Pauline

“Whenever one person in a relationship is unwilling or unable to contact his or her vulnerability in the interaction, there is a simultaneous movement into judgement: self-attack, attack of the other, or both. This is a chicken-or-the-egg situation: Do you resort to judgment for protection because you don't feel safe, or are you not feeling safe because of the presence of judgment? This is a fundamental question in dealing with the judge.”
― Byron Brown, Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within

“Many people spend their whole lives doing their best to follow the coaching, guidance, and warnings of the inner critic. Society supports this. However, if you choose to pursue inner work--the search for understanding who you are, what your life means, and what reality is--you are by necessity setting yourself directly in conflict with your judge. To explore what you believe, what you experience, why you act and feel the way you do, is to question the authority of the judge. To bring the underpinnings of your psychological reality (how you think and feel) into consciousness means potentially replacing those assumptions and beliefs with direct knowledge. This would mean experiencing that your conscious awareness can begin to take the place of accepted standards and beliefs. Then you don't need to be guided, limited, and controlled by the unconscious through your judge.”
― Byron Brown, Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within

“Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.”
― Confucius

“When life comes knockin', it's the heartbroken doo-wop singer who understands regret and the price of loving, the hard-living soul man who understands "I take what I want, I'm a bad go-getter, yeah..." and the Motown divas, men and women, who know you've got to play a little bit of the white man's/rich man's game. You have to make thoughtful compromises that don't sell out your soul, that let you reach just a little bit higher until your moment comes and then you set the rules. This was the credo all along Route 9 and you'd better understand it or else you would die an ugly musical death while risking bodily injury on Saturday night.”
― Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run