Susan Piver > Quotes

“Confidence is the willingness to be as ridiculous, luminous, intelligent, and kind as you really are, without embarrassment.”
― Susan Piver

“as unlikely as it may sound, in fact this sorrow is the gateway to lasting happiness, the kind that can never be taken from you.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“Instead of making it safe, love—whether for all beings or for one—actually breaks your heart. Being loved is uncomfortable; and the more I love, the more uncomfortable it is. In the end, I’m still not quite sure what I’ve vowed to do either as a wife or a bodhisattva, except to break my own heart, over and over. And to see what happens next.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“Meditating with a goal or in order to accomplish something is not giving the practice a fair shake.Instead let yourself off the self-improvement treadmill, and simply be with yourself in your natural state. The practice isn't about achieving something. It's about letting go.”
― Susan Piver, How Not to Be Afraid of Your Own Life: Opening Your Heart to Confidence, Intimacy, and Joy

“No matter how much help you ask for, cultivating these spiritual qualities is something you have to do within yourself, and it requires solitude. So if you feel like locking your door, closing the blinds, and retreating from the world, this is probably a good idea. Sit with the darkness. Allow it to teach you. This is a very brave thing to do.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“I realized that in depression, nothing matters,” she said. “And in sadness, everything matters.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“Our culture generally views tears and what may lie behind them—sadness, anger, disappointment, fear—as signs of a problem. Something has gone wrong. Somebody needs to figure out who screwed up so we can set this thing right. But tears are actually sweet things. They are signs of authentic feelings. Of”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“My heart, which I thought had been dead, stopped. Of course. I had been betrayed. My ex boyfriend had reneged on his promise to love me, and this odious event had a name: betrayal. Somehow, knowing this calmed me down. And I began to contemplate betrayal. My conclusion? It is the most difficult of all woundings. Betrayal comes in many forms. It's not just about being cheated on or left for another. It's about any promise, overt or implied, that has been broken without your participation in the decision, or even knowing that a decision was on the table. It's about believing something that you later find out is untrue. It's no wonder that the first response to betrayal is likely to be denial. It's an enormous shock to find out that a solid reality is not so solid after all. It can feel like the most deviant form of attack. When betrayal is at the root of your pain, something horrible is unleashed. Different and perhaps more horrible than the pain of disappointment, grief, or anger. With other causes of suffering, you can at least pretend you have some measure of control. You can blame the other person for disappointing you, you can read books that outline and predict the course of grief, and when you're angry you can always fall back on self-righteousness. But when you're betrayed, you have been blindsided and your vulnerability is confirmed. You lose a misplaced innocence that you really can never regain. Your ability to trust is basically obliterated. And not just your trust in your own perceptions and your trust in the person you loved. Once you lose trust in one person, your trust in all beings is undermined, making the future seem like a giant landmine.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“It (becoming disheartened) is insidious, buried, sticky . . . like a weird smell you can't quite pinpoint and eventually get used to.

Becoming disheartened is actually one of three forms of laziness; the others are procrastination and being too busy.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“I want full-on emotional, sexual, spiritual passion—not the torments of fights and jealousies, but the power of engaging deeply, from the bottom of my heart, with my lover’s heart, with lots of ebb and flow in both passion and friendship, periods of great agreement and great distance, but always coming back to each other, to self, to commitment, together.”
― Susan Piver, The Hard Questions: 100 Questions to Ask Before You Say "I Do"

“real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“Rather than sweeping romantic gestures or grand overtures, it is these tiny courtesies that create the foundation for the love we seek. If they are missing, the foundation will weaken over time.”
― Susan Piver, The Four Noble Truths of Love: Buddhist Wisdom for Modern Relationships

“Tranquility, compassion, and wisdom are the components of fearlessness, not power, control, and remaining unaffected.”
― Susan Piver, How Not to Be Afraid of Your Own Life: Opening Your Heart to Confidence, Intimacy, and Joy

“To enter a relationship for the long term is to enter the space of not knowing. While this is so brave and beautiful, exhilarating even, it is not particularly comfortable.”
― Susan Piver, The Four Noble Truths of Love: Buddhist Wisdom for Modern Relationships

