Inward Focus Quotes

“The self-esteem of western women is founded on physical being (body mass index, youth, beauty). This creates a tricky emphasis on image, but the internalized locus of self-worth saves lives. Western men are very different. In externalizing the source of their self-esteem, they surrender all emotional independence. (Conquest requires two parties, after all.) A man cannot feel like a man without a partner, corporation, team. Manhood is a game played on the terrain of opposites. It thus follows that male sense of self disintegrates when the Other is absent.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide

“Recovering is a process of coming to experience a sense of self. More precisely, it is a process of learning to sense one's self, to attune to one's subjective physical, psychic, and social self- experience. These woman's core sense of shame and their difficulty tolerating painful emotions had led them to avoid turning their attention inward to their internal sense of things. In recovering, they "came to their senses" and learned to trust their sensed experience, in particular their sense of "enoughness"".”
― Sheila M. Reindl, Sensing the Self: Women's Recovery from Bulimia

“The only way to experience true wellbeing is to turn inward. This is what yoga means - not up, not out, but in. The only way out is in.”
― Sadghuru

“The best part of silence is that the ego is switched off at least for a while, and we are focusing our attention inwards.”
― Dada J. P. Vaswani

“The soul becomes the thought it dwells in.”
― Aiyaz Uddin, The Inward Journey