It's easy to fall into the trap of feeling responsible for other people's emotions, reactions, and inner turmoil. We have an innate desire to be understood and accepted. So when others seem upset with us, judge us, or want us to change, we leap to explain, rationalize, and pacify. But in our quest to please or appease, we often lose ourselves.... See more
"You can choose peace in every moment of your life. We have been taught to believe that when we don’t get what we want, or things aren’t unfolding as we had thought they should, that’s bad and thus we should feel badly. This struggling against what is, this inability or unwillingness to love what is, is the source of all of our suffering and it is entirely our own creation. With practice, we can become as masterful at choosing peace as we have become at choosing anything else."
The lowest level of choice is not making a conscious choice at all, which happens when you don’t notice that you even could make a choice. In this case there is effectively no space between stimulus and response, so you just act out your habitual behavior unconsciously. If you ever find yourself skimming the news or looking in the fridge without... See more
Nobody wakes up feeling great and ready to get after it every day. The work is accepting your feelings and taking them along for the ride. It requires equal parts grace and grit, self-discipline and self-compassion.
Keep showing up.
learn to notice what’s happening with your broad awareness of the space around you. I’ve written before about the idea that awareness—the breadth of things you are able to notice in any given moment—can expand and collapse. Collapsed awareness is like tunnel vision, where there’s a sense that the wider world around you goes away while the thing... See more