Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation. . . Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche
to swing open.
to swing open.
What is too soon for, too late for, just the right time for?
When you are very still in a place without words, steeped in silence,
when the world is elsewhere with its noise and motion, what are
the sacred hungers that echo inside of you?
Who am I when I stop doing?
~ Dawna Markova, I Will Not Die an Unlived Life**
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* Jungian analyst and post-trauma specialist Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes is deputy managing editor and columnist for The Moderate Voice. Her columns are here.
** A bio for inspirational speaker and writer Dr. Dawna Markova is here.
** A bio for inspirational speaker and writer Dr. Dawna Markova is here.
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8 comments:
What a wonderful question: Who am I when I stop doing?
Something to ponder.
Maureen ... thanks for this ... I love questions and collect quotes about questions so I appreciate having a new one to chew on.
Here's a writing from Rilke that I love also ...
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear friend, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
oooh... I just love that second one. "Who am I when I stop doing?" This is the question few of us dare ask, for we're too afraid to stop doing and find out...
Joyce, nice to learn something new about you. I recall posting that Rilke quote, or some portion of it, on Our Cancer, where there are always lots of questions, mostly unanswerable.
small childeren
ask many questions
holding secrets
from heaven
in their heart
When I stop doing, I am asking questions, or seeing things in different configurations, like a puzzle of sorts. I am asking when I wake up, when I go to sleep, when I wander. So the Rilke quote has always been a favorite. Though I ask a lot of questions when I'm doing too. Might be good to ask, "Who am I when the questions stop?" I don't know that one.
Great quotes. But then I will always appreciate anything Estes has to say.
Oh oh, I love both of these, but especially the second. I have had to {begin to} discover the answer to that question - "who am I when I stop doing?" the last few years, forced to put doing on the shelf by chronic illness. As someone who has defined herself by the doing, it was terrifying. If I *do* nothing, does that then mean I *am* nothing?
I am slowly discovering that is not so, I am *something*, apart from my doing. Still figuring out what, though. Or is it *whom*?
Anyhow, thank you.
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