Josh Buckley
https://www.joshbuckley.co/
“Do not let anything that happens in life be important enough that you’re willing to close your heart over it.”
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
“When you are trained, like a great athlete, to immediately relax through your edges when they get hit, then it’s all over. You realize that you will always be fine. Nothing can ever bother you except your edges, and now you know what to do with them. You end up loving your edges because they point your way to freedom. All you have to do is constantly relax and lean into them. Then one day, when you least expect it, you fall through into the infinite. That is what it means to go beyond.”
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
“To get some distance from this, you first need to get some perspective. Walk outside on a clear night and just look up into the sky. You are sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Though you can only see a few thousand stars, there are hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy alone. In fact, it is estimated that there are over a trillion stars in the Spiral Galaxy. And that galaxy would look like one star to us, if we could even see it. You’re just standing on one little ball of dirt and spinning around one of the stars. From that perspective, do you really care what people think about your clothes or your car? Do you really need to feel embarrassed if you forget someone’s name? How can you let these meaningless things cause pain? If you want out, if you want a decent life, you had better not devote your life to avoiding psychological pain. You had better not spend your life worrying about whether people like you or whether your car impresses people. What kind of life is that? It is a life of pain. You may not think that you feel pain that often, but you really do. To spend your life avoiding pain means it’s always right behind you.”
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
“The heart that gives, gathers.”
― Tao Te Ching
― Tao Te Ching
“The psyche is built upon avoiding this pain, and as a result, it has fear of pain as its foundation. That is what caused the psyche to be. To understand this, notice that if the feeling of rejection is a major problem for you, you will fear experiences that cause rejection. That fear will become part of your psyche. Even though the actual events causing rejection are infrequent, you will have to deal with the fear of rejection all the time. That is how we create a pain that is always there. If you are doing something to avoid pain, then pain is running your life. All of your thoughts and feelings will be affected by your fears.”
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
― The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
Josh’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Josh’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Polls voted on by Josh
Lists liked by Josh




































