Mallika Goyal > Mallika's Quotes

“Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns...We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing -- our inner moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in. We can't hold on to anything -- a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self -- because all things come and go. Lacking any permanent satisfaction, we continuously need another injection of fuel, stimulation, reassurance from loved ones, medicine, exercise, and meditation. We are continually driven to become something more, to experience something else.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“The emotion of fear often works overtime. Even when there is no immediate threat, our body may remain tight and on guard, our mind narrowed to focus on what might go wrong. When this happens, fear is no longer functioning to secure our survival. We are caught in the trance of fear and our moment-to-moment experience becomes bound in reactivity. We spend our time and energy defending our life rather than living it fully.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“If we are taken over by craving, no matter who or what is before us, all we can see is how it might satisfy our needs. This kind of thirst contracts our body and mind into a profound trance. We move through the world with a kind of tunnel vision that prevents us from enjoying what is in front of us. The color of an autumn leaves or a passage of poetry merely amplifies the feeling that there is a gaping hole in our life. The smile of a child only reminds us that we are painfully childless. We turn away from simple pleasures because our craving compels us to seek more intense stimulation or numbing relief.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“The renowned seventh-century Zen master Seng-tsan taught that true freedom is being "without anxiety about imperfection.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“I recently read in the book My Stroke of Insight by brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor that the natural life span of an emotion—the average time it takes for it to move through the nervous system and body—is only a minute and a half. After that we need thoughts to keep the emotion rolling. So if we wonder why we lock into painful emotional states like anxiety, depression, or rage, we need look no further than our own endless stream of inner dialogue.”
― Tara Brach

“I found myself praying: "May I love and accept myself just as I am.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Feelings and stories of unworthiness and shame are perhaps the most binding element in the trance of fear. When we believe something is wrong with us, we are convinced we are in danger. Our shame fuels ongoing fear, and our fear fuels more shame. The very fact that we feel fear seems to prove that we are broken or incapable. When we are trapped in trance, being fearful and bad seem to define who we are. The anxiety in our body, the stories, the ways we make excuses, withdraw or lash out—these become to us the self that is most real.”
― Tara Brach

“But this revolutionary act of treating ourselves tenderly can begin to undo the aversive messages of a lifetime.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“In bullfighting there is an interesting parallel to the pause as a place of refuge and renewal. It is believed that in the midst of a fight, a bull can find his own particular area of safety in the arena. There he can reclaim his strength and power. This place and inner state are called his querencia. As long as the bull remains enraged and reactive, the matador is in charge. Yet when he finds his querencia, he gathers his strength and loses his fear. From the matador's perspective, at this point the bull is truly dangerous, for he has tapped into his power.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Awakening self-compassion is often the greatest challenge people face on the spiritual path.”
― Tara Brach, True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart

“You have a unique body and mind, with a particular history and conditioning. No one can offer you a formula for navigating all situations and all states of mind. Only by listening inwardly in a fresh and open way will you discern at any given time what most serves your healing and freedom.”
― Tara Brach, True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart

“On this sacred path of Radical Acceptance, rather than striving for perfection, we discover how to love ourselves into wholeness.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Fear of being a flawed person lay at the root of my trance, and I had sacrificed many moments over the years in trying to prove my worth. Like the tiger Mohini, I inhabited a self-made prison that stopped me from living fully.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Nothing is wrong—whatever is happening is just “real life.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Learning to pause is the first step in the practice of Radical Acceptance. A pause is a suspension of activity, a time of temporary disengagement when we are no longer moving toward any goal. . . . The pause can occur in the midst of almost any activity and can last for an instant, for hours or for seasons of our life. . . . We may pause in the midst of meditation to let go of thoughts and reawaken our attention to the breath. We may pause by stepping out of daily life to go on a retreat or to spend time in nature or to take a sabbatical. . . . You might try it now: Stop reading and sit there, doing "no thing," and simply notice what you are experiencing.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“While the bodies of young children are usually relaxed and flexible, if experiences of fear are continuous over the years, chronic tightening happens. Our shoulders may become permanently knotted and raised, our head thrust forward, our back hunched, our chest sunken. Rather than a temporary reaction to danger, we develop a permanent suit of armor. We become, as Chogyam Trungpa puts it, “a bundle of tense muscles defending our existence.” We often don’t even recognize this armor because it feels like such a familiar part of who we are. But we can see it in others. And when we are meditating, we can feel it in ourselves—the tightness, the areas where we feel nothing.”
― Tara Brach

