300+ Brianna Wiest Quotes: Infinite Stream of Life-Changing Wisdom & Inspiration

Brianna Wiest (born October 11, 1992) is an American writer, author, and poet. Her work on mindfulness leads her to fame, spirituality, and emotional intelligence.
Brianna Wiest’s quotes have that kind of transformative power, and in this comprehensive collection, you’ll encounter over 300 + pieces of her life-changing wisdom. This article will help you to understand  her messages, which focus on resilience, and personal growth. These powerful life quotes to live by will inspire you to grow, heal, and embrace every moment with purpose.

  Let’s be clear about something: To put an end to your self-sabotaging behavior absolutely means that change is on the horizon. Your new life is going to cost you your old one. It’s going to cost you your comfort zone and your sense of direction. It’s going to cost you relationships and friends. It’s going to cost you being liked and understood. It doesn’t matter. The people who are meant for you are going to meet you on the other side. You’re going to build a new comfort zone around the things that actually move you forward. Instead of being liked, you’re going to be loved. Instead of being understood, you’re going to be seen. All you’re going to lose is what was built for a person you no longer are. Remaining attached to your old life is the first and final act of self-sabotage, and releasing it is what we must prepare for to truly be willing to see real change.

Your new life is going to cost you your old one.

  Will you continue to replay the memories of yesterday, or will you meet the moment and make the most of what is in front of you now?

Real growth is quiet.

What if you knew that you were never meant to get it right the first time, but to build it through trial and error? How much more grace would you give yourself, how much more human might you be?

 When you do not know what is next, you enter the realm of infinite potential

  What if there is a path for you that is greater than what you can envision? What if there is a life for you that is more than you would even know to ask for? What if you are inherently and unknowingly limited by your old perspectives, your outdated ideas of what is possible? What if all the discomfort within your being is simply trying to redirect you to a place beyond anything you’ve considered before? What if there is more than you know? What if there are things out there so good you don’t even know you’re waiting for them?

You are allowed to outgrow people.

Healing is not linear.

Rumi told us that the wound is the place where the light can enter. Khalil Gibran told us that out of suffering emerges the strongest souls, that the most massive characters are seared with scars. Napoleon Hill told us that every adversity, every failure, and every heartache carries with it the seeds of an equal or greater benefit.

Stop waiting for clarity

  Discomfort is the doorway to growth.

  You become what you believe.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross told us that the most beautiful people we have known are those “who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with gentleness, and a deep loving concern.” That “beautiful people do not just happen.”

15: When Joseph Campbell outlined the hero’s journey for us, the premise was that at the moment of the deepest and most unmoving difficulty, the protagonist recognized that it was they who must change. That which seemed to derail the path was the pinnacle moment at which the true path was actually revealed.

16: In each case, the epiphany is that the presence of the challenge is the initiator. If we are lucky, our lives will continue to grow as we are presented with new paths, and various obstacles among them. To heal is not to arrive at a place where we are absolved of that difficulty, but where we no longer interpret the presence of it as our finality, our ending. Rather, we come to see it is as yet another beginning in support of the continual unfolding of all we will one day know ourselves to be.

17: In a world where most of us die before we are dead, where most of us hyper-fixate on what we cannot control and leave to ruins everything that we can, where most of us fear our humanness and our vulnerability — I think you find the courage to try. I hope you will come to see that just maybe, beneath the journey you fear to take is the life you had been waiting for, all along.

The greatest act of self love is to no longer accept a life you are unhappy with.

Your habits shape your future.

Let it be hard but don’t let it stop you.

You don’t have to have it all figured out.

A list of people to thank this year —

The friends who healed hearts they didn’t break. Chosen family. The person who listened to you talk about the same situation over and over until you healed. The person who encouraged you. The person who pushed you. The person who loved you from a distance. The person who you could call at any hour. The person you grew closer to. The person you had to step away from. The person who inspired you to begin the next era of your life. The person who reminded you who you are. Yourself.

 The real love story is always you and you. It was how you walked alone and learned what you needed to carry. It was how you began to see through your own eyes and not someone else’s. It was how you began to dig joy beneath your cynicism, how you slowly built your desires into form. It was how you learned what you like and don’t, and what you came here to be. The real love story was always how you opened your heart to yourself.

 The practice of your own love is what builds inside you a landing place, a space within which you can meet the love that is trying to greet you, and accept it, and hold it, and grow with it. Your own love is the beginning, and the end, of it all.

 We are made to think that love is something we are given, when in truth it is something we create. It is something we offer out from inside of ourselves, something we allow to fuse and form with someone else’s. Our own love is the engine of our joy, and what we love well is what we find the most meaning in, the most beauty. The pieces of our lives that seem to overflow are the same ones that we have set an intention to seek the good within, though there is so much negativity that we could think on instead.

 That is what it means to love ourselves first — to understand that in the end, the story of our lives is a journey of one. We come alone and we go alone, and though the chance to have our paths run parallel with other human beings is a beautiful gift, it is our own love that holds a torch through the unknown, through the mystery, through the lingering of questions and the finding of answers. It is our own love that will rise with us each day and put us to bed each night. It is our own love that is an offering not only to ourselves, but to the ones we hold closest.

 It is our own love we must practice.

