Quotes About Self-awareness

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. —LEO TOLSTOY

Ironic that those most holy are least likely to see themselves that way.

Part of being a Christian is recognizing that sin deceives us, and we need other believers to help us see the things we cannot see about ourselves. Joining a church, I've often said, is like throwing paint on the invisible man. New sins become visible in the course of our discipling relationships.

If we take an honest look at the mistakes we've made, we'll see that many of them were a reaction to unnamed fear within us.

With some gratitude, I realized that my awareness was now stronger than my neurosis. This did not mean that things would never go to pieces, only that I did not have to fall apart when they did. In fact, my own ability to go to pieces was protecting me in this situation. I did not have to let my identity as an efficient and together person imprison me.

His efforts were always in the service of releasing people from their fixed ideas about who or what they were, about freeing them from attachment to whatever concept they were clinging to, about loosening the hold that the fear-based ego claimed as its birthright.

The early parent-child environment, the balance between being and doing, lives on in the mind. Mindfulness offers an opportunity to see these patterns clearly. In seeing them, in bringing them into the domain of reflective self-awareness, there is a possibility of emerging from their constraints. Choice emerges where before there was only blind and conditioned behavior.

To be free, to come to terms with our lives, we have to have a direct experience of ourselves as we really are, warts and all.

The Buddha] is not dividing himself into worthy and unworthy pieces; he is one being, indivisible, immune from the tendency to double back and beat up on himself. He has seen the worst in himself and not been taken down.

According to Buddhism, it is our fear at experiencing ourselves directly that creates suffering.

Buddhism teaches us that we are not so much isolated individuals as we are overlapping environments, and that we have the capacity to know ourselves in this way.

It's one of my theories that when people give you advice, they're really just talking to themselves in the past.

Like meditation, psychotherapy has the potential to reveal how much of our thinking is an artificial construaction designed to help us cope with an unpredictable world.

Many people, in both the East and the West, believe that shutting down the ego, and the thinking mind, is the ultimate purpose of meditation. The Dalai Lama, rather forcefully, always argues that this is a grave misunderstanding. Ego is at once our biggest obstacle and our greatest hope. We can be at its mercy or we can learn to mold it according to certain guiding principles. Intelligence is a key ally in this shaping process, something to be harnessed in the service of one's progress.

When those aspects that have been unconsciously refused are returned, when they are made conscious, accepted, tolerated, or integrated, the self can then be at one, the need to maintain the self-conscious edifice disappears, and the force of compassion is automatically unleashed.

It's not what she is thinking that matters, it's how she relates to her thoughts that will make all the difference.

Many others do not make this transition so seamlessly: they become enamored of the observing self that beginning meditation empowers and use that capacity for self-observation as a way to avoid personal responsibility. They observe their own pain, but not their contribution to its making.

But sometimes we get sad about things and we don't like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes we are sad but we don't really know we are sad. So we say we aren't sad. But really we are.

but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me.

When he finally let the car it was because e could no longer bear his own company in such a confined space.

For the first time in his life, he felt exactly what he was, and he was not impressed.

What's the difference what you watch?" Praeger shot back. "When that stream of hypnotic electrons starts winging into your brain, you're finished, good-as-gone, condemned to hell. No matter what it is, if you don't move your eyes and set the pace yourself, your intellect is sentenced to death. The mind, you see, is like a muscle. For it to remain agile and strong, it must work.

Throughout my life, there has always been a number that sounded old. When I was sixteen, it was twenty-seven; at twenty-nine, it was forty-two; at thirty-eight, it was fifty-two. At sixty-five, however, it was sixty-five.

The past only has power over you when it's forgotten... ignored or repressed.