Quotes from Brene Brown

No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It's going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn't change the truth that I am brave and worthy of love and belonging.

Laura's courage is acknowledging hurt without running from it, and my courage is acknowledging hurt and not hurting back. We also agreed that cruelty is never brave

Who we are matters immeasurably more than what we know or who we want to be.

I can definitely say, "Hi. My name is Brené, and today I'd like to deal with vulnerability and uncertainty with an apple fritter, a beer and cigarette, and spending seven hours on Facebook." That feels uncomfortably honest.

When you hold someone accountable for hurtful behaviors and they feel shame, thats not the same as shaming someone. I am responsible for holding you accountable in a respectful and productive way. I am not responsible for your emotional reaction to that accountability.

We can never become completely resistant to shame; however, we can develop the resilience we need to recognize shame, move through it constructively and grow from our experiences.

On a cultural level, I think the absence of honest conversation about the hard work that takes us from lying facedown in the arena to rising strong has led to two dangerous outcomes: the propensity to gold-plate grit and a badassery deficit.

We disengage to protect ourselves from vulnerability, shame, and feeling lost and without purpose. We also disengage when we feel like the people who are leading us--our boss, our teachers, or principal, our clergy, our parents, our politicians--aren't living up to their end of the social contract.

The Center for Complicated Grief at Columbia is another tremendous resource.

When I interviewed the participants whom I'd describe as living a Wholehearted life about the same topic, they consistently talked about trying to feel the feelings, staying mindful about numbing behaviors, and trying to lean into the discomfort of hard emotions.

What we are teaches the child more than what we say, so we must be what we want our children to become.

by-products of shame—fear, blame and disconnection—and move toward the courage, compassion and connection we need to live our best, authentic lives.

Vulnerability is not weakness, and the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure we face every day are not optional. Our only choice is a question of engagement. Our willingness to own and engage with our vulnerability determines the depth of our courage and the clarity of our purpose; the level to which we protect ourselves from being vulnerable is a measure of our fear and disconnection. When

We define nostalgia as a yearning for the way things used to be in our often idealized and self-protective version of the past.

I love how researchers Ulrich Weger and Johannes Wagemann explain it. They write, "Wonder inspires the wish to understand; awe inspires the wish to let shine, to acknowledge and to unite.

There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." THE

How much we know and understand ourselves is critically important, but there is something that is even more essential to living a Wholehearted life: loving ourselves. Knowledge

As long as we're creating, we're cultivating meaning.

Mary Pipher's book Reviving Ophelia

It's in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced, and Photoshopped world very dangerous. If we want to cultivate a resilient spirit and stop falling prey to comparing our ordinary lives with manufactured images, we need to know how to reality-check what we see.

The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining.

Dread occurs frequently in response to high-probability negative events; its magnitude increases as the dreaded event draws nearer.

To love with any level of intensity and honesty is to become vulnerable. I used to tell couples getting married that the only thing I could tell them with certainty was that they would hurt each other. To love is to know the loss of love. Heartbreak is unavoidable unless we choose not to love at all. A lot of people do just that.

it is less about who people are, and more about how they behave and show up in difficult situations. Fear is the emotion at the center of that list of problematic behaviors