Quotes about Self-awareness

you learn how to recover from falling by falling! It is precisely by falling off the bike many times that you eventually learn what the balance feels like. The skater pushing both right and left eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with.

People who know who they are find it the easiest to know who they aren't.

Shadow work is humiliating work, but properly so. If you do not eat such humiliations with regularity and make friends with … all those who reveal to you and convict you of your own denied faults…, you will certainly remain in the first half of life forever.

He did not come to change God's mind about us. It did not need changing. Jesus came to change our minds about God—and about ourselves—and about where goodness and evil really lie.

This needed work is indeed "spiritual warfare," as the desert monks called it, since it takes conscious and sustained struggle to be aware of the shadow self—which only takes ever more subtle disguises the "holier" you get.

When the self is surrendered—when we're not too tied to our own agenda, anger, fear, or desire to make things happen our way—we are truly open to love. But be aware of the heart's propensity to clench and close.

It takes uncommon humility to carry both the dark and the light side of things. The only true perfection available to humans is the honest acceptance of our imperfection.

There is a good and needed "narcissism," if you want to call it that. You have to first have an ego structure to then let go of it and move beyond it.

One of the major problems in the spiritual life is our attachment to our own self-image—either positively or negatively created. We have to begin with some kind of identity, but the trouble is that we confuse this idea of ourselves with who we actually are in God. Ideas about things are not the things in themselves. We all have to start by forming a self-image, but the problem is our attachment to it, our need to promote it and protect it and have others like it. What a trap!

we are product of our past but we don't have to be prisoners of it.

Remember how far you've come, not just how far you have to go. You are not where you want to be, but neither are you where you used to be.

Many of your relationship problems are not really relationship problems. They're personal problems that spill over into relationships.