"Well, where do Mermaids stand? All the "Mermaids"--all those who are different, who do not fit the norm and who do not accept the available boxes and pigeonholes? Answer that question and you can build a school, a nation, or a world on it...It is not true, by the way, that mermaids do not exist. I know at least one personally. I have held her hand." (Robert Fulghum)
This is awesome!
(Source: mydearsamwise, via benedict--cumberbatch)
"During a rehearsal of Brahms’ Symphony 2, Lawrence Loh turned to the orchestra and said, “I know you’ve all played this a hundred times. But tonight, I want you to play this for two people: the person who is hearing Brahms 2 for the first time, and the person who is hearing it for the last."
John Lithgow, during an interview with Chris Hardwick of The Nerdist
"The therapist’s task should not be a proselytizing of the patient with his own beliefs and understandings. No patient can really understand the understandings of his therapist nor does he need them. What is needed is the development of a therapeutic situation permitting the patient to use his own thinking, his own understandings, his own emotions in the way that best fits him in his scheme of life. (Milton Erickson)"
Erickson, 1965/1980, p. 223.
"Psychotherapists cannot depend upon general routines or standardized procedures to be applied indiscriminantly to all their patients. Psychotherapy is not the mere application of truths and principles supposedly discovered by academicians in controlled laboratory experiments. Each psychotherapeutic encounter is unique and requires fresh creative effort on the part of both the therapist and patient to discover the principles and means of acheiving a therapeutic outcome. (Milton Erickson)"
Erickson & Rossi, 1979, p. 233-34. In Freedman, J. & Combs, G. (1996). Narrative therapy: The social construction of preferred realities. New York: WW Norton Company
"Often the moment when we most need to pause is exactly when it feels most intolerable to do so. Pausing in a fit of anger, or when overwhelmed by sorrow or filled with desire, may be the last thing that we want to do. Like the high-altitude pilots, letting go of the controls seems to run counter to our basic and instinctual ways of getting what we want."
Tara Bruch, Radical Acceptance
"The poet Rumi saw clearly the relationship between our wounds and our awakening. He counseled, ‘Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.’ When we look directly at the bandaged place without denying or avoiding it, we become tender toward our human vulnerability. Our attention allows the light of wisdom and compassion to enter."
Tara Bruch, Radical Acceptance
"We seem unaware that choices and options might exist. When we are in the trance and caught up in our stories and fears about how we might fail, we are in much the same state. We are living in a waking dream that completely defines and delimits our experience of life."
Tara Bruch, Radical Acceptance
"I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever “fixed” at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today."
Justice Thurgood Marshall, first black Supreme Court Justice, 1987. (via monsterbeard)
(via bensgrabbag)
"D. H. Lawrence described our Western culture as being like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. ‘We are perishing for lack of fulfillment of our greater needs,’ he wrote, ‘we are cut off from the great sources of our inward nourishment and renewal.’"
Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance
