Words Are My Matter by Ursula K Le Guin

Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence.  Reading is a means of listening.

Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever.

No matter how humble the spirit it’s offered in, a sermon is an act of aggression.

Judgment Detox: Release the Beliefs that Hold You Back from Living a Better Life by Gabrielle Bernstein

We get a quick hit of self-righteousness when we judge others.  It's a reliable little crutch when we feel hurt, insecure, or vulnerable.

The moment we see ourselves as separate from anyone else, we detour into a false belief system that is out of alignment with our true nature.

We must recognize that we all have the same problem and the same solution.  Our problem is that we

separated from love and the solution is to return to love.

Ego reinforces our separation by convincing us that we're less special or more special than others.

Our manifestation of specialness is the special relationship, which the ego uses to protect us from feeling the pain of separation. 

When your idol falls, you fall with them.

Judgment is the number one reason we feel blocked, sad, and alone.

It's easier to make fun of, write off, or judge someone for a perceived weakness of theirs than it is to examine our own sense of lack.

We unconsciously choose to judge rather than feel the pain beneath our wounds.

You create your reality with the thoughts you repeat and the beliefs you align with.

We can use logic and intuition to discern what feels right for us without being judgmental.  It's the habit of condemning and criticizing that we must let go of.

One way you know you're in judgment (and not discernment) is that you don’t feel good; instead you feel defensive, fearful, or under attack.  It's a sign you've separated from love and chosen fear.

Often when people trigger our wounds, we judge them when this happens instead of accepting that the discomfort is really about us.

The way out of judgment begins when you witness the judgment without more judgment. 

Being willing to accept the parts of our consciousness that are out of spiritual alignment makes us stronger.

When we feel safe enough to expose our shadows, that's when we become free.

Why would I feel the need to judge if I felt safe and complete?

The clearest way to find joy and success is to join your mind with love. 

The reason you judge is because you're avoiding an emotion that you don't want to feel.

When judgment is on the altar, we get stuck in the chaos of what we don't want and only create more of it.

When we say a prayer, we allow our consciousness to receive intuitive guidance.

Whenever you're triggered by others, it's because they're mirroring back elements of your shadow that you're unwilling to heal.

Meditation has the capacity to transform all your relationships, including your relationship to yourself.

Witness your fear, offer it to your inner guide for healing, and let forgiveness lead to miracles. 

Liberation from judgment requires our willingness to forgive.  Without forgiveness we continue to live in the shadows of our past and our projections of the future.

Your ego works continuously to convince you that some outside force is the source of your dilemma, rather than your inward-facing turmoil.

Forgiveness requires practice and repetition.

Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandries by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Thoughts and emotions move between people in time and space through the human energy field.

The remarkable feature of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. After the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.

Some morning while your eating breakfast and you need something new to think about, though, you might want to ponder the fact that you see your kids across the table not as they are but as they once were, about three nanoseconds ago.

After 50 years of television, there’s no other conclusion the aliens could draw, but that most humans are neurotic, death-hungry, dysfunctional idiots.

The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

At unexpected points in life, everyone gets way laid by the colossal force of recollection.

Memory is a pinball in a machine -- it messily ricochets around between image, idea, fragments of scenes, stories you've heard.

With such intense memories… we often record the emotion alone, all detail blurred into unreadable smear.

Voice isn't just a manner of talking.  It's an operative mindset and way of perceiving that naturally stems from feeling oneself alive inside the past.  That's why self-awareness is so key.

We don't see events objectively; we perceive them through ourselves.

The trick to fashioning a deeper, truer voice involves understanding how you might misperceive as you go along; thus looking at things more than one way.  The goal of a voice is to speak not with objective authority but with subjective curiosity.

Most of us don’t read the landscape so much as we beam it from our eyeballs.

Carnality may determine whether a memoir's any good, but interiority -- that Kingdom the camera never captures -- makes a book rereadable.

