Healing for me is being able to sit next to the butcher and say 'Yes, Iβm sitting next to the butcher now,' instead of saying 'there is no butcher'.
Tori AmosRead
Though I can't change what happened, I can choose how to react. And I don't want to spend the rest of my life being bitter and locked up.
Interpretation
We cannot alter our past, but we can control our responses to it.
This quote by Tori Amos emphasizes the importance of personal agency in the face of life's challenges. While we cannot change the events that have occurred in our lives, we have the power to determine our reactions and attitudes towards those events, suggesting that a positive mindset can lead to a more fulfilling life.
In practice
Using this quote in a motivational speech about resilience.
Healing for me is being able to sit next to the butcher and say 'Yes, Iβm sitting next to the butcher now,' instead of saying 'there is no butcher'.
When you stop putting yourself on the line, and you don't touch your own heart, how do you expect to touch other people?
If you can't create physical life, you find a life force. If that's in music, that's in music. I started to find this deep, primitive rhythm, and I started to move to it. And I held hands with sorrow, and I danced with her, and we giggled a bit.
I don't want to sit on the sidelines and not value the gift of being here. Instead of the idea of time ticking away, the grains of sand running out, I try to think of time as giving me another grain of sand, another gift. So time passing is an accumulation, rather than a diminishing.
I don't mind a dirty girl. But what I find tragic is when we, as women, become not the subject of our own story but someone else's object.
For many years, I shut down that place inside myself that needed to rage, cry, ask questions and basically just express herself. I made a conscious choice when I put (the song) 'Me and a Gun' on the record not to stay a victim anymore.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.
The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.
The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
We must not confuse humility with false modesty or servility.
Truth is generally the best vindication against slander
Meditation takes us just as we are, with our confusion and our sanity. This complete acceptance of ourselves as we are is called maitri, or unconditional friendliness, a simple, direct relationship with the way we are.
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