Christina Baldwin Quotes & Sayings

When you are stuck in a spiral, to change the aspects of the spin you only need to change one thing. — Christina Baldwin

When you choose to write using yourself as the source of the story, you are choosing to confront all the silences in which your story has been protectively wrapped. Your job as a writer is to respectfully, determinedly, free the story from the silences and free yourself from both. — Christina Baldwin

Words are how we think; stories are how we link. — Christina Baldwin

Forgiveness is the act of admitting we are like other people. — Christina Baldwin

In writing we live life twice: once in the experience, and again in recording and reflecting upon our experience. — Christina Baldwin

My real journey had very little to do with traveling Europe, and a whole lot to do with traveling my own mind. — Christina Baldwin

Spiritual energy brings compassion into the world. — Christina Baldwin

The ordinary stories of our ordinary lives have extraordinary gifts coded within them ... — Christina Baldwin

Most of us have developed a fairly extensive vocabulary for describing pain, as though the journal were a doctor requiring much detail to make the correct diagnosis. The roundness of the spiritual journey cannot be expressed without developing an equally extensive vocabulary for talking to ourselves and others about the nature of wonder, joy, ecstasy, love, transfiguration. — Christina Baldwin

The reason I spend thousands of lifetime hours creating something 99 percent of which no one else is likely to ever read is that writing itself is the gift. — Christina Baldwin

With compassion, we see benevolently our own human condition and the condition of our fellow beings. We drop prejudice. We withhold judgment. — Christina Baldwin

Every person is born into life as a blank page and every person leaves life as a full book. — Christina Baldwin

Spirituality is the sacred center out of which all life comes, including Mondays and Tuesdays and rainy Saturday afternoons in all their mundane and glorious detail ... The spiritual journey is the soul's life commingling with ordinary life. — Christina Baldwin

Wonder is not a Pollyanna stance, not a denial of reality; wonder is an acknowledgement of the power of the mind to transform, to notice, to decide what experience shall mean. — Christina Baldwin

Meaning drives us from despair to wonder, from confusion to clarity, from hesitance to confidence. And the only place to find meaning is in the importance of small things. — Christina Baldwin

We make our lives bigger or smaller, more expansive or more limited, according to the interpretation of life that is our story. — Christina Baldwin

How we remember, what we remember, and why we remember form the most personal map of our individuality. — Christina Baldwin

To work in the world lovingly means that we are defining what we will be for, rather than reacting to what we are against. — Christina Baldwin

Millions of people are joined in the knowledge that writing brings insight and calm in the same way that prayer, meditation, or a long walk in the woods does. They have discovered that writing allows the racing mind to move at the pace of pen and paper or the pace of typing on the waiting screen - that journal writing is a spiritual practice. — Christina Baldwin

My journal is my life's companion. — Christina Baldwin

Spiritual empowerment is evidenced in our lives by our willingness to tell ourselves the truth, to listen to the truth when it's told to us, and to dispense truth as lovingly as possible, when we feel compelled to talk from the heart. — Christina Baldwin

By its simple shape, circle includes everyone without distinction, welcomes and invites all to participate, and creates equality among those gathered. — Christina Baldwin

The purpose of life is not to maintain personal comfort; it's to grow the soul. — Christina Baldwin

We cannot think without language, we cannot process experience without story. — Christina Baldwin

When you're stuck in a spiral, to change all aspects of the spin you need only to change one thing. — Christina Baldwin

When story and behavior are consistent, we relax; when story and behavior are inconsistent, we get tense. We have a deep psychological need for our stories and behaviors to be consistent. We need to be able to trust the story, because it's the lens through which we see reality. We will go to great lengths in the attempt to make a story that explains an action and supports or restores consistency. If we cannot make story and action fit, we either have to make a new story or change the action ... [But] The drive for consistency and the ability to redefine abhorrent action so it fits the story are very complex issues. We have a huge ability to continue believing stories we are told are true in order to stay comfortable with actions we don't want to change, or don't feel capable of changing. — Christina Baldwin

In the midst of overwhelming noise and distraction, the voice of story is calling us to remember our true selves. — Christina Baldwin

Writing makes a map, and there is something about a journey that begs to have its passage marked. — Christina Baldwin

Curiosity restores is a state of heightened awareness. Culturally, this has been considered a child's activity. By the time we're grown, we're supposed to know enough not to get bogged down in life's miraculous detail. But the spiritual journey reactivates our sense of miracle and invites us to pause again, squatting over the sidewalk cracks, to ponder the lives of ants and stars. — Christina Baldwin

Contact with the sacred occurs in the stillness of the heart and mind. If there is any real destination to the spiritual quest, it is this point of silence, the middle of the spiral, the center of the self ... The only map that does the spiritual traveler any good is one that leads to the center. — Christina Baldwin

Despair is our chance to wrestle with fire and come through. — Christina Baldwin

We are living in a renaissance of personal writing. People are rebalancing the impersonalization endemic to modern society with an increase in personal introspection. We have enough common psychology under our belts to know that psychology doesn't explain or heal everything and that it isn't the fulfillment of awareness, but its beginning. We are undergoing a shift in paradigms in which we are trying to develop new models for humanness and human responsibility. This is no small task. Our individual lives are placed under increasing pressure to respond adequately to both inner and outer change. — Christina Baldwin

Spiritual life is contractual. The sacred cannot dialogue with the unresponsive. — Christina Baldwin

Story is the mother of us all. First we wrap our lives in language and then we act on who we say we are. We proceed from the word into the world and make a world based on our stories. — Christina Baldwin

Journal writing is a voyage to the interior. — Christina Baldwin

Intuition always has our best interest at heart. — Christina Baldwin

The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them. — Christina Baldwin

Friendship has no civil, and few emotional, rights in our society. — Christina Baldwin

We need a revolution in the West: not violent overthrow, but a willingness to take responsibility for the course of history being set forth in our names. We need a revolution determined to activate broad, inclusive social change. — Christina Baldwin

Our desires teach us who we are and who we want to become. Our desires shape our stories. — Christina Baldwin

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the ordinary. — Christina Baldwin

Ritual is the way you carry the presence of the sacred. Ritual is the spark that must not go out. — Christina Baldwin

The spiritual journey is what the soul is up to while we attend to daily living. — Christina Baldwin

Ritual consists of the external practices of spirituality that help us become more receptive and aware of the closeness of our lives to the sacred. Ritual is the act of sanctifying action - even ordinary action - so that it has meaning. I can light a candle because I need the light or because the candle represents the light I need. — Christina Baldwin

Surprise is the practice of accepting the unexpected interruption, and the practice of leaving enough space in the day for something to happen that isn't on the list. Surrendering to surprise is the practice of balancing structure and openness. — Christina Baldwin

This unceasing interplay between experience and narrative is a uniquely human attribute. We are the storytellers, the ones who put life into words. — Christina Baldwin

Writing bridges the inner and outer worlds and connects the paths of action and reflection. — Christina Baldwin

Story is the mother of us all, for we become who we say we are. — Christina Baldwin