Quotes

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• "…when you find the courage to turn inward, to become curious about the labyrinths and caves that make up your inner world, everything changes."

  — Sheryl Paul

  The Wisdom of Anxiety

• "…anxiety represents not only an attempted return of the repressed but also a striving on the part of the total personality toward a re-establishment of unity, harmony, oneness, “health.”"

  — Rollo May

  The Meaning of Anxiety

• "…the social nature of the human being as the source of our uniquely creative intellectual capacities as well as our capacity for anxiety."

  — Rollo May

  The Meaning of Anxiety

• "Fears may mask anxiety."

  — Rollo May

  The Meaning of Anxiety

• "Just as too much physical force can break a child’s bones, too much control can break a child’s spirit and fracture his psyche. It can cause a splintering of self, causing a child to disown some parts of himself and to inflate others."

  — Beverly Engel

  Healing the Emotional Self

• "Sanity—mental health—is a state of flow and well-being; being grounded, resilient, and balanced; possessing self-esteem; and being able to adjust to the events of life."

  — David Richo

  Wholeness and Holiness

• "Anxiety was born in the very same moment of mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it — just as we have we have learned to live with storms."

  — Paulo Coelho

  Manuscript Found in Accra

• "One must have a chaos inside oneself to give birth to a dancing star."

  — Friedrich Nietzsche

  Thus Spake Zarathustra

• "Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."

  — Anais Nin

  The Diary of Anais Nin vol. 4

• "There is nothing wrong with anxiety. Although we cannot control God’s time, it is part of the human condition to want to receive the thing we are waiting for as quickly as possible."

  — Paulo Coelho

  Manuscript Found in Accra

• "… although anxiety is a part of life, never let it control you."

  — Paulo Coelho

  Manuscript Found in Accra

• "Trauma is perhaps the most avoided, ignored, belittled, denied, misunderstood, and untreated cause of human suffering."

  — Peter A. Levine PhD

  https://www.somaticexperiencing.com

• "… what doesn’t destroy me makes me stronger."

  — Friedrich Nietzsche

  Twilight of the Idols

• "The person … in the grip of an old distress says things that are not pertinent, does things that don’t work, fails to cope with the situation, and endures terrible feelings that have nothing to do with the present."

  — Harvey Jackins

  As cited in Homecoming

• "The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places."

  — Ernest Hemingway

  A Farewell to Arms

• "Just as too much physical force can break a child’s bones, too much control can break a child’s spirit and fracture his psyche. It can cause a splintering of self, causing a child to disown some parts of himself and to inflate others."

  — Beverly Engel

  Healing The Emotional Self

• "If psychologists and psychiatrists would be in dialogue with the insights of St. John of the Cross and those who experience the dark nights, there could be a marvelous symbiosis of treatment. We are not sick just because of some physiological pathology. It is not just a question of sin either; it is a question of the human condition, for which none of us is initially responsible but, on becoming adults, we are now called to be responsible."

  — Father Thomas Keating

  The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

• "When we feel held by a caring presence, by something larger than our small frightened self, we begin to find room in our own heart for the fragments of our life, and for the lives of others. The suffering that might have seemed “too much” can awaken us to the sweetness of compassion."

  — Tara Brach

  Radical Acceptance

• "… trauma, undigested and locked in our body, randomly breaks through into consciousness. For years after the actual danger is past, a person who has been traumatized may relive an event as if it were continually occurring in the present."

  — Tara Brach

  Radical Acceptance

• "Perhaps the biggest tragedy in our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns. Entangled in the trance of unworthiness, we grow accustomed to caging ourselves in with self-judgment and anxiety, with restlessness and dissatisfaction."

  — Tara Brach

  Radical Acceptance

• "No matter what problems we struggle with—anxiety, depression, negative rumination, self-doubt, chronic pain—they do not have to keep us from acting in a way that brings our lives meaning and purpose."

  — Steven C. Hayes, Ph.D.

  A Liberated Mind

• "Anxiety is simply insight that we haven’t yet found a productive use for, that hasn’t yet made its way into art or philosophy."

  — Alain De Botton

  The School of Life

• "Anxiety is not a sign of sickness, a weakness of the mind or an error for which we should always seek a medical solution. It is mostly a hugely reasonable and sensitive response to the genuine strangeness, terror, uncertainty and riskiness of existence."

  — Alain De Botton

  The School of Life

• "We can notice whether we are anxious about accidents or misfortunes, and how much anger, irritation, fear, anxiety, or worry are still in us. As we become aware of the feelings in us, our self-understanding will deepen."

  — Thich Nhat Hanh

  How to Love

• "When we’re anxious, worried, or angry, we can’t make good decisions. When we’re free, we make better decisions. This freedom is something we can attain whenever we like with the practice of breathing in mindfulness, walking in mindfulness."

  — Thich Nhat Hanh

  How to Relax

• "Traumas can be defined as experiences that cause people to develop erroneous beliefs about themselves or the world which keep them from living to their full potential and causing them suffering."

  — Laurel Parnell

  Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Spiritual Unfolding

• "… if I turn to face my own demons, they dissolve, revealing themselves to be my own living energy. Then I can begin to feel my tenderness, my vulnerability to life, which reminds me that what I really am is a living being who is exposed to the world, interdependent and connected with all other beings."

