Martha Beck Quotes
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At times in my life, I have been utterly lonely. At other times, I've had disgusting infectious diseases. Try admitting these things in our culture.
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I always felt that it was my job to try to help other people get it and deal with it.
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To make an activity joyful, keep adding things until the activity as a whole becomes more appealing than repulsing.
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When your entire brain is active, that means you are taking everything in through all sense perception. Your entire memory bank and your instincts are in play, so you make much quicker and more intelligent choices.
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Good-looking individuals are treated better than homely ones in virtually every social situation, from dating to trial by jury.
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You get social pressure from your parents, who teach you to pay attention to certain things and not to others. You get it in school.
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The most common reason we stumble into the delusion of powerlessness is that we're afraid of what other people would do or say or feel if we were to act as we wanted.
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Cheerfully fessing up to our failures turns crazy mind off, humility and compassion on. I learned this in a karate dojo that had a strange tradition. Everyone there loved recounting failure stories, and after an evening of smacking one another, we'd sit and have a beer while the students swapped tales of martial arts disaster.
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Adults under threat feel like children.
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Indecision may come from an instinctive hunch that there's more you need to know - which means it's time to learn everything you can about the pros and cons of each option. You can continue on this track, however, only as long as you're unearthing genuinely new information.
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We virtually never feel our age, but thinking that we should can lead to disaster.
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Painful events leave scars, true, but it turns out they're largely erasable. Jill Bolte Taylor, the neuroanatomist who had a stroke that obliterated her memory, described the event as losing '37 years of emotional baggage.'
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Friends, there are many areas in which I need encouragement, but worrying is not one of them. I worry the way Renee Fleming sings high Cs: Effortlessly. Loudly. At length.
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As I obsess about my ancient problems, I feel more like I'm sinking in quicksand than lighting a torch. I'm creating neither heat nor light, just the icky, perversely pleasurable squish of self-pity between my toes. My only defense is that I'm not the only one down here in the muck - our whole culture is doting on tales of personal tragedy.
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Self-improvement books, friends, and polite strangers often tell soothing lies about our physical appearance that prevent many of us from facing, discussing, and solving our real problems.
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Seek art from every time and place, in any form, to connect with those who really move you.
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Getting bogged down in old stories stops the flow of learning by censoring our perceptions, making us functionally deaf and blind to new information. Once the replay button gets pushed, we no longer form new ideas or conclusions - the old ones are so cozy.
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I cannot count the times I've been defeated, humiliated, or physically injured immediately after saying the words, 'Hey, how hard can it be?' But that never seems to stop me from saying them again.
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Polite strangers often tell soothing lies about our physical appearance that prevent many of us from facing, discussing and solving our real problems.
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Do whatever it takes to convey your essential self.
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Even if you can be the world's best at one thing, you'll be the world's worst at something else. Supermodels make pathetic sumo wrestlers.
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No matter how difficult and painful it may be, nothing sounds as good to the soul as the truth.
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Every day brings new choices.
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Tiny steps will get you to your goal months and months sooner. A little is better than a lot.