Gudjon Bergmann > Quotes

“Everyone who is alive can find something to be grateful for if they look for it. If you are among the few that can’t find anything, start with the fact that you are ALIVE and continue from there. Counting ones blessings is a barometer of mental health.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, The Seven Human Needs: A practical guide to finding harmony and balance in everyday life

“We don’t need to be perfect to do good deeds in the world, but we need to be sincere in our efforts.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Co-Human Harmony: Using Our Shared Humanity to Bridge Divides

“At the end of the day, developing goodness comes down to a simple question: Will this emotion, thought or action, increase or decrease my capacity for goodness?”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Experifaith: At the Heart of Every Religion; An Experiential Approach to Individual Spirituality and Improved Interfaith Relations

“On the surface, we are all different. We ascribe to a variety of belief systems, attain our identity from various stories, get our customs from diverse cultures, and so on. And, rightly or wrongly, we generally define ourselves by these differences—there is no denying that. However, when we look beneath the surface, we discover certain universal elements.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Experifaith: At the Heart of Every Religion; An Experiential Approach to Individual Spirituality and Improved Interfaith Relations

“What I call stupidity is not only lack of knowledge, although much of humanity could be elevated from poverty, dogma, illusions and war through traditional education. A thriving education system is the foundation for progress. But stupidity is not merely ignorance; it can also be a way of acting. If you act contrary to your own goals in life – you’re stupid.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, The Seven Human Needs: A practical guide to finding harmony and balance in everyday life

“If you decide to focus on one thing at a time, instead of trying to solve everything at once, and just do that one thing, then you will feel a sudden decrease in stress.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Yes! You Can Manage Stress: Regain Control of Your Life Using the Five Habits of Effective Stress Management

“The worst possible approach to a problem is waiting until it becomes overwhelming or irreversible, and that is exactly what many people do. They put dealing with stress on the backburner until they start to experience all the worst symptoms of stress, and by then, it may be too late!”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Yes! You Can Manage Stress: Regain Control of Your Life Using the Five Habits of Effective Stress Management

“This notion of shared experience is important. A hiker, for example, has much more in common with other hikers who have walked paths foreign to him than with sedentary people who have never hiked anywhere but have read books about the hiker’s favorite path. If someone has hiked several mountains in Switzerland, for instance, he or she is likely to have more in common with those who have hiked in the Rocky Mountains than with those who have never hiked at all. The terrain may be different, but the act of hiking is similar. The same is true about spirituality. The acts of praying, meditating, fasting, contemplating deeply, and having other direct forms of experience, all influence practitioners differently than mere reading or listening. Moreover, because we all have the same tools to work with—body, mind, and spirit—practitioners from different faiths will have more in common than they realize.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Experifaith: At the Heart of Every Religion; An Experiential Approach to Individual Spirituality and Improved Interfaith Relations

“What then are the benefits of being mentally flexible? Imagine a storm brewing. Intense winds are blowing hard. Stiff trees are breaking under the pressure while softer more flexible trees are bending and will rise again when the strong winds subside. Now turn this image onto human beings. People who are narrow minded, opinionated, stubborn and bullheaded are more likely to crack under pressure than people who take up a more flexible attitude towards life. It is the difference between bending and breaking under pressure.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Living in the Spirit of Yoga: Take Yoga Off the Mat and Into Your Everyday Life

“Devotees of these two spiritual paths of experience—oneness and goodness—have been at odds for centuries.
Proponents of the oneness path have insisted that the goal of spirituality is to reconnect with everlasting eternity. They yearn to taste the quintessence of their being, to transcend time and space, to be unified with the one.
In the other camp, advocates of the goodness path have traditionally seen stark choices in the world. They believe we should choose love, compassion, beauty, truth, and altruism over hatred, fear, anger, judgment, and other opposites of goodness. To them, there are constructive forces in the world that are being challenged by destructive ones. Their goal has been to stand their ground and choose to be good above all else.
Even with those apparent differences, both paths have found homes within each of the world’s religions. As noted earlier, Hinduism offers the oneness path of Yoga, Judaism offers Kabbalah, Islam offers Sufism, Christianity offers Mysticism, and so on. Whatever the arrangement, the two paths have historically found ways to co-exist.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Experifaith: At the Heart of Every Religion; An Experiential Approach to Individual Spirituality and Improved Interfaith Relations

“Relaxation is… a state between waking and sleeping, where the body is completely still and the mind is allowed to flow freely from one thought to another, or alternately, a state in which the mind becomes inadvertently calm.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Baby Steps to Meditation: A Step by Step Guide to Meditation

“Love is the most complex of all human phenomena. It exists on a spectrum from tolerance and kindness to romantic love and self-sacrifice, reaching its pinnacle in altruism, a love that needs nothing in return.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Experifaith: At the Heart of Every Religion; An Experiential Approach to Individual Spirituality and Improved Interfaith Relations

“Once we got closer to the origins of these Eastern practices, we found that the monks and swamis were just as dogmatic and paternalistic, just as literal and conservative in their approach to spirituality as the Christian priests and ministers we were trying to get away from.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, More Likely to Quote Star Wars than the Bible: Generation X and Our Frustrating Search for Rational Spirituality

“In civilized society, we humans are responsible for nurturing and sustaining the force of inter-relational harmony in our lives.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Co-Human Harmony: Using Our Shared Humanity to Bridge Divides

“I believe that if you truly understand the importance of relaxation, you will make time for it in your schedule.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Yes! You Can Manage Stress: Regain Control of Your Life Using the Five Habits of Effective Stress Management

