Jane Peters > Recent Status Updates

“Putting on headphones and watching the world go by around you is luxurious. The morning dew on grass in the spring is luxurious. The humid smell of the Earth after it’s been raining is luxurious. The sound of rainfall on the windows when you’re warm indoors is luxurious. The warmth of another person’s body under yours is luxurious.”

“Time without your phone is luxurious. The sun on your face is luxurious.… The smell of a sea salt breeze when you walk past the ocean is luxurious. Birds chirping in the morning is luxurious. Feeling the soft, buttery texture of rose petals on your fingers or brushing them against your cheek is luxurious. Your pet’s soft paws are luxurious. Being awake before everyone else luxurious.”

“I used to fear that my ability to be easy, delighted by life was a weakness. I feared it contradicted the high standards I was trying to develop for how I was treated by others…But in reality, it’s allowed me to create a life so full and vibrant, full of delights, whenever I wanted them, that it protected me from the temptation to settle for other people’s crumbs!”

“Master the art of being easily delighted, and you will become one of the most mentally wealthy people on the planet… it is impossible to be bored when we practice viewing life as infinitely delighting. Which, it is!”

“The next time you call yourself insecure I want you to correct yourself and say, ‘no, I’m not insecure, life is insecure, and I am struggling to accept the loss of control I feel in this moment.’”

“We are not insecure, life itself is insecure. I would say it’s unfortunate that nothing lasts forever, but I’m an optimist–I think the fleeting nature of things allows us to love and cherish them more deeply. When we describe ourselves as insecure, it is because we have an insecure attachment to these people, possessions, titles, clinging onto them for a sense of safety, which, in reality, does not exist.”

“Safe is good, but sometimes we can fool our minds into settling for something that’s easy, that does not stretch our limits. Comfort fulfills our need for human safety, but it does not fulfill our desire for expansion. Ultimately, it’s a false comfort, because the discomfort is delayed. We delay it for a future version of ourselves that lives in regret of a life lived pleasing and playing it safe.”

“ You start to envy other women who live and embody the carefree energy you wish to possess. – You start to exist in comparison mode, where everyone is in competition instead of collaboration.”

“Let’s look at the delayed and compounding cost of not expressing yourself. – You build a resentment towards how you’re living your life, as the daily inaction and the habits that are not in favor of the person you want to be pile up and you feel as though you cannot even rely on yourself. This lack of self-esteem is so crushing.”

“Affirmations:
- Anything I do to elevate my energy is not silly, it is a generous contribution to the planet that desperately needs more people full of life…
- I am worth the effort it takes to live a beautiful life.”

“Creating romance in our lives makes us less susceptible to when people ‘use’ romance to win over our affection. It makes it that much easier to walk away…If we expect romance because it is a habit – A way of being in the world and seeing beauty everywhere – other people‘s gestures cannot be used to sway or manipulate us.”

“I am not a victim to life. I am not a victim to my mind. I am not a victim to fear. I am not a victim to my habits. I am not a victim to the opinions of others. I am not a victim to the expectations of others. I am always the one holding the pen. I am always the one writing my own life. I am always the one who creates my experience of reality. I can always choose differently.”

Affirmation:
“I will honor my gut feelings about people, even if no one agrees with me, because I would rather be seen as “cold” then rope another energy vampire into my life because I wanted to be “nice” and “agreeable,”

Affirmations:
“- I will choose what’s right for me, independent of other people‘s opinions, because when I allow my life to be shaped by other people‘s desires, I feel resentful. Choosing myself saves my relationships.
- I will control my reactions to my negative thoughts, because I am the master of them.”

“Affirmation: I am a silly woman who gets shit done.”

“Seeking joy is not frivolous. It is not silly. I realized from the bottom of the hole that it’s not something I could wait for it to happen to me. That I could no longer afford the romance and joy of my life to be an afterthought, the icing, or the decoration. The romance and joy of my life had to be baked into the fucking cake from scratch.”

“Bringing our attention back to the present moment to make conscious and intentional choices is how we remind ourselves that we are in charge. This is how we can start to design our lives. Allowing nothing but the desires, the joy, the awe, the curiosity that has been buried beneath them, the whole time to become the new and rightful architect of our life, in whatever shape or form that takes for you.”

“Moral perfectionism and purity plagues women’s minds, perhaps as deeply, if not more deeply than our need to be pretty. Moral perfection has always been expected of women, but its modern conception has become stealthier... There was a time when women were not allowed to have opinions, now we must have the correct ones.”

“The only way I could move on from my pain was to release the identity I had created an opposition and resistance to it… To take everything back to basics and start from scratch, asking, “who am I without my pain?” To bring that pendulum back to the middle point and find my own fucking voice.”

“Trying to be perfect by chasing, striving to prove our worth, and hustling to receive approval and love isn’t liberation. It is just patriarchy in a pair of heels and a pant suit, trying to seduce us to become just as closed off and afraid of vulnerability as men. Perfection is a myth. It does not exist.”

“The desire to do everything by ourselves and become too independent strips us of the beautiful warmth and connection built in asking others for help, it stops us living, building communities, it robs us of the wonderful realm of feeling, delighting, and enjoying, laughing, dancing, singing, crying. By shutting ourselves off after trauma, we no longer expose ourselves to joy.”

“I vowed to become as independent as possible, and galvanize other women to stand up for themselves too. The title of the diary I started at that time was literally PERPETUALLY EXHAUSTED BY MEN. I hated them. And I loved it… What I didn’t prepare for was that hating men would become just as exhausting as my years of mentally submitting to them.”

“Perhaps nobody will ever come, perhaps one day, an astounded human being, arriving at the foot of the stairs as I did so long ago, will see the dark wood-panelled room, the neatly arranged bed, and an old woman sitting upright, a knife in her heart, looking peaceful.
It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods and who have never known men.”

184: “Sometimes the women pitied me, saying that at least they'd known real life, and I was very jealous of them, but they died, as 1 am about to die, and what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?”

“I suppose I am an old woman, but I still love looking at my face. I don't know if it's beautiful or ugly, but it is the only human face I ever see. I smile at it and receive a friendly smile back.”

“You've never seen a child, you don't know what it means—their vulnerability, their trust, the love you feel for them, the anxiety, being ready to lay down your life to save them, and it's unbearable to imagine a child's pain.'
It's true I know nothing of all that... Perhaps that's why I'm so different from the others. I must be lacking in certain experiences that make a person fully human.”

“they began arguing about whether marriage was a good thing or not. In that wilderness where there were no men to marry, they debated whether it was better to be unfaithful or to leave, and then they burst out laughing...But later, they cried, and I wasn't able to understand them any more. Then they felt sorry for me, because I'd never experience love,”

“I was surprised at how much they had to say, the passion with which they repeated the same thing in ten different ways so as to avoid accepting that they'd had absolutely nothing to say to one another for ages. But human beings need to speak, otherwise they lose their humanity, as I've realised these past few years.”

“I only recently started taking an interest in the prefaces…They often seem to feel the need to emphasise that they wrote the book not out of vanity, but because someone asked them to, and that they had thought about it long and hard before accepting. How strange! It suggests that people were not avid to learn, and that you had to apologise for wanting to convey your knowledge.”

“‘Disturbed her? No! she has disturbed me, night and day, through eighteen years - incessantly - remorselessly - till yesternight; and yesternight I was tranquil. I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped and my cheek frozen against hers.'”