Martha Beck
Hopeful thinking can get you out of your fear zone and into your appreciation zone.Collection: Hope
To know what that true self is without social pressure is to know your true nature.Collection: Nature
Anything you're trying to will is focused on the future; it's always associated with some sort of anxiety that makes the present moment somewhat uncomfortable.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Death
The process of spotting fear and refusing to obey it is the source of all true empowerment.Collection: Fear
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.'Collection: Equality
Self-pity, a dominant characteristic of sociopaths, is also the characteristic that differentiates heroic storytelling from psychological rumination. When you talk about your experiences to shed light, you may feel wrenching pain, grief, anger, or shame. Your audience may pity you, but not because you want them to.Collection: Anger
Anger elicits anger, fear elicits fear, no matter how well meaning we may be.Collection: Anger
Allowing children to show their guilt, show their grief, show their anger, takes the sting out of the situation.Collection: Anger
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.Collection: Trust
Absolutely lonely people have few personal interactions of any kind.Collection: Alone
You have the freedom to live and let live, to love and let love. Granting yourself that freedom is one of the healthiest, most constructive things you can do for yourself and the people who matter to you.Collection: Freedom
Good-looking individuals are treated better than homely ones in virtually every social situation, from dating to trial by jury.Collection: Dating
Good-looking individuals are treated better than homely ones in virtually every social situation, from dating to trial by jury. If everyday experience hasn't convinced you of this, there's research that will.Collection: Dating
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.Collection: Learning
Although beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, the feeling of being beautiful exists solely in the mind of the beheld.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Sad
People are so afraid of authority figures and doctors are authority figures.Collection: Medical
No matter how difficult and painful it may be, nothing sounds as good to the soul as the truth.Collection: Truth
It takes about four days of virtuous living to create a little weight loss. That also happens to be the time required to get used to eating less. In other words, if you can get past day three of a fitness regimen, things improve.Collection: Fitness
As a life coach, I love makeovers, from new clothes to surgery, pedicures to highlights. But redoing makes you feel better only if approached with the right attitude.Collection: Attitude
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.Collection: Happiness
Every day brings new choices.Collection: Positive
We evolved to move and to learn with all our five senses!
Almost all my middle-aged and elderly acquaintances, including me, feel about 25, unless we haven't had our coffee, in which case we feel 107.
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.
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.
When you meet people, show real appreciation, then genuine curiosity.
Whoever said love is blind is dead wrong. Love is the only thing that lets us see each other with the remotest accuracy.
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.
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.
Comparing and contrasting is a valuable human skill - and not just during high school English exams. Our ability to rank-order things is invaluable in making choices and setting priorities.
Given the eclectic and constantly shifting nature of my metaphysical inclinations, I will probably never feel certain exactly what an angel is.
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.
In one century, we've added 28 years to our average life span - a change so rapid that our brains couldn't possibly have evolved to accommodate it.
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.
Polite strangers often tell soothing lies about our physical appearance that prevent many of us from facing, discussing and solving our real problems.
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.
Use anything you can think of to understand and be understood, and you'll discover the creativity that connects you with others.
We virtually never feel our age, but thinking that we should can lead to disaster.
What laughter is to childhood, sex is to adolescence.
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.
Every worldview I chose, it seemed, edged me toward belief.
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.
Sometimes a psychic tells you something and it feels wrong and others may be right on the money. It's your choice about whom to trust, and giving that trust is something we do ourselves.
All religious leaders and spiritual teachers emphasize finding a place within us that is true. People who obsessively follow these leaders instead of their own purpose attach to the spiritual leader and become fanatical and controlling. That's why Jesus tried to tell his followers not to get attached to outward form.
As soon as you think you know someone else's truth better than they do, you are in deep water.
To make an activity joyful, keep adding things until the activity as a whole becomes more appealing than repulsing.
Creating ways to be happy is your life's work, a challenge that won't end until you die.
Ten bajillion product ads notwithstanding, your looks are another thing that's basically genetic.