Knowledge is important, but only if we’re being kind and gentle with ourselves as we work to discover who we are. Wholeheartedness is as much about embracing our tenderness and vulnerability as it is about developing knowledge and claiming power.
Practicing courage, compassion, and connection in our daily lives is how we cultivate worthiness.
I’ve learned that playing down the exciting stuff doesn’t take the pain away when it doesn’t happen. It does, however, minimize the joy when it does happen. It also creates a lot of isolation.
Every time we choose courage, we make everyone around us a little better and the world a little braver.
Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.
many of the truly committed compassion practitioners were also the most boundary-conscious people in the study.
Compassionate people are boundaried people.
if we really want to practice compassion, we have to start by setting boundaries and holding people accountable for their behavior.
If we want to fully experience love and belonging, we must believe that we are worthy of love and belonging.
Relationship and connection happen in an indefinable space between people, a space that will never be fully known or understood by us.
Incongruent living is exhausting.
If we want to live and love with our whole hearts, and if we want to engage with the world from a place of worthiness, we have to talk about the things that get in the way—especially shame, fear, and vulnerability.
What I’m proposing is that we learn how to wade through it. We need to see that standing on the shore and catastrophisizing about what could happen if we talked honestly about our fears is actually more painful than grabbing the hand of a trusted companion and crossing the swamp.
“How-to” is a seductive shortcut,
science—why are we struggling like never before? Because we don’t talk about the things that get in the way of doing what we know is best for us, our children, our families, our organizations, and our communities.
Shame is about who we are, and guilt is about our behaviors.
Not only do we need to own our story and love ourselves in the process, we have to figure out the real story!
We also have to learn how we protect ourselves from shame if we want to develop worthiness.
If we want to live fully, without the constant fear of not being enough, we have to own our story.
authenticity is not something we have or don’t have. It’s a practice—a conscious choice of how we want to live.
Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are.
Most of us have shame triggers around being perceived as self-indulgent or self-focused. -to be perceived as selfish or narcissistic.
Cruelty is cheap, easy, and rampant. It’s also chicken-shit.
refers to all of the opportunities we miss because we’re too afraid to put anything out in the world that could be imperfect.
It is in the process of embracing our imperfections that we find our truest gifts: courage, compassion, and connection.
“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” So many of us run around spackling all of the cracks, trying to make everything look just right. This line helps me remember the beauty of the cracks (and the messy house and the imperfect manuscript and the too-tight jeans). It reminds me that our imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together. Imperfectly, but together.
Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning, and purpose to our lives.
Tolerance for disappointment, determination, and a belief in self are the heart of hope.
The question is, does our _______________ (eating, drinking, spending, gambling, saving the world, incessant gossiping, perfectionism, sixty-hour workweek) get in the way of our authenticity? Does it stop us from being emotionally honest and setting boundaries and feeling like we’re enough? Does it keep us from staying out of judgment and from feeling connected? Are we using _____________ to hide or escape from the reality of our lives?
The only experience that seems broad and fierce enough to combat a list like that is the belief that we’re all in this together and that something greater than us has the capacity to bring love and compassion into our lives.
AEIOUY.
It seems that gratitude without practice may be a little like faith without works—it’s not alive.
Ironically, since doing this research, surveying has become a red flag for me—it tells me that I’m feeling vulnerable about making a decision.
“When things are going really well in our family, what does it look like?”
The things we were working toward did nothing in terms of making our life fuller.
Increasing my daily intake of calm and stillness along with walking and swimming and cutting caffeine has done wonders for my life.
Squandering our gifts brings distress to our lives. As it turns out, it’s not merely benign or “too bad” if we don’t use the gifts that we’ve been given; we pay for it with our emotional and physical well-being. When we don’t use our talents to cultivate meaningful work, we struggle. We feel disconnected and weighed down by feelings of emptiness, frustration, resentment, shame, disappointment, fear, and even grief.
Sharing our gifts and talents with the world is the most powerful source of connection with God.
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
In his book Outliers, Gladwell proposes that there are three criteria for meaningful work—complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward—and
Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you’ve never been hurt and live like it’s heaven on Earth. — MARK TWAIN
When we consistently betray ourselves, we can expect to do the same to the people we love.
When we don’t give ourselves permission to be free, we rarely tolerate that freedom in others.
Choosing to live and love with our whole hearts is an act of defiance.
A woman I know says, for her morning prayer, “Whatever,” and then for the evening, “Oh, well,”
