Daniel J. Siegel, MD, is an American clinical professor of psychiatry, author, founding codirector of the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center, and executive director of the Mindsight Institute.
CLEAR ALL
Anger is inevitable when our lives consist of giving in and going along; when we assume responsibility for other people’s feelings and reactions; when we relinquish our primary responsibility to proceed with our own growth and ensure the quality of our own lives; when we behave as if having a...
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Empathetic listening is an awesome medication for the hurting heart.
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We must not confuse letting go of past injuries with feeling an obligation to let the injurers back into our life. The freedom of forgiveness often includes a firm boundary and loving distance from those who have harmed us.
If only our passion to understand others were as great as our passion to be understood. Were this so, all our apologies would be truly meaningful and healing.
When forgiveness experts talk in binary language (’You either forgive the wrongdoer or you are a prisoner of your own anger and hate’), they are collapsing the messy complexity of human emotions into a simplistic dichotomous equation.
People’s sense of self-worth is pivotal to their ability to look clearly at the hurt they’ve caused. The more solid one’s sense of self regard, the more likely that that person can feel empathy and compassion for the hurt party, and apologize from an authentic center.
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Excessive use of external motivation can slow and even stop your journey to mastery.
When we do not put our primary emotional energy into solving our own problems, we take on other people’s problems as our own.
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Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it . . . the upward spurts vary; the plateaus have their own dips and rises along the way. . . .
What we call ‘mastery’ can be defined as that mysterious process through which what is at first difficult or even impossible becomes easy and pleasurable through diligent, patient, long-term practice.