Tara Bennett-Goleman > Quotes

“To her lover a beautiful woman is a delight; / To a monk she’s a distraction; / To a mosquito, a good meal. It makes the point well: how things seem depends on the lens or filter through which we look at them.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“As we’ve seen, the task of changing a schema is two-fold: we have to unlearn the self-defeating old habit and replace it with a new, healthier one. That change is very different from mere intellectual understanding—it involves the emotional brain. It takes much persistent practice, cultivation of the ability to bring awareness to what had been unconscious behavior, and sustained effort to try out the new way of thinking and acting despite its initial awkwardness and relapses into old habit.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“It has taken years and years, starting early in childhood, for the emotional brain to acquire its repertoire of habit. Schemas like perfectionism and deprivation become ingrained through innumerable repeated episodes. It naturally takes time to undo these emotional habits and to master a healthier response.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“Mindfulness gives us breathing space from this conditioning.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“We start to regulate an upsetting emotion the moment we become aware of it.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“We can change habits at any of four levels: our thoughts, our emotions, our behavior, and our relationships.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“But once we become aware that the sequence is starting, we can consciously and intentionally initiate a different, more constructive response.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“Strong emotions are messages from the unconscious.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“her craving for food was actually masking her need for emotional nurturance.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“breaking free from a habit, no matter how seemingly trivial, can bring a shift in our awareness, inspiring a fresh attitude: beginner’s mind, seeing things as if for the first time. And that fresh look gives us the option of doing things differently.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“Mindfulness means seeing things as they are, without trying to change them. The point is to dissolve our reactions to disturbing emotions, being careful not to reject the emotion itself. Mindfulness can change how we relate to, and perceive, our emotional states; it doesn’t necessarily eliminate them.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“mindfulness creates a “wise” attention, a space of clarity that emerges when we quiet the mind. It makes us more receptive to the whispers of our innate intuitive wisdom.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“But when emotions enter the picture, our mind’s selective attention can be less useful: we can avoid noticing something not because it’s irrelevant but because it might disturb us.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“Recognizing, for instance, “Oh, I’m having those-feelings again,” or “Here come my schema thoughts,” gives us the freedom to wake from the schema trance.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“Stepping back from our thoughts through mindfulness gives us the freedom to question the thoughts and so be less controlled by them.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“apply an antidote, a positive alternative to the mental habit of the afflictive emotion.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“we’ve sacrificed our potential in a bargain to preserve connection.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“with the rest of our lives: whatever the objective reality, our emotional reactions to it add another layer to the suffering.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“May I be free from suffering and the cause of suffering. May I have ease of well-being. May I be protected and safe. May I be happy. Then express the same wish for others—your loved ones, difficult people, or whomever you choose. Finally extend these genuine wishes of compassion and love to all beings everywhere: May all beings be free from suffering and the cause of suffering. May all beings be protected and safe. May all beings be happy. Here’s a short form of the loving-kindness practice, expressed toward all beings: May all beings be safe, happy, healthy, and free from suffering. May all beings be liberated.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“our emotional problems are seen as temporary and superficial. The emphasis is on what is right with us,”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“I realized that part of my struggle was in wishing things were different:”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“Thoughts have no solidity, but merely the appearance of solidity because of the power we give them.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“Their rule of thumb for classifying a state of mind was simple but profound: it depended on whether the mind state led to inner peace or disturbed the mind.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“This gives us an added anchor in the mind to resist the tide of those thoughts and to help us determine how active the schema seems to be. Mindfulness teacher Joseph Goldstein points out that one reason it is so important to make our thoughts the object of mindfulness is that “if we remain unaware of thoughts as they arise, it is difficult to develop insight” into them.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“There are several forms of the loving-kindness meditation. Here’s one. Just as I want to be free from suffering, may all beings be free from suffering.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“Bringing mindfulness to the moment, she was able to step back enough to ask herself, “Do I want to make this real?” That gave her a chance to answer herself, “No”—and she would drop it.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“Becoming aware of these emotional habits is the first step, because unless we can catch and challenge them as they are triggered by the events of our lives, they will dictate how we perceive and react.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“Our emotional reactions often distract us from the present, filling our minds with relentless thoughts about another time and place, filling our bodies with turbulent feelings.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“Meditating on thoughts—being mindful of them—as he defines it, means “simply to be aware, as thoughts arise, that the mind is thinking, without getting involved in the content: not going off on a train of association, not analyzing the thought and why it came, but merely to be aware at the particular moment [that] ‘thinking’ is happening. If we fail to do this, to see our thoughts as such, they remain the unconscious filters on our perception.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

“other people very clearly, especially the ways we perpetuate our own suffering, driven by habitual impulses and patterns but oblivious to their root causes.”
― Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart