Until you heal the wounds of your past, you are going to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, alcohol, with work, cigarettes, or sex. But eventually it will ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in the past, and make peace with it.  Iyanla Vanzant

Self-betrayal is betraying your true self by serving the false self. The false self calls itself “myself,” but it is based in ignorance, fear, and greed. As long as you are serving the egoic selfishness, you are betraying the pure loving intelligence that is the true heart. As long as you are following thoughts instead of love, as long as you believe the voices in your head instead of the clarity of open emptiness, you are betraying yourself. Gangaji

I know what hurts and what doesn’t. Byron Katie

If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is inside you, what is inside you will destroy you. Saint Thomas, Gnostic Gospels

Enlightenment, joy, and peace can never be given to you by another. The well is inside you. Thich Nhat Hahn

This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all, even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of all its furniture, still treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet then at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whatever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. Rumi

But the secret of life is: If you bring your unconsciousness into the light, those hidden secrets which are functioning like wounds, like burdens that are heavy on you, evaporate. Osho

One of the greatest feelings in life is the conviction that you have lived the life you wanted to live ~ with the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad ~ but yours, shaped by your own choices, and not someone else’s. Michael Igratief

If we begin to get in touch with whatever we feel with some kind of kindness, our protective shells will melt, and we’ll find that more areas of our lives are workable.  Pema Chödrön

Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

We must accept that if we are born into this world and have become “normal” citizens of our community, then there is a storm raging within us. That is because what is accepted as normality in this world is a state of quiet desperation. As much as we would like to deny its existence, this controlled and sedated inner storm cannot be hidden. It is the storm of duality. It is the war between authenticity and the inauthentic. It is the great divide between presence and pretense. It is the vast canyon of fear, anger and grief between the adult and the child self. If we seek real peace, then we must enter the storm willingly and consciously. Michael Brown

There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. Carl Jung

There is a madman inside of you Who is always running for office – Why vote him in? He never keeps the accounts straight. He gets all kinds of crooked deals happening all over town That will just give you a big headache and glue to your kisser A gigantic confused frown. Hafiz

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat. Teddy Roosevelt

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.  Rumi

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. Marcus Aurelius

We are each of us a wise guru in charge of a mental patient. Jamie Catto

 

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