Quotes About Self

During the Civil War, traumatized combatants developed a condition that they called "soldier's heart."8 The violence that results in soldier's heart shatters a person's sense of self and community, and war is not the only setting in which violence is done: violence is done whenever we violate another's integrity. Thus we do violence in politics when we demonize the opposition or ignore urgent human needs in favor of politically expedient decisions.

Alice Kaplan is a teacher of French language and literature, and she has done this kind of remembering in a book called French Lessons. "Why do people want to adopt another culture?" she asks as she summarizes her journey into teaching and into life. "Because there's something in their own they don't like, that doesn't name them."5

When the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself-and me-even as I give it away.

But if the self seeks not pathology but wholeness, as I believe it does, then the willful pursuit of vocation is an act of violence toward ourselves—violence in the name of a vision that, however lofty, is forced on the self from without rather than grown from within. True self, when violated, will always resist us, sometimes at great cost, holding out lives in check until we honor its truth.

A relationship with our imagination is a relationship with our deepest self.

Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.

In the real world, the Sergeant was tired of worrying and sick of cocoa. He was disturbed by feelings in his mind that he was not really himself at all. Several times he half-started out of his chair on an impulse to get out on the streets to ask the first person he met: "Where were you at ten past three on the morning of December the thirteenth, nineteen fifty-four"; just to prove to himself that he was still the Sergeant and that he knew how to do his duty.

Top-down cortically mediated techniques typically use cognition to regulate affect and sensorimotor experience, focusing on meaning making and understanding. The entry point is the story, and the formulation of a coherent narrative is of prime importance. A linguistic sense of self is fostered this process, and experience changes through understanding

In bottom-up approaches [to processing trauma], the body's sensation and movement are the entry points and changes in sensorimotor experience are used to support self-regulation, memory processing, and success in daily life. Meaning and understanding emerge from new experiences rather than the other way around. Through bottom-up interventions, a shift in the somatic sense of self in turn affects the linguistic sense of self.

Don't let other people tell you what you want.

All you have been waiting for is your own permission.

Maybe she is right. Maybe the old self has to die for the new self to be born. Or maybe, for me, the old self doesn't have to die. Maybe who I have been is not erasable on the tablet of who I am, or in the book of who I will become. Maybe writing, like painting, can be pentimento—one layer over another, the early layers now and then showing through.

I'd wake up in the morning and I would think, 'Where am I?' I'd have to gather myself.

Our imagination is the most important faculty we possess. It can be our greatest resource or our most formidable adversary. It is through our imagination that we discern possibilities and options. Yet imagination is no mere blank slate on which we simply inscribe our will. Rather, imagination is the deepest voice of the soul and can be heard clearly only through cultivation and careful attention. A relationship with our imagination is a relationship with our deepest self.

Identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life. ~ Bran

Mine, ... Mine is what she is.

If you are going to use white man's words to describe yourself, 'avatar' is more accurate than 'walker.

It's just I," I told him, more pedantic than usual because I was scared.

her natural State of Personal Power.

You can't put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.

Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world.

First and foremost, we need to acknowledge we are not our ego-based interpretation of ourselves but the Spirit beyond it, and so much more powerful than we even know.

I have learned to trust myself and so have the women with whom I sit in circle. We no longer choose to expend our precious life energy scrutinizing every facet of our beings to figure out what is wrong with us. Instead, we celebrate ourselves as gifted and powerful children of life.

Our search for a God who looks like us begins in our own lives. She will be found there.