Whenever a writer gets reflective about how she feels or complains or celebrates or plots or judges, she moves inside herself to where things matter and mean.

We each nurture a private terror that some core aspect, something of either our selves or our story must be hidden or disowned.

Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will Be Created and How It Will Change Our Lives by Alvin and Heidi Toffler

Desire may reflect anything from a desperate need to be transitory want.  In either case, wealth is anything that satisfies the craving.

If the First Wave wealth system was chiefly based on growing things, and the Second Wave on making things, the Third Wave wealth system is increasingly based on serving, thinking, knowing and experiencing.

What most business, political and civil leaders have not yet clearly understood is a simple fact: An advanced economy needs an advanced society, for every economy is a product of the society in which it is embedded and is dependent on its key institutions. 

Today an estimated 8 percent of the human race -- roughly half a billion people -- travel across some national boundary in the course of a year.  This number is equal to the entire population of the earth in 1650.

Illegal drugs, for example, are a $400 billion business, according to the United Nations, and add up to about 8 percent of the world economy.

Few are aware that every time they use an ATM or a telephone they are relying on technology twelve thousand miles from Earth.

In each of us there is a crowded, invisible warehouse full of knowledge and its precursor data and information.  But unlike a warehouse, it is also a workshop in which -- or, more accurately, the electrochemicals in our brains -- continually shift, add, subtract, combine and rearrange numbers, symbols, words, images and memories combining them with emotions to form new thoughts.

As we move farther into the twenty-first century, and more societies develop economies based on ideas, culture and wealth-relevant knowledge, why we believe what we believe becomes more critical than ever.

Those who wish to blindfold or silence science would not merely shrink tomorrow's wealth and indirectly slow the alleviation of poverty but return humanity to the physical and mental poverty of the Dark Ages.

In 2001, our chances of dying in a hospital from a medical mistake or new infection were much greater than our chances of being killed while driving.

Today's main killers in the affluent nations are no longer communicable diseases like pneumonia, tuberculosis or influenza.  They are heart disease, lung cancer and other illnesses that are clearly affected by individual behavior. 

In a hurry-up economy every minute counts.

At one time, groceries were kept behind the counter and clerks retrieved them as requested.  Self-serve supermarkets were invented in 1916.

[In 1977] at that time there were, for all practical purposes, zero personal computers on the planet.  By the year 2003, however, there were 190 million in use in the United States alone.

Education should be more than occupational.

Until recent centuries, the overwhelming majority of our ancestors lived in a pre-market world.  Pockets of commerce existed, but most humans never bought or sold anything during their lives.

The Hard Questions: 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say "I Do" by Susan Piver

As I remembered past relationships, I realized that it was never lack of love that caused the relationships to fail, it was dislike of the life my partner and I had created together. 

For those of us contemplating marriage in the new millennium, a conscious effort is required to create a shared vision.

Your work is to understand your partner's internal logic.

Ultimately, through revealing and accepting self and other, through paying attention to your love affair and your life together and always working to tell the truth, a genuine long-term romance is created.

If we can find a way, within ourselves and together, to hold off, even just for a moment, from running from discomfort, it will bear gifts.

Discomfort just means that a boundary is being stretched.  

The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World by Nilofer Merchant

Every one of the 7.5 billion humans on this planet has value to offer.  How? You're standing in a spot in the world that only you stand in, a function of your history and experiences, visions, and hopes.  From this spot where only you stand, you offer a distinct point of view, novel insights, and even groundbreaking ideas.

Choices define us.  The hand we're dealt is just a starting point; its our choices afterward that reveal what genuinely matters to us.

Without new questions, there's no place for new answers. 

When your life has meaning, it's because you have defined that meaning.

You can always find time for things that matter by consuming less and creating more.

For your idea to even have a chance, you have to give it room to grow.

Your agency -- your ability to act -- is one key to being more powerful.

Looking for success rather than looking at a problem more deeply can distract focus from what is truly meaningful.

