Naomi Hermitage

“Without the pieces there can be no whole and without the whole the pieces have no place. What the hell does that mean?
Did you know that it requires the time and effort of approximately 10,000 individuals to get the coffee from the plant to your coffee pot each and every morning? That's just your morning cup of coffee! Expand that outwards to all the other products you pick up from your grocery store, to the water, sewage, and power systems hooked up to your house. In order for you to maintain your lifestyle, it requires the efforts of millions of individuals you don't even know exist. Suddenly the concept of independence sounds kind of absurd!
If you are special, it's not because of you as an individual, it's because of your compatibility within the whole. Become a source of dysfunction within the whole and suddenly your importance wanes, folks try to avoid you.
This is the philosophy of sunyata which some refer to as the theory of emptiness but which I choose to think of as the theory of the pieces and the whole.”
― Bryan Oftedahl

“Every thing you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.”
― Franz Kafka, Kafka's Selected Stories: A Norton Critical Edition

“Sometimes I simply remind patients that sooner or later they will have to relinquish the goal of having a better past.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

“Once we are honest about our feelings, we can invite ourselves to consider alternative modes of viewing our pain and can see that releasing our grip on anger and resentment can actually be an act of self-compassion.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection