YOU ARE YOUR OWN TEACHER

 “Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.” –Wendell Berry

“You have to stop expecting the outside world to take care of you and begin to accept responsibility for your own healing.” -Harville Hendrix in Getting the Love You Want

 “Caminante, no hay camino. Se hace camino al andar.” (Traveler, there is no path. You make the path by walking.) -Poet Antonio Machado

 "I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains/ I looked to the children, I drank from the fountain/ There's more than one answer to these questions/ Pointing me in crooked line/ The less I seek my source for some definitive/ The closer I am to fine." –Indigo Girls in “Closer to Fine”

 “Meaning is unique to each one of us.” –Brene Brown in The Gifts of Our Imperfections

"Well, dog my cats!" says Baba Fats. "here’s one more burnt–out soul, Who’s looking for some alchemist to turn his trip to gold. But you won’t find it in no dealer’s stash, or on no druggist’s shelf. Son, if you would seek the perfect high –– find it in yourself." -Shel Silversteen, excerpted from “The Perfect High” 

"An ethical and evolved life entails telling the truth about oneself and living out that truth…when it comes down to it, you must trust your truest truth, even though there are other truths running alongside it." -Cheryl Strayed in Tiny Beautiful Things

"The bridge will only take you halfway there, to those mysterious lands you long to see. Through gypsy camps and swirling Arab fair, and moonlit woods where unicorns run free. So come and walk a while with me and share the twisting trails and wondrous worlds I've known. But this bridge will only take you halfway there. The last few steps you have to take alone." -Shel Silversteen

TOO MUCH CHOICE CAN CAUSE ANXIETY

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” -Slyvia Plath in The Bell Jar

“The despair of too much possibility.” -Soren Kierkegaard

“Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.” -Jonathan Safran Foer in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“…the fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better…there is a cost to having an overload of choice. As a culture, we are enamored of freedom, self-determination, and variety, and we are reluctant to give up any of our options. But clinging tenaciously to all choices available to us contributes to bad decisions, to anxiety and stress, and dissatisfaction—even to clinical depression.” -Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice 

SELF-COMPASSION IS ESSENTIAL

"There is something wonderfully bold and liberating about saying yes to our entire imperfect and messy life." -Tara Brach in Radical Acceptance

“We cannot change and grow when we are in shame and we can’t use shame to change ourselves or others.” -Brene Brown in I Thought it Was Just Me

“Without loving kindness for ourselves, it is difficult, if not impossible, to genuinely feel it for others.” -Pema Chodron in The Places That Scare You

“We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better ‘me’ who one day will emerge.” -Pema Chodron in When Things Fall Apart

“Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all those imperfections that we don’t even want to look at.” -Pema Chodron in When Things Fall Apart

COMPARISON GETS IN THE WAY OF SELF COMPASSION

“If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.” -Max Ehrmann in “Desiderata”

“The seaweed is always greener in somebody else’s lake." -Sebastian to Arial in The Little Mermaid

“The comparison mandate becomes this crushing paradox of ‘fit in and stand out!’ It’s not cultivate self-acceptance, belonging, and authenticity, it’s be just like everyone else, but better.” -Brene Brown in The Gifts of Our Imperfections

“Nothing has transformed my life more than realizing it’s a waste of time to evaluate my worthiness by weighing the reaction of the people in the stands.” -Brene Brown in Daring Greatly

"Comparison is the thief of joy" -Theodore Roosevelt 

“Each one began to look at the other and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a value…And this was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice. From these first preferences were born vanity and contempt on the one hand, and shame and envy on the other.” -Rousseau in The Social Contract

“What makes this constant assessing and comparing so self-defeating is that we are often comparing our lives, our marriages, our families and our communities to unattainable, media-driven visions of perfection, or we’re holding up our reality against our own fictional account of how great someone else has it. Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison.” -Brene Brown in Daring Greatly 

“Our judgment of what constitutes an appropriate limit on anything—for example, on wealth or esteem—is never arrived at independently; instead, we make such determinations by comparing our condition with that of a reference group, a set of people who we believe resemble us…Status anxiety is the feeling that we might, under different circumstances, be something other than what we are—a feeling inspired by exposure to the superior achievements of those whom we take to be our equals—that generates anxiety and resentment.” -Alain De Botton in Status Anxiety

TRUE EMPATHY IS A TWO WAY STREET

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.” – Pema Chodron in The Places That Scare You

“One of the most important benefits of reaching out to others is learning that the experiences that make us feel the most alone are actually universal experiences.” –Brene Brown in I Thought it Was Just Me

"Empathy is connecting with the emotion that someone is experiencing, not the event of the circumstance." --Brene Brown in Daring Greatly

