Monday evening, I went to the last Mind, Supermind Lecture of the Spring Adult Education Program here in Santa Barbara. Joan Borysenko was the lecturer. She is an expert on the mind/body connection. The title of her lecture was, “Saying Yes to Change: Following the Wisdom of the Heart“. (If you click on this link, it will take you to her website, where you can find out more about her thoughts on this subject.) She talked about how resilient people are when they are able to go along with change, rather than staying locked into something that is no longer working. Too often they let fear of going into the unknown stop them. She cited a quote of Richard Bach:
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly.
I’ve been writing about change lately in this blog, and as usual, when you’re focused on something, you start seeing it everywhere. I saw an illustration the other day of a quote and a concept that I’ve talked with my clients about many times. It showed a man in a narrow hall. There were two doors in the hall. One was closed, and the man was pulling with all his mite, trying to open that door. Right behind him was a door wide open, but he was so focused on the closed door that he didn’t even see the open door. The illustration was in an e-book called Dare to Dream by Anthony Fernando. Below the illustration was this quote, which I first saw and loved a long time ago:
“When one door closes, another opens;
but we often look so long and so
regretfully upon the closed door that we
do not see the ones which open for us”
– Alexander Graham Bell
but we often look so long and so
regretfully upon the closed door that we
do not see the ones which open for us”
– Alexander Graham Bell
Isn’t that a great quote? Isn’t that what we so often do, when we determined to stay with what’s familiar, even though it’s no longer working for us.
Please give both of these quotes some thought. Think about whether the closed door quote is reflective of where you might be stuck in your life right now. The butterfly is a symbol of rebirth. It takes courage and faith to go toward the unknown, but the rewards can be amazing. Let me know what you think.
Linda