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Kindle Notes & Highlights
In a sense, the notion that thoughts create reality is more than just a nice idea; it’s also a fact of evolution. It was because of language and thought that we could create a world within our minds, and ultimately, it is because of language and thought that we have evolved into the society we have today—for better and for worse.
if you consciously learn to regard the “problems” in your life as openings for you to adopt a greater understanding and then develop a better way of living, you will step out of the labyrinth of suffering and learn what it means to thrive.
There is nowhere to “arrive” to. The only thing you’re rushing toward is death. Accomplishing goals is not success. How much you expand in the process is.
You’re never upset for the reason you think you are: At the core of your desire to create a problem is simply the fear of being who you are and living the life you want.
So many people get caught up in allowing the past to define them or haunt them simply because they have not evolved to the place of seeing how the past did not prevent them from achieving the life they want, it facilitated it.
Most negative emotional reactions are you identifying a disassociated aspect of yourself.
The things you love about others are the things you love about yourself. The things you hate about others are the things you cannot see in yourself.
It’s interesting to think about how we make people who used to be everything into nothing again.
Maybe it’s just that we’re all at the centers of our own little universes, and sometimes they overlap with other people’s, and that small bit of intersection leaves some part of it changed. The collision can wreck us, change us, shift us. Sometimes we merge into one, and other times we rescind because the comfort of losing what we thought we knew wins out.
We find souls made of the same stuff ours are.
It’s interesting how we realize the storm returns to calm, but we see the stars differently now, and we don’t know, and we can’t choose, whose wreckage can do that for us.
The main thing socially intelligent people understand is that your relationship to everyone else is an extension of your relationship to yourself.
you are the only person responsible for your life and your happiness.
Real emotional maturity is how thoroughly you let yourself feel anything. Everything.
healing is really just letting yourself feel.
Numbness is not nothing, neutral is nothing. Numbness is everything at once.
We’re more comforted by ideas of what things are as opposed to what they really are.
you do not need to be exceptionally beautiful or talented or successful to experience the things that make life profound: love, knowledge, connection, community, and so on.
without any single one of us, nothing would exist as it is right now.
Finding the exceptional in the ordinary is the real extraordinary.
When people complain, it’s because they want others to recognize and validate their pain;
Calmly standing up for oneself is indicative of inner resolve and self-esteem.
unless we heal what happened in the past, we’re always going to be controlled by it.
“The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.”
Start appreciating how rare and beautiful it is to even just have one close friend in life.
It is always about infusing purpose into whatever it is you already do.
If you believe you’re worthy of love, you will experience love when it comes.
The more you accept other people, the more you’ll accept yourself, and vice versa.
Let go of the idea that anything is “given” or “taken” from you. You create. You choose.
Stop thinking that being sad or broken makes you unlovable or “bad.” Your honest moments don’t destroy relationships, they bond (as long as you’re being genuine).
“This too shall pass.”
The single most powerful, liberating thing any one of us can do is choose to believe that everything is here to help us.
When we think there is a purpose for our pain, the discomfort of it dissolves.
Assume that all things are for the best.
Everything in your life does one of three things: shows you to yourself, heals a part of yourself, or lets you enjoy a part of yourself. If you adopt that perspective, there’s nothing left to fear.
You don’t come across these people by accident; they were your teachers and catalysts.
we’re all stars that think they’re dying until we realize we’re collapsing into supernovas—to become more beautiful than ever before.
Those relationships didn’t actually hurt you; they showed you an unhealed part of yourself, a part that was preventing you from being truly loved.
but to heal the things that were preventing you from seeing and receiving it.
If healing is just acknowledging pain, then maybe living is just acknowledging life.
“The purpose of being here is growth. Growth means being able to experience and see more because you are aware of it. The purpose of being here, then, is expanding awareness.”
“The things I’m meant to have will simply come to me.
