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"Do Quote This"

I'm not okay; you're not okay; and that's okay.

Virginia Satir

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Two Witnesses

Our patterns are well established, seductive, and comforting. Just wishing for them to be ventilated isn't enough. Those of us who strugle with this know. Awareness is the key. Do we see the stories that we're telling ourselves and question their validity? When we are distracted by as strong emotion, do we remember that it is out path? Can we feel the emotion and breathe it into our hearts for ourselves and everyone else? If we can remember to experiment like this even occasionally, we are training as a warrior. And when we can't practice when distracted but know that we can't, we are still training well. Never understimate the power of compassionately recognizing what's going on.

When we're feeling confused about our words and actions and about what does and does not cause harm, out of nowhere the slogan, 'Of the two witnesses, hold the principal one' might arise. Of the two witnesses - self and other - we're the only one who knows the full truth about ourselves.

Pema Chodron, from, "The Places the Scare You"

Widening the circle

A human being is a part of the whole called by us 'the universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for u, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living ceatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Albert Einstein, as quoted for Chapter Two of 'The Places That Scare You' by Pema Chodran

overgeneralizing from remarks

Something else that needs to be watched is the habit of overgeneralizing from the speakers's remarks. If a speaker is critical of, let us say, the way in which design is taught at a particular school, some persons in the audience seem automatically to assume that the speaker is saying that design shouldn't be taught at all. When I speak on the neglected art of listening, I am often confronted with the question, "If everybody listened, who would do the talking?" This type of misunderstanding may be called the "pickling in brine fallacy," after the senior Oliver Wendell Holmes's famous remark, "Just because I say I like sea bathing, that doesn't mean I want to be pickled in brine." When Alfred Korzybski found himself being misunderstod in this way, he used to assert with special forcefulness, "I say what I say; I do not say what I do not say". Questions of uniqueness, properly chosen, prevent not only the questioner but everyone else present from projecting into a speaker's remarks meanings that were not intended.

S.I. Hayakawa, from How to Attend a Conference

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