Martha Beck
The important thing is to tell yourself a life story in which you, the hero, are primarily a problem solver rather than a helpless victim. This is well within your power, whatever fate might have dealt you.Collection: Hero
Pain is like a life coach in your body. It’s what made me a life coach because I started paying a lot of attention to what made me hurt and what didn’t. It turned out my body was trying to steer me away from a life that was absolutely wrong for me and into a life that was absolutely wonderful.Collection: Hurt
What would you do if you knew that every good thing in your life depended on your getting enough rest? Because it does.Collection: Doe
To attract something that you want, become as joyful as you think that thing would make you.Collection: Thinking
Here is the crux of the matter, the distilled essence, the only thing you need to remember: When considering whether to say yes or no, you must choose the response that feels like freedom. Period.Collection: Essence
Welcoming imperfection is the way to accomplish what perfectionism promises but never delivers. It gives us our best performance and genuine acceptance in the family of human -- and by that I mean imperfect -- beings.Collection: Mean
We can’t save ourselves from fear by seeking safety, because safety always means there’s something to be safe from-in other words, something to fear. The way out of fear isn’t safety. It’s freedom.Collection: Mean
A true leader is not someone who feels fully informed but someone who continuously receives insight and guidance.Collection: Leader
The only map of your right life is written on your soul at its most peaceful, and the only sure compass is your heart at its most open.Collection: Heart
Peace is more than just a feeling. It's the mental and physical frequency where you'll find all your real power.Collection: Real
Question every thought that causes suffering and test it against your own sense of truth.Collection: Suffering
Your body is free but your heart is in prison. To release your heart, you simply reverse the process which locked it up. First you begin to listen for messages from your heart-messages you may have been ignoring since childhood. Next you must take the daring, risky step of expressing your heart in the outside world. . . . As you learn to live by heart, every choice you make will become another way of telling your story. . . . It is the way you were meant to exist. If you stop to listen, you'll realize that your heart has been telling you so all along.Collection: Inspirational
External circumstances do not create feeling states. Feeling states create external circumstances.Collection: Feelings
We are a time-starved people, obsessed with fitting huge achievements into our few years. In the process, we often fill our buckets with things that don't matter or work. But when we give up on trying to change what can't be changed, and simply embrace what we love, a miracle occurs. We notice that the moment to be happy has already arrived. It's here, now.Collection: Giving Up
Where your attention goes, your life goes.Collection: Attention
Remember that it’s okay to ask for help when you’re stumped, because sometimes you really can’t be expected to handle everything alone.Collection: Helping
Most unhappy people need to learn just one lesson: how to see themselves through the lens of genuine compassion, and treat themselves accordingly.Collection: Compassion
I’ll tell you what it’s time to do right now. It’s time to set your schedule in order so that you don’t look back on the day of your death and wonder why you never really lived. It’s time to ignore the opinions of those who think your life should be all about their cause, their rules, their agenda, and not your soul’s desire. It’s time to stop flagellating and start dancing.Collection: Thinking
Connecting with the people who are meant to be part of your own North Star is much more important than any aspect of business. It's the essence of happiness, the full realization of your potential for joy.Collection: Friends
Just one mental shift-focusing on the abundance of your environment-switches your psychological settings so that your life automatically improves in many areas you may think are unrelated. This is essentially a leap from fear to faith.Collection: Thinking
I have discovered that many of the things I thought were priceless are as cheap as costume jewelry, and much of what I labeled worthless was, all the time, filled with the kind of beauty that directly nourishes my soul... Now I think that the vast majority of us "normal" people spend our lives trashing our treasures and treasuring our trash. We bustle around trying to create the impression that we are hip, imperturbable, omniscient, in perfect control, when in fact we are awkward and scared and bewildered.Collection: Thinking
My anguish came from my hypothesis that other people's hypothetical hypotheses about me mattered. Ridiculous!Collection: People
Though we often see life troughs as the universe's conspiracy to ruin us, they're actually our own true nature inviting us to lay down our weary heads.Collection: Ruins
The part of you that is unhampered by illusion-the illusion of time, the illusion of powerlessness, the illusion of impossibility-i s waiting for you to slow down and open up so that it can speak to your consciousness. In some unguarded moment, you will hear its wildly improbable words and know that they are guiding you home.Collection: Home
I now believe that bêtes noires usually attack because we're thwarting our own destinies. Calming the beast turns us toward our best lives.Collection: Believe
True freedom starts with absolute honesty. The moment you call a problem by its real name, you’re already learning how to make it less harmful.Collection: Honesty
The difference between success and failure isn't the absence of fear but the determination to pursue your heart's desires no matter how scared you are.Collection: Determination
You are lovable. Can you show me any baby in any nursery who isn't priceless? No. There's no such thing as a worthless newborn. And the essential value that was born into brand-new-baby you can never be extinguished. This means that even if you think you're being absolutely honest, believing yourself to be anything other than astonishing, incomparable, and infinitely precious makes you a habitual liar.Collection: Baby
A joyful life isn’t about others; it’s about the brightness that is associated with being alive. Your path to it is through anything that replaces thinking with pure flight, pure joy.Collection: Thinking
Don't fight fearful thoughts. Just match each one with an alternative thought that brings you more peace.Collection: Fighting
Don't let your life revolve around whatever you're trying not to do or feel. Live to experience, not to avoid.Collection: Trying
This very moment of your life, if you experience it fully, will show you astonishing wonders and exquisite delights.Collection: Delight
Good fortune has side effects.Collection: Luck
Instead of hiding your loneliness, bring it into the light. Honor it. Treat it. Heal it. You'll find that it returns the favor.Collection: Loneliness
Stop fixating on stuff you can touch and start caring about stuff that touches you.Collection: Caring
When making a decision, focus on what feels "shackles off" versus "shackles on".Collection: Choices
The end goal of all of this striving is to live joyfully, and that there are often more direct ways of achieving this than conforming to rigid standards set by social custom.Collection: Standards Set
Many people think passion is a fuzzy feeling that makes taking action effortless. In fact, it's the gritty courage and tenacity to forge onward.Collection: Passion
If you did nothing but pursue the truth about yourself for the rest of your life, you would never run out of fresh discoveries.Collection: Running
A lot of my clients say they don't deserve to mope about their sad little memories while children are starving in India. I say that just because your broken arm isn't as serious as someone else's gut wound, that doesn't mean your injury isn't excruciating or doesn't require attention. If you want to help the Indian children, or make the world a better place in any other way, you have to start by becoming whole yourself.Collection: Memories
This is the part of us that makes our brief, improbable little lives worth living: the ability to reach through our own isolation and find strength, and comfort, and warmth for and in each other. This is what human beings do. This is what we live for, the way horses live to run.Collection: Running
I want you to be supervised, all day every day, by people who forgive your errors and believe in your destiny.Collection: Believe
Heading towards that inner home will take you places-both inside yourself and in the external world-which your heart will recognize as its native environment, even though you have never been there before.Collection: Home
Silence comes in two varieties: One that nourishes and comforts; another that chokes, smothers, and isolates. Solitary confinement is the worst kind of imprisonment we can inflict on fellow humans, and if you are forced to keep silent about some dark secret, you live in solitary confinement. Without the bridge of communication connecting you to other human beings, you can’t share your burdens, can’t receive comfort, can’t confirm that you still belong. Silence is the abyss that separates you from hope.Collection: Communication