Yung Pueblo Lighter Quotes

The real you is not your initial reaction. The real you is your response that comes after your reaction. The real you is the one who can weave out of the grasp of the past and produce an authentic response that is based in the present.

Building the foundation for a better life starts with what is happening in your mind.

If you spent more time observing than reacting, you would start to notice how the absence of reaction also means the absence of tension. The absence of reaction is essentially a profound ability to let go.

How many times has your imagination disturbed a perfectly peaceful moment? How many times have your cravings blocked you from fully enjoying the abundance in front of you?

As you become less of a mystery to yourself, you can start to look at other people with a greater sense of clarity and compassion.

Self-love is a vehicle we use to travel through our own inner universe.

It is to everyone's benefit to build a more compassionate world, because when fewer people are hurting, everyone is safer and there is more victory, celebration, and joy.

In a society based on speed and productivity, moving slowly is a radical act.

Love is freedom, while attachment is control.

Embracing change is the path to alleviating and eventually eradicating suffering.

Letting go is essentially a profound acceptance of the present moment.

A person can be in love and also unprepared to care for that love

your immediate reaction does not tell you who you are it is how you decide to respond after the reaction that gives you real insight into how much you have grown your first reaction is your past your intentional response is your present

pick the path that lights you up the one you know deep down is the right choice stop listening to doubt start connecting with courage do not let the idea of normal get in the way it may not be the easy path but you know great things take effort lean into your determination lean into your mission lean into the real you

Serenity is possible when we are no longer carrying the ever-growing baggage of mental images, fueled by craving or aversion, everywhere we go.

We have to slowly train ourselves to stop living in the past and set aside the emotional baggage we carry.

Part of letting go is recognizing that we are a function of our past. As a result, our emotional whims normally have great power over what we think, say, and do.

Your initial reaction is your past revealing itself.

When it comes to you and the inner workings of your mind, no one has the power or authority to save you the way you can save yourself.

The only option that supports our inner peace is to find a balance where we live our truth without trying to mold the people around us.

Healing will not only improve your life, but it will open the door for good things to come to you because the quality of your mind determines the quality of your life.

The end of a relationship is the end of a home.

that create space between you and your happiness. Healing

At its core, emotional maturity is a matter of improving your communication with yourself.

Our real human nature is love, mental clarity, creativity, and a zest for life that is informed by the past but no longer weighed down or controlled by it.

A synonym for love is truth.

Real healing is definitely doable and life-changing, but it will take time—great transformations are normally things you will have to work for. And there is nothing wrong with that.

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.

A promising path to security, even though it may seem paradoxical, is letting go. When you are attached to nothing, there is no pathway to hurt. When you are attached to nothing, happiness appears in abundance.

The biggest improvement to your life will come from you changing yourself. Since the amount of stress you experience depends on the intensity of your reaction, the only solution that is within your control is changing yourself.

Deep healing and emotional maturity begin when you turn your attention inward. The ability to see yourself as you move through the ups and downs of life, without running away or suppressing your feelings, enhances your understanding of yourself.

Another thing to watch out for is your own doubt. Doubt is one of the ways that your old patterns will try to defend themselves. The conditioning of the mind wants to just repeat the past over and over again, and it will try to reject new things.

The conscious mind is sometimes able to forget, but the subconscious mind accumulates every reaction from the past. These reactions harden over time and develop into specific behavior patterns that arise when the mind is reminded of a past situation.

While many of us have encountered serious trauma and some people have done us incredible harm, if we want to repair and heal the imprints that burden our subconscious and skew our perception, we need to embrace the hard work of becoming our own hero.

This doesn’t mean suppressing or ignoring the past. The pull to behave in old ways weakens over time as we keep choosing to behave in new ways that honor the present more than the past. How we focus our mental energy can determine the future of our life.

maturity is when you can finally ride the ups and downs of life without getting tossed around by them you don’t expect everything to be perfect you know change is a constant you don’t judge yourself when times get hard you live in gratitude you enjoy the good when it is here

There is a universe inside each one of us that is untapped and largely undiscovered, but most people walk the earth unaware that they are not seeing with their eyes. Instead, they are seeing with their emotions, and often these emotions are just the echoes of their past hurts.

This truth of suffering guides you inward and makes you wonder where the suffering begins; with proper insight it will point you to your own mental reactions. The truth of suffering may seem overwhelming and unavoidable, but it reflects your own power—it highlights the potential for real freedom and happiness.

Healing does not erase the past, and the point of healing is not to forget what has happened. Old memories from hard moments may come up even after deep healing has taken place, but what shifts is how we react to them when they arise. If the intensity of the reaction is decreasing, then real progress is being made.

Thinking that the sole source of your stress is external is an illusion, one that we all fall for until we turn our awareness inward and pay close attention to the way our mind moves. People can certainly do mean or harmful things to us, but the way we perceive and react to what is happening lies within our own mind.

The interaction between mental and physical phenomena occurs at incredible speeds—at the conventional level of everyday life, we may seem solid, but, in reality, our being is in a constant state of motion. This means that who we were in the past only remains as a memory; that person is not someone we can truly go back to.

