Martha Beck Quotes
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I practice staying calm all the time, beginning with situations that aren't tense.
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Life is full of tough decisions, and nothing makes them easy. But the worst ones are really your personal koans, and tormenting ambivalence is just the sense of satori rising. Try, trust, try, and trust again, and eventually you'll feel your mind change its focus to a new level of understanding.
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Many of us have spent a lifetime trying to be what we're not, feeling lousy about ourselves when we fail and sometimes even when we succeed. We hide our differences when, by accepting and celebrating them, we could collaborate to make every effort more exciting, productive, enjoyable, and powerful. Personally, I think we should start right now.
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My own nature hovers between neurotic and paranoid. I've developed the habit of mentally listing things that make me optimistic about the future. I do it every day.
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What laughter is to childhood, sex is to adolescence.
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Children who assume adult responsibilities feel old when they're young.
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To complete your daily mental hygiene, observe any part of you that is upset or anxious, and offer that part of yourself the following simple wishes: 'May you be well. May you be happy. May you be free from suffering.' Repeat this until you actually mean it.
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I majored in Chinese. I was never really good at Chinese but I really, really benefited from having been exposed to Asian philosophy early in my life.
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When I tell a woman you really need to quit your soul-sucking job, she goes home, and she can tell her husband, 'I need to quit,' and he's like, 'O.K., let's do it.'
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Whether you've seen angels floating around your bedroom or just found a ray of hope at a lonely moment, choosing to believe that something unseen is caring for you can be a life-shifting exercise.
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Instead of fretting about getting everything done, why not simply accept that being alive means having things to do? Then drop into full engagement with whatever you're doing, and let the worry go.
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People are so afraid of authority figures and doctors are authority figures.
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To live a life that is wrong for you is a form of dying. There are people who have lives that look perfect. They try to be happy, they believe they should be happy, they are trying to like it, but if it's off course from their north star, they aren't satisfied.
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I was learning to track rhinoceroses in Africa and tracked right up on an animal that really I thought was going to kill me.
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Whatever causes you to drop your plan forward and open to your vision, your own, deeply personal vision of what your life could be at its very best, that's what I call meeting your rhinoceros.
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Western democracies exalt the ideal of social equality, but our economic system arguably emerged from 16th-century Calvinism, a religion whose members believed that God showed favor by bestowing wealth and other forms of success on what they called 'the chosen.'
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The average adult laughs 15 times a day; the average child, more than 400 times.
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I have come to believe that there are infinite passageways out of the shadows, infinite vehicles to transport us into the light.
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Our ideas about love and attractiveness are so primal, our need for belonging so intense, that most of us are loath to abandon our favorite beliefs on these issues. If you've ever let yourself feel lovable and lovely, only to be deeply hurt, you may see accepting your own body as a setup for severe emotional wounding.
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To know what that true self is without social pressure is to know your true nature.
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Not everyone is equally good-looking.
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Allowing children to show their guilt, show their grief, show their anger, takes the sting out of the situation.
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No one else can take risks for us, or face our losses on our behalf, or give us self-esteem. No one can spare us from life's slings and arrows, and when death comes, we meet it alone.
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The position that I take partly as a result of living in Asia is where you stop living according to your expectations and you become available to experience things as they are.