101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

by Brianna Wiest

What you have to know is that suffering is just the refusal to accept what is.

Pace yourself—if at any point you’re doing anything in which you cannot feel your breath, you’re moving too fast. Make physical relaxation a priority—no matter what you’re doing. Keep track of your breath at all times. Be mindful, present and intentional with everything you do. It is not the quantity of what we accomplish, but the quality of it.

You’ll regret what you didn’t do, not what you’ve done.

Volunteer at a homeless shelter, donate your belongings, work with kids after school.

Stop judging other people. See everyone with dignity, with a story, with reasons for why they are how they are and why they do what they do. The more you accept other people, the more you’ll accept yourself, and vice versa.

You create. You choose.

Thinking that there are starving kids on the other side of the world will not alleviate your pain, so stop trying to compare.

That said: There’s a lot worse you could be going through, and if you think back on your life,

Nobody is thinking about you the way you are thinking about you. They’re all thinking about themselves.

“This too shall pass.”

Fucking try. Honestly, seriously, try. Put your everything into the work you have. Be kind to people when they don’t deserve it. You’ll have a lot less energy to worry with when you’re funneling it into things that are really worthwhile.

If you want to understand why you perceive your life the way you do, ask yourself what you think the point of it is.

This is the underbelly of how you think and behave.

You either see yourself as a victim of what happens to you, or as someone given opportunity to change, grow, see differently, and expand.

You’re mentally lazy. You know you should be more present, but you won’t put in the effort to practice it. You know you should meditate and learn to train your brain to focus so it doesn’t become engulfed by negativity, but you head to the gym instead. You’re lazy in the way it matters most, and that’s your biggest problem.

The pain of losing transmutes into the beauty of having discovered something more important than someone who can promise you forever.

other words, they’re you, projected outward. It’s what you’re judging yourself for. The first step is realizing that the “people” you worry about don’t really exist.

It showed you what you do deserve. 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. That’s what happens when we finally get past hurtful experiences and terrible relationships: We realize we are worth more, and so we choose more. We realize how we blindly or naively said “yes” to someone or gave them our mind and heart space when we didn’t have to. We realize our role in choosing what we want in our lives, and by experiencing what seems like the worst, we finally acknowledge that it feels so wrong because we deserve so much more.

healing is just acknowledging pain, then maybe living is just acknowledging life.

you know, at your core, that you must start over, it’s not a matter of whether or not you will—it’s whether you’ll do it later, or whether you’ll do it now.

Physiologically, of course this is true, but it’s even more true emotionally and mentally. We almost like to create problems for ourselves out of a very deep belief that we deserve pain (the bad kind) out of retribution for how terrible we (wrongfully) believe ourselves to be. It’s only through grappling with that pain that we realize it was always self-induced and served mostly just to help us unlearn our need to create it, to realize why we don’t deserve it, and in the process of doing so reconnect with who we truly are, not just what the rest of the world sees us to be.

you do owe it to yourself to step out of the inevitable frustration and self-doubt of interacting with people who don’t listen to understand, but to respond; who don’t speak to be heard, but to defend.

Judging people for things that seem “wrong.” Every single thing serves a purpose. The goal is not to create a seamless image, it’s to go through the experiences that need to grow and teach and change us. You don’t know that a completely wrong and illogical marriage is what someone really needs. You don’t know that there’s no element of fate or destiny involved in the birth of a child that seems young and for which the parents seem ill prepared. You don’t know that the people who seem to be doing nothing with their lives are gathering the knowledge and experience that will one day write the next great American novel, uncover the next great philosophic idea, etc. As hard as it may be to grasp, all things are good, because all things serve us in the way of growth and development.

All hatred is self-hatred. And everything is feedback.

Unless you are there to touch and smell and see a flower, it is nothing but random matter vibrating in a void. Your recognition gives it its beauty and its presence. You are not in the world; the world is in you. And though that sounds like another abstract platitude, it is not. It is reflective of a greater, deeper, truer truth, and in these tiny moments of recognition, of awareness, we find that what we immediately perceive is not all there is, and that anything that feels dense and heavy and “wrong” and “negative” is not a matter of what’s going on outside but what we’re not healing and changing inside.

Your life exists in its days. Not in your ideas about those days. Your habits accumulate and begin to default.

Choose not to be harmed, and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed, and you haven’t been.

Kids do not do what we tell them; they do what we do. If we want the world to change, we have to change ourselves. If we want to inspire them to cope

Our perceptions of other people’s mindsets largely dictate how we see ourselves.