Once we're willing to confront our emotional suffering, we begin making choices based on attraction instead of aversion, love instead of fear.… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
Self-improvement books, friends, and polite strangers often tell soothing lies about our physical appearance that prevent many of us from facing, discussing,… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
One reason most people never stop thinking is that mental frenzy keeps us from having to see the upsetting aspects of our… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
Our thoughts about an event can have a dramatic effect on how we go through the event itself. When our expectations are… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
Cheerfully fessing up to our failures turns crazy mind off, humility and compassion on. I learned this in a karate dojo that… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
Realizing that we've surrendered our self-esteem to others and choosing to be accountable for our own self-worth would mean absorbing the terrifying… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
In the developed world, hundreds of millions of us now face the bizarre problem of surfeit. Yet our brains, instincts, and socialized… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
All mental hygiene is based on the core practice of doing nothing. Most of us are good at wasting time, staring at… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
The great power of separating the watching mind from the thinking mind is that the watching mind is innately loving. Some call… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
Our ideas about love and attractiveness are so primal, our need for belonging so intense, that most of us are loath to… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
Getting bogged down in old stories stops the flow of learning by censoring our perceptions, making us functionally deaf and blind to… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
Since our society equates happiness with youth, we often assume that sorrow, quiet desperation, and hopelessness go hand in hand with getting… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
Our culture has created two almost irreconcilable descriptions of a 'good woman.' The first is the individual achiever; the second, the self-sacrificing… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
Western democracies exalt the ideal of social equality, but our economic system arguably emerged from 16th-century Calvinism, a religion whose members believed… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
As I obsess about my ancient problems, I feel more like I'm sinking in quicksand than lighting a torch. I'm creating neither… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
A designated patient 'carries' the group's dysfunction. A designated issue performs the same service for an individual, dominating our psyches so that… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
Comparing and contrasting is a valuable human skill - and not just during high school English exams. Our ability to rank-order things… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
I'm not saying we have power over everything in our lives - if that were true, my hair would look so, so… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
Imagine what you'd do if it absolutely didn't matter what people thought of you. Got it? Good. Never go back. — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
In one century, we've added 28 years to our average life span - a change so rapid that our brains couldn't possibly have evolved… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
If I tell a man he needs to quit his soul-sucking job, he has to go home and fight with his wife or fight… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
I was learning to track rhinoceroses in Africa and tracked right up on an animal that really I thought was going to kill me. — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
There has never been, and never will be, anyone who sees, thinks, or responds exactly the way you do. Whether you’re revolutionizing physics or… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
Most of my clients don't realize that the way they look and the way they think about their looks are two separate issues. — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
The power to bring me out of solitude - or to push me back into it - had never belonged to another person. It… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
Learning to quit while you're not ahead, when the dull ooze of depression tells you things are not going to get any better, is… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
The important thing is to tell yourself a life story in which you, the hero, are primarily a problem solver rather than a helpless… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
A joyful life isn’t about others; it’s about the brightness that is associated with being alive. Your path to it is through anything that… — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
Fear is the raw material from which courage is manufactured. Without it, we wouldn't even know what it means to be brave. — Martha Beck Copy Share Image
