American - Author | November 29, 1962 -
Every day brings new choices.
Martha Beck
PositiveDayChoicesEvery DayNew
Ten years ago, I still feared loss enough to abandon myself in order to keep things stable. I'd smile when I was sad, pretend to like people who appalled me. What I now know is that losses aren't cataclysmic if they teach the heart and soul their natural cycle of breaking and healing.
SmileHeartSadMyselfSoulHealing
Although beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, the feeling of being beautiful exists solely in the mind of the beheld.
BeautyBeautifulMindEyeFeeling
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.
LifeChangeTrustFocusMindTough
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.
FailureCompassionHumilityBeer
Since our society equates happiness with youth, we often assume that sorrow, quiet desperation, and hopelessness go hand in hand with getting older. They don't. Emotional pain or numbness are symptoms of living the wrong life, not a long life.
LifeHappinessGetting OlderPain
Loneliness is proof that your innate search for connection is intact.
LonelinessSearchConnectionProof
What happens when we're willing to feel bad is that, sure enough, we often feel bad - but without the stress of futile avoidance. Emotional discomfort, when accepted, rises, crests, and falls in a series of waves. Each wave washes parts of us away and deposits treasures we never imagined.
StressWavesFeelWaveEnoughBad
Only since the Industrial Revolution have most people worked in places away from their homes or been left to raise small children without the help of multiple adults, making for an unsupported life.
LifeChildrenPeopleSmallHelp
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.
LifeVisionBestForwardPlanYou
Not everyone is equally good-looking.
Good-LookingEveryoneEqually
Rest until you feel like playing, then play until you feel like resting, period. Never do anything else.
RestFeelYouPlayRestingNever
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