"You can't selectively numb emotions. Numb the light and you numb the dark." --Brene Brown in Daring Greatly

"Compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got." -Cheryl Strayed in Tiny Beautiful Things

“Show me a woman who can hold space for a man in real fear and vulnerability, and I’ll show you a woman who’s learned to embrace her own vulnerability and who doesn’t derive her power or status from that man. Show me a man who can sit with a woman in real fear and vulnerability and just hear her struggle without trying to fix it or give advice, and I’ll show you a man who’s comfortable with his own vulnerability and doesn’t derive his power from being Oz, the all-knowing and powerful.” -Brene Brown in Rising Strong

THERE IS NO “OTHER”

"One of the greatest enigmas of human behavior is the way we isolate ourselves from each other. In our misguided perception of separation, we assume that others  are not sharing a similar experience of life. We imagine that we are unique in our eccentricities or failures or longings. And so we try to appear as happy and consistent as we think others are, and we feel shame when we stumble and fall." -Elizabeth Lesser in Broken Open

"When we are caught in our own self-centered drama, everyone else becomes "other" to us, different and unreal. The world becomes a backdrop to our own special experience and everyone in it serves as supporting cast, some as adversaries, some as allies, most as simply irrelevant." -Tara Brach in Radical Acceptance

“Most of us judge others whom we perceive as having the traits we dislike in ourselves.” –Brene Brown in I Thought it Was Just Me

“[People you don’t like] are projections of your own rejected qualities—the people who repel us unwittingly show us aspects of ourselves that we find unacceptable which otherwise we can’t see.”--Pema Chodron, “Comfortable with Uncertainty” CDs

 “Many of your repetitious, emotional criticisms of your partner are disguised statements of your own unmet needs”--Harville Hendrix in Getting the Love You Want

“It is difficult to hear that what we reject out there is what we reject in ourselves, and what we reject in ourselves is what we are going to reject out there.” –Pema Chodron in When Things Fall Apart

"The only people who strike us as normal are those we don't yet know very well." -Alain de Botton in The Course of Love: A Novel

"We all have stories...And the gulf that exists between us as people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin color, gender, race, or attitudes, but we don't see, we can't see, the stories. And once we hear each other’s stories we realize that the things we see as dividing us are, all too often, illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are in truth no thicker than scenery." -Neil Gaiman in the forward to All These Wonders, a collection of Moth stories

CONTROL IS VERY LIMITED

“Be intent on action…not the fruits of action…Be impartial to failure and success.” -Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita

 “I can find only three kinds of business in the universe: mine, yours and God’s. (For me, the word God means ‘reality.’ Reality is God because it rules. Anything that’s out of my control, your control, and everybody else’s control—I call that God’s business.) Much of our stress comes from mentally living out of our own business.” –Byron Katie in  Loving What Is

 “Since the beginning of time, people have been trying to change the world so that they can be happy. This hasn’t ever worked, because it approaches the problem backward. What The Work gives us is a way to change the projector—mind—rather than the projected.” –Byron Katie in Loving What Is

“We can’t control how people perceive us.” –Brene Brown in I Thought it Was Just Me

“We can’t control how people are going to respond or react” –Brene Brown in I Thought it Was Just Me

"It is easy to feel that something bad will happen if we don't maintain our habitual vigilance by thinking, judging, planning. Yet this is the very habit that keeps us trapped in resisting life." -Tara Brach in Radical Acceptance

“Someone can be madly in love with you and still not be ready. They can love you in a way you have never been loved and still not join you on the bridge. And whatever their reasons you must leave. Because you never ever have to inspire anyone to meet you on the bridge. You never ever have to convince someone to do the work to be ready. There is more extraordinary love, more love that you have never seen, out here in this wide and wild universe. And there is the love that will be ready.” -Nayyirah Waheed

ATTACHING TO OUR STORIES CAN CAUSE SUFFERING

“I have never experienced a stressful feeling that wasn’t caused by attaching to an untrue thought….[when] we have a thought that argues with reality, then we have a stressful feeling…” –Byron Katie in Loving What Is

“When we develop expectations in our minds that have our entire self-worth riding on their realization, we set ourselves up for shame.” –Brene Brown in I Thought it Was Just Me

“The klesha mara is characterized by strong emotion. A simple feeling will arise, and instead of simply letting it be there, we panic. We begin to weave our thoughts into a story line, which gives rise to bigger emotions. Instead of just sitting in some kind of openness with our uncomfortable feeling, we bring out the bellows and fan away at it.” –Pema Chodron in When Things Fall Apart

"External situations are not the cause of internal problems." -Michael A. Singer in The Untethered Soul

