More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 13 - August 11, 2025
Yes, things can be different. We don’t know exactly what that looks like yet, but it could be different. The way things are now is not the way that things have to be. Celeste Ng
give your brain permission to stand down and allow guidance from some other place. Even if it’s just for five minutes, allow something else to speak. Your body knows what’s true. Elizabeth Gilbert
The word right can be a red flag. If you’re looking to do what’s right, then you know you’re looking to somebody else’s map instead of your own inner compass. That approach is never going to feel like knowing. Knowing doesn’t speak in the language of being right; it speaks in the language of feeling alive, of feeling free. So we can just remove the right. Let’s stop asking, “Is it right for me?,” and start asking, “Is it for me?” Amanda
The true knowledge of what to do next is not in the brain, but it’s in all the senses. It’s in every single bit of you once the clamor of consensus is gone. Don’t live by coming to consensus. Live by coming to your senses.
need you to get back into your body, and I need you to tell me what feels warm. It is okay for you to go toward what feels warm. It is okay to trust that.” That moment changed my life.
If you’re unsure about whether or not to do something, imagine standing on a high diving board over a pool on a very hot day. Is the water sparkling and blue but you’re scared because it’s a really long way down? Or is it a pool of stinky toxic sludge and you’re just revolted by the idea of going down? If it stinks, don’t do it. If the water is calling to you but you’re scared to jump because it’s a long way down, then you’re having a conflict between the longing for the water and the fear of the fall.
The instructions are there. They’re there inside the rage. They’re there inside the dejection and the limpness and the suffering. The suffering is teaching you the instructions for your life. And here’s the cool thing: Nobody else has them. The only way you’re going to ever find them is if you go in and get them from inside yourself. Your instructions are nowhere else but inside you. Martha Beck
The knowledge of what to do next is there. It’s not in the brain, it’s in all the senses.
You are lonely and frightened and fearful and exhausted right now, believing you’re not enough. So if you’re going to be that anyway, if you’re going to do that anyway, fall forward toward your liberation.
The most painful thing is to be misaligned, to have your life out there be different from your life in here.
Setting boundaries comes in two simple parts. The first part is saying the thing. The second part is being a strong little tree in a storm, staying rooted and grounded until everybody’s feelings settle. We’re responsible for telling our truth with love. We are not responsible for the way the world receives our truth. Glennon
Just because we feel pain and loss on this path doesn’t mean the other path would have been pain free. We have to be humble enough to admit that the imagined reality is not actually reliable, and we most likely would have a lot of the same pain and confusion and hurt on the path we didn’t take.
Glennon: There is an image of a woman who has just leaped off a cliff. Behind her is a big hand—the hand of the universe—which has pushed her off the cliff. There’s a second big hand beneath her; it’s about to catch her. That is the other hand of the universe. The universe pushes you off the cliff, and the universe will catch you before you hit the ground. But the fall is still so scary that it’s tempting to panic, turn around, and try to claw your way back up the cliff. That climbing back is trying to unknow what became clear to you once. Your knowing has led you to do something so scary and
...more
Amanda: Recovery is so courageous and nonsensically faithful and wild because it is deciding, with no evidence, to live without something that you cannot live without. The reason you’re so worried about your drinking is because you know you can’t stop drinking. The reason you need to live without it is because you can’t live without it. And so you’re just deciding: Okay, I’m going to do that thing that I cannot do. That’s the miracle of it. It’s the biggest act of faith.
There’s this period when I can start to sense a new version of myself on the periphery of my consciousness. It’s unclear, but it’s there. The more work I do, the more I stay with myself and let myself fall without grabbing for old ways, the clearer the outline of that new self becomes, and then it starts to become colored in, and then I start to feel that it’s real. I start to feel myself becoming. And at some point, that new self becomes more real to me than the old self behind me.
It takes so much energy to show up, to say the thing bravely, and to continue without lying down and taking a break. You got to do that day after day after day after day. I had to give myself a pep talk the other day. I looked at myself in the mirror and was like “Girl, you are just a miracle. You are a miracle. The fact that you are where you are, from where you came from, having withstood what you’ve been through, it is a miracle that you’re here smiling with that clear-ass melanin skin of yours, looking as good as you do, having a happy spirit, raising an incredible daughter, being an
...more
We’ve got to put down what was never ours to carry so we can start living light and free. We deserve that.
