Paradoxes
- To require that others respond to you exactly as you want gives them control over you.
- To influence others to respond in the specific way that you want renders them inauthentic in your mind.
- Acceptance is not acquiescence.
- It is rare to see fully all that there is, yet nothing else.
- Activity is not necessarily the same as productivity; work ethic is not the same as success ethic.
- Assumptions and beliefs, like traumas, are ways of stopping time.
- “More” is not a goal, yet its elusiveness serves as a container of hope and happiness.
- Suffering and desire are the two secrets we cannot keep.
- See it big; keep it simple.
- The only thing constant is change; often the hardest work is accepting the changes.
- The loss of the illusion is more difficult than the loss of the real thing.
- We most engage what we run away from.
- The more we deny or disavow something, the more apparent it becomes.
- We criticize, perhaps to prove that we do not posses the fault.
- Both opposition and conformity occupy the same prison.
- Only when you feel fully secure can you be aware of how afraid you were.
- Fighting engages; accepting lets go.
- Only the impossible is addictive—a fantasy that has been lost but given temporary hope by proxy.
- The answer gives birth to and shapes the question; by listening to the answers you may give voice to the question.
- Adolescents can teach us the depth of superficial things.
- If you don’t change your direction, you are likely to end up where you are headed.
- Judgment resides in the potential space between urge and action.
- It is a moment of liberation to know that no one is binding you.
- The most common thing that gets in the way of seeing something as it truly is, is our preconception of it.
- The most common thing that gets in the way of listening and understanding is trying to fix.
- Fear, change and adventure are synonyms.
- Mistakes and successes both teach.
- The past is a lesson; to let go and learn from it is a process.
- All you ever have to do is the next right thing.
- Sometimes it isn’t clear what the next right thing is, but you can almost always determine what it isn’t.
- Whatever we experience, we either create or accept. Wisdom is to relinquish all hope of a better past.
- Wisdom is to relinquish all hope of a better past.
Antipodes—The opposite of…
- perfect is real.
- fear is freedom.
- control is mastery.
- doing is being.
- repetition is creativity.
- working harder is working smarter.