Edith Eger Quotes

Our painful experiences aren’t a liability—they’re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength.

We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but no one can take away from you what you put in your own mind.

Time doesn't heal. It’s what you do with the time. Healing is possible when we choose to take responsibility, when we choose to take risks, and finally, when we choose to release the wound, to let go of the past or the grief.

To be passive is to let others decide for you. To be aggressive is to decide for others. To be assertive is to decide for yourself. And to trust that there is enough, that you are enough.

To forgive is to grieve—for what happened, for what didn’t happen—and to give up the need for a different past.

Perfectionism is the belief that something is broken - you. So you dress up your brokenness with degrees, achievements, accolades, pieces of paper, none of which can fix what you think you are fixing.

It’s the first time I see that we have a choice: to pay attention to what we’ve lost or to pay attention to what we still have.

The only place where we can exercise our freedom of choice is in the present.

When we seek revenge, even non-violent revenge, we are revolving, not evolving.

Just remember,” she says, “no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind.

...By the time I would finish school I'll be fifty? He smiled. "You're going to be fifty anyhow

Change is about noticing what’s no longer working and stepping out of the familiar, imprisoning patterns.

There is no hierarchy of suffering. There's nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours.

Answer the most important questions at the start of any journey towards freedom: What am I doing now? Is it working? Is it bringing me closer to my goals, or farther away?

Here you are! In the sacred present. I can’t heal you—or anyone—but I can celebrate your choice to dismantle the prison in your mind, brick by brick. You can’t change what happened, you can’t change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now. My precious, you can choose to be free.

You can live to avenge the past, or you can live to enrich the present.

Survivors don't have time to ask, "Why me?" For survivors, the only relevant question is, "What now?

We cannot choose to have a life free of hurt. But we can choose to be free, to escape the past, no matter what befalls us, and to embrace the possible.

The hardest person to forgive is someone I’ve still to confront: myself.

When we abdicate taking responsibility for ourselves, we are giving up our ability to create and discover meaning. In other words, we give up on life.

We can’t choose to vanish the dark, but we can choose to kindle the light.

A good definition of being a victim is when you keep the focus outside yourself, when you look outside yourself for someone to blame for your present circumstances, or to determine your purpose, fate, or worth.

What are you going to do about it? I believe in the power of positive thinking—but change and freedom also require positive action. Anything we practice, we become better at.

Taking risks doesn’t mean throwing ourselves blindly into danger. But it means embracing our fears so that we aren’t imprisoned by them.

Time doesn’t heal. It’s what you do with the time.

the willingness to take absolute responsibility for your life; the willingness to risk; the willingness to release yourself from judgment and reclaim your innocence, accepting and loving yourself for who you really are—human, imperfect, and whole.

and understand that when we anesthetize our feelings, with eating or alcohol or other compulsive behaviors, we just prolong our suffering.

I don't want you to hear my story and say, "My own suffering is less significant." I want you to hear my story and say, "If she can do it, then so can I!

It’s our responsibility to act in service of our authentic selves. Sometimes this means giving up the need to please others, giving up our need for others’ approval.

Freedom lies in examining the choices available to us and examining the consequences of those choices.

the opposite of depression is expression. What comes out of you doesn’t make you sick; what stays in there does.

Our painful experiences aren’t a liability—they’re a gift.

But from this moment on, I understood that feelings, no matter how powerful, aren’t fatal. And they are temporary.

But over time I learned that I can choose how to respond to the past. I can be miserable, or I can be hopeful—I can be depressed, or I can be happy. We always have that choice, that opportunity for control. I’m here, this is now, I have learned to tell myself, over and over, until the panicky feeling begins to ease.

...I understood that feelings, no matter how powerful, aren't fatal. And they are only temporary. Suppressing the feelings only makes it harder to let them go. Expression is the opposite of depression.

This is how we release ourselves from the prison of avoidance—we let the feelings come. We let them move through us. And then we let them go.

Just remember, no one can take away from you what you've put in your own mind.

Doing what is right is rarely the same as doing what is safe.

When we’ve been victimized, there’s a part of our psyche that identifies with the victimizer, and sometimes we adopt that punitive, victimizer stance toward ourselves, denying ourselves the permission to feel good, depriving ourselves of our birthright: joy.

As long as we live, there’s the risk that you might suffer more. There’s also the opportunity to find a way to suffer less, to choose happiness, which requires taking responsibility for yourself.

In my first weeks at Auschwitz I learn the rules of survival. If you can steal a piece of bread from the guards, you are a hero, but if you steal from an inmate, you are disgraced, you die; competition and domination get you nowhere, cooperation is the name of the game; to survive is to transcend your own needs and commit yourself to someone or something outside yourself.

Puedes vivir en la prisión del pasado o puedes dejar que el pasado sea el trampolín que te ayude a alcanzar la vida que deseas.

