Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living: THE NO.1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

Pain is not tragic. Pain is magic. Suffering is tragic. Suffering is what happens when we avoid pain and consequently miss our becoming.

The girls are silent at first. Then each girl diverts her eyes from the television screen and scans the faces of the other girls. Each looks to a friend’s face to discover if she herself is hungry. Some kind of telepathy is happening among them. They are polling. They are researching. They are gathering consensus, permission, or denial.

Obeying the zookeeper’s every command, just like Minnie, the Lab she’s been trained to believe she is. Unaware that if she remembered her wildness—just for a moment—she could tear those zookeepers to shreds.

I stopped believing in middlemen or hierarchy between me and God.

If I am living bravely, my entire life will become a million deaths and rebirths.

All of our suffering comes when we try to get to our resurrection without allowing ourselves to be crucified first.

It struck me that in every family, culture, or religion, ideas of right and wrong are the hot cattle prods, the barking sheepdogs that keep the masses in the herd. They are the bars that keep us caged. I decided that if I kept doing the “right” thing, I would spend my life following someone else’s directions instead of my own. I didn’t want to live

Because what scares me a hell of a lot more than pain is living my entire life and missing my becoming. What scares me more than feeling it all is missing it all.

I wanted to be a good girl, so I tried to control myself. I chose a personality, a body, a faith, and a sexuality so tiny I had to hold my breath to fit myself inside.

I do not want my children to become people who abandon themselves to please the crowd.