I suggest Substituting Inedible Nurturance, or SIN. Don't replace overeating with virtuous work or exercise; instead, make a list of things you love, from watching TV to hanging out with favorite people.
Polite strangers often tell soothing lies about our physical appearance that prevent many of us from facing, discussing and solving our real problems.
Almost all my middle-aged and elderly acquaintances, including me, feel about 25, unless we haven't had our coffee, in which case we feel 107.
Loneliness is proof that your innate search for connection is intact.
Our thoughts about an event can have a dramatic effect on how we go through the event itself. When our expectations are low, it's easy to be pleasantly surprised. When they're not, we're vulnerable to painful disappointment. Because of this, many people spend a good deal of effort trying to avoid developing high hopes about anything.
No matter how difficult and painful it may be, nothing sounds as good to the soul as the truth.
Every day brings new choices.
Use anything you can think of to understand and be understood, and you'll discover the creativity that connects you with others.
If you're living completely on your own, break out of solitary confinement. Seek to understand others, and help them understand you.
Allowing children to show their guilt, show their grief, show their anger, takes the sting out of the situation.
Good-looking individuals are treated better than homely ones in virtually every social situation, from dating to trial by jury.
As much horror as we have always created, we are a species that keeps moving forward, seeing new sights in new ways, and enjoying the journey.
Cheerfully fessing up to our failures turns crazy mind off, humility and compassion on. I learned this in a karate dojo that had a strange tradition. Everyone there loved recounting failure stories, and after an evening of smacking one another, we'd sit and have a beer while the students swapped tales of martial arts disaster.
Only since the Industrial Revolution have most people worked in places away from their homes or been left to raise small children without the help of multiple adults, making for an unsupported life.
When you meet people, show real appreciation, then genuine curiosity.
Hopeful thinking can get you out of your fear zone and into your appreciation zone.
Whoever said love is blind is dead wrong. Love is the only thing that lets us see each other with the remotest accuracy.
I really do think that any deep crisis is an opportunity to make your life extraordinary in some way.
The way we can allow ourselves to do what we need to, no matter what others may say or do, is to choose love and defy fear.
I don't believe that there are no spiritual beings around us. I don't know what to call them, I don't know how they work. But I know they're there.
No one else can take risks for us, or face our losses on our behalf, or give us self-esteem. No one can spare us from life's slings and arrows, and when death comes, we meet it alone.
Something in the human psyche confuses beauty with the right to be loved. The briefest glance at human folly reveals that good looks and worthiness operate independently. Yet countless socializing forces, from Aunt Clara to the latest perfume ad, reinforce beliefs like 'If I were pretty enough, I would be loved.'
If you're religious, it gives you a perspective.
Much protective self-criticism stems from growing up around people who wouldn't or couldn't love you, and it's likely they still can't or won't. In general, however, the more you let go of the tedious delusion of your own unattractiveness, the easier it will be for others to connect with you, and the more accepted you'll feel.
What laughter is to childhood, sex is to adolescence.
The average adult laughs 15 times a day; the average child, more than 400 times.
People are so afraid of authority figures and doctors are authority figures.
If I tell a man he needs to quit his soul-sucking job, he has to go home and fight with his wife or fight with his parents and fight with his in-laws and fight with everybody, because men aren't supposed to be happy; they're supposed to do well.
Focusing on one mildly disturbing, semi-controllable issue allows the mind to stuff much greater terrors in relatively tidy packages.
Not everyone is equally good-looking.
My dog has the intellectual capacity of a lime wedge, yet even he possesses an elaborate set of assumptions, based on his ability to control my behavior through a combination of slavish devotion and incessant howling.
When fear makes your choices for you, no security measures on earth will keep the things you dread from finding you. But if you can avoid avoidance - if you can choose to embrace experiences out of passion, enthusiasm, and a readiness to feel whatever arises - then nothing, nothing in all this dangerous world, can keep you from being safe.
Whatever causes you to drop your plan forward and open to your vision, your own, deeply personal vision of what your life could be at its very best, that's what I call meeting your rhinoceros.
I'm not saying we have power over everything in our lives - if that were true, my hair would look so, so different - but I am saying that there's no circumstance in which we are completely powerless.
Every worldview I chose, it seemed, edged me toward belief.
Everything I've ever taught in terms of self-help boils down to this - I cannot believe people keep paying me to say this - if something feels really good for you, you might want to do it. And if it feels really horrible, you might want to consider not doing it. Thank you, give me my $150.