Gudjon Bergmann Quotes

Forgiveness is probably the most important self-esteem building process anyone can undertake. Forgiveness is an internal response to the fact that we cannot, under any circumstances, change the past. The only things we can change are our thoughts about the past. Forgiveness happens when we stop wishing for a better past and understand that we are carrying hatred, anger and resentment within us.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

You can tend to a garden every day for 20, 30 or 40 years. But if one day you stop giving it loving attention and care it will rapidly deteriorate. Weeds will start to grow, and in a relatively short period of time the garden will become a jungle. On the other hand, it is much easier to turn things around and start cultivating the garden again if it has flourished in the past. The same is true with the human mind and respectively the actions we take every day. If we cultivate our life with dedication, positive thinking, and consistent actions, it will be much easier to turn away from destructive behavior, however far we stray away from our original course.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Many people close themselves off from the world when they are under pressure. That is understandable. I have gone through periods when I didn’t want to meet people because I didn’t feel good about my situation in life and that made my life even more stressful. Remind yourself often about how much of an impact compassion and friendship can have on your life. You need to get out there, be compassionate and share your time and your life with your friends and other people that need your support. It’s worth it on every level.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Gandhi is an example of a man who grew from being self-centered as he was learning to become a lawyer in England, to becoming more family- and social oriented in South-Africa, where he led a reformation of Indian rights, to becoming determined in helping his nation recover from British rule at which he succeeded in the end with the help of a great many people. At the end of his life Gandhi was increasingly focused on a larger picture, encasing the whole world in his vision of a peaceful future.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Breaking away from old psychological memes requires a Herculean effort in many cases. In essence, we are outgrowing a worldview while maintaining a relation-ship of sorts. Transcending an ideology can feel like going through a divorce and having to stay friends because of the kids.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Growth seems to evolve from a narrow-minded, constricted worldview (selfish) to an ever-more-encompassing worldview (multiperspective caring). To put it simply, the more self-centered you are, the lower you tend to land on these scales, while the more perspectives you can entertain—the more empathy you can show and the better your ability to see things from a variety of viewpoints—the higher you land on these scales.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

While having information is a crucial first step, more information isn´t necessarily better. Take a look at your bookshelves and the list of seminars you have attended. If you have read more than one book about a subject or attended more than one seminar but still haven’t reached your goals, then your problem is not lack of information but rather lack of implementation.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Short term goals are often based on dissatisfaction, and actions based on dissatisfaction will eventually lead to a life of unhappiness.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Fear and anger, the two emotions that most people came to him to reduce—emotions that he’d worked so hard to overcome in his own life—were fuel for politicians. Maybe candidates and congressmen thought that sowing discord among countrymen, even family members, was an unfortunate type of collateral damage. Maybe they didn’t think about it at all.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Being a good parent is not an obligation, it is a choice. Plenty of people fall short in the parent category and quite a few refuse to accept it. You will do a much better job if you understand that taking care of your children is a choice not an obligation.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

We are known to be anti-authoritarian, anti-institutional, and notoriously anti-religious—more likely to quote Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Monty Python, or Star Trek than the Bible.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Walk into any church, and you will see people swimming in a sea of emotions (everything from shame and guilt to love and ecstasy). That may be the reason some people think that the more emotional they are, the more spiritual they are. But, as we will explore later in the book, undiluted spirituality has little to do with emotions, and what little it does have has more to do with emotional growth than feelings of elation.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

You are here and you can’t escape it. Thoughts about why you came to be here and a poor-me mentality will not help you to resolve the situation. You cannot avoid being here now, in this present moment, in this unfortunate predicament. Your choices, lack of choices, or accidental events, have led you to this moment. That cannot be changed no matter how much you think about it. The only things that can be changed in this present moment are your thoughts and actions right now. Take a deep breath and totally accept this moment.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

One of the hallmarks of great teachers is that they rejoice when their students surpass them. Encouraging an atmosphere of questioning and inviting people to grow within your classroom isn’t necessarily easy, which must explain why people who want to create cults or die hard followers discourage questioning in general. They would rather have people reciting their dogma than asking hard questions.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Self-confidence is built from the inside out and has little or nothing to do with outside circumstances.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Self-confidence is not a fixed way of being. People are not born with certain levels of self-confidence, it can be acquired, and it can be lost.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Self-confidence can be defined in two sentences. (1) I trust myself to face life’s challenges and (2) I trust myself to follow my dreams and goals.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

If you want to increase your self-confidence as a yoga teacher very fast – go out there, face your fears, and teach as much as you possibly can!

