The Dance Quotes

“Sometimes I think there are only two instructions we need to follow to develop and deepen our spiritual life: slow down and let go.”
― Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance: Moving To the Rhythms of Your True Self

“What if the task is simply to unfold, to become who you already are in your essential nature—gentle, compassionate, and capable of living fully and passionately present? How would this affect how you feel when you wake up in the morning?”
― Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance: Moving to the Deep Rhythms of Your Life

“Where I had felt a victim, I had become a determiner by recognizing I had choices. When considering a purchase, I stopped saying, "I can't afford it," and started saying, "That's not where I want to spend that amount of money.”
― Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance: Moving To the Rhythms of Your True Self

“Somewhere along the road many of us have picked up the belief that to change we must suffer. Some things are earned with work. But work is not suffering. Work is just work.”
― Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance: Moving To the Rhythms of Your True Self

“If I want to live my ability to be fully present and compassionate, my ability to be with it all—the joy and the sorrow—I must find the ways, the people, the places, the practices that support me in being all I truly am. I must cultivate ways of being that let me feel the warmth of encouragement against my heart when it is weary.”
― Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance: Moving to the Deep Rhythms of Your Life

“Show me how you take care of business without letting business determine who you are. When the children are fed but still the voices within and around us shout that soul’s desires have too high a price, let us remind each other that it is never about the money.”
― Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance: Moving to the Deep Rhythms of Your Life

“Every day, sometimes when I am doing my meditation practice and sometimes when I am working at my computer or sitting in my car waiting for a traffic light to change or sharing a meal with friends, I turn my attention to my breath and visualize myself on some inner plane of the imagination turning my face toward that which is larger than myself—the Great Mystery. I only have to turn my face toward it. I become aware of the temperature of the air touching my cheek. I imagine the molecules of oxygen and hydrogen and carbon dioxide colliding in exuberant activity, caressing the skin of my face. And I become aware that these molecules are alive with a vibration, a presence that is there also in the cells of my skin and in the molecules of those cells and in the atoms and subatomic particles of those. Slowly I turn my attention to an inner view of the landscape around and within me, and I become aware of this presence, like the hum of a great song constantly reverberating throughout and emanating from my body, the chair supporting me, the ground beneath me, and the people around me. And I know this presence as a whole that is larger than the sum of the parts and yet inseparable from the parts—including me—which are in a state of constant change. And I experience this presence, this bloodred thread of being that runs through the dark tapestry of daily life, as that which gives me the ability to truly know each other as another myself—as compassion.”
― Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance: Moving to the Deep Rhythms of Your Life

“Don’t tell me how wonderful things will be…someday. Show me you can risk being completely at peace, truly okay with the way things are right now in this moment, and again in the next and the next and the next… Here is the question: Are you willing to be completely at peace with how things are right now in your life? Are you willing for just one moment to let go of all your dissatisfaction, of all your suffering about how things are? Are you willing to let go of all the worry and tension in your body and simply breathe? I think of happiness as the delight I have when I am aware of being completely at peace and fully present with myself and the world just the way it is in this moment. It is a lack of suffering plus a self-reflectivity that makes the peace I am feeling a conscious state of awareness. I am not simply at peace, I am aware that I am at peace—happy. So, are you willing to be happy?”
― Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance: Moving to the Deep Rhythms of Your Life