 It is the hardest thing you will ever have to do, and it will also be the most important: stop giving your love to those who aren’t ready to love you. Stop having hard conversations with people who don’t want to change. Stop showing up for people who are indifferent about your presence. Stop prioritizing people who make you an option. Stop loving people who aren’t ready to love you.

 I know that your instinct is to do whatever you can to earn the good graces of everyone you can, but that is also the impulse that will rob you of your time, your energy and your sanity.

 When you start showing up to your life wholly and completely, with joy and interest and commitment, not everyone is going to be ready to meet you there. It doesn’t mean you need to change who you are. It means you need to stop loving people who aren’t ready to love you. 

 The most precious, important thing that you have in your life is your energy. It is not your time that is limited, it is your energy. What you give it to each day is what you will create more and more of in your life. What you give your time to is what will define your existence. 

 Don’t waste another moment on those who treat you as an option when you have made them a priority. On trying to save those who don’t want to be saved, or convince them that they do. On trying to write a novel of justifications as to why you are or are not suited for one another.

 There are those who are simply not for you, and that is a truth that can stand alone. The sooner you accept it, the sooner you will be free to join the ones who are — the ones who have been waiting all along.

 The deepest form of self-care is building a life you are in love with, and that is very often an unbeautiful thing.

 It means making a spreadsheet of your debt and and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer running from the problem and calling the distraction your solution. It means looking your failures and disappointments in the eye and restrategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living in a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t. It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life — not escape from it.

 It is the willingness to see loving yourself not as a matter of infatuation, but as caretaking, that will change your life. Seeing self-love not as eros, but something deeper than what’s on the surface, will tip the scales eternally in your favor. Because it is that love — the unconditional, practical, grounded kind — that does not just last, but roots, and makes you stronger than you were before. It is that kind of love that does not always give you what you want, but rather, supplies what you need. It tells the truth. It does not cater to your self-defeat, but reimagines your becoming, your way forward. It serves the sake of your future self, the person you most hope to be.

 This is the kind of love that can think long-term. The kind of love that knows what you need on the simplest and most fundamental level. Giving this to yourself requires the grace to endure the temporary discomfort in favor of the greater peace you foster by taking upon yourself your own real self-care.

 Your new life is going to cost you your old one your comfort zone your sense of direction and sometimes even your relationships but it will be worth it.

 So rather than attempting to see yourself the way you’d want to imagine someone you are romantically in love with — as perfect, and beyond your own humanness — try to see yourself the way someone who actually loves you does. To take into consideration your goodness, and allow it to not erase the unseemly parts, but make them also worth loving, and holding, and seeing to the other side.

 This is your evergreen reminder that the greatest act of self-love is to no longer accept a life you do not like.

 And to remember that the pathway to that change — though inspired at the onset, is often more tedious, more unknown, and more challenging than most care to consider. However, there is nothing kinder you can do for yourself, or for your life, than to start organizing your feelings into what feels good and what does good, as opposed to just what feels good, or not. The very things that often bring us the greatest peace and wellness and stability long-term are uncomfortable at the start.

 We can only find what we are meant for, when we stop running from what we are not.

 It is hard to be in the wrong relationship, and it is hard to be in the right one. It is hard to stay at a job you hate, and it is hard to pursue your dreams. It is hard to be at war with yourself, and it is hard to heal. It is hard to resist your impulses, and it is hard to be controlled by them. It is hard to stay as you are, and it is hard to be vulnerable, to risk, to leap, to embrace the unknown.

 Everything is hard in some way, but you get to decide what you’re willing to hurt for, what you’re willing to try for, what you’re willing to work for. You get to choose your hard.

 We often organize experiences into “feels good” and “feels bad,” when we need to sort them into “feels good,” and “does good,” then “feels bad,” and “does bad.” Sometimes, the things that feel bad for us at the start are what are best for us in the long-run; and vice-versa. Sometimes, when we only live by what feels good in the moment, we lose our longevity, our foresight. In an attempt to be most free, we become more stuck. It’s a fine balance between trusting your instincts, honoring your heart, and still knowing that many of your feelings will continuously draw you back into the same old cycles, patterns and self-defeating habits that have kept you where you are. At times, you need to trust your emotions. At times, you need to trust your higher knowledge, your logic, your reason. You have to learn how to keep both aspects of your functioning within their own lanes. You will sabotage love if you overthink it, because it’s a matter of the heart. You will sabotage health if you trust your feelings over your knowledge, because it is a matter of the head.

The moment you stop chasing validation is the moment you start building a life that actually feels like your own.

 But everything comes with a cost. When you say “yes” to one thing, you say “no” to another. And that’s where the matter of your free will, your value system, your greater vision, must come into place. You have to decide what is going to matter to you, and what you are willing to fight for. Then you have to decide to let go of the rest.

 You are the most constant thing in your life. Befriend yourself first. Invest in yourself first. Become yourself first. The rest will come together in time.

 A book you read this weekend can teach you something that changes your life for decades to come. A decision you make tomorrow can do the same. When you get better at relationships, your entire life becomes more connected. When you get better at managing your emotions, your entire life becomes more leveled-out. When you get better at managing your money, your entire life becomes more stable. When you get better at managing your reactions, things last. They last because you know how to take care of them — because you first learned to take care of you.

 You are the most constant relationship in your own life, you are the most constant presence in your own life, you are the most common denominator in every experience you have ever had, and will ever have. Investing in yourself is an evergreen task, the ripple effects of which are often greater than you can imagine. You have to decide how you want to be. What you are going to value, what is going to matter. You have to choose, and cultivate, the kind of person you are going to become, because a beautiful life rarely happens on accident. You are your own vessel, and the way you build it changes the way you experience everything — every last thing that will ever come your way.

 You have to decide which version of you is going to show up to the days you are dreaming about. Which version of you is going to meet the love of your life, which version of you will create your legacy project, which version of you will step on the flight or open the door to your future home for the very first time. And that work will not instantaneously click into place just because you have arrived at an end-goal, or a milestone. You are the foundational element of every single thing you will ever touch and see and feel and know, and that is why it matters.

 The variable is not whether or not the future will arrive — the choice is what version of you shows up to meet it.

 Real change is something that happens on the fringe of your life.

 It’s the tiny glimmers that peer through and reach you, unexpectedly. The small moments where you think of just one more thing you could try. Fate is often stumbled upon. The pieces pull together in ways that are often so quiet, so unassuming, in the heat of your fear, you can look right past them. You may know at the deepest level that you are meant for something more, or different, and yet don’t recognize that the journey of a hundred miles is composed of steps — small steps that are insignificant until they are taken consistently.

Real growth often feels like losing people losing habits and losing parts of yourself that you thought you needed.

 These little things grow to become something bigger than the sum of their parts. Within your process, you rediscover your confidence, your motivation. The bigger picture begins to cohere itself, and once again, you have something to believe in, to fight for, to hold onto. You realize, slowly but surely, that the fork in the road was a matter of you not knowing how to engage with the life you have found yourself in, and learning to do so is the character development required to be able to immerse yourself in it completely.

You cannot keep choosing what is easy if you want a life that is meaningful fulfilling and aligned with who you truly are.

 If you attempt to seek the greater purpose or impetus that this unlikely moment may be acting as, you will always find it. And you will find it not because it is always easily or inevitably there, but because that is what the human spirit does — it finds, it makes. And while your dead-end might seem like a road in which you were unceremoniously left at the end of, it’s more the result of a world that slowly taught you to deny the wiring in your brain that seeks to form connection, that recognizes opportunity, and acts. You have only ever been asked to do what you can with what you have, and what you have is exactly what you need, even in the lack, even in the blank spaces.

Healing does not mean the damage never existed it means the damage no longer controls your life.

 What is not there, or has not been; what has left or has not seemingly come as easily as you imagined it would, is also offering a sort of framing, a contrast, a necessity.

 The most unlikely moments often contain within them a piece of yourself you have spent a lifetime looking for. Find it. Carry it with you toward your next horizon.

Sometimes the hardest part is not letting go of what hurts but letting go of what once felt right.

 I hope this is the year you change your life. Not in the superficial way. Not in the way of moving things around on the surface and wondering why nothing feels much different underneath. Not in the way of conformity. Not in the way that aligns you most closely with all of the traditional emblems of success the ones that leave you smiling beside your accomplishments but feeling so pinched with regret.

 I  hope this is the year you change your life in all the ways you have always secretly wanted to. The year you discover that those quiet dreams that have lingered for so long are actually echoes of parallel lives, sister stories, asking you to tell them, to leap toward them, to move them out of your mind and into a touchable, physical reality.

You are not behind in life you are exactly where you need to be to learn what you need to learn next.

 I hope this is the year you stop dancing around the perimeter of who you intended to be, of what you came here to do. I hope this is the year you learn to defy what’s reasonable and build sense into a world of your own design. I hope this is the year you discover that the floor does not only hold up if you remain where you are standing. With each step you take, and wherever you may go, it will rise to meet you — as it always has, and always will.

 I hope this is the year you find the bravest, boldest kind of courage. I hope this is the year you walk into the life that was always meant to be yours.

 Your great vision of your life quieted over time by the world. It is once again time to listen. It is once again time to live.

 Not everything you lose is a loss. Some things are freedom. Some things are second chance. Some things are a miracl in disguise. Some things are a detachment long-needed, a clarity brought to blurry eyes. Some things are an intervention. Some things are the unexpected answer to a long chanted prayer. Some things are a healing. Some things are a becoming. Some things are planned long before you ever came to be. Some things are a devastation, but others are a kind of vital guidance, the kind of course-correction you did not even know you needed. The kind you did not even realize you were asking for all along.

 The way you speak to yourself becomes the way you experience your life so choose your words with care.

 When we are not writing the story of this chapter, we give our minds no choice but to continue re-reading the last.

 We do not let go by standing in the ruins, running our minds in circles trying to more deeply understand how the pieces came apart. We let go when we clear what is beneath us and begin building a new life in its place.

 There is a time for sadness and at time to grieve. There is a time to feel and a time to reflect. A time to seek wisdom and a time to learn. Then there is a time to simply go on.

You do not need to have everything figured out to move forward you just need the courage to take the next step.

 And go on is what all of us will have to do, not just once, but at many points of our lives. Because the truth about loss is that it is not something that happens when we fail, but something that happens as we grow. It is as natural as the changing of seasons. It can be as effortless as an exhale, or as painstaking as a death to the selves we used to be.

 If we do not learn how to let go, we do not ever learn how to live. We did not come here to stand still. To hold within our hearts and heads the details of everything we have ever known and loved and wanted and felt and wondered about.

 You will realize that not everything you lose is a loss sometimes it is a necessary step toward becoming who you were meant to be.

 We came here to experience, we came here to grow. We came here to learn that nothing presses us to release it unless something new is imminently waiting to arrive.

 It is very hard to show up as the person you want to be when you are surrounded by an environment that makes you feel like a person you aren’t.

 Either way, mental strength is not just hoping that nothing ever goes wrong. It is believing that we have the capacity to handle it if it does.

 The real glow up isn’t proving the people from your past wrong. It is finally feeling so content and hopeful about your future that you stop thinking about them entirely.

The life you want is built in the small choices you make every day not in one big moment of change

 Mental strength is a practice. Though many of us see it as a fixed trait — something we were either born with, or not — it is something that we can develop within ourselves over time.

You cannot heal in the same environment that made you sick sometimes distance is the only way forward

 When we think of mental strength, we assume that it correlates with an emotional steadiness, as though we may be able to move through life less affected by what’s happening around us. The truth is that real mental strength is the capacity to respond to a range of human emotion and experience without becoming stuck in one or another. When we understand that it’s not about what we experience, but how we react to it, we begin to see the role we play in the unfolding of our own lives. We begin to see that though we cannot influence nor create objective reality indefinitely, we get an almost complete say over how we choose to interpret the moments that we meet, the things we go through, and the people we become because of them.

Growth is choosing to stay committed to yourself even when it becomes uncomfortable lonely or uncertain.

 Rather than assuming your inherent emotionality makes you weaker, understand that to be sensitized to life is a gift in itself. It means that you are aware and connected to what’s happening around you. It means you care. It means things matter. Now, you get to do the work of developing yourself into the kind of person who can build, and nurture, and repair, and move forward in authenticity.

 You receive opportunities to practice your mental strength every day. In the same way that your body must be both exercised and rested in order to achieve physical health, your mind operates similarly. When we choose to endure internal challenges for the sake of making ourselves stronger, what we avoid is the long-term challenges that inevitably arise because we did not take care of ourselves. The body, and mind, are not so different, in this regard.

 Your future depends on what you are willing to let go of today not what you are trying to hold onto

 You are not failing because you are feeling. You are being presented with an opportunity to expand your consciousness, understand your power, and choose to become the person you know you really are inside — one day at a time.

 I am walking through a garden my younger self planted for me.

 If we want gardens, we must become the gardeners. If we want love, we must be loving. If we want change, we must alter our own course. If we want connection, we must reach. If we want place, we must be steady. If we want home, we must nurture a house. If we want to love who we are, we must become who we most respect, and admire.

The most powerful transformation happens when you stop trying to control everything and start trusting the process.

 Everything heals and grows when it is loved well. People, too.

 Every piece of you that hurts is a part of you that wants to be loved but does not know how to ask for it, or how to receive it, or how to allow it to seep into the openings where the losses and the lessons left caverns the size of your hope, your wide-eye awe, your child self, your true self; and in their place left hardness, and avoidance, and cynicism, and fear.

You are allowed to change your mind your direction and your priorities as you grow into a new version of yourself.

 When we don’t know how to say that there’s a part of us that wants to be seen, we often find an unconscious way to require that it is noticed. But if we began to recognize the most unseemly parts of ourselves not as the pieces that need to be amended or corrected or rejected — rather, the ones that most need to be nurtured and nourished and loved — we would transform. It would all transform.

 Every piece of you that hurts is a part of you that is asking you to pay attention to it. By bearing witness, by being present, by spending time. We think that loving something means to be unconditionally permissive when it is often in fact just the willingness to pay attention to the pieces that nobody else notices. To give the light of our awareness in the most tiny, ordinary ways.

Peace comes when you stop forcing things that are not meant for you and start accepting what truly is.

 Everything heals and grows when it is loved well because everything reveals its true and whole nature to us when we care enough about it to see the perfection within it. Things tend to meet us at the level of our expectation of them. When we decide to look at the ugliest parts of ourselves as the ones most deserving of love, they become the avenues to the deepest and fullest experience of being loved.

 We come to find that the purpose was never to reach a completed state and then allow the floodgates to open; rather, to open the floodgates and let them fill us up from the inside out. To show us that cheap love walks beside us at our easiest, but deep love finds us at our lowest, and brings us back out into the light.

 When things want to die, but you keep them alive, they slowly kill you inside.

 We often grip most tightly to the things that are not really meant for us because, at some level, we know that if we are unattached, they will fall away. But those are not the things investing in, anyway — the things that only exist because we force them. When we have the courage to let go, we see most clearly what is there because it is so essentially a part of us, so deeply and intricately and undeniably connected.

The person you are becoming will require you to release the person you used to be.

 Sometimes the right path is not the easiest one but it will lead you to the life you have been searching for

 When we let go, we get to see what is real.

 The right time to let go is always.

 The second you begin to wonder whether or not it is time for you to open your palms and stop gripping is the exact moment that you should.

 Because the things that are really right for you — the ones that resonate, and land — they will remain. They will not require closed fists to keep them. They will not need you to tint them with a rose-colored lens. They will not ask you to list off all the reasons that make them right. They will just be.

 Letting go is not an event, it is a practice.

 We learn how to do it with the small stuff, so when the big stuff comes, we are ready.

 Letting go is not actually a matter of releasing, or pushing away. It is a process of opening our hands and staying still and allowing things to show us their true nature. When we are no longer painting our love and hope and idealizations upon those things, we get to see what they actually are. From there, we get to choose.

 When you finally have the courage to stand in the quiet for a while, a new life often arrives to meet you at the doorway. You see things you hadn’t before. You imagine things you didn’t before. You try for things you wouldn’t before. In that surrendered place, you begin to find your way back to yourself.

You cannot start the next chapter of your life if you keep rereading the last one and hoping the ending will change.

. Your growth will require you to let go of people places and habits that no longer align with who you are becoming.

. The more you try to hold onto what is not meant for you the more you block what is truly meant to find you.

. Becoming yourself is not about adding more it is about removing everything that is not truly you.

. You will not always feel ready but that does not mean you are not capable of creating the life you want.

Your new life is going to cost you your old one.

It’s going to cost you your comfort zone and your sense

of direction.

It’s going to cost you relationships and friends.

It’s going to cost you being liked and understood.

It doesn’t matter.

 When you let go, you notice that the things that are right for you never leave you. They always return, clearer and stronger than they were before. The only thing you’re actually letting go of is the idea that you are not enough. The only thing you’re actually letting go of is the idea that life was meant to just be lukewarm. The only thing you’re actually letting go is the assumption that you could not stand on your own, even for the briefest period of time. The only thing you are letting go of is valuing how things appear behind other people’s eyes over how they feel in your own heart. The only thing you’re actually letting go of is the false assumption that in place of what has gone, new and greater things could not arrive. The only thing you’re actually letting go of is the idea that all you’d ever deserve are the things that do not reach back.

 When you do not know what to do next, you do nothing.

 You open up space and you redirect your attention and you let yourself get lost in something that is not the question for which there seems to be no clear or simple answer.

 Every time you move your focus onto something else, you let go a little more. That is when things will either fully release, or come back to you with complete clarity.

 When it is no longer you who is keeping something alive, you get to see whether or not it is viable on its own. You get to see what stays. What strengthens. What becomes something even better than it was before. What is easy. What is supportive. What guides you more deeply into the person you most intend to be. You get to see what rises back up to meet you.

 You start to let go on the day you take one step toward building a new life and then let yourself lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and cry for as many hours as you need.

 Happiness is not something you can chase. It is something you have to allow.

 Happiness is your natural state. That means you will return to it on your own if you allow the other feelings you want to experience to come up, be felt, be processed, and not resisted.

 Happiness is not an epiphany, it’s a practice. As much as your conscious mind may tell you that it’s all you want to feel, and as often as it tallies up and lists out all of the reasons for which you should already feel that way — all of the answered prayers, all of the opportunities, all of the facets of a genuinely good life that you logically know you have — the truth is that the subconscious mind, the greater piece of your inner working, wants to feel what is familiar. You’d be surprised at what it considers familiar.

 If you have spent years of your life on a healing journey, familiar is the breaking and the mending, the process of losing and finding, of ending and beginning. Familiar is healing, not being healed. If you have spent years of your life resolving the tension inside of you by solving other people’s problems, by being the universal sounding board, the unpaid therapist, the person in everyone’s life that becomes simultaneously responsible for them and their wellbeing and their future, familiar is the peace you find through changing what’s outside of you, not what’s within. Familiar is fixing, and fixing requires us to always see an issue, or to get very close to those who are likewise seeking a way to export their hurt onto a willing soul. If you have spent years of your life in fear, in lack, in a constant worry about what is next and whether or not you will be okay, familiar is uncertainty. Familiar is the state of acquiring, and still not having acquired enough.

 Mostly, if you have spent years of your life thinking that happiness is joyfulness — that high-like feeling you get when something truly tremendous is happening — then you have probably likewise spent all of the downtime between those peak states reaching, and wanting, and wondering, why they are not more quickly and consistently arriving. Familiar has become unhappiness, because you do not really understand happiness.

 You did not get it wrong. No, you did not make a mistake. You stumbled into just the person who would let you experience love at the level at which you were. You discovered that you could make a home in many houses; that no matter what you had to offer, there were others out there who needed to receive what you could create, what you could give. And that when it was time to let go of what was, the next thing would always catch you. The road would always rise.

 How beautiful, to think that you were given the chance to know love not as only the final and most perfect version of yourself, but other ones along the way, too. How beautiful, to think that you were able to know home not just as the final place you would ever exist, but in little alcoves, in little corners, in little flats and apartments and all the things that held you along the way. How beautiful, to realize that the world would be so eager to meet you no matter how you showed up, just as long as you did. And how beautiful, that when you had outgrown what you’d once been a match for, life would not allow you to settle, or to stagnate. That love would continue to pull you toward ever-brighter and more expansive horizons.

 Yes, the way you once saw something, or someone, may have changed. It may have changed faster than you ever anticipated that it could, or in ways that you never would have imagined that it might. But that does not lessen, and does not negate, what you thought you knew at the beginning, what you imagined that you saw. You were right — it was the next step, even if it was not the last step. There was something within that experience that you had to learn, needed to know — even if you are still uncovering what that is, even if you are still piecing together the clarity.

 So if you are gazing toward the future, and you do not know what to do, please remember that no matter what you choose, and no matter where you go — life will meet you there. It will meet you because it is within you, because it is you.

 Sometimes, you get what you want. Other times, you get a lesson in patience, timing, alignment, empathy, compassion, faith, perseverence, humility, trust, meaning, awareness, resistance, purpose, clarity, grief, beauty, and life. Either way, you win.

 The hard truth is that we are often softened, and deepened, by the moments life doesn’t turn out the way we anticipated, the way we hoped, the way we planned. The truth is that we learn more from what we do not receive than what we do. The truth is that the contrasts make us more whole than we were before. The heaviness sensitizes us in such a way that we come to comprehend the light.

 The valleys in our lives can either be a waiting room, a suffering, or a preparation period. We get to choose what we do with defeat. We get to decide whether or not what hurts will simply burden and then jade us, or if it will catalyze us — if we will alchemize a sometimes brutal reality into an appreciation of our temporary, stinging, gorgeous, fleeting, surreal, confusing, perfect, chaotic, ecstatic time alive.

The things you love about others are the things you love about yourself. The things you hate about others are the things you cannot see in yourself.

The greatest act of self-love is to no longer accept a life you are unhappy with.

Happy people know suffering more than anyone else, and that’s how they can see just how damn beautiful their lives are. It’s because they’ve seen the depths.

 You are not waiting on another person, or for the right timing, or for everything to magically fall into place. You are waiting until you feel ready to live within the questions, to not need every answer, and to know that this life does not come to us to be fully understood, but fully experienced — in every direction we can possibly reach.

 You are not for everyone, and everyone is not for you. That’s what makes it so special when you do find the few people with whom you have a love relationship: you’ll know how precious it is because you’ve experienced what it isn’t.

People will come and go as they are scheduled to. Let them. Holding on does not affect them, only you.

 …But the longer you stay small, tucked into the familiarity of the people who use you as a cushion, a back burner option, a therapist and a ploy for their emotional labor, the longer you keep yourself out of the community you crave.

Many people say that you have to love yourself first before you can love others, but really, if you learn to love others, you will learn to love yourself.

 Nobody in the history of existence ever experienced happiness because everything was perfect. Happiness is a state that only overcomes us when we pay attention long enough and deeply enough to all that’s temporary — how fleeting, how delicate, how fast it is passing us by. Only when we pay attention long enough to how many answered prayers we are living inside — how much we have, how much we can do. Only when we realize how little others are evaluating our path and place in life the way that we are — how free we are, how well received, how loved. It’s all that is not present, all that is heavy, all that is haunting, that contrasts the beauty and makes it more alive, recognizable, and real. Nobody in the history of existence experienced happiness because they had perfection, only because they developed the ability to see perfection within a moment before it passed them by.

 In retrospect, you will see how clearly and intricately you have been guided. How the right things always arrived at the right time, even when you were absolutely convinced that they would not. How the wrong things left no matter how tightly you gripped, how hard you tried, how much you attempted to force a lesson into a lifetime.

The key to finding happiness in this life is realizing that the only way to overcome is to transcend; to find happiness in the simple pleasures, to master the art of just being.

 Everything unfamiliar is also uncomfortable — no matter how good it is for us. That is what makes change so scary. Not that we are actually afraid to try new things or have new experiences or press up against the limits of our perception and defy them, but that we grow to prefer a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven.

 When we reestablish our comfort zones around the things we actually want, things start to come together effortlessly. It’s cause-and-effect. It’s inevitability. If we get comfortable with consistency, eventually, the right things align. The idea is born, the love is found, the next step is taken, and the new path has begun. In time, it culminates to becomes the foundation upon which we build our new lives — including all of the pieces of the past we’ve loved, and all the new ones we did not even know we would come to find.

 In a world where most people settle, happiness is a foreign thing.

 People can understand milestones more than they do meaning. They understand following the course over trailblazing toward your soul. They understand the love that looks right over the one that feels right. They understand what it is to pull your hope by the root, and plant sense in its place. They understand a plan that is followed, rather than a life that is engineered; one that is dreamt, and built.

 Because when you are following your heart, you are going to spend a lot of time in the unknown. You’re not always going to see what’s next because you’re working with an open-ended resource. You’re not always going to be able to move in a linear trajectory, because some things have to be revisited, revised, picked back up, and carried forward. Some things pique your interest and within them, a piece of your future is formed. When you are following your heart, you understand that you don’t always know what you don’t know. You’re not working just with the world you can see, but the one you might imagine.

 And so if you are in a place right now where you are convinced that nothing is going to work out, this is your sign that you will find everything you fear you won’t. That you will have love, have work, have home, have purpose, even if, right now, it feels as though more is coming apart than coming together.

 Because right now, the storm that’s formed did not arrive to obstruct your path, but to clear your vision. Right now, you are getting a chance to choose from your heart, and not your head. You are getting a chance to pick what’s real to you over what’s real to others. You are getting a chance to defy what you thought life would be, and enter an entirely new realm instead.

 You may believe that living life to the fullest is seeing every country in the world and quitting your job on a whim and falling recklessly in love, but it’s really just knowing how to be where your feet are. It’s learning how to take care of yourself, how to make a home within your own skin. It’s learning how to build a simple life you are proud of. A life most fully lived is not always composed of the things that rock you awake, but those that slowly assure you its’ okay to slow down. That you don’t always have to prove yourself. That you don’t need to fight forever, or constantly want more. That it’s okay for things to be just as they are. Little by little, you will begin to see that life can only grow outward in proportion to how stable it is inward—that if the joy is not in the little things first, the big things won’t fully find us.

 One day you will realize that true success is not the way things look, but how they feel. And a life that feels truly good will require you to be uncomfortable. It will ask you to stretch. It will force you to be vulnerable, to lay your heart bare. It will prompt you to make the hardest choices, and to reconcile the fact that sometimes, what’s hard is also what’s right. It will force you into integrity. It will open you where you’ve tried to build every wall. It will make you process every hurt you thought you had moved beyond, only to discover it’s been lingering somewhere inside, waiting to be felt, to be held.

 One day you will realize that true success is not someplace you might arrive one day, but the way in which you take each step in stride. It is the way you move forward, how you make the most of anything and everything around you. One day you will realize that the path to where you want to be is paved from the pieces that are already in front of you. One day you will realize that you were only ever meant to do what you can with what you have. One day you will know that if you keep reaching in the direction of your heart’s calling, eventually you will land.

Love someone because their soul inspires you, not because you’re interested in the relief from loneliness and companionship they can provide. Anybody can do that. Not just anybody can show you to yourself.

 One day you will realize it is entirely possible to have everything on the surface, but an emptiness just beneath. This is because we can never have enough of what we don’t truly want, and the things we do want? They will require us to risk. To face. To be honest, and true. It will require us to ask for the love we are seeking, and to give all of it back, a thousand times over. It will shatter our egos and diminish our defenses and make us start over again and again, until we have built ourselves a little corner of the world we are proud of. Until we have arrived not at a place in the world where there is nothing but peace, but a place in our souls that is evergreen.

 One day you will realize that happiness is not what your house looks like, but how you love the people within its walls. Happiness is not finding success by a certain time, but finding something you love so much time itself seems to disappear. At the end of the day, all we really want are a few close people who know us (and love us) no matter what.

 One day, you will look back on this time, and all you will see is magic.

It is very hard to show up as the person you want to be when you are surrounded by an environment that makes you feel like a person you aren’t.

 The person you become when you are on your own is a garden you will carry with you forever. Use the quiet. Even if single thing in your life works out exactly the way you want it to, you wake up with yourself every day. You have to know who you want to be.

Not everyone will like you. Not everyone will be kind to you. Not everyone will agree with you. That does not mean you have to be unkind in return.

The worst happened, and then it passed. You lost the person you thought you couldn’t live without and then you kept living. You lost your job then found another one. You began to realize that “safety” isn’t in certainty—but in faith that you can simply keep going

 The idea that you might take your quiet hours to work on that self is not a throwaway option or a consolation prize for not being able to participate in external love the way you might want. It’s a lesson on ground zero of what it is to be human. You will wake up with yourself every day, and put yourself to sleep every night. You will be left with yourself when everyone around you goes to work and to school and grows up and moves on and once again, it is you and you. You will guide yourself through every heartache, every loss. You will also get to cherish every victory, every success, every resounding win. You are the undercurrent of your entire life experience, the most common denominator.

The things you love about others are the things you love about yourself. The things you hate about others are the things you cannot see in yourself.

 The arena in which you have full and total control is that of yourself. You cannot control every passing thought or feeling that arises or experience that happens around you or to you, but you decide what you do, regardless of how you feel, or have been made to feel. And so that place becomes the most critical, the most potentially world-altering. It’s the only thing you can actually, fully assert your will upon and over, and so it is funny to consider that it’s the very same place that most people avoid. We spend eternity gazing outward and identifying all that’s wrong, but nothing too much changes, because there is little relief in realizing — perhaps my purpose is something far more difficult. Perhaps my offering must begin with me.

Either way, mental strength is not just hoping that nothing ever goes wrong. It is believing that we have the capacity to handle it if it does.

 All the pieces of your story that have not made sense, that have left you with more questions than answers, that felt like false starts and endless cycles, will eventually reveal themselves to you as perfectly sequenced, perfectly timed, perfectly destined to set you up for all that you would one day come to know and be.

Happy people know suffering more than anyone else, and that’s how they can see just how damn beautiful their lives are. It’s because they’ve seen the depths

People will come and go as they are scheduled to. Let them. Holding on does not affect them, only you.

Deep Brianna Wiest Quotes

Brianna Wiest’s insights reveal that true love often begins within us. Wiest also captures the essence of timing in love with her “Pivot Year Quotes,” suggesting that love often manifests when we align our life’s trajectory with our authentic selves.