Our relationship to change defines the level of peace in our mind. The wisest and happiest people I have met are continuously immersed in the truth of change. Since the weight of forever is no longer something they are chasing, they move easily through life’s ups and downs, and treat each moment more genuinely than the average person.

Taken to its highest form, self-love is an energy we use to evolve. Ultimately, I define self-love as “doing what you need to do to know and heal yourself.” True self-love is multifaceted and includes radical honesty, positive habit building, and unconditional self-acceptance. These three pillars work internally and externally to generate and support an enduring sense of self-love.

An identity that is flexible will encourage your flourishing and support you in discovering new parts of yourself. Attempting to stay the same, or to get back to an old version of yourself, is a form of attachment that brings little security and causes much mental tension. If everything in existence is powered by change, our only option is to embrace it and let its movement inspire our evolution.

Most of our reactions are impulsive. When emotions spark, we quickly jump into feeding them and making them stronger, without realizing that this behavior just reinforces how we will feel in the future when a similar situation arises. Over and over again, the mind will see the present through the lens of the past, keeping us in a state of repetition and slowing down our ability to behave and think in new ways.

Curiosity is especially useful when intense emotions arise. When we encounter sadness, for instance, we can ask ourselves where it is coming from. When we find a hardened pattern, we can ask ourselves how it came to be. Was it a tactic of survival? Did it emerge from fear? Where is this sadness coming from? When did this pattern start forming? What triggers this pattern and how is this behavior affecting my life?

Too often, we think of healing in an external sense—we try to remove the obstacles from our lives without realizing that to make our healing long-lasting, it is more effective to address our own perception and reactions. There is nothing wrong with saying no to difficult people and putting ourselves on a better path that more substantially supports our happiness, but it would be unrealistic to expect that we can remove all difficulties from our lives.

This idea should not be taken to an extreme; being in community can be very healing and human beings are naturally interdependent. What you should be alert to is the constant avoidance of solitude. There is also nothing wrong with having a friend help you take your mind off something that is too heavy to process at the moment, but a clear sign of being disconnected from yourself is when too many of your relationships are driven by your need to dodge your tension.

To simply let your past self dominate your present-day thoughts, words, and actions is to miss out on fully living your life. Doing this means you are stuck in a loop where you are repeatedly replaying the past and strengthening patterns that don’t necessarily enhance your happiness. Reinforcing the past keeps you stagnant, which may be easy in the moment because the past is familiar, but ultimately does not serve you well. The river of life wants to move you toward embracing change.

maturity in a relationship is not expecting your partner to constantly be happy. ups and downs are natural. giving each other space to feel heavy emotions while staying attentive and actively supporting one another is a sign of real love. relationships are not about fixing everything for each other; they are about experiencing joyful moments and tough times as a team and loving each other through the changes. sometimes your partner needs to go through their own process to emerge lighter and freer than before.

Healing begins with the willingness to become an explorer, to enter the vast inner forest that exists within your being, using your awareness as the light that shows you the way. It is a journey that is challenging and sometimes filled with difficulty, because you will undoubtedly come across shadows and parts of yourself that may be hard to fully embrace with self-acceptance. But this is a challenge that can bring unparalleled rewards. When you are able to see yourself clearly, you awaken your true inner power.

The understanding of self-love that makes the most sense to me is much more internal. It is the way you relate to yourself with compassion, honesty, and openness. It is meeting every part of yourself with unconditional acceptance, from the parts that you find easy to love, to the rough and imperfect parts that you try to hide from. Self-love begins with acceptance, but it does not stop there. Real self-love is a total embrace of all that you are while simultaneously acknowledging that you have room to grow and much to let go of. Real

On the surface, it may look like this is our true nature, because it is currently rampant throughout the world. But the reality is that greed is a conditioned habit that is easily mistaken for our true nature. The selfishness of greed is deeply rooted in the mind, but it is a pattern like any other—it can be observed and released. What was once widely understood as human nature—being greedy, fearful, and even hateful—is not our nature at all. These traits are human habits, conditioned behavior that was imprinted onto us by past generations and past experiences.

Human habit is prevalent in us when our mind focuses too much on the past or the future. Since human habit is strongly connected to survival, our record of the past will be the main filter that we use to assess the world. Rather than taking in what is happening in a fresh way and without judgment, we will make quick evaluations and not have the patience to fully grasp the novel and complex quality of each individual moment. Our thoughts of the future will be similarly molded by whatever happened in the past. And our anxieties and concerns will be on a mission to make sure that the things we hated from the past do not happen again,

The mind combats the natural flow of change by allowing most of its motivation to come from craving. Cravings quickly become attachments that try to mold reality into something it is not. Cravings are a rejection of reality as it is, and bring our focus into imagining what is missing or how we wish things would be. When our desire for things to be a certain way combines with tension, craving emerges. When we lock on to a particular idea and make our “happiness” dependent on it coming true, we are no longer living in the present moment—instead, we are striving to control reality. A continuous craving for things to be a certain way is known as “attachment.

One of the hardest battles to overcome is simply having enough courage and inner security to adopt a lifestyle that supports your evolution and mental health. Once you make this lifelong pledge to grow, your task will be to apply effort so that you can remain on the path. Emotional maturity is a lifelong practice in humility and persistence, because you understand that your immediate thoughts are not always correct and that it is worth your time to patiently investigate the roots of your patterns. At its core, emotional maturity is a matter of improving your communication with yourself. This ongoing commitment to yourself will also enhance outward connection and communication with others.

