When You're Ready, This Is How You Heal

And maybe in the end, the kindest possible thing you could do for yourself is to know that there is nothing that holds us back more than the important words that went unspoken, the deep instincts that went unfelt, the callings that went unanswered. Your life is reaching toward you, and maybe the kindest possible thing you could do is reach back.

Relationships are not safeguards against loneliness. You can’t whittle yourself down to being as nice and accepting and likable as possible in order to ensure that as many people as possible won’t leave you. Relationships come and go; that is what they are designed to do.

You will have to build a home no matter where you are. You will have to decorate and settle and reach out. You will have to find rhythms and routines. You will have to be vulnerable, and you will have to be seen.   There is nowhere we can turn to that is an escape from ourselves.

The most precious, important thing that you have in your life is your energy. It is not your time that is limited, it is your energy. What you give it to each day is what you will create more and more of in your life. What you give your time to is what will define your existence.

The path forward is understanding that we are sometimes collateral damage to people’s own inner wars, and that we do not need to adopt their weapons as our own in order to fight back.

We heal when we learn how to adjust how we show up, not how we change what we show up to.

Make your life a safe haven in which only people that have the capacity to care and listen and connect are allowed. You are not responsible for saving people.

When we feel most stuck, it is often because we are trying to decipher who we really are by piecing together images we assume others have of us. What we don’t realize is that there is not just one, singular version of us that exists. There’s our experience of ourselves, and then the kaleidoscope of ways we are perceived by others. When we spend all of our lives trying to manage those perceptions, we become completely lost within them.

You will know that it’s time to take your power back when there is no other viable choice, because in the aftermath of loss, you discovered that you unraveled your own existence so that nothing could be taken from you again.

Life contracts before it expands, and pulls back before it leaps forward. This balancing act is not something we should resist, but rather, embrace.

The point was never that you adjusted everything around you until it was made perfect, but that you adjusted the way you see everything until you realize that it is enough, and it always has been.

This moment is not your life, this is a moment in your life.” — Ryan Holiday

I know that your instinct is to do whatever you can to earn the good graces of everyone you can, but that is also the impulse that will rob you of your time, your energy and your sanity.

Do you really want to leave your self-esteem hinging on how you imagine others perceive you, or do you want to find a way to feel proud of yourself at the end of the day? Do you want to arrange your existence so that it would be impossible for anyone to say anything negative about it, or do you want to live with so much joy spilling out from inside you that it renders such opinions meaningless either way?

To trust yourself means that you are no longer content to lodge your soul in the circumstances that have long stopped serving you.

You’re living in a work of art while treating it as an equation that you have not yet solved.

Your old self is no longer suited to manage the life you have today, and so they must transform into who you are becoming now.

I am entitled to my own idea of myself.

The best” doesn’t mean “the most perfect.” It just means that instead of passively letting life happen to you, you show up in each moment and you work with what you have, instead of just complaining about what you don’t.

In fact, our ability to respond to and cope with life is usually a direct reflection of how many challenges we’ve been through. It’s usually the people who are the most at peace who have also been through the worst that life could offer them.

It is never the right time until it is the right person.

Though you cannot always control what you feel, you can control how you respond, and in that response, you can find your freedom.

We are not alive to coast. We are not alive to seek safe spaces within the idea of another. We are here to realize that we are the source of our own existence, of all we create, of all that we are. We are here to bring ourselves home, and then to show others the way back to themselves.

What if, instead of believing that you have failed, you began to recognize that failure is just life’s way of moving you in another direction? What if instead of counting up all the times things haven’t worked out precisely the way you imagined they would or should, you considered that perhaps you were being led somewhere better? What if you found awe and reverence in the fact that there is a force so powerful protecting you — perhaps one you cannot even name or see or even believe in — that is refusing to let you have even the things you beg hardest for because there is something else you are so destined for?

just complaining about what you don’t. “My most persistent judgments of other people are often a reflection of a block within myself.

heard them say is and isn’t acceptable in life. You build your idea of success around the ultimate vision of what would make you most loved.

When we don’t allow ourselves to have these very vulnerable, very human moments, it turns us into hypersensitive robots constantly trying to control our lives and the lives of those around us out of the fear that any trigger might unleash the avalanche. We can better assimilate ourselves

What if you realized that they are under no obligation to be who you think they should be, and the most loving thing you could do would be to set them free of the expectations you hold in your own mind? What if you realized that they don’t have to be just as you imagine in order for you to exchange the love you are meant to share?