Martha Beck Quotes

If you're living completely on your own, break out of solitary confinement. Seek to understand others, and help them understand you.

~ Martha Beck

There’s a Chinese word that means “soul sister,” and that is the word I would use to address you in my heart. Listen to me, soul sister: Fate or luck or destiny already put you through hell once. Please don’t make it worse by condemning yourself. There is no choice that would have left you feeling no guilt. Every time I watch Adam struggle to speak, every time I see another child laugh and point at him, every time I watch his face fall as he realizes he is not going to be treated like the other kids, I feel wrenched by guilt just as you did when you heard my story. Life is hard. We make the best choices we can. Condemnation, whether it comes from around you or inside you, only robs the world of another dram of compassion. God knows, we need all the compassion we can get. If you promise to try to forgive yourself, I’ll try to forgive myself as well. I think, in my heart of hearts, that there is nothing for either one of us to forgive.

~ Martha Beck

I am bewildering you a little. Just enough to help you forget what you came to believe, so that you can remember what you’ve always known.

~ Martha Beck

As a life coach, I love makeovers, from new clothes to surgery, pedicures to highlights. But redoing makes you feel better only if approached with the right attitude.

~ Martha Beck

Whether you've seen angels floating around your bedroom or just found a ray of hope at a lonely moment, choosing to believe that something unseen is caring for you can be a life-shifting exercise.

~ Martha Beck

Hopeful thinking can get you out of your fear zone and into your appreciation zone.

~ Martha Beck

Fact: From quitting smoking to skiing, we succeed to the degree we try, fail, and learn. Studies show that people who worry about mistakes shut down, but those who are relaxed about doing badly soon learn to do well. Success is built on failure.

~ Martha Beck

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.

~ Martha Beck

I feel about aging the way William Saroyan said he felt about death: Everybody has to do it, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case.

~ Martha Beck

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.

~ Martha Beck

Western democracies exalt the ideal of social equality, but our economic system arguably emerged from 16th-century Calvinism, a religion whose members believed that God showed favor by bestowing wealth and other forms of success on what they called 'the chosen.'

~ Martha Beck

The thing I love most about my job is watching people age backward, becoming more lively and energetic as they free themselves from situations that are toxic to their essential selves.

~ Martha Beck

Since our society equates happiness with youth, we often assume that sorrow, quiet desperation, and hopelessness go hand in hand with getting older. They don't. Emotional pain or numbness are symptoms of living the wrong life, not a long life.

~ Martha Beck

Getting bogged down in old stories stops the flow of learning by censoring our perceptions, making us functionally deaf and blind to new information. Once the replay button gets pushed, we no longer form new ideas or conclusions - the old ones are so cozy.

~ Martha Beck

I had a client who was a professional baseball player once, and he would go to clubs and dance for seven, eight, nine hours at a time. He wouldn't drink, he wouldn't take drugs - he just danced because he had so much physical energy; he was this amazing athlete.

~ Martha Beck

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.

~ Martha Beck

The process of spotting fear and refusing to obey it is the source of all true empowerment.

~ Martha Beck

Anger elicits anger, fear elicits fear, no matter how well meaning we may be.

~ Martha Beck

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.

~ Martha Beck

People are so afraid of authority figures and doctors are authority figures.

~ Martha Beck

No matter how difficult and painful it may be, nothing sounds as good to the soul as the truth.

~ Martha Beck

Every day brings new choices.

~ Martha Beck

If we're stuck with having expectations, there's a very good reason to embrace positive ones: It's that we often create what we anticipate.

~ Martha Beck

Life is full of tough decisions, and nothing makes them easy. But the worst ones are really your personal koans, and tormenting ambivalence is just the sense of satori rising. Try, trust, try, and trust again, and eventually you'll feel your mind change its focus to a new level of understanding.

~ Martha Beck

Sometimes a psychic tells you something and it feels wrong and others may be right on the money. It's your choice about whom to trust, and giving that trust is something we do ourselves.

~ Martha Beck

Denial exists because human infants, though equipped with trust-o-meters, are built to trust, blindly and absolutely, any older person who wanders past.

~ Martha Beck

Although beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, the feeling of being beautiful exists solely in the mind of the beheld.

~ Martha Beck

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.'

~ Martha Beck

Ten years ago, I still feared loss enough to abandon myself in order to keep things stable. I'd smile when I was sad, pretend to like people who appalled me. What I now know is that losses aren't cataclysmic if they teach the heart and soul their natural cycle of breaking and healing.

~ Martha Beck

Good-looking individuals are treated better than homely ones in virtually every social situation, from dating to trial by jury.

~ Martha Beck

Good-looking individuals are treated better than homely ones in virtually every social situation, from dating to trial by jury. If everyday experience hasn't convinced you of this, there's research that will.

~ Martha Beck

Self-pity, a dominant characteristic of sociopaths, is also the characteristic that differentiates heroic storytelling from psychological rumination. When you talk about your experiences to shed light, you may feel wrenching pain, grief, anger, or shame. Your audience may pity you, but not because you want them to.

~ Martha Beck

Allowing children to show their guilt, show their grief, show their anger, takes the sting out of the situation.

~ Martha Beck

It takes about four days of virtuous living to create a little weight loss. That also happens to be the time required to get used to eating less. In other words, if you can get past day three of a fitness regimen, things improve.

~ Martha Beck

Absolutely lonely people have few personal interactions of any kind.

~ Martha Beck

You have the freedom to live and let live, to love and let love. Granting yourself that freedom is one of the healthiest, most constructive things you can do for yourself and the people who matter to you.

~ Martha Beck