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41 " choose "
― Edith Eger , The Choice: Embrace the Possible
42 " Freedom lies in examining the choices available to us and examining the consequences of those choices. "
43 " 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. "
44 " 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. "
― Edith Eger , The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life
45 " 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. "
46 " But from this moment on, I understood that feelings, no matter how powerful, aren’t fatal. And they are temporary. "
47 " 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. "
48 " 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. "
49 " 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. "
50 " ...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. "
51 " 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. "
52 " 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. "
53 " the opposite of depression is expression. What comes out of you doesn’t make you sick; what stays in there does. "
54 " Doing what is right is rarely the same as doing what is safe. "
55 " Our childhoods end when we begin to live in someone else’s image of who we are. "
56 " 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? "
57 " I release you!” I shout to that old sorrow. “I release you! "
58 " nobody can take your inner life or responses from you. Why do you give him more power? "
59 " 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. "
60 " 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. "