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Quote by Sonya Renee Taylor

“Body terrorism is a hideous tower whose primary support beam is the belief that there is a hierarchy of bodies. We uphold the system by internalizing this hierarchy and using it to situate our own value and worth in the world. This system is destructible, and the fastest way to obliterate its control over us is to do the scary work of tearing down those pillars of hierarchy inside ourselves. At the same time, we must trust that what will be left standing is our own divine enoughness, absent of any need for comparison.”

Quote by Sonya Renee Taylor

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The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

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Sonya Renee Taylor

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“When we are no longer on autopilot, we are forced to deal with the discomfort of new action. Think of radical self-love as resistance training against our decades-old, tight, calcified thoughts. Adopting actions that promote radical self-love is comparable to working a muscle that has not been moved in years. It's going to be sore and tender. You are going to be tired. But the exhaustion and frustration will lessen over time, and there will be ease where there was once pain.”

“In the chronicles of body shame, movement became a thing we avoided. Unapologetic action is our departure from those old stories, prompting us to reconnect to the joys of movement. Many of us cannot recall a time when moving our bodies was something other than a way to punish them for failing to meet society's fictitious ideals. But just as we were once babies who loved our bodies, we were also babies who loved moving them. We can invite ourselves back to this place. There was magic there.”

“And if the world asked me, what is love? I would not point to poems or stars or endless metaphors I would simply point to her. Because love is her. In every curve, in every laugh, in every silence. She is both the question and the answer. And she is the forever I didn’t know how to ask for, but was blessed to find.”

“The Prophet had a universal soul. He had an oceanic soul. One that embraced all other Souls and our masters in our tradition talk about that. They talk about the magnanimity of the Prophet. The great souledness of our Prophet. That meant that he had the ability to relate to every single human being: as they are, where they are, to feel and suffer with them if they had harm and to feel joy with them if they had good and to be intent on their well-being in all things that they did. This is an incredible capacity. And as we grow spiritually this must be one of the gauges by which growth is measured. You are able to embrace people as a whole, not just your own group, not just your own family, not just your own country, but to embrace all people. And not just the good ones but also the bad ones as well. The more that we grow spiritually, the greater this quality becomes. That‘s why the community that embodies that becomes a mercy to the worlds like the Prophet himself. Then that community is a mercy for everyone around it. For the trees, for the animals, for all the people no matter who they are. For the homeless, for the down-and-out, for the people that have nothing. This is the way the community got to be. It‘s got to be a community with open arms, a community that is here to serve and to love. That‘s the way the Prophet was, isn‘t it? The Prophet who is the greatest thing that God created in creation, the greatest of all the human beings, of all the Jin, greater than all the angels. Greater than anything that God created. And we believe also that he is the first thing that God created, the light of our Prophet. (From the lecture „Community and Continuity“)”

“The heart is not merely a metaphor for an undefined capacity for feeling. The heart is an objective, cognitive power beyond intellect. It is the organ of perception which can know the world of spiritual qualities. It is the heart that can love, that can praise, that can forgive, that can perceive the Divine Majesty. Only the human heart can say yes, can affirm wholeness, can know the Infinite. Guided by its inner discernment, al-Furqan, the heart can apprehend what is Real. As a Hadith Qudsi says: „The heavens and the earth do not contain Me. Only the heart of my faithful servant contains me.“ We need an education of the heart to receive this qualitative knowledge.”

“As spiritual seekers, we know that the objective knowledge we require cannot be constructed by human intellect alone. Intellect can perform many useful functions; it can divide, critique, and negate, but intellect is not the source of inspired knowledge about the purpose of life. Intellectual conjecture too often leads only to a labyrinth of opinion. Rather it is the heart that is the seat of true knowing. (p. 53)”