The Path Made Clear: Discovering Your Life's Direction and Purpose(7)

OPRAH: What’s interesting is, you were feeling this sense of angst, this sense of urgency flooding your body all of the time, but at least you were feeling it. I think so many people are so disconnected and numbed by the routine of life, they don’t even have an opportunity to stop and know what they’re feeling. And that’s why sometimes it’s three o’clock in the morning when it’s waking you up.

DANI: I would get my whole day done, and check everything off every list that I had to do, and drive everywhere that I had to drive, and get dinner on the table, and answer e-mails, and just do all of the things in that endless kind of list. Then my head hits the pillow. I fall asleep, and something in my being was forcing me awake because it was a thing that I hadn’t dealt with.

OPRAH: You’re blessed to have that restlessness, really.

DANI: Yes, it’s a gift. It’s a wake-up call.





CAROLINE MYSS


CAROLINE MYSS: We have an intuitive voice in us. We are born intuitive. We are so intuitive that for most people, it’s the source of their greatest suffering. Because people hear when they’ve betrayed themselves. People are very much aware when they are not honest with themselves. It’s that voice that says, You shouldn’t have said that. Or, You know that’s not right.

OPRAH: Meaning things like, You’re still with this person, but you should have left twelve years ago.

CAROLINE: This is the voice of your conscience. It’s the voice of your gut instinct. It’s the voice you don’t want to hear that never turns off. This is the part that says, You should push. And, You should do this. So it’s the part that keeps us moving and turning the wheel of our life. It’s also the part that says, This is it. You’ve done everything you can. That’s as far as you can go. It will guide you. It will say, This is it.

OPRAH: So what you’re saying is exactly what I’ve always believed and how I’ve operated. Once you accept when you have done everything that you can do, you surrender it. Let it go to the power and energy that’s greater than yourself.

CAROLINE: That’s it. You got to give it your all. Give it your best.

OPRAH: And then not be attached to the outcome.

CAROLINE: Totally. You got it.





ADYASHANTI


We’re always living a life where we’re chasing a sense of self which feels, underneath it, inauthentic. And then life becomes a compensation for not knowing who we are. It is almost like a wound within us when we get disconnected from the truth of our being. We do feel that. And then we’re trying to fill it with love or approval or success or the million ways that we seek fulfillment from outside of ourselves. But no matter how much fulfillment we get, there’s that place inside that until we’ve realized the truth of our being, we will feel estranged from our own being. And from each other.





JON KABAT-ZINN


JON KABAT-ZINN: What mindfulness is saying to all of us is, Find your own way. Listen to your own heart. Listen to your own longing. Because what we’re really trying to do is live our life as if it really matters.

OPRAH: Because it does matter.

JON: It does.





CHERYL STRAYED


I glanced over and I saw these books on the shelf. The Pacific Crest Trail Volume 1: California was one of the books. I had never heard of the trail before. I had never gone backpacking before. I had done a lot of hiking and grown up in the wilderness of northern Minnesota, but something about this book called to me. So I turned it over and read the back. And it told the story of this amazing national scenic trail that went from Mexico to Canada through California, Oregon, and Washington. And along the spine of the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Range. And it just seemed like such an important thing. Such a grand thing, such a significant thing. And I was none of those things at that moment in my life. I just knew that I wanted to attach myself to it. The best way for me to describe it is that something bloomed in my chest. I felt some sense of opening or wonder. I knew instinctively that the wilderness was the place that I felt most gathered.





PEMA CH?DR?N


PEMA CH?DR?N: My whole life I’ve had that instinct of what’s forward. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but …

OPRAH: It makes all the sense to me. I think everybody has patterns. And it’s your job to figure out what your pattern is. Mine is I’ve learned as much as I can learn doing this one thing. Now I need to move forward. And it happens when I’ve learned as much as I can learn at that thing. And then something else opens itself.

PEMA: Somehow there’s always forward.

OPRAH: As long as there is still breath there’s forward.





AMY PURDY


Instead of people looking at me, hearing my story and thinking, Oh that’s inspiring, I want people to be “inspired” to take action themselves. I’ve had all these little whispers in my life guiding me; the whispers have quieted down over the years because I believe I am now where I am meant to be.





U.S. Representative JOHN LEWIS


We were ordinary human beings, ordinary people touched by what I like to call the spirit of history. Some force just grabbed us. People had to do something, people had to say something. If not, I don’t think history would have been kind to us.