All human beings carry tension in the mind that inhibits them from living their best life. But, fortunately, the tension that accumulates within us can also be released. Healing is when you intentionally decrease the tension you carry in your mind.

Self-love and healing are deeply intertwined, and if you take one of them seriously, the other will be immediately activated. They rise and fall together. Similarly, if the two are flourishing, a profound transformation is bound to take place.

The human mind is commonly full of stress and anxiety. It does not do a good job focusing on the present moment and it is full of attachments that get in the way of living peacefully and making effective decisions.

Healing begins with the willingness to become an explorer, to enter the vast inner forest that exists within your being, using your awareness as the light that shows you the way. It is a journey that is challenging and sometimes filled with difficulty, because you will undoubtedly come across shadows and parts of yourself that may be hard to fully embrace with self-acceptance.

Being able to see the power our reaction has over our mood and the amount of tension we feel in the mind can show us how much suffering we have been causing ourselves.

When the healing begins, the strong emotions that surface are sometimes triggered by the present, but what you are feeling is actually from your past.

When the healing begins, the strong emotions that surface are sometimes triggered by the present, but what you are feeling is actually from your past. Later on, I recognized that each time sadness was arising within me, my mind was just cleaning itself out. Sticking to meditating through that time helped me more efficiently process all that stagnant sadness that had been sitting in my subconscious

Building your self-awareness increases the agility of your mind. When you make time to be present in your own mind, it becomes possible to slow things down when difficult situations arise. Rather than falling back into blind reactions that are rooted in your past, you can intentionally lean into pausing and give yourself a moment to take a look at what is actually happening. This ability to pause is not easy and it takes time to build this quality of the mind, but the results of this practice are immense. Giving yourself time to witness reality without immediately reacting is a sign of progress in your healing. Now that you can see yourself and give yourself more time to process what is happening, you can more easily behave in ways that align with your goals and honor your authenticity. Finding the balance where you can be honest about what you are feeling and not allow a temporary emotion to take total control of your actions can help you better handle the unexpected changes of life.

The toughest part of healing is staying inspired so you can keep plugging away at building the new you, thought by thought, action by action, step by step. All these seemingly small movements eventually add up to a total transformation. People who heal themselves are lions, heroes with exceptional bravery—and I say this not to discourage you, but to make it clear that this journey is not fast, not easy. This is a really long commitment. There can be no time limit set. You have to love yourself to change yourself, and loving yourself does not take days off.

Healing is about illuminating your mind with your own awareness, turning on the light within so brightly that your old patterns no longer have anywhere to hide.

Managing reactions does not mean suppressing emotions. Being thoroughly honest with yourself means embracing all your emotions without rejecting those that are harder to feel.

Without intention, you would be aimless. Through intention, you reveal who you really are.

The greatest lever that affects your mood is reaction. Reaction to not feeling good makes you feel worse. Reaction to disliking something pushes you into anger. Reaction creates the fire of a tumultuous mind and then continuously feeds that fire, making it hotter and all-encompassing.

Managing our reactions means being aware when a tough emotion has appeared and understanding that even if we have an initial reaction, we do not need to keep feeding that reaction. We can honor the fact that the emotion is there without fully becoming it. Instead of throwing more fire onto it, we focus on observing it and remind ourselves that this emotion will change, eventually, as all things do. The biggest asset to personal transformation is awareness.

Hurt and attachment are bound together. When someone says something contrary to what we would like them to say—or, even worse, when what we are attached to no longer exists because the flow of time has eroded it—the pain we feel is tremendous. The more deeply we identify with something, the more our ego grabs hold of it.

The purpose of letting go is not to erase emotions, but to acknowledge their presence and transform your relationship to them.

When you deeply get to know yourself through the energy of self-love, you start to learn about the human condition, and how your own heavy emotions and traumas have shaped your behavior and reactions over time. As you become less of a mystery to yourself, you can start to look at other people with a greater sense of clarity and compassion.

Simply accepting whatever I found helped me feel a new sense of ease, even when my mood was down. Running away from myself took up so much more energy than mustering the courage to embrace solitude and stillness.

you meet the rough parts of yourself with gentleness, they will melt away, leaving you lighter and giving you more space to act from a place of wisdom. all you need to do is be okay with not being okay during tense moments of release.

healing isn’t about filling your life with pleasure or never having a hard moment again it’s about being real and facing what you feel so that it doesn’t accumulate in unhealthy ways being with the down moments is better than carrying unprocessed pain everywhere you go

healing is open and available to anyone who seeks it. Healing yourself is possible through letting go of the past and connecting with the present, all so you can expand your future. And healing progresses quickly when you find the practices that connect well with the conditioning your mind has developed over time.

This book is meant as a bridge between the ideas of personal transformation and global transformation, to show that the two are deeply intertwined and function in support of each other.

That day, I resolved deeply in my heart to stop dulling my senses and to start the long walk back to a better life. Gambling with my life, just because I feared my emotions, was over. I knew that I had to cut out all the drugs and start being radically honest with myself.