If your goal is based on acting out a role or merely striving for success, then you're likely to be prone to imposter syndrome.  It occurs when you try to look the part of a badass entrepreneur rather than concentrating on whom and what to serve distinctly well.

A trap of imposter syndrome is that it invites exactly the type of behaviors that only make it worse.

Take good care of your actions and your reputation takes care of itself.

We discover what matters not by focusing on our own needs but by paying attention to those of the world.

Ideas are relatively easy to come by, but conviction demands the energy of purpose.  We need to know that something matters and why.

Conviction is willingness to do the work, to live with uncertainty, to be open to asking for help, and not to worry about the end result.  Real confidence (as opposed to bravado) is born of committing oneself to that work. 

Discovering yourself is a function of practicing being yourself.

Signaling and seeking between people is the invisible cord of meaning lassoing people together into an organized whole.

There is no one "right" you, one perfect notion of your identity that therefore dictates what you can or cannot do. 

To rebel is to push against; to lead is to advocate for.  To rebel is to say "we won't"; to lead is to say "we will".

The core tension of being apart of an "us" often comes down to the dilemma: "Do I have to give up me to belong to us?"

While anger rarely unites people productively, it does serve an important role: it is the sound of your values screaming to you.  You need to listen to the anger to hear what matters to you, but externalizing it and directing it at others is a trap.

To make a big dent on such a complex topic…wasn't a matter of organizing more effort by more people -- everyone working harder -- but, rather, of introducing a new effort through a new understanding of the issue involved.  The power wouldn't come from doing more but in re-imagining what was possible.

My Heart Soars by Chief Dan George

It is hard for me to understand a culture that spends more on wars and weapons to kill, than it does on education and welfare to help and develop.

When I pray, I pray for all living things.  When I thank, I thank for everything.

A man who lives and dies in the woods knows the secret life of trees. 

My people’s memory reaches into the beginning of all things.

Of all the teachings we receive this one is the most important:  nothing belongs to you of what there is, of what you take, you must share.

Do not despise the weak, it is compassion that will make you strong.

No longer can I sing a song to please the salmon.

What you do not know you will fear.  What one fears one destroys. 

Coaching for Breakthrough Success: Proven Techniques for Making Impossible Dreams Possible by Jack Canfield and Dr Peter Chee

If people don’t like their outcomes, they need to change their responses.  

If you want to create the life of your dreams, then you are going to have to take 100 percent responsibility for your life as well.  That means giving up all your excuses, all your victim stories, all the reasons why you can’t and why you haven’t up until now.  You have to stop blaming your life on outside circumstances.  If something doesn’t turn out as planned, ask yourself “How did I create that? What was I thinking? What were my beliefs?  What did I say or not say? What did I do or not do to create that result? How did I get the other person to act that way? What do I need to do differently next time to get the result I want?” 

Tibetan Yogas of Body, Speech and Mind by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

Groundedness and connectedness (earth), comfort and fluidity (water), joy and inspiration (fire), flexibility and movement (air), and openness and accumulation (space).  If one or more of these five natural elements is lacking or diminished in us, our soul will be damaged.

Allowing the pain to freely arise, abide, and dissolve.

We practice meditation not only to relieve mundane suffering and conflicts but also as a spiritual path for this lifetime and for beyond this life as well.  Practicing meditation is a means of liberating not only ourselves but all beings from all the causes of suffering.

All the issues, conflicts, and emotions you get caught up with from day to day, hour to hour, or minute to minute, these are only reflections of the pain body, pain speech, and pain mind.  When you can learn to draw your attention to the stillness of body, the silence of speech, and the spaciousness of the mind your identity as pain body, pain speech, and pain mind can start to dissolve, and you can enter through these doorways to a lighter, more joyful sense of being.

We tend to justify and rationalize our anger, but this only fortifies it.  But if you become aware of the energy that anger rides, you can work directly with that energy and shift it.

