Quotes & Sayings About Self Awareness Psychology

The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain. — William Styron

The wounding becomes sacred when we are willing to release our old stories and to become the vehicles through which the new story may emerge into time. — Jean Houston

each day's life comes with lot of puzzles, mysteries to unravel; being so conscious of life can make one so unconscious of life — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Rest as the awareness that is aware without using thought. — Loch Kelly

Biological instincts are the key to understanding how every single human being is wired. The marvelous interplay of various brain circuits creates our instinctual reality of the daily life. If you're conscious about the fact that there lies a complex yet vividly beautiful brain circuit mechanism behind every single impulse of your daily emotions, then you can choose how to react upon each of those impulses. You can thus program your behavioral response in a certain situation. — Abhijit Naskar

Stories that are truly successful are the ones where the protagonist is the bad, dirty one. The human story is a fairly dark one with painful and dangerous impulses that we all have. And that's coupled with a fortress-like psychology that most people have, protecting them from the awareness of the fact that they are part of this human experience — Ryan Blacketter

The presence of the inner feeling of emptiness directs our attention to a past experience of guilt and to our inner feeling awareness of the cause in the past. We must be sensitive to that feeling and accept it in order to chase down the cause, ferret it out, reassess the value of the experience to us in order not to further project the blame in anger outward to an external cause. — Martha Char Love

In situations where I feel unclear or I do not know what to say or do, I turn my attention within myself. Then I listen to what my intuition and to what Existence within myself wants in this moment. Through listening within in this way, an answer often comes in the form of a creative and authentic impulse to say or do something or simply being silent until Existence is ready to respond. — Swami Dhyan Giten

We must judge the tree by its fruit. The best fruits of the religious experience are the best things history has to offer. The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, and bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have all been flown for religious ideals. — William James

PTSD in its rawest form is a death sentence which causes many veterans and others to execute themselves in hope to be free. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

What you feed in yourself that grows. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

During the second half of the twentieth century, cross-fertilization among the disciplines of history, literature, sociology, and psychology led to scholarly awareness that historical accounts are not direct representations of actual events; they are, instead, interpretations of the meaning of events and are thus impacted by authorial bias, cultural assumptions, and linguistic frameworks. Historical accounts are conveyed through structures of stories, or in other words through the medium of narrative. This conceptual shift calls into question the assumption that histories recount factual descriptions of real events while stories narrate the literary artifice of imagine events. — Miranda Wilcox

But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but convention forbids! — C. G. Jung

All evil seems to arise from the desire to dominate others. Most men in our society are taught from a very early age to try to dominate. It isn't something that they think about consciously. It operates at a subconscious level. They are taught by the adults around them and their peers. Someone dominates them and they in turn try to dominate others. They do it without even realizing it and they do it without even thinking about why. It is without question. In their conscious awareness they may aspire to grandiose ideals but their actions speak for what really motivates them from a subconscious level. — Mark Alberto Yoder Nunez

We tend to be particularly unaware that we are thinking virtually all the time. The incessant stream of thoughts flowing through our minds leaves us very little respite for inner quiet. And we leave precious little room for ourselves anyway just to be, without having to run around doing things all the time. Our actions are all too frequently driven rather than undertaken in awareness, driven by those perfectly ordinary thoughts and impulses that run through the mind like a coursing river, if not a waterfall. We get caught up in the torrent and it winds up submerging our lives as it carries us to places we may not wish to go and may not even realize we are headed for.
Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us rather than to tyrannize us. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them. The prefrontal cortex allows each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent psychologists call metacognition. We know when we are angry; every emotional state comes with self-awareness attached, so that an individual can try to figure out why he's feeling what he's feeling. If the particular feeling makes no sense - if the amygdala is simply responding to a loss frame, for example - then it can be discounted. The prefrontal cortex can deliberately choose to ignore the emotional brain. — Jonah Lehrer

The human tendency toward confirmatory thinking - all of us are bias to seek information that fits what we already believe. — Valerie Tarico

It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement. — Abraham H. Maslow

It is fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead.What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new sciences,new talks, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks. — U.G. Krishnamurti

Presence is to meet another person in meditation. Presence is to invite another person in meditation. It is a meeting in love, joy, acceptance, sincerity, truth, silence and oneness. — Swami Dhyan Giten

Sanity today appears to rest very largely on a capacity to adapt to the external world - the interpersonal world, and the realm of human collectivities.

As this external human world is almost completely and totally estranged from the inner, any personal direct awareness of the inner world already has grave risks.

But since society, without knowing it, is starvingfor the inner, the demands on people to evoke it in a "safe" way, in a way that need not be taken seriously, etc., is tremendous - while the ambivalence is equally intense. Small wonder that the list of artists, in say the last 150 years, who have become shipwrecked on these reefs is so long... — R.D. Laing

Synchronicity - the sense of significance beyond chance — Elisabeth Y. Fitzhugh

A child comes from God, a child
is a gift from God, but a child is
not our possession.
Give the child unconditional love
and freedom. Respect the child, the child has its own soul. The child has its own way. — Swami Dhyan Giten

I think the reason Buddhism and Western psychology are so compatible is that Western psychology helps to identify the stories and the patterns in our personal lives, but what Buddhist awareness training does is it actually allows the person to develop skills to stay in what's going on. — Tara Brach

When we are authentic, when we act out of presence and awareness, it also gives nourishment to the inner being of people around us. — Swami Dhyan Giten

Central to Jungian psychology is the concept of "individuation," the process whereby a person discovers and evolves his Self, as opposed to his ego. The ego is a persona, a mask created and demanded by everyday social interaction, and, as such, it constitutes the center of our conscious life, our understanding of ourselves through the eyes of others. The Self, on the other hand, is our true center, our awareness of ourselves without outside interference, and it is developed by bringing the conscious and unconscious parts of our minds into harmony. — Morris Berman

The difficult thing is not to pick up the information but to recognise it - to accept it into our consciousness. Most of us find it difficult to know what we are feeling about anything. In any situation it is almost impossible to know what is really happening to us. This is one of the penalties of being human and having a brain so swarming with interesting suggestions and ideas and self-distrust. — Ted Hughes

DENIAL
Defense mechanism in which the existence of unpleasant realities is disavowed; refers to keeping out of conscious awareness any aspects of external reality that, if acknowledged, would produce anxiety. — Benjamin James Sadock

The great gift of a spiritual path is coming to trust that you can find a way to true refuge. You realize that you can start right where you are, in the midst of your life, and find peace in any circumstance. Even at those moments when the ground shakes terribly beneath you - when there's a loss that will alter your life forever - you can still trust that you will find your way home. This is possible because you've touched the timeless love and awareness that are intrinsic to who you are. — Tara Brach

When emotions are long held and extremely complex, it sometimes takes years for them to enter fully into awareness. — Sharon Salzberg

Meditation is the art of awareness. And once you are aware, out of your awareness your actions will arise - not out of conscience. Conscience is cultivated by others, by the vested interests, by the establishment. Consciousness is yours. It is individual, it is not collective. Conscience is part of the mob psychology. Consciousness gives you dignity because it gives you individuality. It gives you rebellion, it makes you capable of saying yes or no of your own accord. There is no foreign agency manipulating you in the name of religion, morality, etcetera. — Rajneesh

Awareness is the novelty of our youth — Brian Triptow

I don't have to say so because people can see it from leagues away. I am ugly, shy and anachronistic, but by dint of not wanting to be those things I have pretended to be just the opposite. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Be aware of the type of humor you use in your daily life. Just because people are laughing doesn't mean it is creating positive vibes. — Alaric Hutchinson

Be YOU. There is nothing sexier than someone who is confident enough to be themselves, quirks and all. It is often your unique nature that separates you from the crowd in the best way possible for your romantic match to notice you. — Alaric Hutchinson

I always have my reasons, even when I don't know what they are. — Eric Micha'el Leventhal

The human being is so complicated in some ways, and yet so simple in others. Sometimes, we need complex medication regimens. Yet, sometimes, we just need a good cry. — Vironika Tugaleva

We are living in a renaissance of personal writing. People are rebalancing the impersonalization endemic to modern society with an increase in personal introspection. We have enough common psychology under our belts to know that psychology doesn't explain or heal everything and that it isn't the fulfillment of awareness, but its beginning. We are undergoing a shift in paradigms in which we are trying to develop new models for humanness and human responsibility. This is no small task. Our individual lives are placed under increasing pressure to respond adequately to both inner and outer change. — Christina Baldwin

...the rationale for the existence of literature lies precisely in its ability to work on issues that concern us deeply. And it does so in a way that keeps our motivation at its highest intensity. Literature is fuel for 'hot cognition.' One may presume that imaginative literature is a property that all human cultures possess and as such may provide humans with an evolutionary advantage. — Mette Hjort

One can ask why the I has to appear in the cogito {Descartes' argument "I think therefore I am.}, since the cogito, if used rightly, is the awareness of pure consciousness, not directed at any fact or action. In fact the I is not necessary here, since it is never united directly to consciousness. One can even imagine a pure and self-aware consciousness which thinks of itself as impersonal spontaneity. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Spontaneity in the therapeutic work arises when the therapist can allow creative and authentic impulses to arise from moment to moment from the inner being, from the meditative quality within, from the inner emptiness, from the capacity to surrender to life. Then the therapist becomes less of a technician and more of an artist in the therapeutic work. It is then when the therapist and client meets in awareness without any barrier between. — Swami Dhyan Giten

The fear of failure is not just the greatest fear of man, it is the fear of man. All other fears are avatars of the fear of failure. — Anup Kochhar

Emptiness and the not-"I" is the quality that arises when the therapist consciously moves out of his own way without hindering the therapeutic process through his own ideas, attitudes, expectations and concepts. He is present, available and responds with the truth in the moment. — Swami Dhyan Giten

Excuses are a promise of repetition. — Stefan Molyneux

As it almost always was when I'd been too self-centered to see the truth of the matter, I felt impossibly foolish. — Jaida Jones

Through others we become ourselves. — Lev S. Vygotsky

What we do not confront, we inhabit.
What we do not reject, we accept.
What we do not fight, we become. — Stefan Molyneux

Our immune system is evolving through trials of use in fighting illnesses and the bombardment of our modern world toxins and that this evolution not only engages the strengthening of the body and it's T-Cell use but also our emotional intelligence and a higher awareness of our human nature and its original DNA coding as a highly self-reflective and intelligence evolving entity. — Martha Char Love

Each time you meet an old emotional pattern with presence, your awakening to truth can deepen. There's less identification with the self in the story and more ability to rest in the awareness that is witnessing what's happening. You become more able to abide in compassion, to remember and trust your true home. Rather than cycling repetitively through old conditioning, you are actually spiraling toward freedom. — Tara Brach

These moments of nocturnal prowling leave an indelible impression. Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass in an unutterably menacing thing. Your breath comes in shallow bursts; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing. There is a little mechanical click as the safety-catch of your pistol is taken off; the sound cuts straight through your nerves. Your teeth are grinding on the fuse-pin of the hand-grenade. The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsmen, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape.
p. 71 — Ernst Junger