Self-acceptance is a deep embrace of reality, letting go of punishing ourselves for the past, and the foundation that balances all the other tools we use for personal transformation. When our self-love becomes active, transformation is immediately set in motion. No transformation carries an unbreakable upward trajectory—we are bound to stumble, to momentarily regress to old habits, to move a few steps back before taking a life-changing leap forward, or to experience moments when we simply need a break. In our personal journey, every moment will not be a victory. Especially during tough times, when inner turmoil arises, it does not help to have a strong aversion to our own tension—that will only make the heaviness we already feel worse. The best way to be prepared for the long journey is to move through the ups and downs with self-acceptance.

As the author James Clear put it so succinctly in his book Atomic Habits, “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.

her rebirth was stunning- she lifted herself up from the depths of despair, grasped her dreams, embedded them in her heart, and walked forward into a future that only her will and vision could control (revival)

Throughout your healing journey, your intuition will be the primary compass for you to follow. Many people may try to give you advice and you may see different things online, but if your intuition is not fully aligned with what you are doing, that is a clear sign it is not for you. People read their intuition differently, but, for me, it is a calm persistence that reveals itself as a knowing, as opposed to a craving.

Even though no one is perfect, being open to someone with a base of emotional maturity as you cultivate your own will increase your chances of connecting more deeply next time. Your emotional energy is sacred, and there is nothing wrong with treating it as such. If connection is what you are looking for, give your emotional energy to a person who is ready to cherish it and give their own.

Love is so attractive that even the pain of unwanted endings will eventually yield to the possibility that we may find the right connection with someone who is also ready for the type of love that goes deeper than the surface level—a love that welcomes growth and vulnerability. Even when it feels incredibly difficult to open up our hearts to such a sensitive depth, we still take the leap forward when our intuition makes it clear that we should try again.

keep unbinding the past that weighs down the mind let go of the tension that limits your ability to wholeheartedly enter into the present heal the fear that stops you from aligning with your highest goals —this is how you stay committed to your growth

Healing does not make all the pain go away, and often it is a slow process that takes patience and commitment. What makes this journey worth it is that even small amounts of healing can make a difference in our lives. When you start saying no to old patterns and choosing actions that better align with how you authentically feel, your human nature starts to shine through.

Your peace has the power to stop a disagreement from escalating into an argument. It takes two people to intensify a disagreement to the point where it becomes a real conflict; if you refuse to conduct yourself with tension it will help the conversation remain civil.

Honoring the truth that challenging moments are common will help us let go of resistance so that we can pass through difficult times with less tension and use them to gain more wisdom. Facing difficult situations head-on from a place of balanced action, rather than with blind reaction, is a sign of emerging emotional maturity.

More than anything, you give yourself what you need, instead of what you crave. Treating your energy like a precious resource has a deep effect on your life. Saying no becomes more common so you can focus your time and give it to your highest goals. You miss out on some events because you don’t need as much external stimulation to make you feel fulfilled.

But our intuition often moves in a way that allows us to break out into the world and fulfill our deepest aspirations. Intuition is not grounded in fear and it does not feel like the endless cravings that swirl in the mind. It feels like the body has a calm compass and it knows where to go next, even if that knowledge causes the mind to recoil with fear and aversion because you have to do something that is totally outside of your comfort zone.

We all feel our own intuition differently. For me it appears as a quiet knowing that persists until I follow through on it, even if this means taking a considerable leap or a large risk.

One of the best ways to get to know yourself is through interactions with other human beings. Silent meditation retreats or deep one-on-one sessions with a therapist are extremely productive, but putting the skills you’ve developed into action in the real world builds self-awareness in a whole new way.

Proximity among imperfect human beings, even when they have cultivated a lot of emotional maturity and taken their inner work seriously, will eventually lead to some sort of discord or conflict. Try to look at these moments as opportunities for you both to see yourselves more clearly—moments when harmony has decayed so that it can be rebuilt with a wiser design.

For the both of us, the first two years of meditating were a period of self-discovery and strong determination. We knew that the healing happening in our minds was bringing great results because we both felt much less tense, but we also knew that we had to remain committed to the practice to be able to fully benefit from the process. We started off by going to retreats, but over time we realized that it would benefit us immensely to start meditating daily at home. It felt like a herculean effort to push against the mix of laziness and the feeling of being too busy to make room in our lives for daily meditation. It made sense to do this because investing in the health of our minds was going to bring more harmony into our lives, but even that clear logic did not make sitting on the cushion easier. Eventually, we put our feet down and decided that, no matter what, we were going to move in this direction.

Since we are communicating through filters of perception, it takes a certain degree of calmness and emotional maturity between two people to ask each other, “What do you mean by this?” or “Can you tell me more?” to really understand what is being said. Communication without patience is likely to turn into conflict. Communication with patience is likely to lead to deeper connection.

the real game changer is when you stop making assumptions about what your partner is saying and simply ask them for clarification this can prevent false narratives that cause arguments from sneaking into your mind and save your feelings from getting hurt

maturity is being able to maintain your energy the way you want it to be when someone close to you is trying to drag you into their storm you hear them you offer support but at the same time you let their tension be theirs and you let your peace be yours

The Value of Friendship Signs of a deep friend connection: Laughter is abundant. Honesty is encouraged. Support is real and active. Vulnerability is welcomed. You can put your guard down. You inspire each other to grow. You give each other good advice. Both of you feel stronger together. You help each other weather storms.

