The body says what words cannot.
Martha GrahamRead
What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.
Interpretation
It's essential to prioritize your own self-perception over the opinions others have of you.
This quote by Martha Graham emphasizes the importance of self-acceptance and the idea that external judgments should not dictate your sense of self-worth. It suggests that focusing on what others think can lead to unnecessary anxiety and distract from personal growth and authenticity.
In practice
During a motivational workshop about self-esteem.
The body says what words cannot.
Nobody cares if you can't dance well.
Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it.
No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a strange, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.
There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.
I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
To despise theory is to have the excessively vain pretension to do without knowing what one does, and to speak without knowing what one says.
Realization is to get rid of the delusion that you have not realized.
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.
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