Just a sampling of some beautiful, thought-provoking quotes and notes, and gems of wisdom I gathered this year. Hope they inspire you.
Happy New Year!
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“My father too shows me how it feels to be
exquisitely seen.”
“She was used to seeing
the world a place of deficit, and therefore Joy was foreign to her.”
“A gift wrapped in a
criticism.”
“We may want others’
forgiveness, But that comes from a place of self-gratification. We are asking
forgiveness of others to avoid the harder work of forgiving ourselves.”
~ Lori Gottlieb, “Maybe
you should talk to someone”
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"I like having things to
do but I hate having to do
things. Having things to do is
an option. Having to do things is a
demand."
~ Mrs. Mazel (from
Amazon’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”)
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“Tears are often the
telescope by which men see far into heaven”
~ Henry Ward Beecher
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“Whatever you think the
world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world.”
“Emotion itself is not
and happiness. Only emotion combined with the story is.”
“My secret is I don’t
mind what happens.”
“To be in alignment with
what is, is to be in a relationship of nonresistance with what happens.”
“Only if you resist what
happens are you at the mercy of what happens and the world will determine your
happiness or unhappiness.”
“Three modalities of
consciousness (or awakened doing) are acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm.
Make sure that one of them operates when you’re doing anything at all, from the
most simple task to the most complex.”
~ Eckhart Tolle
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“Just as a truly
courageous person is someone who knows fear but acts bravely in spite of it, a
truly forgiving person is someone who experiences all the anger merited by
injustice and still acts with fairness and compassion."
~ Martha
Beck
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“9
attitudes to cultivate” by Jon Kabat Zinn.
- Non-judging
- Acceptance
- Patience
- Beginner’s mind
- Trust
- Non Striving
- Letting Go
- Gratitude
- Generosity
PS - Mindfulness =
heartfulness
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“There is blindness that
comes with self-furthering agendas. That leaves us thinking we know, but
actually we don’t know as much as we think”
“Surrender - willingness
to participate in life’s dance with a quiet mind and open heart.”
“Adding nothing, subtracting nothing.
Affirming that this is it”
“The power of mindful
selfless generosity - at the deepest level there’s no giver, no gift, or the
recipient. Only the universe rearranging itself.”
~ Jon Kabat Zinn,
“Wherever you go, there you are.”
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“The desire for safety
stands against every great and noble enterprise.”
~ Tacitus
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“The danger is that if
we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human
consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers
might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans.”
~ Yuval Noah Harari, “21
Lessons for the 21st Century”
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“We don’t have to intend
to exclude for the results of our actions to be exclusion.”
“The way we’ve come to
define racism makes it impossible for white people to understand it.”
“According to the
ideology of individualism race is irrelevant.”
“A romanticized past is
a strictly white construct.”
“2016 study found that
half the medical students in the study believed that blacks felt less pain.” (Study:
Racial bias in
pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about
biological differences between blacks and whites.)
”White equilibrium is a
cocoon of racial comfort. Centrality, superiority, entitlement, racial apathy, obliviousness
all rooted in the identity of being good people free of racism. Challenging
this cocoon throws off our racial balance.”
“White fragility is the
sociology of dominance”
“It would be
revolutionary if we (white people) could receive and reflect on the feedback.”
“White fragility
punishes the people who give feedback and presses them back in the silence”
~ Robin Diangelo, “White
Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism”
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“To help other people we have to focus on them
and not on our vision of how things should be.”
~ Richard Boyatzis,
Melvin L. Smith and Ellen Van Oosten, “Helping
people change.”
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The concept of Hedonic
Treadmill or Hedonic Adaptation.
Hedonic Adaptation means
you get used to the good things in life and you adapt to them and they no
longer bring you as much pleasure as they used to. We take things for granted.
“The sad fact about
human experience is that the more we have something the less we appreciate it.”
~ Hidden
Brain, You 2.0
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“There’s a big difference between compassion
and pity. Pity is a certain kind of othering. […] If you are really sorry for
this person’s loss, maybe you don’t need to say anything. Maybe it’s your being
that does all the talking. Maybe it’s the silent presence that does all the
talking.”
“Healing is not fixing.
