“Anxiety is one of the most contagious emotions – that’s why it always takes down groups of people, not just individuals.⁣⁣”

Courage is listening, learning, unlearning, knowing when to lead, and knowing when to let others lead.⁣

If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.

Hope is a function of struggle.

Vulnerability is not about winning or losing. It’s having the courage to show up even when you can’t control the outcome.

Feeling and owning our own shit instead of working it out on others is key.

Nothing has transformed my life more than realizing that it’s a waste of time to evaluate my worthiness by weighing the reaction of the people in the stands.

Staying vulnerable is a risk we have to take if we want to experience connection.

Our choices affect everyone around us. There is no such thing as “individual risk” or “individual wellness.

Surviving this crisis will take a shift in mindset, and that’s tougher than we think – especially when we’re afraid. ⁣

If you own this story you get to write the ending.

We can’t call ourselves free or brave when we keep running from the truth.

Our ability to live a life of love and meaning, to make the world a braver and kinder place.

The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it. It’s our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows.

Always straddling the tension and trying not to tap out.⁣

You are imperfect, you are wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.

Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.

The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.

The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.

A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.

What anxiety means is it’s as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It’s what makes us human beings.

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.

I pass for a hypersensitive, reclusive neurotic, which I may well be, but I hope the year won’t come when my anxieties and fatigue will destroy my love of this life, of all the things that inspire me–a line of music, a face in a Vermeer portrait, a character in an opera, or a model born in Harlem.

Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.

Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence.