Amy Johnson > Quotes

“It’s as if we are the sky—always blue, always clear, with the sun always shining. That is our never-wavering spiritual essence. And our human experience is weather. Weather (thought, emotion, behavior) rolls in and covers up the blue sky at times. The storms can be so violent that they are all we can see; the clouds can be so thick that we forget the sun is there. But the weather doesn’t disturb the sky. The sky contains the weather but is not affected by it, just like our spiritual nature contains our human experiences but is not affected by them. And the weather, like thought and emotion, is always temporary. Sometimes it comes and goes quickly. Other times, it lingers. Sometimes the weather is pleasant, and sometimes we curse it. But it is all surface-level and temporary.”
― Amy Johnson, The Little Book of Big Change: The No-Willpower Approach to Breaking Any Habit

“didn’t consciously see it like this, but his habit became his go-to way to distract himself from”
― Amy Johnson, The Little Book of Big Change: The No-Willpower Approach to Breaking Any Habit

“In a neurological sense, you have your habit because of how you react to your own thoughts or urges. When you act on an urge, you strengthen the wiring of the habit in your brain.”
― Amy Johnson, The Little Book of Big Change: The No-Willpower Approach to Breaking Any Habit

“This steady stream of experience that makes up your life is like a river. New thoughts, emotions, and other experiences are always flowing toward you and then away. The source of the river is something beyond the psychological, human realm. The nonphysical, spiritual side of life is the source of our physical, human experiences. Water”
― Amy Johnson, The Little Book of Big Change: The No-Willpower Approach to Breaking Any Habit

“You may have heard the expression “neurons that fire together, wire together,” which points to the fact that when two things occur together repeatedly—when an urge arises, and you then obey that urge—that leads to those events being even more strongly linked, neurologically (Shatz, quoted in Doidge, 2007). That means that each time you give in to an urge, you essentially strengthen the neural associations that represent the habit in your brain; you tell your brain to keep producing urges. Giving in to your urges can make your habit stronger and “stickier” over time.”
― Amy Johnson, The Little Book of Big Change: The No-Willpower Approach to Breaking Any Habit