I discovered that the appreciation you seek from others will not hold the same rejuvenating power as the appreciation, attention, and kindness you can give yourself.

Initially, commercialization surrounded the idea, with mainstream media pushing the belief that you could buy yourself happiness and self-worth.

The understanding of self-love that makes the most sense to me is much more internal. It is the way you relate to yourself with compassion, honesty, and openness. It is meeting every part of yourself with unconditional acceptance, from the parts that you find easy to love, to the rough and imperfect parts that you try to hide from. Self-love begins with acceptance, but it does not stop there. Real self-love is a total embrace of all that you are while simultaneously acknowledging that you have room to grow and much to let go of. Real self-love is a tricky concept that requires a sense of balance to be able to use its transformative power—it is nourishing yourself deeply without becoming self-centered or egotistical. It is no longer seeing yourself as less than others, but at the same time maintaining the humility not to see yourself as better than others. The greatest benefits of self-love come from the positive interactions between you and yourself. Self-love is not only a mindset but a set of actions.

Radical honesty is not about punishing yourself or harsh self-talk. Rather, it is about calmly being in constant contact with your truth. Practicing this balance is critical. In the beginning, radical honesty may feel hard to manage, but it is truly a long-term project. If you want to see great results, you need to wholeheartedly commit to the process, especially when it gets difficult,

The only way to put an end to the burning fire of fear is by thoroughly extinguishing it with truth. Dishonesty is the fear of truth. Dishonesty with yourself creates distance. The more lies you build up over time, the more you become a stranger to yourself. When you cannot accept your own truth, you are moving in the opposite direction of self-awareness. When lies suffuse your mind, life becomes opaque and the right actions you need to take to ease your inner tension become difficult to decipher. The lies you tell yourself will also manifest as a lack of depth in your relationships. A deep connection with another being is not possible if you are deeply disconnected from yourself.

As you practice radical honesty, this distance decreases and your mind starts to become calmer. Telling yourself the truth is the beginning of inner harmony.

Radical honesty is not just observing what you find—it also requires us to approach ourselves with curiosity. Engaging ourselves through the medium of curiosity will take the old energy that we formerly used to run away from ourselves and give it a new purpose that helps us go deeper into our own truth.

the biggest shift in your life happens when you go inward. you step in and observe all that you find with acceptance; the love you bring lights up your self-awareness; you start seeing how the past is packed into your mind and heart— patience, honesty, and observation start the healing process. with time, intention, and good healing practices, the past loses its power over your life. you continue the process—stepping in, feeling, understanding, and letting go. and then you start noticing the results; you are not the same anymore. your mind feels lighter and develops a new, sharper clarity. you start arriving into your life and relationships ready for deeper connection.

In a dark room that is lined with concrete, if a small hole is made, the darkness will no longer be all-consuming. In a similar way, if we keep chipping away and breaking down the walls of old conditioning that confine us, more light will get in and we will be able to see the outside world with a wider and clearer perspective.

There is a wealth of energy and creativity that flows beneath the hardened layers of human habit. So much energy is burned away through worry, anxiety, and falling into the loops of false narratives, but a healed mind has a pristine and flexible quality that allows us to see things from more perspectives than just our own.

You don’t need to jump into every argument or give your opinion on every matter. Sometimes you need to speak up in self-defense or to reaffirm boundaries, but saying less can make what you stand for much clearer and it will save your energy for moments when you know your words will have a great impact.

Emotions usually attract similar emotions, and what you give to others in interpersonal situations is normally what you will get back.

You learn to say no. When you make your goals a top priority, it will mean saying no to things that don’t align with your vision. This is a sign that you have a clear view of where you are heading. Knowing what your real aspirations are will make your journey forward clear, so that you don’t get pulled into distractions.

Since every human being only has a finite amount of energy and time, it becomes incredibly important to have a serious conversation with yourself and ask: What do I want to do with my life? What do I want my mind to feel like a decade from now? What do I need to do now so that I can thrive later? Giving the greater share of your energy to your goals is not selfish. It means you know yourself so deeply that there is no confusion as to what truly matters to you and what you are currently building.

Part of self-improvement is saying no to good things to make more space for the type of work or opportunities that really get you fired up. Not settling for less is one of the most direct ways for you to embody the principle of self-love.

I loved New York and my friends, but something within me kept saying it was not right yet. However, this time things were different. I had never felt such clear support from within, and it was not just support. It felt like a clear instruction: “The next step is NYC.

my intuition struck again, this time with even stronger force. I felt a continuation of its original message, but now that I was in New York City, my intuition stated clearly that it wanted me to focus on writing. There may be moments when your intuition tells you something but you are too afraid to hear it. And that is OK. Just don’t forget the message. Return to it when you feel ready. I had felt this call about a year before, but at the time I had not taken it seriously. It felt real and strong but also too different and new to me. This time it hit like lightning. I could feel that if I focused on writing now, it could be a good way to serve.

Ultimately, human habit is survival mode. Human habit is not permanent, and it is not who we are at our core. Our real human nature is what shines brightly underneath all the patterns, old pain, and confusion that stops us from being the best version of ourselves. Our real human nature is love, mental clarity, creativity, and a zest for life that is informed by the past but no longer weighed down or controlled by it.

the roughest aspects of your character do not fully define who you are. The outer shell may be thick and prone to harmful or defensive behavior, but underneath there is a vast pool of loving clarity waiting for you to access it. If you do the work, the brightness of your true human nature will reveal itself.

Accessing your human nature is not easy. We all have such different conditioning that we can’t compare our personal journey with another’s. We can certainly be inspired by the progress others make, but we can’t expect to move on the same time line or for the tools that work for someone else to work in the same way for us.

The default mode of the mind is survival, meaning it is mainly motivated by fear, craving, aversion, and self-centeredness—this is the initial layer of human habit. Many of these habits stem from encoded evolutionary direction to help keep us safe and survive long enough to pass along our genes. Being cautious and greedy can have its survival advantages.

When you train the mind to observe things as they really are, to take in reality without projecting your emotions onto it and without trying to control it, happiness will become more available to you—this is how you open yourself up to your loving human nature. Happiness requires intentional action, healing, letting go, and teaching the mind to settle into the present moment.

Your real human nature is found in the present moment, and many of the most powerful experiences available to a person can be found there: wisdom, love, joy, healing, happiness, and peace. While these can be superficially accessed through memories or by imagining the future, to experience the full power of them you have to feel them in real time.

What are my healing goals? What patterns do I need to unbind and release? What type of practice am I interested in trying? Having an aim will help you narrow down the field and give your mind a clear trajectory of how it is going to evolve. As you try different methods, you need to check in with yourself and ask, “Can this practice help me move in the direction of my goals?

The practice that is right for you will be something that you find challenging but not overwhelming. You have to locate your own sweet spot, where the practice is hard enough that it is helping you grow, but not so difficult that too many heavy patterns and old emotions are coming up all at once.

At the end of the day, you are the only person who can take steps forward on your healing path—no one else can do the work for you. People who are serious about deep healing are not afraid of the long journey.

If both of you keep trying to win the argument, both of you will lose. Ego craves to win, but loving clarity seeks to understand.

Selfless listening does require some degree of emotional maturity—the ability to feel your truth but not be totally dominated by it, so you can grasp more of what’s happening than just your immediate emotions. When it is time for you to share your perspective, it is most helpful to describe things from your point of view, without being accusatory or defensive.

The other side of things is that a great friendship doesn’t need to last forever for it to be an incredibly profound part of your life story. Sometimes you overlap with a person for a specific purpose and you spend a lot of time together, but, as you both grow, life takes you in different directions. New interests emerge that set you on the path of new adventures. Even though your time together has ended, there is no real love lost. We only have so much time to give to other people, especially as we grow older. Priorities become clearer and sometimes that means sacrifices. Maintaining an active friendship takes energy and time, but even though we dearly love a person, it won’t always be possible to spend all the time we wish we could together.

What worked especially well for the two of us is that we set the expectations really low for each other. That may sound counterintuitive, but this degree of flexibility helped us with the ebb and flow of our friendship. Some years we didn’t spend much time hanging out and others we would spend whole weeks together. The situation kept changing because life kept moving on, but we both maintained an unspoken open door policy. The other strength was that neither of us was afraid to talk through the rough moments, and, once the talking was done, we let it go and moved on.

When you are building self-awareness and intentionally trying to break out of old patterns, the past has a way of thundering into the forefront of your mind. The emotional reactions that have accumulated over time in the subconscious will rise up from the depths, temporarily shaking up your mind and making it cloudy and dark.

Even if past emotions roar as they are released, we do not need to roar back. We just need to let ourselves be with our truth—being with our truth becomes our means for healing.

A mind that is already caught in a storm tends to set aside rational and compassionate thinking. Passive aggressiveness and unnecessary conflicts are common when we let our mental heaviness chart the course of our actions. The mind is more familiar with turbulence than it is with peace. It tends to swing between mental images of the past and the future. Peace requires intentional mental training because it can only be found in the present moment.

take time to feel gratitude and eventually your mindset will flow in that direction more easily.

When old, heavy emotions arise for further processing and release, you deal with them with a new grace—you feel your emotions without giving them all your power.

the right path. The beauty of intuition is that, if you listen, it will push you to grow. In my experience, following what was clear in my gut made me address deeper and deeper levels of fear.

Attachments, our cravings to have things exist in a very particular way, are the rocks that clog up the mighty flow of love. Our attachments are often molded by the hurt we have felt in the past. In this sense, attachments represent our inflexibility.

Seeking someone who complements you with their own level of emotional maturity, willingness to grow, kindness, and honesty is key.

The only way loneliness will ever end is if you are no longer far away from yourself.

To be clear, self-acceptance does not mean complacency. It just means that instead of rejecting or fighting whatever comes up, we acknowledge it for what it is and if there is a need to take action, we do so skillfully.

With enough steps forward, the past goes from being a heavy part of our life to an old memory that serves as a reminder of how much we have overcome.

We have two objectives before us. One is beginning the healing journey as individuals and the second is coming together in groups to help design a better world that mirrors the qualities of love.

Ultimately, the future will be designed by those bold enough to start modelling the world we want to live in without waiting for permission.

Centre yourself in your healing and everything else will flow from there.

Self-acceptance is a deep embrace of reality, letting go of punishing ourselves for the past, and the foundation that balances all the other tools we use for personal transformation.

Deep healing and emotional maturity begins when you turn your attention inward.

Come to terms with your past and notice the way it shows up in your present. Watch your mind as it processes difficult situations. Examine your inner narrative and how you own thinking affects your emotions.

The things that are for you will come to you much more easily when you are deeply aligned with your truth and pursuing your growth.

As a child, I would wonder if my parents were right for each other because they were often arguing. Now, as an adult, I can see that there was no lack of love between them. What was happening was a structural problem: Having very little money filled their minds with tension and they often projected that tension onto each other.

It is no longer seeing yourself as less than others, but at the same time maintaining the humility not to see yourself as better than others.

people who have experienced deep suffering and are still gentle with others do not get enough credit to not let the hard things that happened to you win is heroic work, to drop the bitterness and still live with an open heart despite it all is a massive gift to the world

More of us can feel the way our past weighs down our present, and we are looking for ways to alleviate the tension in our minds because we know that doing so will improve every facet of our lives.

If you are seeking to reclaim your power, one of the essential steps is realizing how much of your power you have given up to the hurt of the past and your fears of the future.

Letting go is essentially a profound acceptance of the present moment. To be able to accept what is, we have to relinquish our hold on how we wish things to be.

you—the art of being real and staying true. Be real by accepting what you are feeling and stay true by maintaining your growth mission even when things get hard. The key is that you can feel it without becoming it.

Storms serve two main purposes: They give you an opportunity to practice acceptance and gentleness and they help you release whatever is coming up.

A commitment to patiently reminding yourself that you are the maker of your destiny will help you reassert yourself as the one who is in charge of your mental state.

It is a good thing to know yourself, but it is even more worthwhile to free yourself.

The understanding of self-love that makes the most sense to me is much more internal. It is the way you relate to yourself with compassion, honesty, and openness. It is meeting every part of yourself with unconditional acceptance, from the parts that you find easy to love, to the rough and imperfect parts that you try to hide from. Self-love begins with acceptance, but it does not stop there. Real self-love is a total embrace of all that you are while simultaneously acknowledging that you have room to grow and much to let go of.

We may start to think that the only way to fix thing is to cause a strategic amount of harm to those we may se as our enemies, but... If we rely on violence, we will only create more wounded people who will later seek violence as a form of retribution.

The greatest lever that affects your mood is reaction.

Real self-love is a total embrace of all that you are while simultaneously acknowledging that you have room to grow and much to let go of.

manage your reactions by slowing down listen to your intuition by slowing down restore your energy by slowing down enter the moment by slowing down feel your truth by slowing down

Who I was before—when my mind was riddled with pain, anxiety, and insecurity—is long gone. I still feel tough emotions, but with nowhere near the same intensity as before. Though the journey continues, the tension in my mind has decreased and I am able to show up in my life and the lives of loved ones in a more effective way. And that feels like a true victory.

Challenges during Healing Healing is for the brave and for those ready to face what lies within. There is so much inside of us, depending on our personal emotional history, that at times it can feel overwhelming. What your journey looks like in the beginning will be sharply different from what it looks like once you are deep in the emotional trenches of inner discovery. The popular understanding that healing is not linear is totally correct. The deepest parts of healing come in waves and between the waves there are periods of integration so you can connect with the new you. Along the way the challenges will be unique to your conditioning and related to the method(s) you have picked to aid you in your quest of developing greater happiness. If letting go was easy, no one would be hurting. So it is no surprise that the process of letting go will be filled with ups and downs. But if you can handle them with awareness, openness, and a keen mind that is ready to learn more, the ups and downs will help fill you with new wisdom.

Real self-love is a tricky concept that requires a sense of balance to be able to use its transformative power—it is nourishing yourself deeply without becoming self-centered or egotistical. It is no longer seeing yourself as less than others, but at the same time maintaining the humility not to see yourself as better than others. The greatest benefits of self-love come from the positive interactions between you and yourself. Self-love is not only a mindset but a set of actions.

The shape of your internal dynamic always influences what will come your way. Your inner blocks, meaning the parts of your conditioning that you do not realize are resisting your freedom, have a way of pushing things away from you until they are unbound.

Healing is when you intentionally decrease the tension you carry in your mind.

being okay with not being okay does not make things automatically better, but it does stop you from adding more tension to an already difficult situation being okay with not being okay helps you let go tough feelings and agitated thoughts cannot take over your life when you meet them with ease, acceptance, and a calm mind. sometimes these old imprints bring with them visceral, rough feelings that have been locked away but suddenly have the space they need to momentarily arise and evaporate. an important part of letting go is feeling without reinforcing—you can be honest with yourself about the heavy emotions that come up and choose not to act them out or make them worse. if you meet the rough parts of yourself with gentleness, they will melt away, leaving you lighter and giving you more space to act from a place of

Our craving for pleasant things is sometimes so strong that we don’t even want to acknowledge that tough moments are happening. Resisting the flow of change will cause you an immeasurable amount of struggle. It is like trying to move upstream against the clear flow of a river. You can spend countless hours pushing against change with no real success—change will always win. If you were simply to let go and allow yourself to move with the flow of nature, you would still encounter occasional challenges, but you would not be adding as much mental pressure as before.

Even if past emotions roar as they are released, we do not need to roar back.

Peace requires intentional mental training because it can only be found in the present moment.

To be fully happy and wise requires mental training, and most of that training revolves around having the patience to repeatedly pull yourself out of senseless narratives, driven by tension, and back to reality.

A promising path to security, even though it may seem paradoxical, is letting go. When you are attached to nothing, there is no pathway to hurt. When you are attached to nothing, happiness appears in abundance. There is nothing passive or cold about letting go—it actually helps you live a much more active life, except that now you are living in alignment with the truth of impermanence. Yes, there are things and people you love, but they are always changing. They will be with you for some time, and eventually they, too, will be gone, just like everything else. If we embrace the truth of change, letting go becomes more clear-cut. We can enjoy things when they are around and we can help and be of service whenever possible, but we won’t expect anything to last forever, especially in the same way that things currently exist, because that is simply not possible. We can also have goals and plans for the future, but not expect to achieve all of them in a specific amount of time. When we stop fighting the truth of change, letting go of our attachments feels more natural, and, in the act of letting go, the love you have for whatever you hold dear will become purer because the element of control won’t be as predominant. Serenity is possible when we are no longer carrying the ever-growing baggage of mental images, fueled by craving or aversion, everywhere we go. Without realizing it, we are weighing ourselves down by existing in a state of judgment—judgment of the present moment. These mental cravings become like rocks in the mind. If we recognize what we are holding on to, we have the opportunity to let it go.

The act of running away from yourself has clear consequences in your relationships.

Your only route to happiness is developing greater self-awareness, combined with more wisdom regarding the human condition.

Real security can only be found in a deep embrace of impermanence.

Everyone has the innate capacity to enter into a transformative process to free themselves of behavior that harms others and stop the patterns that do not serve their personal well-being.

A calm mind that has slowly become unconditioned and relieved of old patterns has an easier time connecting with beauty and finding solutions.

Ego craves to win, but loving clarity seeks to understand.

I found that inner struggle is one of the great causes of outer conflict. It can be seen in moments when someone is tense and that tension narrows their ability to be patient with someone else, causing them to retort with angry words.

Anything powerful and long-lasting requires a sturdy foundation. When a home is being constructed, all attention first goes to the foundation that will stabilize the structure. Once that foundation is firmly in place, you can go on to build, expand, and create something magnificent. The evolution of the individual works in a similar manner. Self-love is the first step that all inner and outer success is based on. Self-love gives your journey the energy and stability to stay on a clear trajectory. It is a profound commitment to self-discovery and to making your well-being a top priority.

love is one of the best parts of being alive

What makes this journey worth it is that even small amounts of healing can make a difference in our lives.

The real you is your response that comes after your reaction.

Your real human nature is found in the present moment, and many of the most powerful experiences available to a person can be found there: wisdom, love, joy, healing, happiness, and peace.

People are quite different: Some people love being alone, while others desire a partner. But in each case there are still many connections in your life that will benefit directly from having a healthy relationship with yourself. Love exists in every human being, but the ways you show it depend on your conditioning and preferences. What matters most is that you tend to the love that dwells within you so that you can use it as a light as you travel through life.

Healing yourself is possible through letting go of the past and connecting with the present, all so you can expand your future.

being with the down moments is better than carrying unprocessed pain everywhere you go

A deep connection with another being is not possible if you are deeply disconnected from yourself.

An individual who is completely free does not harbor any ill will in their heart or mind. Their being will radiate love for all beings, whether or not they have encountered them in person.

Vipassana means “to see things as they really are.

rejecting change only makes life harder.

to not let the hard things that happened to you win is heroic work, to drop the bitterness and still live with an open heart despite it all is a massive gift to the world

True self-love is multifaceted and includes radical honesty, positive habit building, and unconditional self-acceptance.

There is a universe inside each one of us that is untapped and largely undiscovered, but most people walk the earth unaware that they are not seeing with their eyes. Instead, they are seeing with their emotions, and often these emotions are just the echoes of their past hurts. Many fall into cycles of projection where they are taking their inner roughness and spewing it out into the world.

Couples are strikingly different, and the way your relationship story will unfold is unique to you. But even though relationships are complex and situational, it is still possible to build systems that meet your relationship where it is. Perhaps it is through meditation or a couples therapist, or another method entirely, but it’s so worth the effort to

Be real by accepting what you are feeling and stay true by maintaining your growth mission even when things get hard. The key is that you can feel it without becoming it.

If you believe that every moment of tension in your mind is always someone else’s fault

Love is interrupted by the pain we carry.

The trauma we carry and the ways we have blindly reacted throughout our own lives are often picked up from when we were struggling through the more difficult periods of life