“Habits equal autopilot. Take brushing your teeth for example. Once that becomes a habit, you don’t have to write positive affirmations or remind yourself constantly to brush your teeth. It is simply a habitual part of what you do every day. That is why I emphasize the five habits of stress management, not the five rules or the five goals. If you make these five habits an essential part of your life, then you will be able to manage stress effectively.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Yes! You Can Manage Stress: Regain Control of Your Life Using the Five Habits of Effective Stress Management

“Many people close themselves off from the world when they are under pressure. That is understandable. I have gone through periods when I didn’t want to meet people because I didn’t feel good about my situation in life and that made my life even more stressful. Remind yourself often about how much of an impact compassion and friendship can have on your life. You need to get out there, be compassionate and share your time and your life with your friends and other people that need your support. It’s worth it on every level.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Yes! You Can Manage Stress: Regain Control of Your Life Using the Five Habits of Effective Stress Management

“Positive affirmations are powerful, but they can be overrun by complaining and negativity if you allow your mind to focus in that direction. As soon as you start complaining about how difficult this process is, you have begun using negative affirmations, and that will in turn give power to your prior longing to smoke (as if that needs empowerment).”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Quit Smoking and Be Free: 7 Steps to a Smoke Free Life

“Everyone knows that a quick-fix usually doesn’t work, yet we have all been sold on the idea time and time again. Most of us would like to believe in miracle drugs and fast relief. The truth is that most of the quick fixes for stress focus on temporary relief from tension or pain. Temporary, as in, the problem will return with a vengeance. This doesn’t mean we should never take drugs to alleviate tension or pain, it just means that taking drugs is not a viable permanent solution; it’s just a temporary relief.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Yes! You Can Manage Stress: Regain Control of Your Life Using the Five Habits of Effective Stress Management

“Ever since the Enlightenment era in the 17th and 18th Centuries—which, among other things, gave birth to the U.S. Constitution and the de facto motto E Pluribus Unum (out of the many, one)—interfaith tolerance has been sown into the fabric of Western society. The rules of one religion are not made into law for all citizens because of a simple social agreement. For you to believe what you want, you must allow me to do the same, even if we disagree.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Experifaith: At the Heart of Every Religion; An Experiential Approach to Individual Spirituality and Improved Interfaith Relations

“Bridges are made with intention. They make it possible to go between two places that were previously difficult to access.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Co-Human Harmony: Using Our Shared Humanity to Bridge Divides

“Stress is a natural and normal part of being alive. Stress-free promises set people up for failure. Even when used with good intentions and accompanied by relevant and beneficial ideas and practices, the use of the words stress-free is still ill advised because the approach is infused with an erroneous idea that will never come to fruition. The stress-free idea has become a significant hurdle on the path to real stress management, which is the balance between using stress productively and relieving harmful stress symptoms.”
― Gudjon Bergmann

“With experience as their guiding light, Christian monks and nuns could, for example, come together with Sufis and Yogis to pray and meditate, then discuss their experiences by talking about how silence and inner peace have changed their lives, instead of talking about the content of their prayers or focusing on theology. Hindus, Christians, and Muslims, who tread the path of goodness, could come together and do good works. Doing good side by side would show them that they are not as different as previously thought and that their various beliefs can lead to similar outcomes.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Experifaith: At the Heart of Every Religion; An Experiential Approach to Individual Spirituality and Improved Interfaith Relations

“The most important project at this moment in history is to reclaim a social connection to the human persona, to move away from dehumanizing and otherizing in the direction of co-humanizing.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Co-Human Harmony: Using Our Shared Humanity to Bridge Divides

“Folks who only battle the symptoms of stress are losing the battle because the symptoms are sure to return if the causes aren’t dealt with.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Yes! You Can Manage Stress: Regain Control of Your Life Using the Five Habits of Effective Stress Management

“When you first start chanting or repeating your positive affirmations, they don’t make much sense. You don’t feel great about them because they strongly oppose your current reality. That’s the point. The affirmations should oppose your current reality. That’s how change happens. Everyone feels strange about using affirmations to begin with. But if you stick to the program, the power of positive affirmations will take effect.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Quit Smoking and Be Free: 7 Steps to a Smoke Free Life

“The term stress has effectively become an umbrella concept, which gives us permission to call any kind of discomfort that we don’t know how to define in other terms stress, be it physical, emotional or mental. Pretty much everything can become stress, or stressful, without any further evidence being presented.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Yes! You Can Manage Stress: Regain Control of Your Life Using the Five Habits of Effective Stress Management

“There is not a single person I have met in my lifetime who is comfortable talking about death. It’s the biggest downside to our youth-centric culture. Death is a bummer, so let’s not talk about it. Let’s hide it away and hope it never strikes close to home.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, The Meditating Psychiatrist Who Tried to Kill Himself

“Gandhi is an example of a man who grew from being self-centered as he was learning to become a lawyer in England, to becoming more family- and social oriented in South-Africa, where he led a reformation of Indian rights, to becoming determined in helping his nation recover from British rule at which he succeeded in the end with the help of a great many people. At the end of his life Gandhi was increasingly focused on a larger picture, encasing the whole world in his vision of a peaceful future.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Living in the Spirit of Yoga: Take Yoga Off the Mat and Into Your Everyday Life

“Too much stress is bad, but occasional stress is good – it’s the zest of life.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Yes! You Can Manage Stress: Regain Control of Your Life Using the Five Habits of Effective Stress Management