Quotes About Awareness

If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger that we will become the tool of our tools

But emotions teach those who are willing to pay attention. By processing them, we learn to empathize, and love ourselves and others. In fact, understanding this aspect of our being is central to healing our family history, because it holds the most powerful energy that we use to create our lives.

by uncovering the illusions and finding the gifts they've masked, we can grow, and begin to feel more love and gratitude for our relatives. This is the true healing process.

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't.

Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.

Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness.

There's no good reason (and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators.

We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or be seen. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then become a story-teller.

Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.

I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.

when you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind and walking travels both terrains.

We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.

Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone.

Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.

the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.

How long does it take to see something, to know someone? If you put in years, you realize how little you grasped at the start, even when you thought you knew. We move through life mostly not seeing what is around us, not knowing who is around us, not understanding the forces at play, not understanding ourselves. Unless we stay with it, and maybe this is a movie about staying with it.

The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all.

James Baldwin famously wrote, "If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.

It's the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open.

Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.

Children, Landon said, are good at getting lost, because the key in survival is knowing you're lost: they don't stray far, they curl up in some sheltered place at night, they know they need help.

Not till we are completely lost, or turned round,—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

As Nancy Frey writes of the long-distance pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, 'When pilgrims begin to walk several things usually begin to happen to their perceptions of the world which continue over the course of the journey: they develop a changing sense of time, a heightening of the senses, and a new awareness of their bodies and the landscape....A young German man expressed it this way: 'In the experience of walking, each step is a thought. You can't escape yourself.

This is why I pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege's form of deprivation.