Tanya

“Mindfulness practices are especially important in the early days of abstinence. Many of us use high-dopamine substances and behaviors to distract ourselves from our own thoughts. When we first stop using dopamine to escape, those painful thoughts, emotions, and sensations come crashing down on us.
The trick is to stop running away from painful emotions, and instead allow ourselves to tolerate them. When we're able to do this, our experience takes on a new and unexpectedly rich texture. The pain is still there, but somehow transformed, seeming to encompass a vast landscape of communal suffering, rather than being wholly our own.”
― Anna Lembke, MD

“dogmatism. The journey toward humility comes by honestly knowing our history. Chuck Klosterman’s excellent little book But What If We’re Wrong? details the endless ways societies have been utterly wrong.7 We were wrong about gravity, philosophy, worldview, Pluto, slavery, the earth-centered universe. Time and again, we were wrong. Everything that we now believe to be “true” at some point we were utterly wrong about. Klosterman’s work raises a big question: What are we wrong about right now? The goal of this thought experiment is humility. Klosterman even invites us to “think about the present as if it were the distant past.”8 What do we hold dearly to today that in three hundred years will be found to be entirely wrong? It is a mark of humanity to think that we are right at this very moment. We are full of pride. We assume our progressive, secular values of today can’t be wrong. How could they be? We believe them to be true. But we do not want to confront the ways in which we might be wrong.”
― A.J. Swoboda, After Doubt: How to Question Your Faith without Losing It

“We have little power over the course the world is taking. That much I learned from my husband's experience. But we do have power over our personal dominions.”
― Cynthia Reeves, The Last Whaler

“How is it that the songs we've repeated for years suddenly seem to speak to us? It's as if we mindlessly sing and recite until one day, we finally listen.”
― Cynthia Reeves, The Last Whaler