Martha beck quotes

No part of your experience is wasted. Everything you've experienced so far is part of what you were meant to learn.

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.

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.

Loneliness is proof that your innate search for connection is intact.

The way out of fear isn’t safety. It’s freedom.

Your relationship is not supposed to be perfect all the time, your business is not supposed to do well all the time, your soufflés are not supposed to raise perfectly all the time. Everything is designed to go wrong so that you can gain the skills of rediscovering your tracks, even in difficult or frightening circumstances. Especially in difficult and frightening circumstances.

I really do think that any deep crisis is an opportunity to make your life extraordinary in some way.

When you do the thing you fear, the thing loses its power to scare.

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.

Don’t hide love. If you feel it, express it-not to demand that others love you back, but simply to live outwardly the best of what you feel inwardly. The worst that can happen to your heart is not rejection by another person but failure to act on the love you feel.

It isn’t necessary to know exactly how your ideal life will look; you only have to know what feels better and what feels worse…Begin making choices based on what makes you feel freer and happier, rather than on how you think an ideal life should look. It’s the process of feeling our way toward happiness, not the realization of the Platonic ideal, that creates our best lives.

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.

Any moment you spend attacking yourself is a moment away from your higher purpose and your power to love. Don't go there.

Everything always passes, and everything is already okay. Stay in the place where you can see that, and nothing will resist you.

Instead of fretting about getting everything done, why not simply accept that being alive means having things to do? Then drop into full engagement with whatever you're doing, and let the worry go.

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.

Use anything you can think of to understand and be understood, and you'll discover the creativity that connects you with others.

Slow is fast, gentle is powerful and stillness moves mountains

Learning to spot narcissists and deal with their destructive behavior can save you the world of hurt that awaits anyone who mistakes the near enemy for a friend.

No matter how difficult and painful it may be, nothing sounds as good to the soul as the truth.

Imagine what you'd do if it absolutely didn't matter what people thought of you. Got it? Good. Never go back.

The past doesn’t exist except as a memory, a mental story, and though past events aren’t changeable, your stories about them are. You can act now to transform the way you tell the story of your past, ultimately making it a stalwart protector of your future.

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.

Although beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, the feeling of being beautiful exists solely in the mind of the beheld.

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.

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.

Breathe in, breathe out, no fear, no doubt.

Good fortune has side effects.

Don't expect the future to look like the past. Clear away expectations, and let yourself picture a wild, grand new world.

What would you do if you knew that every good thing in your life depended on your getting enough rest? Because it does.

Bad habits fill needs, so find good alternatives for them.

The way to find your own North Star is not to think or feel your way forward but to dissolve the thoughts and feeling that make you miserable. You don't have to learn your destiny--you already know it; you just have to unlearn the thoughts that blind you to what you know.

Your life is not little, and your playing small doesn’t serve the world. Your living large, on the other hand-your being your true self despite fear, fatigue, doubt, and opposition- will serve the world more than you can imagine. In fact, it may help save it. And saving the world, after all, is what all heroes (including you) are here to do.

Seek art from every time and place, in any form, to connect with those who really move you.

If you see failure as a monster stalking you, or one that has already ruined your life, take another look. That monster can become a benevolent teacher, opening your mind to successes you cannot now imagine.

Fear is the raw material from which courage is manufactured. Without it, we wouldn't even know what it means to be brave.

Any transition serious enough to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis.

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.

If you feel stuck in your present life, if you feel no enthusiasm for anything, if you think you have no purpose or that you lost that purpose somewhere along the way, I guarantee you are living in a dungeon made of stories. And that none of those limiting stories are true.

Forcing yourself to think happy lies doesn't heal your dreams. Getting to the truth does.

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.

Most unhappy people need to learn just one lesson: how to see themselves through the lens of genuine compassion, and treat themselves accordingly.

Where your attention goes, your life goes.

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.

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.

When you meet people, show real appreciation, then genuine curiosity.

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.

Allowing children to show their guilt, show their grief, show their anger, takes the sting out of the situation.

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.

Your life follows your attention. Wherever you look, you end up going.

If you're miserable, make a choice. If you're still miserable, you can choose again.

If we're stuck with having expectations, there's a very good reason to embrace positive ones: it's that we often create what we anticipate.

My point is that perceptual bias can affect nut jobs and scientists alike. If we hold too rigidly to what we think we know, we ignore or avoid evidence of anything that might change our mind.

Don't let your life revolve around whatever you're trying not to do or feel. Live to experience, not to avoid.

Caring for your inner child has a powerful and surprisingly quick result: Do it and the child heals.

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.

As any good Buddhist will tell you, the only way to find permanent joy is by embracing the fact that nothing is permanent.

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.

If anything is worth doing, it is worth doing it badly.

When you are in a creative or appreciative zone, you literally have no access to your inner lizard, to that fear-based, non creative, shrieking little beasty who's so afraid you're going to be a bag lady.

You shine for who you are ... because no one can steal your light.

The process of spotting fear and refusing to obey it is the source of all true empowerment.

If a problem looks difficult, relax. If it looks impossible, relax even more. Then begin encouraging small changes, putting just enough pressure on yourself to move one turtle step forward. Then rest, savor, celebrate. Then step again. You’ll find that slow is fast, gentle is powerful, and stillness moves mountains.

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.

Whoever said that love is blind was dead wrong. Love is the only thing on this earth that lets us see each other with the remotest accuracy.

Humans only really learn from each other by storytelling. We didn't evolve to memorize things. We evolved to hear each other's stories and feel them in our heart. Your life is the most powerful story you can tell.

