Quotessence
Home / Authors / Martha Beck
Martha Beck

Martha Beck Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

Famous Martha Beck Quotes

“Your body is free but your heart is in prison. To release your heart, you simply reverse the process which locked it up. First you begin to listen for messages from your heart-messages you may have been ignoring since childhood. Next you must take the daring, risky step of expressing your heart in the outside world. . . . As you learn to live by heart, every choice you make will become another way of telling your story. . . . It is the way you were meant to exist. If you stop to listen, you'll realize that your heart has been telling you so all along.”

“In the pursuit of Knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Way, every day something is dropped. Less and less do you need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.”

“It isn’t necessary to know exactly how your ideal life will look; you only have to know what feels better and what feels worse…Begin making choices based on what makes you feel freer and happier, rather than on how you think an ideal life should look. It’s the process of feeling our way toward happiness, not the realization of the Platonic ideal, that creates our best lives.”

“This is the part of us that makes our brief, improbable little lives worth living: the ability to reach through our own isolation and find strength, and comfort, and warmth for and in each other. This is what human beings do. This is what we live for, the way horses live to run.”

“I am free, and always have been; free to accept my own reality, free to trust my perceptions, free to believe what makes me feel sane even if others call me crazy, free to disagree even if it means great loss, free to seek the way home until I find it.”

“The way to find your own North Star is not to think or feel your way forward but to dissolve the thoughts and feeling that make you miserable. You don't have to learn your destiny--you already know it; you just have to unlearn the thoughts that blind you to what you know.”

“What should you do now? Find a new way. A better way. Your way. The unknown, uncharted path through this wild new world that allows you---yourself, in your uniqueness--to reclaim the full measure of your true nature.”

“If you feel stuck in your present life, if you feel no enthusiasm for anything, if you think you have no purpose or that you lost that purpose somewhere along the way, I guarantee you are living in a dungeon made of stories. And that none of those limiting stories are true.”

“A lot of my clients say they don't deserve to mope about their sad little memories while children are starving in India. I say that just because your broken arm isn't as serious as someone else's gut wound, that doesn't mean your injury isn't excruciating or doesn't require attention. If you want to help the Indian children, or make the world a better place in any other way, you have to start by becoming whole yourself.”

“Menders of all times and places have taught that silencing the thoughts in our heads and opening to the experience of the body and emotions is the basis of all healing. It's the only means by which we can reclaim our true nature or feel the subtle cues telling us how to find our way through life.”