“The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

“Suffering is our call to attention, our call to investigate the truth of our beliefs.”
― Tara Brach, True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart

“If someone’s opinion of you goes from sky-high to rock bottom, this isn’t normal.”
― Jackson MacKenzie, Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People

“Psychopaths do not actually feel the love and happiness that they so frequently proclaim. They oscillate between contempt, envy, and boredom. Nothing more.”
― Jackson MacKenzie, Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People

“But that’s the magic of alone time! You are completely and 100 percent in control of your own happiness. You can imagine anything you want, transforming a bad mood into a good one. Or maybe you want to feel the bad mood fully, in which case you can cry all you want, and nobody can judge you. When you’re alone, there’s no pressure to be someone you’re not. For a while I actually used to need time alone in order to remember who I was. When we’re constantly surrounded by people—especially toxic influences—it becomes really easy to forget ourselves. We get caught up in drama, gossip, and negativity.”
― Jackson MacKenzie, Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People

“Psychopaths provide shallow praise and flattery only in order to gain trust. When you actually need emotional support, they will typically offer an empty response—or they will completely ignore you. With time, this conditions you not to bother them with your feelings, even when you need a partner the most, especially during times of tragedy or illness. You will begin to notice that you are never allowed to express anything but positive praise for them.”
― Jackson MacKenzie, Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People

“In their interpersonal relationships, this leads to early idealization in the honeymoon phase, where they groom you to become a constant source of positive energy—temporarily satisfying their pathological feelings of emptiness. But because they are also angry and impulsive, you quickly start to discover that there won’t be any room for your own happiness. Once you fail to meet their rapidly shifting standards, you will be devalued and criticized until you have nothing left to offer to them.”
― Jackson MacKenzie, Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People

“These are the Cluster B personality disorders, and based on the statistics above, they are found in more than one in every seven people—over 15 percent of the population (I’m rounding down, to account for comorbidity). Now consider that most of these people are highly functional, nonincarcerated, active members of society. So given the raw numbers, it’s highly likely that you unknowingly pass by one of these cunning manipulators every day on your way to work—perhaps even today, when they served you your morning coffee. So what’s the problem? The problem is that the general public knows virtually nothing about these incredibly pervasive disorders.”
― Jackson MacKenzie, Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People

“You cannot circle around the pain and discover the happiness you deserve. You must travel through the pain and embrace all of the challenging feelings and difficult ups and downs that are the essence of the grieving process. For a long time, it may seem as if you will always be hurting . . . until one day you will find that you turned a corner and found a lovely new world you never could have imagined.”
― Jackson MacKenzie, Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People

“It’s also not normal to trash an ex and then hang out with them on a daily basis.”
― Jackson MacKenzie, Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People

“True forgiveness comes from within, not from another person validating your compassion.”
― Jackson MacKenzie, Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People

“When you are the most important person who can disappoint or inspire you, everything becomes very exciting. It also becomes quieter. Because it’s a lot easier to be a quiet, genuine version of you than it is to frantically maintain a loud version of you that isn’t really you at all. If you find yourself desperately trying to prove to the rest of the world that a certain version of yourself is the real you, then it’s probably not the truest version of you.”
― Jackson MacKenzie, Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People

“This is what happens when you enter the psychopath’s reality—all of their gossip and lies start to distort your own reality. Because here are the two realities you must choose from: The psychopath is normal. Everyone else is jealous, ill-intentioned, and self-serving. The psychopath is jealous, ill-intentioned, and self-serving. Everyone else is normal.”
― Jackson MacKenzie, Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People