  — John Welwood

  Awakening the Heart

• "The brain is malleable and can be reshaped, and thus so can the neural circuits that contribute to depression and anxiety."

  — Alex Korb

  The Upward Spiral

• "Those of us who have suffered from extreme physical, sexual, and emotional abuse have a big challenge trying to create a loving Inner Adult."

  — Margaret Paul

  Inner Bonding

• "When our Inner Child feels consistently unloved by our Inner Adult, the Child’s false beliefs, adopted in childhood when parents were unloving, are reinforced—beliefs that we are bad, wrong, unlovable, unimportant, inadequate, defective in some way."

  — Margaret Paul

  Inner Bonding

• "In overcoming the destructive force of trauma, our innate potential… lifts us to new heights of mastery and knowledge."

  — Peter Levine

  Waking the Tiger

• "The challenge of trauma treatment is not only dealing with the past but, even more, enhancing the quality of day-to-day experience… When you can’t be fully here, you go to the places where you did feel alive—even if those places are filled with horror and misery."

  — Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

  The Body Keeps the Score

• "If you are experiencing strange symptoms that no one seems to be able to explain, they could be arising from a traumatic reaction to a past event that you may not even remember. You are not alone. You are not crazy. There is a rational explanation for what is happening to you. You have not been irreversibly damaged, and it is possible to diminish or even eliminate your symptoms."

  — Peter Levine

  Waking the Tiger

• "Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence. Not only can trauma be healed, but with appropriate guidance and support, it can be transformative. Trauma has the potential to be one of the most significant forces for psychological, social, and spiritual awakening and evolution."

  — Peter Levine

  Waking the Tiger

• "Ultimately, the main goal of trauma therapy is to relegate the trauma to its rightful place in the client’s past."

  — Babette Rothschild

  The Body Remembers

• "One of the difficulties of PTSD is the phenomenon of flashbacks, which involve highly disturbing replays of implicit sensory memories of traumatic events sometimes with explicit recall, sometimes without. The sensations that accompany them are so intense that the suffering individual is unable to distinguish the current reality from the past. It feels like it is happening now."

  — Babette Rothschild

  The Body Remembers

• "While dissociation appears to be an instinctive response to save the self from suffering—and it does this very well—it exacts a high price in return."

  — Babette Rothschild

  The Body Remembers

• "Depression hurts. It’s the “black dog” of the night that robs you of joy, the unquiet mind that keeps you awake. It’s a noonday demon that only you can see, the darkness visible only to you."

  — Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel V. Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn

  The Mindful Way Through Depression

• "Depression and anxiety are downward spirals: patterns of negative, unhealthy activity and reactivity that the brain ends up stuck in… Recent research has uncovered the power of the upward spiral: the fact that small positive life changes lead to positive brain changes in its electrical activity, its chemical composition, and even its ability to grow new neurons… Upward spirals can reverse the downward patterns of depression and anxiety…"

  — Alex Korb

  The Upward Spiral

• "… by making small changes in your thoughts, actions, interactions, and environment, it’s possible to change the activity and chemistry of the key brain circuits underlying depression and anxiety."

  — Alex Korb

  The Upward Spiral

• "People first awaken to a spiritual dimension in their lives in an incredible variety of ways. Some people seem to open up to it through traumatic experiences… Other people awaken through meditation or through religious experiences. Others arrive at it through sex or through drugs."

  — Ram Dass

  Polishing the Mirror

• "To live in the here and now is to have no regrets about the past, no worries or expectations for the future. To be fully present in each moment of existence is to live in total contentment, in peace and love. To enter into this presence is to reside in a different state of being, in a timeless moment, in the eternal present."

  — Ram Dass

  Polishing the Mirror

• "Amongst all of the existential angst of modern life there is a blossoming of spirit arising within the collective psyche of humanity."

  — Adyashanti

  The Deep Heart

• "Normal anxiety is an expression of the capacity of the organism to react to threats; this capacity is innate and has its inherited neurophysiological system."

  — Rollo May

  The Meaning of Anxiety

• "…conscious anxiety is more painful but it is available also to use in the service of integration of the self."

  — Rollo May

  The Meaning of Anxiety

• "…anxiety can inform your life, but it does not have to define it. You’re not destined for anxiety; you’re destined for equanimity."

  — Sheryl Paul

  The Wisdom of Anxiety

• "The constructive way of dealing with anxiety… consists of learning to live with it, accepting it as a “teacher,” to borrow Kierkegaard’s phrase, to school us in confronting our human destiny."

  — Rollo May

  The Meaning of Anxiety

• "The problem of the management of anxiety is that of reducing the anxiety to normal levels, and then to use this normal anxiety as stimulation to increase one’s awareness, vigilance, zest for living."

  — Rollo May

  The Meaning of Anxiety

• "This is the wisdom of anxiety: the call to turn inward so that you can fill your well and turn back outward to give to a world that needs you."

  — Sheryl Paul

  The Wisdom of Anxiety

• "…when we learn how to harness the wisdom of anxiety, the richness and messages contained in the unconscious can inform and expand our conscious lives."

  — Sheryl Paul

  The Wisdom of Anxiety

• "Anxiety… is worry about future uncertainty and our inability to control what will happen to us."

  — Marc Brackett

  Permission to Feel