Hoping a situation will change keeps you at a distance from your true feelings-sadness, anger, fear. Each of these feelings is best appreciated up close. Feel them deeply, and they will cease to bother you. Hope they'll go away, and they'll bother you all day.
Interpretation
Avoiding true feelings only prolongs distress; embracing emotions leads to healing.
This quote emphasizes the importance of confronting and feeling our emotions—such as sadness, anger, and fear—rather than hoping they will disappear on their own. The author argues that by fully experiencing these feelings, we can reduce their hold on us, leading to greater emotional well-being and resilience.
In practice
In a therapy session focusing on emotional release.
You never know when it is going to happen, when you will experience a moment that dramatically transforms your life. When you look back, often years later, you may see how a brief conversation or an insight you read somewhere, changed the entire course of your life.
Each of us has an inner thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed out inner thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves, causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel secure.
It's a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so.
One of the essential tasks for living a wise life is letting go. Letting go is the path to freedom. It is only by letting go of the hopes, the fears, the pain, the past, the stories that have a hold on us that we can quiet our mind and open our heart.
The calm man is not the man who is dull. You must not mistake Sattva for dullness or laziness. The calm man is the one who has control over the mind waves. Activity is the manifestation of inferior strength, calmness, of the superior.
Their reward for enduring the awful experience was the right to tell people about it.
Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.
I've often thought that if planners were botanists, zoologists, geologists, and people who know about the earth, we would have much more wisdom in such planning than we have when we leave it to the engineers.
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