Quotes About Self-discovery

Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Traveler, there is no path, the path must be forged as you walk. This line from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado

People may call what happens at midlife "a crisis," but it's not. It's an unraveling—a time when you feel a desperate pull to live the life you want to live, not the one you're "supposed" to live. The unraveling is

There's nothing that makes us feel more threatened and more incited to attack and shame people than to see someone daring greatly. Someone else's daring provides an uncomfortable mirror that reflects back our own fears about showing up, creating, and letting ourselves be seen." (here

Miriam Greenspan, a psychotherapist and the author of Healing Through the Dark Emotions, was interviewed by Jungian therapist Barbara Platek in The Sun Magazine.

What do you do when you've spent the majority of your life moving to try to fit in, and all of a sudden Maya Angelou is singing to you and telling you not to be moved? You learn how to plant your damn feet is what you do. You bend and stretch and grow, but you commit to not moving from who you are. Or, at the very least, you start trying.

shield required that I stay small and quiet behind it so as not to draw attention to my imperfections and vulnerabilities. It was exhausting.

reporter told me that after reading The Gifts of Imperfection and Daring Greatly, he wanted to start working

To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight—and never stop fighting." "Staying

Knowledge is important, but only if we're being kind and gentle with ourselves as we work to discover who we are.

The greatest gift of having done this work (the research and the personal work) is that I can recognize shame when it's happening. First, I know my physical symptoms of shame—the dry mouth, time slowing down, tunnel vision, hot face, racing heart. I know that playing the painful slow-motion reel over and over in my head is a warning sign.

Now as adults we realize that to live with courage, purpose, and connection—to be the person whom we long to be—we must again be vulnerable. We must take off the armor, put down the weapons, show up, and let ourselves be seen.

In the cartography of the heart, the most meaningful connections are the landmarks that guide us home to ourselves and to each other.

First, when we're feeling that edge, instead of asking ourselves "What's the quickest way to make these feelings go away?," ask, "What are these feelings and where did they come from?

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting." "Staying real" is one of the most courageous battles that we'll ever fight.

When we stop numbing and start feeling and learning again, we have to reevaluate everything, especially how to choose loving ourselves over making other people comfortable.

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself. —ANNA QUINDLEN1

E. E. Cummings wrote, "To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight—and never stop fighting.

Mary Pipher's book Reviving Ophelia

When we are willing to risk venturing into the wilderness, and even becoming our own wilderness, we feel the deepest connection to our true self and to what matters the most.

When we own our stories, we get to write the ending.

It's allowing yourself to recognize the shiver of vulnerability—that "Oh, shit, I have something worth losing now" feeling—and to just sit with it, and be grateful that you have something you want, in your hand, that it feels good to hold and recognize.

We all have to find our own way deep into the wild.

Cultivating authenticity: letting go of

I didn't realize it then, but looking back, those permission slips to myself were actually an attempt to belong to myself and to no one else.