Quotes from Martha Beck

It seems to me at this moment that laughing is a serious thing, that it connects us with truth and love and God.

The more you claim your own destiny, the easier it will be to love unconditionally .

I fell in love with Africa and began helping people fix things there.

In fact, when care appears, unconditional love often vanishes.

No one can give you anything-love, shame, self-esteem- until you give it to yourself. Today, give yourself good things.

Every aspect of your life, whether it's a task or relationship, personal or professional, will be based on love and joy. And when you get right down to it, nothing else really matters.

Constantly measuring ourselves against others sours and shortens our lives, robbing us of the very things we think it will bring: prosperity, love, inner peace, the knowledge that we're good enough.

The pretty girls get all the good stuff. Oh, God. So not true. I unlearned this after years of coaching beautiful clients. Yes, these lovelies get preferential treatment in most life scenarios, but there's a catch: While everyone's looking at them, virtually no one sees them.

People who get what they want tend to be the ones who make the effort to know what they want.

To make an activity joyful, keep adding things until the activity as a whole becomes more appealing than repulsing.

Life is full of tough decisions, and nothing makes them easy. But the worst ones are really your personal koans, and tormenting ambivalence is just the sense of satori rising. Try, trust, try, and trust again, and eventually you'll feel your mind change its focus to a new level of understanding.

You have the freedom to live and let live, to love and let love. Granting yourself that freedom is one of the healthiest, most constructive things you can do for yourself and the people who matter to you.

Since our society equates happiness with youth, we often assume that sorrow, quiet desperation, and hopelessness go hand in hand with getting older. They don't. Emotional pain or numbness are symptoms of living the wrong life, not a long life.

All religious leaders and spiritual teachers emphasize finding a place within us that is true. People who obsessively follow these leaders instead of their own purpose attach to the spiritual leader and become fanatical and controlling. That's why Jesus tried to tell his followers not to get attached to outward form.

The process of spotting fear and refusing to obey it is the source of all true empowerment.

Although beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, the feeling of being beautiful exists solely in the mind of the beheld.

As a life coach, I love makeovers, from new clothes to surgery, pedicures to highlights. But redoing makes you feel better only if approached with the right attitude.

The thing I love most about my job is watching people age backward, becoming more lively and energetic as they free themselves from situations that are toxic to their essential selves.

The way we can allow ourselves to do what we need to, no matter what others may say or do, is to choose love and defy fear.

Whatever causes you to drop your plan forward and open to your vision, your own, deeply personal vision of what your life could be at its very best, that's what I call meeting your rhinoceros.

I want you to notice is that-right here, right now-you're okay. You may be in pain, you may be in fear, you may be in grief. But you're here, you're surviving; this moment is okay.

I want you to be supervised, all day every day, by people who forgive your errors and believe in your destiny.

If you want to end your isolation, you must be honest about what you want at a core level and decide to go after it.

As much horror as we have always created, we are a species that keeps moving forward, seeing new sights in new ways, and enjoying the journey.