“When you are filled with fear, anxiety, or other difficult emotions, the first thing you should always do is make friends with them.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“If you’ve ever wished for a friend who would love you as you are, appreciate your genius, and make space for your foibles, welcome you when you’re funny and shiny and when you’re a complete mess—well, I can introduce you to this person. Rather, your meditation practice can. He or she has been there the whole time. You are the one you’ve been waiting for, as they say.”
― Susan Piver, Start Here Now: An Open-Hearted Guide to the Path and Practice of Meditation

“The way to ensure that your emotional experience of heartbreak is healing and not poisonous is to examine your intention in working with your feelings. Do you want to become whole so that you can love again? Or do you want to banish your emotions so that you don’t have to feel them? An intention that is rooted in a feeling of power, loving-kindness, and compassion is far more effective than one rooted in fragility, bitterness, and insecurity. Paying attention to and constantly resetting your intention (to heal in the name of love) mark it apart from desperation and instead make it the first link in a positive karmic chain.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“The Buddhadharma is not, however, associated with the practice of being a candy-ass.”
― Susan Piver, Start Here Now: An Open-Hearted Guide to the Path and Practice of Meditation

“Let “I intend to find happiness” become “I intend to find happiness to benefit myself and the others in my life.” Let “I set the intention to feel no more misery” become “I set the intention to help all beings escape from misery, beginning with myself.” You can convert any poison into medicine by applying the proper wisdom.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“The bad news is, you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there is no ground. Chögyam Trungpa”
― Susan Piver, The Four Noble Truths of Love: Buddhist Wisdom for Modern Relationships

“It is a wonderful truth that, buried in the muck and mire of that most devastating of emotional difficulties, a broken heart, is the possibility of freedom from suffering.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“Instead, allow yourself to become curious. Curiosity is actually a form of fearlessness, when you think about it. It takes courage to let go of your hopes and fears in order to truly take in the other person. Open up more and more space in your own mind and heart for your partner’s answers. Your own judgments and responses, while vitally important, are not the point right now. Trust, really trust, that they will still be there when you need them. (They will.)”
― Susan Piver, The Hard Questions: 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say "I Do"

“When your partner gives an answer that sparks anger or fear in you, it is important to put those emotional responses on hold, even if just for a moment. It can be hard to do this, I know. But if you can redirect your attention away from your reflexive response (well-founded though it may be) and toward your partner’s internal logic, you will both benefit tremendously. No matter how odd or inappropriate or silly you find your partner’s response, I guarantee that, to them, there is a powerful, important set of reasons for it, reasons that matter.* The work is to understand your partner’s internal logic.”
― Susan Piver, The Hard Questions: 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say "I Do"

“Although it is tremendously disorienting on one hand, on another, you will never see as clearly as you do when your heart is broken. If you’ve ever wanted to get at the truth about your life, your character and destiny, the depth of your friendships, you can choose to see these things now.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“Wisdom is not simply knowing how to avoid casting others in your drama, it is learning how to turn off the projector altogether. This is the ultimate, the finest, the deepest, and, truly, the only way to love fully.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“means understanding the other person first and taking a position second. If we rush to take a position and say any form of “You are wrong and I am right,” the dialogue between us has nowhere to go. If you can express your own feelings without making pronouncements about your partner’s, you invite greater and greater intimacy. If each can find a way to acknowledge the validity of the other’s feelings, there can be a conversation. Even if a couple ends up disagreeing on the specific outcome, they will have evolved their relationship, their knowledge of each other, to a deeper level. And that is seriously what it is all about.”
― Susan Piver, The Hard Questions: 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say "I Do"

“real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world … If a person does not feel alone and sad, he cannot be a [spiritual] warrior at all…”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“saw that I had a choice. I could insist that he get into character with my projected ideal partner, or I could drop it all and try to love this actual human being instead.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“questions continued to come. I wrote them down. And one by one, Duncan and I answered them, together. Some questions took days to answer. Some took a moment. Others had no answer, and that in itself was important. In every case, we learned something about our relationship and each other. We were delighted, appalled, infuriated and/or mystified by each other’s answers.”
― Susan Piver, The Hard Questions: 100 Questions to Ask Before You Say "I Do"

“THE NEXT TIME you notice that despair is driving you and you don’t know how to believe in happiness anymore, slow down. Pick up a pen and a piece of paper and write down the wish that is at the center of your desperation: “I”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love