Martha Beck Quotes
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We virtually never feel our age, but thinking that we should can lead to disaster.
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Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don't match our own beliefs about how we should look.
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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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I feel about aging the way William Saroyan said he felt about death: Everybody has to do it, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case.
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Adults under threat feel like children.
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When fear makes your choices for you, no security measures on earth will keep the things you dread from finding you. But if you can avoid avoidance - if you can choose to embrace experiences out of passion, enthusiasm, and a readiness to feel whatever arises - then nothing, nothing in all this dangerous world, can keep you from being safe.
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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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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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Absolutely lonely people have few personal interactions of any kind.
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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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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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As soon as you think you know someone else's truth better than they do, you are in deep water.
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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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Good-looking individuals are treated better than homely ones in virtually every social situation, from dating to trial by jury.
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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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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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For the vast majority of world history, human life - both culture and biology - was shaped by scarcity. Food, clothing, shelter, tools, and pretty much everything else had to be farmed or fabricated, at a very high cost in time and energy.
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The way we do anything is the way we do everything.
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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.
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The thing I love most about my job is watching people age backward, becoming more lively and energetic as they free themselves from situations that are toxic to their essential selves.
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Do whatever it takes to convey your essential self.
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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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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.