Discerning Yasha

Our celebration of western individualism has not been balanced with an understanding of the importance of community. We have failed to value enduring relationships, instead viewing relationships as disposable and escaping many of the fetters of interwoven life and. As a result we are lonely and untethered.

We want to move from a mindset of individualism to a mindset of interconnectedness, to understanding that we are all part of a larger organism—the being called Yasha. We must learn to discern the entirety of the body of humanity as a wholism, an embodiment with its own personality. We want to learn the story of Yasha and learn how our individual health and the health of our wholism are inextricably intertwined.

  • We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.

    CS Lewis

  • A human being…experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.…Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

    Albert Einstein

  • We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.

    Thich Nhat Hanh

  • We are like puzzle pieces who are perfectly suited to make a giant picture together, but we are assembling ourselves in the dark.

    Vironika Tugaleva

  • We’re in a spiritual crises, the key to building a true belonging practice is maintaining our belief in inextricable human connection. That connection—the spirit that flows between us and every other human in the world—is not something that can be broken; however, our belief in the connection is constantly tested.

    Brené Brown

  • The instinct for communion in contrast, involves ‘the longing for the world to become present to us as a person, which goes out to us as we to it, which chooses and recognizes us as we do it, which is confirmed in us as we in it’

    Martin Buber

  • As we each attend to our own individual practice, we contribute to the whole in unimaginable ways.

    Giorgia Milne

  • Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.

    Arthur M. Schlesinger

  • It is always the first morning of Creation and always the last day, always the now that is in time and the Now that is not, that has filled time with reminders of Itself.

    Wendell Berry

  • True history is not the battles won and lost but the stories we believe in

    Sekou Sundiata

  • Humanity is one, with one psyche

    CG Jung

  • The act of perception creates the existence of whatever is perceived. At the quantum level, being and knowing are inextricably entangled.

    John Wheeler

  • The transition from the “possible” to the “actual” takes place during the act of observation

    Heisenberg

  • To take the world into one's arms and act towards it in a soul-filled and soul-strengthening manner is a powerful act of wildish spirit.

    Clarissa Pinkola Estés

  • The next Buddha will not take the form of a person. The next Buddha will rather take the shape of a community, a community, that practices, understanding and loving kindness, a community that practice as a way of conscious living. This may be the most important thing for earths survival.

    Thich Nhat Hanh

  • Here and there does not matter./ We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion.

    T.S. Eliot

  • Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered

    José Saramago

  • Stories are medicine

    Clarissa Pinkola Estes