External circumstances do not create feeling states. Feeling states create external circumstances.

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.

The effect of emotional venting is to sustain an unsatisfactory status quo. Most people think the opposite, that complaining is part of an effort to change an unsatisfying situation. Nope. Complaining lets off pressure so that we neither explode with frustration nor feel compelled to take the often risky steps of openly opposing a difficult person or situation. Keeping emotional pressure tolerably low doesn't change problematic circumstances but rather perpetuates them.

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.

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.

Own your failure openly, publicly, with genuine regret but absolutely no shame, and you’ll reap a harvest of forgiveness, trust, respect, and connection-the things you thought you’d get by succeeding. Ironic, isn’t it?

Hopeful thinking can get you out of your fear zone and into your appreciation zone.

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.

Many of us assume that we have to do things a certain way: ignore passion in favor of safer bets, act stoic amid inner turmoil, run on an upward trajectory of success and money acquisition at any emotional cost. But these are not rules.

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.

When making a decision, focus on what feels "shackles off" versus "shackles on".

Your individuality is the most valuable thing you have.

Perpetually doing, without ever tuning in to the center of our being, is the equivalent of fueling a mighty ship by tossing all its navigational equipment into the furnace.

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.

When we run from our feelings, they follow us. Everywhere.

If you think there is no action that you can perform in your current circumstances that will increase the supply of love in the world, you are believing a lie. At the very least, you always have the option to offer yourself kindness and understanding. That alone can increase the supply of love in the world.

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.

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.

Don't fight fearful thoughts. Just match each one with an alternative thought that brings you more peace.

The way that other people judge me is none of my business.

Somewhere in there, among the worries, questions, advice and advertising jingles, lives your intuition, your true 'inner voice.' You can hear it to the extent that you give it your attention.

Trust in your truth. It will be the best decision you ever make.

My anguish came from my hypothesis that other people's hypothetical hypotheses about me mattered. Ridiculous!

If you’re doing something you love with people you love in a place you love, you are going to create something of value to the world.

To follow your life's guidance, you may have to reassign some seemingly important things to 'unimportant.' If you believe that pleasing your horrible boss or having a spotless house is a higher priority than playing with your children or sleeping off the flu, be prepared for a long and strenuous battle against destiny. Also, be prepared to lose.

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.

I now believe that bêtes noires usually attack because we're thwarting our own destinies. Calming the beast turns us toward our best lives.

When you're weary, find relief. When you're strong, find delight.

Angels come in many shapes and sizes, and most of them are not invisible.

Emotional discomfort, when accepted, rises, crests and falls in a series of waves. Each wave washes a part of us away and deposits treasures we never imagined. Out goes naivete, in comes wisdom; out goes anger, in comes discernment; out goes despair, in comes kindness. No one would call it easy, but the rhythm of emotional pain that we learn to tolerate is natural, constructive and expansive... The pain leaves you healthier than it found you.

People who get what they want tend to be the ones who make the effort to know what they want.

Having fun is not a diversion from a successful life; it is the pathway to it.

I am free, and always have been; free to accept my own reality, free to trust my perceptions, free to believe what makes me feel sane even if others call me crazy, free to disagree even if it means great loss, free to seek the way home until I find it.

Play until it's time to rest, then rest until it's time to play.

Remember, intimacy increases with honesty. Share less to keep people away and more to draw them closer.

The way we do anything is the way we do everything.

If you'd rather live surrounded by pristine objects than by the traces of happy memories, stay focused on tangible things. Otherwise, stop fixating on stuff you can touch and start caring about stuff that touches you.

To attract something that you want, become as joyful as you think that thing would make you.

A confession you make merely to illuminate the murky corners of your little life may end up lighting the path to freedom for a thousand other hearts.

Most of my clients don't realize that the way they look and the way they think about their looks are two separate issues.

If you find yourself getting nervous stop and relax for three full breaths. Then take one small step, then another. That is how people get to the top of Everest.

Peace is more than just a feeling. It's the mental and physical frequency where you'll find all your real power.

The knowledge of your destiny is available to you, well before it actually happens, as a message streaming continuously from your heart to your brain, written in the language of longing.

Every day brings new choices.

Basic human contact - the meeting of eyes, the exchanging of words - is to the psyche what oxygen is to the brain. If you're feeling abandoned by the world, interact with anyone you can.

Learning to let go of expectations is a ticket to peace. It allows us to ride over every crisis—small or large, brother-in-law or end-of-quarter office lockdown—like a beach ball on water. The next time a problem arises in your life, take a deep breath, let out a sigh, and replace the thought Oh no! with the thought Okay.

Instead of hiding your loneliness, bring it into the light. Honor it. Treat it. Heal it. You'll find that it returns the favor.

Truth itself is something you live, not something you think.

Do something today that you think is too delicious, too selfish, too wacky to fit within the rules of your life.

If you begin to face your fears, something bittersweet is going to happen to you: You'll grow up.

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.

A true leader is not someone who feels fully informed but someone who continuously receives insight and guidance.

Don’t worry that you’ve wasted time. Each moment -- no matter how frozen or confused -- was a useful and necessary lesson.

Most of our stress and suffering come not from events, but from our thoughts. Reframe from negative thoughts, and stress subsides.

Question every thought that causes suffering and test it against your own sense of truth.

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.

Stop fixating on stuff you can touch and start caring about stuff that touches you.

You can't stay well without telling--and living--the truth.

Whenever you go somewhere that speaks to your soul, you are going home to yourself.