Quotes About Emotional

I define calm as creating perspective and mindfulness while managing emotional reactivity. When I think about calm people, I think about people who can bring perspective to complicated situations and feel their feelings without reacting to heightened emotions like fear and anger.

The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World, by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his daughter, the Reverend Mpho Tutu.

Yes, we are totally exposed when we are vulnerable. Yes, we are in the torture chamber that we call uncertainty. And, yes, we're taking a huge emotional risk when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. But there's no equation where taking risks, braving uncertainty, and opening ourselves up to emotional exposure equals weakness. MYTH

Why do we cause each other so much pain, and why do we turn away from hurt when the only way to the other side of struggle is through it? I don't know why it's so hard to understand—I've been known to run from vulnerability like someone is chasing me. Granted, not very often anymore. It just takes so much more energy and creates so much more emotional churn than having a seat and asking hurt or uncertainty to pull up a chair.

If we can't handle uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure in a way that aligns with our values and furthers our organizational goals, we can't lead.

You can't fully grow and contribute behind armor. It takes a massive amount of energy just to carry it around—sometimes it takes all of our energy.

We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don't function as were meant to be. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache … The absence of love and belonging will always lead to suffering.

In a healthy family, you know how love is defined: It's clear, has boundaries, and is attainable. Unfortunately, in a shame-bound family, love is a moving target; one day it's this and one day it's that, and just when you're sure you've got it figured out, you discover you don't.

As my friend Richard Rohr said, "If we don't learn to transform the pain, we'll transfer it.

The revolutionary thinking that God loves me as I am and not as I should be requires radical rethinking and profound emotional readjustment.

The revolutionary thinking that God loves me as I am and not as I should be requires radical rethinking and profound emotional readjustment. Small wonder that the late spiritual giant Basil Hume of London, England, claimed that Christians find it easier to believe that God exists than that God loves them.

A periodic tune-up of our personal priorities and a regular safety inspection of the direction and desired destination of our lives help insure us against major temporal, emotional, and spiritual breakdowns.

these past months have been hard on me and I'm quite confused—physically, mentally and emotionally drained. I feel like a wounded animal stuck with spears, staggering around aimlessly. . . . I keep going on like there is nothing wrong. Sooner or later I will break. I want to break, to let it go in an agonizing wail—but I just can't seem to let it out.

In the end everyone, or not quite everyone, made friends again in order not to be stuffy or righteous. I did too. But I could never make friends again truly, neither in my heart nor in my head. When you cannot make friends any more in your head is the worst. But it was more complicated than that.

Who can listen to a story of loneliness and despair without taking the risk of experiencing similar pains in his own heart and even losing his precious peace of mind? In short: "Who can take away suffering without entering it?

Our society is so fragmented, our family lives so sundered by physical and emotional distance, our friendships so sporadic, our intimacies so 'in-between' things and often so utilitarian, that there are few places where we can feel truly safe.

I am constantly surprised at how I keep taking the gifts God has given me - my health, my intellectual and emotional gifts - and keep using them to impress people, receive affirmation and praise, and compete for rewards, instead of developing them for the glory of God.

Often it seems that beneath the pleasantries of daily life there are many gaping wounds that carry such names as abandonment, betrayal, rejection, rupture, and loss.

Friendship and love cannot develop in the form of an anxious clinging to each other.

A complainer is hard to live with, and very few people know how to respond to the complaints made by a self-rejecting person. The tragedy is that, often, the complaint, once expressed, leads to that which is most feared: further rejection.

have seen how the fear of becoming subject to God's revenge and punishment has paralyzed the mental and emotional lives of many people, independently of their age, religion, or life-style. This paralyzing fear of God is one of the great human tragedies.

We resist getting near the suffering of another partly out of our unwillingness to suffer ourselves.

There is great pain and suffering in the world. But the pain hardest to bear is your own.

Forgiveness is to allow the other person not to be God. Forgiveness says, "I know you love me, but you don't have to love me unconditionally, because no human being can do that." [...] If we want other people to give us something that only God can give, we become a heavy burden. We say, "Love me!" and before we know it we become demanding and manipulative [...] To forgive other people for being able to give us only a little love—that is a hard discipline.