How easily a life can become a litany of guilt and regret, a song that keeps echoing with the same chorus, with the inability to forgive ourselves. How easily the life we didn’t live becomes the only life we prize. How easily we are seduced by the fantasy that we are in control, that we were ever in control, that the things we could or should have doneor said have the power, if only we had done or said them, to cure pain, to erase suffering, to vanish loss. How easily we can cling to – worship – the choice we think we could or should have made.

We can choose what the horror teaches us. To become bitter in our grief and fear. Hostile. Paralyzed. Or to hold on to the childlike part of us, the lively and curious part, the part that is innocent.

is a choice. No matter how frustrating or boring or constraining or painful or oppressive our experience, we can always choose how we respond.

Our childhoods end when we begin to live in someone else’s image of who we are.

We’re all victims of victims. How far back do you want to go, searching for the source? It’s better to start with yourself.

...(S)uffering is universal. But victimhood is optional. There is a difference between victimization and victimhood. We are all likely to victimized in some way in the course of our lives. At some point we will suffer some kind of affliction or calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have little or no control. This is life. And this is victimization. It comes from outside. It's the neighborhood bully, the boss who rages, the spouse who hits, the lover who cheats, the discriminatory law, the accident that lands you in the hospital. In contrast, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization. We develop a victim's mind -- a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits or boundaries. We become our own jailors when we choose the confines of the victim's mind.

My mama told me something I will never forget..."We don't know where we're going, we don't know what's going to happen, but no one can take away from you what you put in your own mind.

I release you!” I shout to that old sorrow. “I release you!

nobody can take your inner life or responses from you. Why do you give him more power?

It seemed a just and simple equation. Thousands of miles of ocean separated us from barbed wire, police searches, camps for the condemned, camps for the displaced. I did not yet know that nightmares know no geography, that guilt and anxiety wander borderless.

But as long as you’re avoiding your feelings, you’re denying reality. And if you try to shut something out and say, “I don’t want to think about it,” I guarantee that you’re going to think about it. So invite the feeling in, sit down with it, keep it company. And then decide how long you’re going to hold on to it. Because you’re not a fragile little somebody. It’s good to face every reality. To stop fighting and hiding. To remember that a feeling is just a feeling—it’s not your identity.

You can't change what happened, you can't change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now. My precious, you can choose to be free.

Mientras tiemble, sabré que estoy viva.

And you can’t feel love and fear at the same time.

It took me many decades to discover that I could come at my life with a different question. Not: Why did I live? But: What is mine to do with the life I’ve been given?

What happened can never be forgotten and can never be changed. But over time I learned that I can choose how to respond to the past. I can be miserable, or I can be hopeful—I can be depressed, or I can be happy. We always have that choice, that opportunity for control. I’m here, this is now, I have learned to tell myself, over and over, until the panicky feeling begins to ease.

How easily a life can become a litany of guilt and regret, a song that keeps echoing with the same chorus, with the inability to forgive ourselves. How easily the life we didn’t live becomes the only life we prize. How easily we are seduced by the fantasy that we are in control, that we were ever in control, that the things we could or should have done or said have the power, if only we had done or said them, to cure pain, to erase suffering, to vanish loss. How easily we can cling to—worship—the choices we think we could or should have made.

Freedom is a lifetime practice—a choice we get to make again and again each day.

Romantic love is temporary. Real love is not what you feel, it's what you do.

Sometimes it just takes one sentence to point the way out of victimhood: Is it good for me?

Choice Therapy, as freedom is about CHOICE—about choosing compassion, humor, optimism, intuition, curiosity, and self-expression

Ser pasiva es permitir que otros decidan por ti. Ser agresiva es decidir por los otros. Ser asertiva es decidir por ti misma. Y confiar en que eso basta, que tú bastas.

It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us, Viktor Frankl writes in Man’s Search for Meaning.

Maybe every life is a study of the things we don’t have but wish we did, and the things we have but wish we didn’t.

All your ecstasy in life is going to come from the inside,

Thank you for life, and for the ability to finally accept the life that is.

No podemos borrar el dolor. Pero somos libres de aceptar lo que somos y lo que nos han hecho y avanzar.

No sabemos adónde vamos, no sabemos qué va a pasar, pero nadie puede quitarte lo que pones en tu mente”.»

To be passive is to let others decide for you. To be aggressive is to decide for others. To be assertive is to decide for yourself. And to trust that there is enough, that you are enough.

Time doesn’t heal. It’s what you do with the time. Healing is possible when we choose to take responsibility, when we choose to take risks, and finally, when we choose to release the wound, to let go of the past or the grief.

