“To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common-this is my symphony.”
*******
“Humor is tragedy plus time."
~ Speaking of Psychology Podcast. "What makes things funny?" with Peter McGraw, Ph.D.
*******
“I had broken the fundamental rule of psychotherapy. Do not strip away a
patient’s defenses if you have nothing better to offer in their stead.”
~Irvin Yalom, “Momma
and the meaning of life: tales of psychotherapy.”
*******
“Most of us take pride in our
knowledge and expertise and in staying true to our beliefs and opinions. That
makes sense in a stable world where we get rewarded for conviction in our
ideas. The problem is that we live in the rapidly changing world where we need
to spend as much time rethinking as we do thinking.”
~ Adam Grant, “Think again: the power of knowing what you don’t know”
*******
“He wouldn’t know what to feel until
he knew what to think.”
~ Toni Morrison, “The Song of
Solomon”
*******
“Listen, the problem isn’t how hard
you’re working, it’s that you are working on things that aren’t right for you.
Your goals in motivations aren’t harmonizing with your deepest truths.”
“Now, I have something scary to tell
you. You don’t have that much time left to live. Whether it’s five years or 55,
it’s not all that long. You have no time waste on suffering. No time to keep
torturing your nature to serve your culture. The time for integrity is now.”
“Every day you make thousands of tiny decisions about what to do with your
time. Every single choice is a chance to turn toward the life you really want.
Repeatedly putting a little less time into what you don’t love, and a little
more into what you do love, Is your next step on your way to integrity.”
“What would you do if you were absolutely free?”
~ Martha Beck, “The way of integrity: finding the path to your true self.”
*******
“Like fighting an addiction, being an anti-racist requires a persistent
self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.”
“One of racism’s harms is the way the
falls on unexceptional black person who is asked to be extraordinary just to
survive.”
~ Ibram X. Kendi, “How
to be an antiracist”
*******
“The moral arc of our life bends
toward meaning, especially if we bend it that way with all our damn might.”
“If you are uncomfortable—in deep
pain, angry, yearning, confused—you don’t have a problem, you have a life.
Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re
doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you
must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy.”
~ Glennon Doyle, “Untamed”
*******
“Your past is not an excuse but it is an explanation”
~ Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Bruce D. Perry, “What
Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing.”
*******
“Most of us most of the time live
with unquestioned belief that the world looks as does because that’s the way it
is. There’s one small step from this belief to another: other people view the
world much the way I do. These beliefs which have been called naive realism are
essential to the sense of a reality we share with other people. We rarely
question these beliefs. We hold a single interpretation of the world around us
at any single time. And we normally invest very little effort in creating
plausible alternatives to it. One interpretation is enough and we experiences
as truth. We do not go through life imagining alternative ways to see what we
see.”
~ Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein, “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment”
*******
“From a purely biological perspective,
we humans are feeling creatures who think, rather than thinking creatures who
feel. Neuroanatomically you and I are programmed to feel our emotions. And any
attempt we may make to bypass or ignore what we are feeling may have the power
to derail our mental health at this most fundamental level.”
“Anger is an energetic response to pain.”
~ Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD,
“Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive
Our Life”
*******
“You have a burden. The richer the
soil, the more unforgivable the failure to cultivate it.”
~ Irvin Yalom, “When Nietzsche
wept”
*******
Chinese parable - Is it good? is in bad? Maybe so, Maybe not. We’ll
see. | Dr. Marlo Archer
*******
Alexithymia “emotional blindness”: An inability to identify and describe
one’s feelings or emotions
~ American Psychology
Association dictionary
*******
A conversation between Pico Iyer and Elizabeth Gilbert on what it means to
retreat into smallness, and grapple with a complex understanding of hope, as
the world continues to overwhelm.
*******
“I recognized winter. I saw it coming (a mile
off, since you ask), and I looked it in the eye. I greeted it and let it in. I
had some tricks up my sleeve, you see. I've learned them the hard way. When I
started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favored
child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my
feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed and made
sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and
spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: What is this winter
all about? I asked myself: What change is coming?”
“Doing those deeply unfashionable things—slowing down, letting your spare
time expand, getting enough sleep, resting—is a radical act now, but it is
essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a
skin. If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw
that you’ll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don’t, then that
skin will harden around you.”
“If we don’t allow ourselves the
fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt.
We seem to be living in an age when we’re bombarded with entreaties to be
happy, but we’re suffering from an avalanche of depression. We’re urged to stop
sweating the small stuff, yet we’re chronically anxious. I often wonder if
these are just normal feelings that become monstrous when they’re denied. A
great deal of life will always suck. There will be moments when we’re riding
high and moments when we can’t bear to get out of bed. Both are normal. Both in
fact require a little perspective.”
“When it’s really cold, the snow
makes a lovely noise underfoot, and it’s like the air is full of stars.”
“This isn’t about you getting fixed,” he said. “This is about you living the
best life you can with the parameters that you have.”
~ Katherine May, “Wintering:
The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times”
*******
“Enlightenment is the supreme
tolerance of cognitive dissonance.”
Also, a great interview with Robert Thurman on the “10%
happier” Podcast
*******
“In this world we walk on the roof of hell gathering blossoms”
2 comments:
Insightful, as always! Cheers for the new year!
You’re a SUPER STAR RINA KOSHKINA!
Thank you so much 😊 Adore you. Thank for being my huge fan
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