Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.
Interpretation
Personal transformation is linked to social and political transformation.
Harriet Lerner emphasizes the interconnection between personal change and broader social and political changes. She suggests that while the links between these types of change may not always be immediately apparent, individual growth and development are inherently tied to the collective progress of society. This means that personal choices and transformations can influence and drive social and political movements, and vice versa.
In practice
During a seminar on community empowerment, one could use this quote to highlight the importance of personal responsibility in fostering societal progress.
It is not fear that stops you from doing the brave and true thing in your daily life. Rather, the problem is avoidance. You want to feel comfortable so you avoid doing or saying the thing that will evoke fear and other difficult emotions. Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run but, it will never make you less afraid.
Telling a true story about personal experience is not just a matter of being oneself, or even or finding oneself. It is also a matter of choosing oneself.
Those of us who are locked into ineffective expressions of anger suffer as deeply as those of us who dare not get angry at all.
If we only listened with the same passion that we feel about being heard.
An intimate relationship is one in which neither party silences, sacrifices, or betrays the self and each party expresses strength and vulnerability, weakness and competence in a balanced way.
I was brought up to be uncompromisingly bloody-minded by my mother. She equipped me, without knowing it, to be someone who is creative rather than an entertainer. Not many girls are brought up like that, to never rely on a man. To not be a housewife, not be a mother.
I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time has come - and gone. It's time for change in America.
if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.
Ideas by themselves cannot produce change of being; your effort must go in the right direction, and one must correspond to the other.
We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.
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