When you turn the other cheek, you look at the same thing from a new perspective. You can’t change the situation, you can’t change someone else’s mind, but you can look at reality differently. You can accept and integrate multiple points of view. This flexibility

No existe una jerarquía del sufrimiento. No hay nada que haga que mi dolor sea mejor o peor que el tuyo, no existe ninguna gráfica en la que podamos plasmar la importancia relativa de un pesar respecto a otro.

me doy cuenta de que los sentimientos, por muy intensos que sean, no son fatales. Y son temporales. Reprimir los sentimientos solo hace que sea más difícil liberarse de ellos. Expresión es lo contrario de depresión.

To forgive is to grieve—for what happened, for what didn't happen—and to give up the need for a different past. To accept life as it was and it is.

It's the first time I see that we have a choice: to pay attention to what we've lost or to pay attention to what we still have.

«La vida volverá a ser buena» y «Si puedes sobrevivir a esto, puedes sobrevivir a cualquier cosa». Me he repetido esas frases una y otra vez.

We don’t know where we’re going. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Just remember, no one can take away what you’ve put in your mind.

In Hungary we say, “Don’t inhale your anger to your breast.” It can be harmful to hold on to feelings and keep them locked inside.

Tenemos hambre de aprobación, de atención, de afecto. Tenemos hambre de libertad para aceptar la vida, conocernos y ser realmente nosotros mismos.

Think of the family as a car where all the wheels are integrated and work together to move where it needs to go—no one wheel takes control, no one wheel bears all the weight.

This embarrassment, this feeling of exile, even in my own community, didn’t come from without. It came from within. It was the self-imprisoning part of me that believed I didn’t deserve to have survived, that I would never be worthy enough to belong.

...the biggest prison is in your own mind, and in your pocket you already hold the key: the willingness to risk; the willingness to release yourself from judgment and reclaim your innocence, accepting and loving yourself for who you really are--human, imperfect, and whole.

Our best teachers. The most toxic, obnoxious people in our lives can be our best teachers. The next time you’re in the presence of someone who irks or offends you, soften your eyes and tell yourself, “Human, no more, no less. Human, like me.” Then ask, “What are you here to teach me?

No more don’t, don’t, don’t,” I told her. “I want to give you lots of dos. I do have a choice. I do have a life to live. I do have a role. I do live in the present. I do pay attention to what I’m focusing on, and it’s definitely in alignment with the goals I’m choosing: what gives me pleasure, what gives me joy.

I also want to say that there is no hierarchy of suffering. There's nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours, no graph on which we can plot the relative importance of one sorrow versus another. People say to me, "Things in my life are pretty hard right now, but I have no right to complain -- it's not Auschwitz." This kind of comparison can lead us to minimize or diminish our own suffering. Being a survivor, being a "thriver" requires absolute acceptance of what was and what is. If we discount our pain, or punish ourselves for feeling lost or isolated or scared about the challenges in our lives, however insignificant these challenges may seem to someone else, then we're still choosing to be victims. We're not seeing our choices. We're judging ourselves.

No pienso nada en absoluto. Únicamente siento que cada célula de mi cuerpo la quiere y la necesita. Es mi madre, mi mamá, mi única mamá. Así que digo la palabra que me he pasado el resto de mi vida intentando borrar de mi conciencia, la palabra que no me he permitido recordar, hasta hoy. «Madre»,

So often when we are unhappy it is becasue we are taking too much responsibility or we are taking too little. Instead of being assertive and choosing clearly for ourselves, we might become aggressive (choosing for others) or passive (letting others choose for us), or passive-aggressive (choosing for others by preventing them from achieving what they are choosing for themselves).

…the things that interrupt our lives, that stop us in our track, can also be catalysts for the emerging self, tools that show us a new way to be, that endow us with new vision. This is why I say that in every crisis there is a transition. Awful things happen and they hurt like hell. And these devastating experiences are also opportunities to regroup and decide what we want for our lives.

My past still haunted me: an anxious, dizzy feeling every time I heard sirens, or heavy footsteps, or shouting men. This, I had learned, is trauma: a nearly constant feeling in my gut that something is wrong, or that something terrible is about to happen, the automatic fear responses in my body telling me to run away, to take cover, to hide myself from the danger that is everywhere. My trauma can still rise up out of mundane encounters. A sudden sight, a particular smell, can transport me back to the past.

whatever we deny ourselves the opportunity to accept becomes as inescapable as brick walls and steel bars. When we don’t allow ourselves to grieve our losses, wounds, and disappointments, we are doomed to keep reliving them. Freedom lies in learning to embrace what happened. Freedom means we muster the courage to dismantle the prison, brick by brick.

Perdonar es lamentarse por lo que sucedió y por lo que no sucedió, y renunciar a la necesidad de un pasado diferente. Aceptar la vida como era y como es. Por supuesto, no quiero decir que fuese aceptable que Hitler asesinase a seis millones de personas. Solo que sucedió, y no quiero que ese hecho destruya la vida a la que me aferré contra todo pronóstico.

