Welcome Home: A Guide to Building a Home for Your Soul

by Najwa Zebian

The purpose of using “I” statements is to separate your healing from the person who caused you pain in any way.

It’s because living in pain is a lot less painful than living unanchored to something. To someone. To a memory. To a moment.

Accepting that you are not what happened to you. And that you are not the result of it.

To become who I was meant to become, I needed to stop trying to be who I had been.

three kinds of compassion: compassion toward the world, compassion toward yourself, and compassion from others.

In fact, it’s ensuring that when you are compassionate with others, you aren’t doing so by depleting yourself, that you’re not developing resentment.

With time, I realized that being compassionate with others does not require you to minimize your own problems.

Sometimes people walk in wearing a cloak of compassion that you soon realize is not real.

If you believe you deserve less, you won’t know how to set a boundary.

When you don’t know what you’re open to receiving, you will take in anything and later realize that it’s too little or simply not what you want.

And it’s our own rejection of ourselves and what we deserve that makes us believe that what they’re giving us is too much.

Never the one to be asked “How was your day?” Never the one told “I love you.”

I took his unavailability as a cue to work harder to prove my worth.

Sometimes people will do things that hurt you without thinking of the kind of pain that they’re causing you.

Let them keep what they took from you. That’s how you spread your light in the world.

You choose not to cause pain. And that’s what makes you who you are.

The ultimate goal of being home with yourself is not to never experience negative emotions, but to learn how to dive into them by constructively listening and understanding, not drowning in them by continuing to resist them.

But we are more likely to choose the negative ones over the positive ones when we already know what to expect with the negative ones.

Expressing a question as a positive makes your brain look for evidence of whatever you wonder about.

I was so fixated on the happy ending that I forgot to make sure the right characters were in place.

Accepting the ending of one story means seeing it as part of your journey, not your final destination.

And trusting that what’s unfamiliar at a soul level, but healthy on a logical level, is worth the risk. It’s worth the trust.

That’s why I unconsciously held on to what was so much less than what I deserved because I thought it was more than what I could ever get.

I usually accept less than what I deserve because I don’t want to be alone.

It’s important to not discount anyone’s story because of the affiliations attached to it.

Never be grateful for the person who causes you pain. Be grateful for yourself.