I try to script my life right down to the final scene. And then, my dear beloved friend Life is like: Oh, no, no, no. Oh, it’s not going to be like that. It’s going to be like this. Now what’s your move? Elizabeth Gilbert
You don’t earn a miracle, you just accept it with deep gratitude and you wish it for others. That is my wish for you, that you would get that miracle. But until you do, I wish you freedom—not to wear yourself down endlessly trying to earn it—so that there will be more left of you to celebrate when your miracle arrives. Amanda
For years, I was so focused on helping my son that I almost missed knowing my son. I was so desperate to protect him that my energy went into managing him, not loving him. I was in a relationship with his behaviors, not with him. My eye was so trained to see what was missing that I almost missed seeing what was actually there: the hilarious, kind, handsome, fiercely loyal and loving human standing right in front of me—who, at his core, needs precisely zero fixing. Instead of using my energy to worry about my boy, I started using my energy to get to know him. Instead of being in a relationship
...more
When people don’t accept you, it’s an indication of where they’re at, not where you’re at. It has 100 percent to do with them and nothing to do with you. There’s nothing wrong with you. Other people have been told that they can’t be free or happy. When they see you being free and happy, they get really nervous because they have to hold a mirror to themselves. They wonder: Maybe I’m not as free and happy as I thought. What I always try to remind myself is: This is not my fear. I say that to myself, This is not my fear, and then I go find other people who are investing in love over fear. Alok
nobody’s going to handle my shit for me. I almost died. Nobody is going to look at my life and say, “That’s not working for you.” Nobody is going to protect me but me. That’s my job.
When something stops working for me, when something actually starts to affect my peace, it’s my responsibility to stop and start something else.
If we get to a point where I’m like: This person is not hearing me, they’re not doing anything different, I really can’t trust them, then I decide to let them go. I become less available to them.
You don’t always have to decide whether or not you like the other person. You do have to decide if you like yourself around that person. And if you don’t like or trust yourself or feel calm or safe, then that’s enough information.
True belonging has forever felt inaccessible to me. As far back as I can remember, I have felt like a little bit of an alien, like an outsider looking in. My inner voice is always saying: I don’t belong here I don’t belong here why can’t I belong here? The only real belongingness I’ve ever felt in my entire life is in my home with these four particular people. So as my kids grow up, it’s not just a loss of identity that I’m struggling with but a loss of the only belongingness I’ve ever felt. It’s really hard.
It truly is the most heartbreaking paradox of life that, if you are lucky, your children will not need you—but what you want most in the world is for them to need you. And tragically, it seems as if the surefire way to ensure your kids won’t want you is for you to need them.
If my kid comes home and says, “Hey, I got in trouble today because I was talking while the teacher was talking. They said I was being disrespectful,” I could respond with control: “You need to go upstairs. And you need to send an email to this teacher. Apologize for being disrespectful.” But that is control as opposed to connection, which is “God, that must have been really hard.” Then you hear “Yeah, I was just asking if they had an extra pencil. I’m really sorry.” You have to ask: What does support look like? What can I do? I can listen. I can help. I can say, “I know you’re not inherently
...more
That’s how I ended up at my first online Al-Anon meeting. Somebody had a little thing on their screen that said, “Don’t fight it, don’t fix it, don’t figure it out.” I took a picture of that and sent it to my friend Alex with a text that said, “Excuse me? Is this for real? What the hell am I supposed to do all day?” Slowly, I am learning that it’s my job to make myself okay. It is not my job to control other people’s decisions and lives so that I can feel okay. The question is: How do I be okay without using people to get me there? How do I make myself okay?
if we were to live forever, that would be hell. There is something that makes this life beautiful, and that is the brevity of it. Andrea Gibson
So what if death was the best thing you could ever experience? What if it’s actually really joyful to watch your kids grow up from the other side? What if you get to be more intimately connected with the people you love when you’re dead? We can fill that concept with anything we want, yet we choose pain, we choose the horror of it all.
I think control and love are opposites. Because love requires trust. We only control things or people we don’t trust fully. We can love people or control them, but we cannot do both. So I am practicing loving Abby instead of controlling her, loving my children instead of controlling them, loving my body instead of controlling it, loving my life instead of controlling my life, loving myself instead of controlling myself. It’s still hard. It’s scary for me to trust. But it’s also the biggest relief of my life. I’ve been holding my breath to hold it all together for so long. Trusting feels like
...more
As far as I can tell, grief is forever. Grief is the repeated experience of learning to live in the midst of a significant loss.