If you listen to your inner dialogue, you may discern a certain view or logic at work as you compare yourself unfavorably with others or indulge in self-criticism.  Sometimes we get stuck there, and our whole existence becomes based on that pain.  We love from that pain.  We connect from that pain.  We hate because of that pain.  We do things in life because of that pain, or we stop doing things because of that pain.  And that pain becomes our whole operating system.  That identity is not who you really are. It is a habit.

When you want to make a change in a situation or in your own behavior, it is essential to shift your attention from the story you are telling yourself about what is happening to the inward experience you are having.  The first place to draw your attention to is your body, to experience the discomfort and agitation directly.  

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

What we experience is never limited to our actual sensations.  Impressions are always incomplete and require a dash of subjectivity to render them whole. 

Although genes are responsible for the gross anatomy of the brain, our plastic neurons are designed to adapt to our experiences.  Like the immune system, which alters itself in response to the pathogens it actually encounters, the brain is constantly adapting to the particular conditions of life. 

As long as we are alive, important parts of the brain are dividing.  The brain is not marble, it is clay, and our clay never hardens. 

The mind stalks the flesh; from our muscles we steal our moods.

Your head contains a hundred billion electrical cells, but not one of them is you or knows you or cares about you.

If neuroscience knows anything, it is that there is no ghost in the machine: there is only the vibration of the machinery.

While the corpus callosum lets each of us believe in his or her singularity, every I is really plural.… When the corpus callosum is cut, the multiple selves are suddenly free to be themselves.

Though the brain is enclosed by a single skull, it is actually made of two separate lumps, which are designed to disagree with each other.

We give the world clarity by giving it names. 

Music only excites us when it makes the auditory cortex struggle to uncover its order.

Whenever a noise exceeds our processing abilities --- we can’t decipher all the different sound waves hitting our hair cells --- the mind surrenders.  It stops trying to understand the individual notes and seeks instead to understand the relationships between the notes.

A work of music is not simply a set of individual notes arranged in time.  Music really begins when the separate pitches are melted into a pattern.

Our sense of sound begins when a sound wave, hurtling through space at 1,100 feet per second, collides with the eardrum. This shudder moves the tiniest of three bones in the body, a skeleton locked inside the ear, pressing them against the fluid-filled membranes of the cochlea.  That fluid transforms the waves of compressed air into waves of salty liquid, which in turn move hair cells.  This minute movement opens ion channels, causing the cells to swell with electricity.  If the cells are bent at a sharp enough angle for long enough, they fire an electrical message onward to the brain.  Silence is broken.  Sound has begun.

Once the prefrontal cortex thinks it has seen a mountain, it starts adjusting its own inputs, imagining a form in the blank canvas.  In fact, in the lateral geniculate nucleus, the thick nerve that connects the eyeball to the brain, ten times more fibers project from the cortex to the eye than from the eye to the cortex.  We make our eyes lie.

We can’t separate our own mental inventions from what really exists.  The exact same neurons respond when we actually see a mountain and when we just imagine a mountain.  There is no such thing as immaculate perception.

Vision begins with an atomic disturbance.  Particles of light alter the delicate molecular structure of the receptors in the retina.  This cellular shudder triggers a chain reaction that ends with a flash of voltage.  The photon’s energy has become information.

Reality is not out there waiting to be witnessed; reality is made by the mind. 

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

One-third of the human brain is devoted to vision.  The brain has to perform an enormous amount of work to unambiguously interpret the billions of photons streaming into the eyes.

We are not conscious of much of anything until we ask ourselves about it.

Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You're Taking, the Sleep You're Missing, the Sex You're Not Having, and What's Really Making You Crazy by Dr Julie Holland

We were never meant to be so static.  We are designed by nature to be dynamic, cyclical, and yes, moody.  We are moody bitches, and that is a strength - not a weakness.  We evolved that way for good reasons; our hormonal oscillations are the basis for a sensitivity that allows us to be responsive to our environment.