~ Gudjon Bergmann

A person with less knowledge and more self-confidence (which is primarily a way of thinking and acting) will often run circles around a person with more knowledge and less self-confidence; which means that self-confidence has the upper hand to knowledge when it comes to acting in the world. It has been interesting to see many of my star academic students struggle with teaching in the real world, while others who were less qualified in the academic field but had more self-confidence have gone out and positively affected many more people through their teaching.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Authors, such as William Zinsser, Steven Pinker, Natalie Goldberg, and Stephen King, who have all written exquisite books on the art and craft of writing, have reminded me that it is the commitment to the craft that matters the most; the longing to get better and the countless hours of work that go into writing and rewriting. To them I am eternally grateful.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Perfectionism is the enemy of the author. There is a difference between good writing habits and perfectionism. The author who displays good writing habits delivers on time. The aspiring author who is prone to perfectionism will likely never fin...

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Goals and dreams are the entrepreneur’s mental energy. However, the same goals and dreams that drive his behavior will also drive him to an early grave if he doesn’t take care of his physical energy through a mix of exercise and relaxation. Energy manipulation is the ability to feed the mind with dreams and sustain the body so it will keep up with those dreams.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Stay within the confines of your chosen topic. If you start to stray away from your topic and find an urge to showcase everything that you know, resist that urge. Remember that you are writing a book, not the book.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

I started reading my manuscripts out loud, to hear what they sounded like. If the text flows with little effort, then I am satisfied, but if I keep stumbling and stuttering while I read, then I rewrite.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

It is imperative that your work habits from school do not make their way into your book writing process. I am talking about the practice of typing the last words just before the deadline every time you would hand in an assignment, a paper, or even a thesis. Your book needs time to mature, and you must allow yourself the luxury of rewriting and editing until you are satisfied.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

There is not a single person I have met in my lifetime who is comfortable talking about death. It’s the biggest downside to our youth-centric culture. Death is a bummer, so let’s not talk about it. Let’s hide it away and hope it never strikes close to home.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

…but death can’t be the final word, can it? I mean, look at this fire. The wood that we threw on it has been decimated, or so it seems, but in reality, the wood has been transformed into gasses and ashes. I think about that, you know, about how nothing is ever destroyed, but only changes form.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Motivated authors sacrifice TV time, sleep, hobbies, and even family time.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

There is no such thing as lack of time, only unclear priorities and lack of motivation. It is better to abandon a project than to work on it half-heartedly for a protracted period of time.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Write a book, not the book.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

For years I tried to help people with simple things, such as tension relief through breathing and relaxation, but all they wanted were the drugs. They wanted to numb themselves. They did not want to face their fears or feel better through their own efforts—and they certainly did not want to be illuminated.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

It is not lack of ability, but lack of motivation, lack of focus, and lack of self-confidence that prevents most aspiring authors from finishing what they started.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

What I call stupidity is not only lack of knowledge, although much of humanity could be elevated from poverty, dogma, illusions and war through traditional education. A thriving education system is the foundation for progress. But stupidity is not merely ignorance; it can also be a way of acting. If you act contrary to your own goals in life – you’re stupid.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Once we got closer to the origins of these Eastern practices, we found that the monks and swamis were just as dogmatic and paternalistic, just as literal and conservative in their approach to spirituality as the Christian priests and ministers we were trying to get away from.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Why lie, Robert? Why lie? You know that lying is the alcoholics kryptonite, you can’t afford it, the reasonable voice in his head screamed.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Ever since the Enlightenment era in the 17th and 18th Centuries—which, among other things, gave birth to the U.S. Constitution and the de facto motto E Pluribus Unum (out of the many, one)—interfaith tolerance has been sown into the fabric of Western society. The rules of one religion are not made into law for all citizens because of a simple social agreement. For you to believe what you want, you must allow me to do the same, even if we disagree.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

These superhero and mythical stories have, in many cases, replaced Biblical stories as vehicles for communal myths, but they are hardly any better than ancient magical adventures tinged with mythical archetypes and the decidedly unnuanced black-and-white struggle between good and evil.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

There is no such thing as a stress-free life. No evidence has ever been presented which suggests that a stress-free life can ever be achieved. Stress can be managed, relieved and lessened, but never eliminated.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Stress is a natural and normal part of being alive. Stress-free promises set people up for failure. Even when used with good intentions and accompanied by relevant and beneficial ideas and practices, the use of the words stress-free is still ill advised because the approach is infused with an erroneous idea that will never come to fruition. The stress-free idea has become a significant hurdle on the path to real stress management, which is the balance between using stress productively and relieving harmful stress symptoms.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Stress-free moments certainly exist, but that is the extent of it. People, who have bought into the idea of a stress-free life, believe they should be happy and positive all the time. They have been sold a damaging falsehood. As the first sentence in M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled famously said: “Life is difficult.” Learning to deal effectively with life’s difficulties, learning to manage the inevitable stress of life is attainable, while eliminating stress is not.

~ Gudjon Bergmann