It’s not going back to the way things were before the thing happened. Healing
is the coming to terms with the actually of things as they are.”
~ Jon Kabat Zinn WISDOM
2.0
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The concept of Fundamental
Attribution Error
”The fundamental
attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or over-attribution
effect) is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional, or
personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while
under-emphasizing situational explanations.
In other words, people have a cognitive bias to assume that a
person's actions depend on what "kind" of person that person is
rather than on the social and environmental forces that influence the person.”
~
Simply
Psychology
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“This is what it means to be human. We’re all
just canvases for our scars.”
“There’s so much art in
the ordinary it could leave you in tears.”
~ Jodi Picault, “A
spark of light.”
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“Each of us is in a
container of some kind. The label signals to the world what is presumed to be
inside and what is to be done with it. The label tells you which shelf your
container supposedly belongs on. In a caste system, the label is frequently out
of sync with the contents, mistakenly put on the wrong shelf and this hurt
people and institutions in ways we may not always know.”
“The price of privilege
is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the
least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any
worse.”
“Slavery was not merely
an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an American
innovation, an American institution created by and for the benefit of the
elites of the dominant caste and enforced by poorer members of the dominant
caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences.”
“We are responsible for
our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom.”
~ Isabel Wilkerson, “Caste:
The Origins of Our Discontents”
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“The terrifying power of caring deeply and
being cared for deeply.”
“There was a net of love
to break her fall.”
“Never underestimate the
big importance of small things.”
“Every life contains
many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time any decision
is taken over by another the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs which
in turn leads to further variations.”
“It’s not what you look
at that matters, it’s what you see.”
“What sometimes feels
like a trap it’s just a trick of the mind.”
“A beautiful messy
struggle.”
“The impossible, I suppose,
happens via living”
“You don’t have to
understand life. You just have to live it.”
~ Matt Haig, “The
Midnight Library”
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“There’s really nothing
more to say except the Why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take
refuge in how.”
“Love is never any
better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love
violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love
of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone
possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the
glare of the lover’s inward eye.”
“Lonely was much better
than alone.”
“Anger is better. There
is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It
is a lovely surging.”
~ Toni Morrison, “The
Bluest Eye”
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“How to
stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.”
“Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find
something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window,
some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.”
“There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are
seven billion versions of normal on this planet.”
“To other people, it sometimes seems like nothing at all. You
are walking around with your head on fire and no one can see the flames.”
“You will one day experience joy that matches this pain. You
will cry euphoric tears at the Beach Boys, you will stare down at a baby’s face
as she lies asleep in your lap, you will make great friends, you will eat
delicious foods you haven’t tried yet, you will be able to look at a view from
a high place and not assess the likelihood of dying from falling. There are
books you haven’t read yet that will enrich you, films you will watch while
eating extra-large buckets of popcorn, and you will dance and laugh and have
sex and go for runs by the river and have late-night conversations and laugh
until it hurts. Life is waiting for you. You might be stuck here for a while,
but the world isn’t going anywhere. Hang on in there if you can. Life is always
worth it.”
~ Matt Haig, “Reasons to Stay Alive”
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“Enthusiasm makes
up for a host of deficiencies.”
“Perhaps most troubling of all, our democracy seems to be
teetering on the brink of crisis—a crisis rooted in a fundamental contest
between two opposing visions of what America is and what it should be; a crisis
that has left the body politic divided, angry, and mistrustful, and has allowed
for an ongoing breach of institutional norms, procedural safeguards, and the
adherence to basic facts that both Republicans and Democrats once took for
granted.”
“To be known. To be heard. To have one’s unique identity
recognized and seen as worthy. It was a universal human desire, I thought, as
true for nations and peoples as it was for individuals.”
― Barack Obama, A
Promised Land
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The concept called “Unconditional Positive Regard”
“Unconditional positive regard is a term used by humanist
psychologist Carl Rogers to describe a technique used in his non-directive,
client-centered therapy. According to Rogers, unconditional positive regard
involves showing complete support and acceptance of a person no matter what
that person says or does. The therapist accepts and supports the client, no
matter what they say or do, placing no conditions on this acceptance. That
means the therapist supports the client, whether they are expressing
"good" behaviors and emotions or "bad" ones.”
~ Verywell
Mind