Moodiness - being sensitive, caring deeply, and occasionally being acutely dissatisfied -- is our natural source of power.

Drug companies are spending billions of dollars to turn normal human experiences like fear and sadness into medical diseases.  They aren't developing cures; they're creating customers.

Understanding the meaning and utility of your moods is empowering.

In our digital distraction we've lost a basic truth: fresh air, sunlight, and movement make us feel better.

It is understandable to respond to the man-made madness of this world with tears and frustration; those feelings of distress are a pathway toward health and wholeness.

We need to tune in to our discomfort, not turn it down.  Being sensitive, being irritated, and being vocal about our needs and frustrations will improve our lives.

By evolutionary design, women's brains have developed to encourage empathy, intuition, emotionality, and sensitivity.  We are the caretakers and the life givers.

Feeling deeply may, at times, be difficult to navigate, but it's also a powerful tool, in the workplace and at home, and it's essential for growth.

We are built to be highly attuned and reactive, and embracing that truth is the first step in gaining mastery of our inner lives and health.

Stuffing down your feelings is going to make you miserable.  The suppression of anger in particular is a crucial factor in depression.

You have two competing systems in your body:  sympathetic and parasympathetic.  The sympathetic is the fight-or-flight system, while the parasympathetic is the rest-and-digest system.

As children, we were molded by our parents' reactions toward us.  We put away bothersome behaviors, suppressed our emotional intensity, and hid our needs in order to make their jobs easier. 

We re-create our childhood environment as we project our hurts, insecurities, fears, angers, and anything else from our traumatic pasts.

Mindfulness strengthens that final frontal inhibition, the "don't do it or you'll be sorry" part of the brain.

In yoga, the postures that you hate performing are the ones your body likely needs the most.  That's why they're the hardest.  They reveal your weakest, most inflexible parts.  In life, the people whom you find the most challenging inevitably are the ones who have the most to teach you.

Negativity is invisible abuse that is toxic to the relationship.

A tuned-in parent can help produce a healthy child.  What our kids need most is our genuine presence.

The mantras for marriage hold for mothering.  Same team.  Conflict is growth trying to happen.

Mothering is as much about raising yourself to be an authentic, empathic woman as it is about raising your daughter to become herself.

Actual menopause lasts one day.  It is the one-year anniversary since your periods have completely stopped.

Resilience is a key component of mental health. It is your ability to bounce back, to adapt to adversity, and particularly to recover from trauma, whether physical or psychic.  More resilience means staying healthy in the face of tragedy and stress.  Less resilience means becoming overwhelmed, getting stuck, breaking down, and getting sick.

Artificial sweeteners trigger insulin release as much as or more than real sweeteners.

Intuitive eating means really listening to that inner voice that will tell you honestly what your body requires to stay healthy.  It means trusting and believing your hunger, and making healthy choices.

Inactivity taxes the body as much as obesity does, increasing the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and many cancers.

Sunlight needs to hit your retinas to exert its direct antidepressant effect.

Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find -And Keep- Love by Dr Amir Levine and Rachel S F Heller

Basically, secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving; anxious people crave intimacy, are often preoccupied with their relationships, and tend to worry about their partner's ability to love them back; avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness.

Most people are only as needy as their unmet needs.

Two dimensions essentially determine attachment styles: Your comfort with intimacy and closeness (or the degree to which you try to avoid intimacy); Your anxiety about your partner's love and attentiveness and your preoccupation with the relationship.

People with different attachment styles tend to explain why they are still alone in a different manner: People who are anxious often feel that there is something wrong with them; secures will have a more realistic view of things, and avoidants… attribute their single status to external circumstances, such as not having met the right girl.

Belief in self-reliance is very closely linked with a low degree of comfort with intimacy and closeness. 

Remember that just because you can get along with anyone doesn't mean you have to.

Express your fears!  Don't let them dictate your actions.