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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Time is not linear in the way we perceive it; everything is happening at once. You call into your experience that which you need and that which you are. You’re never with and you’re never without. You’ll never receive and you’ll never lose. You always were, you always are. That knowing is the foundation on which the real magic occurs.
Your gut voice will never go ignored. It will project out and eventually turn into big, loud external voices that demand you pay attention.
You don’t have to merge your coexisting truths and dull your shine just so it makes sense to a small-minded person who wants you to fit into a narrow understanding of what they’re comfortable with.
You do not have to only be what other people are comfortable with.
Things will work out better than you could have chosen or designed them.
In the moments before you realize something better than you can fathom is coming to fruition, it will seem like every plan you made and hope you had has been completely disregarded by whatever higher power you do or don’t believe in.
When people say that you need to “love yourself” before you can love someone else, what they mean is that if you are subconsciously seeking a relationship to fix your life, give you direction, or make you feel better, you will perpetually choose the wrong person, and you’ll never really have the kind of relationship you want.
But you are not going to be ready for the love of your life when they show up.
Loving yourself is letting yourself be loved, too.
We grew up in a culture that taught us to put ourselves last, even when “putting other people first” is fake and disingenuous and rooted in resentment and dishonesty.
We’re suffering from anxiety and depression and loneliness and uncertainty and fear and failure mostly because we have to continue to paint an outward picture of the opposite.
Nobody is honest and so nobody is finding anybody who loves them for them, because they aren’t being who they are. There are only finding people who love their shells, which, as we all know, easily break.
We associate “doing what we want” and “putting ourselves first” with being selfish and with not considering others. We’re taught that what we should want is what makes others happy.
But do you want people in your life who secretly don’t want to be there?
So you should say no when you want to say no.
You should speak precisely and kindly and with understanding but directness when you see a friend struggling to make a simple choice that will have a profound effect on their entire quality of life, instead of walking away and discussing with everybody else but them.
You are bound by nothing but your own fear, so you will not find freedom anywhere but within yourself.
I somehow knew when it was time to break my own heart for the sake of something greater, even though I didn’t know what that greater thing was at the time.
We aren’t meant to attain things like bullet points on a resume; we’re supposed to go through them and let them go through us.
The purpose of most great love is to gut you open, teach you what you need to know, and send you on your way to bigger, better, even happier things. Don’t let your irrational fears talk you out of letting yourself find that.
Someone else’s success doesn’t make you less successful. Someone else receiving love or praise doesn’t mean you aren’t love or praiseworthy. You are not only as good as you are better than someone else.
The happier you are with a decision, the less you need other people to be.
Tangible goals—money, books, job titles, and so on—are mile markers. They are the products of your life, not the goals of your life.
The goals are to be truly fulfilled.
You have to ask yourself: What is the root of this reaction, where does it come from, and what is its outcome in the long-term?
Your soul knows what to do to heal itself; the challenge is just to let it.
Learn to like reading, whatever it is you like to read. Learn to like talking and people, even when they’re not the same as you. Learn that truths can coexist. That’s the one thing that will set you free in this world.
It’s not anger or the sadness that controls you; it’s the resistance of it that keeps them tucked in their place in your soul.
Focus instead on what you want to do with each and every day of your existence. That’s noble. That’s worthwhile. That will get you somewhere.
You owe nothing to your younger self. You are not responsible for being the person you once thought you’d be.
You owe it to yourself to ask yourself what you like, what you want, what calls you, what you need, and what you deserve.
You don’t need to accomplish anything to be a worthwhile human being. Very few people are actually meant to be extraordinary. That does not mean you cannot know contentment, love, joy, and all the real wonders of life.
After all, even the heaviest, darkest things ultimately serve you and open you to a truth you wouldn’t have considered before had you not been put in the context to see it.
If you had the life you think you want, what would tomorrow be like? When you imagine the life you want, rather than focus on the elevator speech (“I am this, I do this…”), focus on the daily routine. If you had the life you think you want, what would you do tomorrow? How different would it be from what you’re doing now? What from that vision can you actually start doing tomorrow?
If nobody would know what you did with the rest of your life, what would you do?
If you could choose five things that matter most to you, what would they be? Whether you realize it or not, your life will fundamentally be built off of the few things you care about the most. When it’s not, it will feel out of alignment at best, or off-the-rails at worst. Fulfillment is living in accordance with what we genuinely value.
What gives you a feeling of subtle, unexplainable enjoyment? What do you like, even though you don’t understand why you like it?
These are the things to pay attention to. These are the things that are real. Your mind is responding to what you think you like, your emotions are responding to what actually resonates.
If you lived today on repeat forever, where would you be? What would you have accomplished? Would you be thriving at work? Would you have made time for the people you love? Would you have written a book, or played music, or be spending your money in a healthy way? Would you be dressing like yourself, and enjoying the sunrise, and eating in a way that will sustain you over the long-term? Your life exists in its days. Not in your ideas about those days.
Bad feelings become bad when we fight them.
Because everything—even the hardest things to get over—can be good, if we choose to see why they’re present, what they need to show us.
In the Tao, it says that softness is the equivalent of life. Bodies stiffen in death. Trees that harden are cut down. Therefore, hardness is death and softness is life.
Who you were doesn’t have to bleed into who you will be. We often stunt ourselves by tying who we were into who we think we need to become.
You weren’t meant to be a story that plays out in a nostalgically pleasing way. Life isn’t a sepia-toned flashback. Life is vivid and changing and real and unpredictable.
Regardless of the mythology, there’s something interesting happening in the world today. Our collective consciousness is expanding. We’re more aware of what’s going on (for better and for worse), we’re striving to understand ourselves, we’re learning to work with our emotions and build lives that represent what we value, not what we’re obligated to.
It wasn’t that we came upon hard times and got through it—we came upon hard times and awakened to something deeper.
Ironically though, the opposite of pain isn’t joy—it’s acceptance.
