Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life

by Gisele Bündchen

Everything we experience, good and bad, has a meaning, even if we may not understand it right away. It’s all happening for us to learn.

Loving yourself. Loving other people. Loving the world in which we all live. Throw away everything else, but please, please don’t ever live your life without love.

I became aware that for now and forever, my bigger purpose was love. It wasn’t about me.

when you start seeing yourself as a victim, you surrender your power, and it can be hard to get it back.

Through yoga we learn we’re already everything we need to be.

At the same time, it was my choice whether or not to keep someone in my life. The decision didn’t mean I didn’t love that person either. It meant only that I needed to love myself first and surround myself with only those things that would nourish me and those people whom I could trust.

We can’t choose the circumstances of our lives, but we can choose how we experience them.

I’ve heard it said that we’re born with the faces God gave us but we end up with the faces we deserve.

At the end of my life, the only thing that will matter to me is whether or not I was a good person. A loving person. An addition to this life—not a subtraction.

Other people’s words have almost nothing to do with you and almost everything to do with them.

Once we believe something is true, it becomes closer to coming true.

Focusing too much of your attention on the news, or on the internet, or on anything outside yourself, can consume you. It isn’t your life, but it might as well be your life. If you keep giving your full attention to things that make you fearful or anxious, you will become more fearful and anxious.

Compulsive exercise can be as much of a problem as no exercise.

The poem reminded me that two people in love can attain both interdependence and balance. With that balance, you each become a pillar strong enough to sustain love while living side by side. One partner doesn’t need to lean on, or crash into, or merge with the other. A strong pillar stands straight on its own. It’s perfect just by being itself, and from that place it chooses to share and to stand with another.