"You (think) you have it all figured out. You know how everything is supposed to be, even the future. Your views, your opinions, your preferences, your concepts, your goals, and your beliefs are all ways of bringing the infinite universe down to the finite where you can feel a sense of control...This mental model has become your reality. You must now struggle day and night to make the world fit your model, and you label everything that doesn't fit as wrong, bad or unfair...if your mental model is bothering you, it's because it doesn't incorporate reality." -Michael A. Singer in The Untethered Soul  

"We do not suffer because we are in pain--we suffer because something has gone wrong with our story..." -Peter Hershock 

"It will take Rabih may years and frequent essays in love to reach a few different conclusions, to recognize that the very things he once considered romantic--wordless intuitions, instantaneous longings, a trust in soul mates--are what stand in the way of learning how to be with someone. He will surmise that love can endure only when one is unfaithful to its beguiling opening ambitions, and that, for his relationship to work, he will need to give up on the feelings that got him into them in the first place." -Alain de Botton in The Course of Love: A Novel

YOU CAN’T SELECTIVELY FEEL

"Vulnerability is what love is all about. And vulnerability involves yielding control, revealing weakness, embracing imperfection, and opening ourselves up to the possibility of loss. Only when we open ourselves to the possibility of loss can we allow for the possibility of love." -Daniel Jones in Love Illuminated

"Take everything that's bright and beautiful in you and introduce it to the shadow side of yourself. Let your altruism meet your egotism, let your generosity meet your greed, let your joy meet your grief. Everyone has a shadow…But when you are able to say, 'I am all of the above, my shadow as well as my light,' the shadow's power is put in service of the good. Wholeness is the goal, but wholeness does not mean perfection, it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of your life." --Parker Palmer in his May 2015 Commencement Address to Naropa University graduates

"Being all light is as dangerous as being all dark, simply because denial of emotion is what feeds the dark." -Brene Brown in Rising Strong

“Who ever got the idea that we could have pleasure without pain? It’s promoted rather widely in this world, and we buy it. But pain and pleasure go together; they are inseparable.” –Pema Chodron in When Things Fall Apart

“We can’t selectively numb emotion. Numb the dark and you numb the light.” –Brene Brown in Daring Greatly

"If you want to grow and be free to explore life, you cannot spend your life avoiding the myriad of things that might hurt your heart or mind." -Michael A. Singer in The Untethered Soul

 “Emotions are like a faucet. If you turn off sadness, fear, anger, etc, you are also turning off joy, delight, excitement, etc. You can’t selectively turn off your emotions.” –From Allison Moir-Smith, author of Emotionally Engaged

"Our romantic lives are fated to be sad and incomplete, because we are creatures driven by two essential desires which point powerfully in entirely opposing directions. Yet what is worse is our utopian refusal to countenance the divergence, our naive hope that a cost-free synchronization might somehow be found: that the libertine might live for adventure while avoiding loneliness and chaos. Or that the married Romantic might unite sex with tenderness, and passion with routine." -Alain de Botton in The Course of Love: A Novel

LIVING WELL DOESN’T REQUIRE A MONUMENT

“One of the greatest cultural consequences of devaluing our own lives has been our tolerance for what people do to achieve their “extraordinary” status.”-Brene Brown in I Thought it Was Just Me

“When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be loveable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.” –Brene Brown in Daring Greatly

“I see the cultural message everywhere that says that an ordinary life is a meaningless life.” –Brene Brown in Daring Greatly

“As though I had been going steadily downhill, imagining that I was going uphill. So it was in fact. In public opinion I was going uphill, and steadily as I got up it, life was ebbing away from me....And now the work's done, there's only death.” -Tolstoy in The Death of Ivan Ilych

"Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon." -Thoreau in Walden

“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 study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly, to listen to starts and birds, babes and sages, with open heart, To bear all cheerfully, Do all bravely, Await occasions, Hurry never—In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. This is my symphony.” –William Ellery Channing 

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the 'rat race' — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing."-David Foster Wallace in “This is Water”

LIVING WELL DOES REQUIRE STAYING PRESENT

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." -Annie Dillard in The Writing Life

"There is only one world, the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle." -Storm Jameson 

"Living in the future creates an illusion that we are managing our life." -Tara Brach in Radical Acceptance

“Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time—that is the basic message.” -Pema Chodron in When Things Fall Apart

"'My, how foolish I am!' my friend cries, suddenly alert, like a women remembering too late she has biscuits in the oven. 'You know what I've always thought?' she asks in a tone of discovery, and not smiling at me but at a point beyond. 'I've always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you don't know it's getting dark. And it's been a comfort: to think of that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I'll wager it never happens. I'll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are'--her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone--'just what they've always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.'" -Ms. Sook to Buddy in Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory