Tag: the Self

You Are a Flowing River

“Don’t push the river; it flows by itself” Fritz Perls The self is fluid, and constantly changing, said learned Eastern philosophers of yore. Your thoughts come and go, emotions change, and although you think of yourself as the same person across time, actually you are never the same. In fact, in some ways, you have no self at all. Now, this may sound nihilistic to many people. But, as it happens,...
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Kill Your Darlings

William Faulkner famously advised writers to edit fearlessly, to remove particularly those sentences that they loved.  Faulkner knew that the narrative and cohesiveness of a novel is ruined by sentences that are incongruent, no matter how beautifully written. Kill your darlings, he said.  If Faulkner were a psychiatrist, he would have said the same thing in psychotherapy. The goal of all growth oriented...
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Living Lighter

We all have expectations and demands from life. When they are not met, we feel sad, angry and hurt. For many people still,  unfortunately, this sense of deprivation is real, and tragic –  those who don’t have  food, water or shelter. But for a growing number of people in the new India, this sense of deprivation is not real, but a construct of the mind. After all, no matter how much you achieve, you feel...
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The River

When you find yourself, you will not find an object. You will not find something that you can point to and say, “This is who I am.” When you find yourself, you will find a flowing...
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Why care?

Why care what I think about you? What I like about you are qualities that I value in myself. What I don’t like about you are qualities that I dislike in myself. My liking or disliking of you is mostly about me, and very little about...
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Insight

She looked at the mirror and saw herself looking back. It seemed as if she were being observed, and a bit critically at that. She reminded herself, “Those are my eyes looking at me. It is I who is doing the observing.” For a moment, a glimpse of the truth. Then, she closed her eyes...
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