Quotes from Sheryl Paul

For it's when you stop seeing your sensitivity as a burden and instead recognize it as the gift it is that you will begin to heal the hurt places inside you and bring your full presence into the world.

Carl Jung said that if you find the psychic wound in an individual or a people, there you also find their path to consciousness. For it is in the healing of our psychic wounds that we come to know ourselves. . . . In the evolution of consciousness, our greatest problem is always our richest opportunity. ROBERT JOHNSON We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love

Part of what trips us up is that we expect life and relationships to be easy. There is nothing easy about life, and relationships especially seem to stir up every hidden demon, every dusty complex, every latent unshed tear from our own life and our parents' histories hidden away in the attics of their psyches. Relationships ask us to grow in ways that nothing else does or can.

If we try to ignore the inner world, as most of us do, the unconscious will find its way into our lives through pathology: our psychosomatic symptoms, compulsions, depressions, and neuroses.

Every moment you can meet your difficult feelings with kindness is a moment of peace.

Many people are so identified with their shame-and-pain stories that they're scared to shift out of that identity; they would rather remain miserable than take the risk of stepping into a new story. Remember: resistance clings to the familiar at all costs, even if what's familiar is making you miserable.

Resistance, which is a cousin of fear, manifests as feeling too lazy, scared, or tired to engage in the practices or actions that you know will serve your higher self.

we're broken open, brought to our knees, dragged into the underworld not to be tortured or because there's something wrong or disordered with us, but because there's something right and beautiful inside that is longing to be seen and known.

We're so deeply conditioned to believe that there's a right or wrong choice that when it comes time to make even minor decisions in life, we're scared of messing up.

One of the blessings of the internet is that the contents of the collective unconscious, formerly only accessible via dreams and myths, are now more widely accessible. You are far from alone with your anxiety, no matter how it manifests.

But when we accept the fact that anxiety, depression, loneliness, powerlessness, grief, joy, and exhilaration are all part of the design, we step out into the rain and perhaps even dance a little.

The path to liberation lies in cultivating a more loving and realistic relationship with life, one that recognizes that there is no finish line, that we are all unformed.

Religion, while often offering a sense of trust in something bigger than ourselves, can also transmit the message of basic wrongness, especially around thoughts, bodies, and sexuality. When children are raised with a belief system that tells them, "If you think certain thoughts (primarily around sexuality) you have sinned," it's a setup for anxiety.

Deep belly breathing is one of the most commonly recommended on-the-spot practices to calm your nervous system and, thus, anxiety. The reason for this is that when you breathe deeply, pushing your belly out all the way like a balloon, your vagus nerve is activated in such a way that it calms your amygdala, the emotional response center deep within your brain.

we have to shift from a mindset of shame, which sees anxiety as evidence of brokenness, to a mindset of curiosity, which recognizes that anxiety is evidence of our sensitive heart, our imaginative mind,

You are far from alone with your anxiety, no matter how it manifests.

Anxiety is a feeling of dread, agitation, or foreboding associated with a danger that does not exist in the present moment.

As the bride lets go of her singlehood identity, she prepares an internal space where her new identity as wife will eventually bloom.

All transitional times afford us the opportunity to redefine who we are; when we are in between identities, we become like a blank slate on which our past, present, and possible future are illuminated.

If you observe a baby, you'll quickly see that we are born knowing what we like and don't like, when we're hungry, tired, or need connection. We know ourselves quite well at birth, and it's only as a result of well-meaning parents, teachers, doctors, other adults, and caregivers that our innate self-trust is damaged.

In the United States, normal arose within a cultural context as the nation sought to control a growing urban population and Americanize immigrants from around the world. Normalcy, though, is first and foremost an idea that arises from statistics. The normal, norm, or normalcy do not exist in the real world of real people [emphasis mine], despite the fact that we are told that we can modify our behavior and train our bodies and minds to reach it.

Whether it's a major decision like accepting a job, or a minor decision like what to order at a restaurant, people struggling with anxiety often find themselves frozen like a deer in the headlights when it comes time to decide.

To be human is to struggle. Eventually we realize that when we sit under the umbrella of "shoulds" — "This shouldn't be so hard. I should be happy." — the pain rains down harder. But when we accept the fact that anxiety, depression, loneliness, powerlessness, grief, joy, and exhilaration are all part of the design, we step out into the rain and perhaps even dance a little.

We avoid pain because we live in a culture that teaches us to avoid pain. We avoid pain because we don't know that turning toward pain — and I use pain as an umbrella term for anything uncomfortable that we wish to avoid feeling — is one of the secret pathways to joy.