Alexandra

“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“So much of what the self-love movement gets wrong is the result of viewing the self as some
kind of monolithic and singular entity. That’s how we’ve been taught to experience ourselves.
But when we put ourselves under the microscope, when we take a good look inside, that view
starts to unravel. We begin to experience our inner lives as fluid, dynamic, multifaceted, vast,
and surprising.”
― Ralph De La Rosa, Don't Tell Me to Relax: Emotional Resilience in the Age of Rage, Feels, and Freak-Outs

“It might seem that we have to generate the sense of openness, freshness, joy, revelry, or stillness we touch in such moments. From the Buddhist perspective, however, such a state of being is already there within us and has been so since the beginning.
It's tantalizing to think that perhaps expansiveness lies waiting to be uncovered within us while we go searching for it everywhere else. It’s not something we go toward so much as it is what we are left with when all our running around ceases. Our deeper nature is simply what’s left when we put down the endless task of trying to be somebody”
― Ralph De La Rosa, The Monkey Is the Messenger: Meditation and What Your Busy Mind Is Trying to Tell You

“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth