Here it is possible to find what we have cut off from, to "remember" a once vital aspect of ourselves. We may uncover a wellspring of creativity that has been hidden for decades. 

Insights from myth, dreams, and intuitions, from glimpses of an invisible reality, and from perennial human wisdom provide us with hints and guesses about the meaning of life and what we are here for. Prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action are the means through which we grow and find meaning.

Syncronistic meetings are like mirrors that reflect something of ourselves. If we want to grow spiritually, all we have to do is take a good look. Synchronicity holds the promise that if we want to change inside, the patterns of our external life will change as well. 

Life presents us with repeated opportunities to face what we fear, what we need to become conscious of, or what we need to master. 

At your most daring moments you believe that what is going on is the ultimate human work the shaping of a soul. The power of life comes from within; go there; pray; meditate. Reach for those luminous places in yourself.

Over the years I have come to believe that life is full of unchosen circumstances, that being human has to do with the evolution of our individual consciousness and with it, responsibilities for choice. Pain and joy both come with life. I believe that how we respond to what happens to us and around us shapes who we become and has to do with the psyche or the soul's growth. 

We need to meditate on what is peaceful. Once we have 'filled up' in this way, we once again have an abundance of love to send out into the world.