.... when we force our truths and stories into hiding, secrets can become their own trauma, their own prison. Far from diminishing pain, whatever we deny ourselves the opportunity to accept becomes as inescapable as brick walls and steel bars. When we don't allow ourselves to grieve our losses, wounds and disappointments, we are doomed to keep reliving them.

It is too easy to make a prison out of our pain, out of the past. At best, revenge is useless. It can’t alter what was done to us, it can’t erase the wrongs we’ve suffered, it can’t bring back the dead. At worst, revenge perpetuates the cycle of hate. It keeps the hate circling on and on. When we seek revenge, even nonviolent revenge, we are revolving, not evolving.

To be a hero requires great moral courage. And each of us has an inner hero waiting to be expressed. We are all “heroes in training.” Our hero training is life, the daily circumstances that invite us to practice the habits of heroism: to commit daily deeds of kindness; to radiate compassion, starting with self-compassion; to bring out the best in others and ourselves; to sustain love, even in our most challenging relationships; to celebrate and exercise the power of our mental freedom.

In contrast, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization. We develop a victim’s mind—a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits or boundaries. We become our own jailors when we choose the confines of the victim’s mind.

If I understand anything about that afternoon, about the whole of my life, it's that sometimes the worst moments in our lives, the moments that set us spinning with ugly desires, that threaten to unglue us with the sheer impossibility of the pain we must endure, are in face the moments that bring us to understand our worth. It's as if we become aware of ourselves as a bridge between all that's been and all that will be. We become aware of all we've received and what we can choose-or choose not-to perpetuate. It's like vertigo, thrilling and terrifying, the past and the future surrounding us like a vast but traversable canyon. Small as we are in the big scheme of universe and time, each of us is a little mechanism that keeps the whole wheel spinning. And what will we power with the wheel of our own life? Will we keep pushing the same piston of loss or regret? Will we reengage and reenact all the hurts of our own abandonment? Will we make our children pick up the tab for our losses? Or will we take the best of what we know and let a new crop flourish from the field of our life?

To be passive is to let others decide for you. To be aggressive is to decide for others. To be assertive is to decide for yourself. In myths, nothing good comes from gloating. You have to let the gods maintain the image of their singular power. I did not yet know that nightmares know no geography, that guilt and anxiety wander borderless. It is a reflex to expect the bad with the good. I don't know what fears kept hidden only grow more fierce. I don't know that my habits of pretending are only making us worse. Maybe moving forward also meant circling back. There are always two worlds. The one that I choose and the one that I deny, which inserts itself without my permission. To change our behavior, we must change our feelings and to change our feelings, we must change our thoughts. Freedom is bout choice - about choosing compassion, humor, optimism, intuition, curiosity and self-expression. To be free is to live in the present. When you have something to prove, you are not free. When we grieve, it's not just over what happened - we grieve for what didn't happen. You can't heal what you can't feel. It's easier to hold someone or something else responsible for your pain than to take responsibility for ending your own victimhood. Our painful experiences aren't a liability, they are a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength. One of the proving grounds for our freedom is in how we relate to our loved ones. There is no forgiveness without rage. But to ask "why" is to stay in the past, to keep company with our guilt and regret. We can't control other people and we can't control the past. You can't change what happened, you can't change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now.

1. What do you want? This is a deceptively simple question. It can be much more difficult than we realize to give ourselves permission to know and listen to ourselves, to align ourselves with our desires. How often when we answer this question do we say what we want for someone else? I reminded Ling and Jun that they needed to answer this question for themselves. To say I want Jun to stop drinking or I want Ling to stop nagging was to avoid the question. 2. Who wants it? This is our charge and our struggle: to understand our own expectations for ourselves versus trying to live up to others’ expectations of us. My father became a tailor because his father wouldn’t allow him to become a doctor. My father was good at his profession, he was commended and awarded for it—but he was never the one who wanted it, and he always regretted his unlived dream. It’s our responsibility to act in service of our authentic selves. Sometimes this means giving up the need to please others, giving up our need for others’ approval. 3. What are you going to do about it? I believe in the power of positive thinking—but change and freedom also require positive action. Anything we practice, we become better at. If we practice anger, we’ll have more anger. If we practice fear, we’ll have more fear. In many cases, we actually work very hard to ensure that we go nowhere. Change is about noticing what’s no longer working and stepping out of the familiar, imprisoning patterns. 4. When? In Gone with the Wind, my mother’s favorite book, Scarlett O’Hara, when confronted with a difficulty, says, “I’ll think about it tomorrow. … After all, tomorrow is another day.” If we are to evolve instead of revolve, it’s time to take action now.