That’s the thing about grief. It doesn’t always show up as sadness and wailing and depression. Sometimes it’s just love and peace and inclusion. I want my husband and my son to know my mother. My husband and my son will know my mother.
When my mom passed, I got really good advice from a family friend. Reflecting on his own experience of losing his mother, he shared with me that the moment she died, she was with him forever. When people are alive, you have to physically go to see them in order to spend time with them. But when someone’s no longer alive, you never have to travel to see them. They’re always there. That articulation is exactly what my experience has been. My mom is always with me.
Sometimes when things are hard and I feel like I’ve failed or let people down, I can look up to the sky and think: My mom is here, and she doesn’t care about this. I have this relationship with my mom that’s growing.
I have often felt that grief is less like something that comes and haunts me like a visitor and more like I’m the visitor and the sadness is a room inside of me. It’s like my body is a house and there is one big room inside of me where the knowing lives; the sad, wild remembering of how beautiful and terrible and temporary and fleeting everything is. I spent decades of my life keeping that room locked: Do not enter. Caution tape. My job was just to walk by it lightly on tiptoes. Then I started letting myself visit the room. I was like: Oh, maybe this is a good place to visit. Maybe it is in my
...more
Sadness is the gap between the seen and unseen—between what we know could be, what should be, and what actually is.
People who have the sadness can become warriors for truth and beauty and peace and love. Because what the sadness is making inside of us soon steps out of us.
I think my mom’s reaction amplified it in my mind.
The adults in our life—who we depend on for our survival—really start to make us doubt the things that we know intuitively. So we face a conflict: Do I stay connected to my body, or do I preserve the relationship that I’m in? The ability to be in relationship with people who approve of us and love us is so essential to our survival that we will sacrifice what’s happening inside of us to make sure that we are safe relationally.
I’m not in the moment that needs to be white knuckled and survived in the same way. I am with people who love me, who want to help me meet my needs. And it is okay for me to be seen in the fullness of who I am now.
We learn with great precision how to make our bodies more desirable, palatable, and valuable to others. But we don’t learn what we need to know about our bodies in order to live our lives with vitality and peace and pleasure—like how we can best cope with the dramatic decades-long process of perimenopause and menopause or how we can consistently and effectively orgasm.
If each of us just decided: Nothing about me is broken, so I’m going to stop trying to fix what isn’t broken, there would actually not be a beauty standard. It only exists because we’re all striving to achieve it.
Oh, wait. Who taught me that my neck’s not supposed to look like this? And then: Who benefits from my believing that? Certainly not me. Just some guy somewhere running a lotion business. No, thanks. I love my neck. It’s done such a good job for so long of holding up my head. I love you, sweet wrinkly neck. You’re perfect to me.
Your capital-S Self will never tell you that you’re broken, it will never tell you something is wrong with your body, whether that’s its shape or size or color or anything about its function. That is never coming from the Self. There is a you that is present and always speaking. And there’s no greater or more important task in this life than to know how to find that voice, hear it, and then live consistently with it. That has proven to be the most important thing I’ve ever done with my life. Carson Tueller
What are the places where I feel mastery in my body, and where I can experience myself as powerful? Can I do those more? Is there an activity that I do that I notice I feel better after doing?
I always thought that my body was just an unfortunate container carrying around my brain. Embodiment is new to me. Hillary McBride said, “Why don’t you stop calling your body ‘it’ and start calling your body ‘she’ and ‘her’? Because she is you. She isn’t separate from your brain and from your heart and soul, she is you. And she is Team You and only Team You, and her only agenda in this entire world is to keep you safe and flourishing. She won’t tell you a lie.” So I started referring to my body as “her,” and I talk to her in the most loving of ways. And when she tells me something, I’m going
...more
Then I started therapy, and I started noticing the pain in my body. My lower stomach hurt, my lower back hurt, I would get headaches. I went to the worst extremes looking everything up. And then I had to stop and realize, maybe my body’s just saying: Oh, this thing is really painful and you’ve been thinking about it a lot. This is a trauma response, a stress response. It took me so long to realize that the trauma I’ve carried in my body since I was little still manifests in my adult body. My adult body is still trying to tell me things just like my child body was trying to tell me things. What
...more