A friend once told me that the secret to finding love was not to actually look for it, but to heal the things that were preventing you from seeing and receiving it. I think the biggest one of all is, “What will having this love fix

At the end of the day, all we really want are a few close people who know us (and love us) no matter what.

Not everyone will like you. Not everyone will be kind to you. Not everyone will agree with you. That does not mean you have to be unkind in return.

“You will know that it’s time to take your power back when there is no other viable choice, because in the aftermath of loss, you discovered that you unraveled your own existence so that nothing could be taken from you again.”

A friend once told me that the secret to finding love was not to actually look for it, but to heal the things that were preventing you from seeing and receiving it. I think the biggest one of all is, “What will having this love fix?”

What will having this person next to me make me feel better about? What do I need them to tell me? What do I need them to prove? Who do I need them to look great in front of? What purpose do they serve for my ego?”

 It is in our highest interest to listen to the discomfort, as it is attempting to lead us to peace. To honor what is not working so we may keep reaching toward what will. To remember that if something is not bringing us wholeness, it is trying to bring us to the piece of ourselves we first must self-realize in order to heal, in order to truly, and completely, be.

Holding on will not make something come back. In my experience, it actually pushes it farther away. You cannot go back and undo what’s done, my friends. You can only move forward. And if your deepest compulsions and instincts tell you that you’re meant to be with that person or doing that thing, you should let go and move forth and see how life takes you there. Clearly, things aren’t going according to your desired plan already, so why not throw caution to the wind and see where you end up.

 Almost when you least expect it, things fall into place. You realize that what left was making space for what was about to arrive. The quiet let you hear the guidance. The unhappiness forced you to make a move. The unsettledness made you keep seeking. The end ushered in a new beginning. The doors that closed turned you towards the ones that were opening. The lessons were always leading you. Every time you got it wrong — you were one step closer to arriving, having it right.

“Happiness is not something you can chase. It is something you have to allow. This likely will come as a surprise to many people, as the world is so adamant about everything from positive psychology to motivational Pinterest boards. But happiness is not something you can coach yourself into. Happiness is your natural state. That means you will return to it on your own if you allow the other feelings you want to experience to come up, be felt, be processed, and not resisted. The less you resist your unhappiness, the happier you will be. It is often just trying too hard to feel one certain way that sets us up for failure

 I know it is hard to have faith in a universe that does not seem to live up to its promises. One that has killed your dreams more than it has held your hope. One that has given you so few reasons to truly trust in it, that has so often seemed to withhold everything you needed.

You were taught that love is supposed to be patient and kind, and not something that challenges you and changes you and makes you who you are

You have to remember that your feelings, while valid, are not often real. They are not always accurate reflections of reality. They are, however, always accurate reflections of our thoughts

You think your past defines you, and worse, you think that it is an unchangeable reality, when really, your perception of it changes as you do

 The universe does not have any one fixed agenda, there is no external source of consciousness deciding when, and for how long, you will be withheld from your heart’s desires. There is only evolution, and growth. There is the subconscious mind, and the superconscious one. There is the people we believe ourselves to be, and the parameters through which we have come to form our image of them. There are our past experiences and our blind spots. There are the things we learn from getting what we want, and the things we learn from getting what we don’t.

Brianna Wiest Quotes on Secret of Finding Love

            

You think your past defines you, and worse, you think that it is an unchangeable reality, when really, your perception of it changes as you do.

It’s not whether you “feel” like putting in the work, but whether or not you do it regardless.

 Instead of focusing all of your attention on what has cycled out of your life, what has not held up the way you thought or hoped that it would, consider instead all that has. All the love that you have carried, all of the dreams that have not died. All of the people who have found you at every iteration of your journey, whose paths have magically seemed to curve and twist alongside your own. All of the things you were right about. All of the things that remained.

Make a list of all the imperfect people you’ve known in your life who have had love. Who have had romantic partners and best friends and jobs you could only ever dream of. Make a list of all the people who are conventionally unattractive and spiritually adrift and imperfect and all the things each one of them had despite being that way. Make it your own personal proof that you do not need to be perfect to be good enough.

 There are always things to grieve over, and things to be grateful for. We get to decide what we pay attention to. We get to decide what we believe in. We get to decide what we see.

Start quantifying your days by how many healthy, positive things you accomplished, and you will see how quickly you begin to make progress.

Danger is real. Heartache is real. Fear is not. It’s a story we tell ourselves.

 You do not have to impose your will upon the outcome, you have to trust the process. You do not have to force a change, you have to engineer it phase by phase. You do not have to hope that things will be different, you just have to change them in the quietest, most unsuspecting ways, and then continue. The horizon is your inevitable destination as long as you keep walking toward it. We do not fail unless we stop, or until we do. You don’t have to feel good enough. You don’t have to be certain. You don’t have to be without any fear or hesitation. You just have to keep going. You have to keep listening to the version of you that is waiting, that is calling to you from the other side.

It’s not about getting over things, it’s about making room for them. It’s about painting the picture with contrast..

 If life has handed you an opportunity to change, I hope you take it. We are not challenged for no reason, we are not tested for nothing. We are given chances to prove our own self-trust, to show ourselves that we are ready to leap.

Emotions are temporary, but behaviors are permanent. You are always responsible for how you choose to act

You start to let go on the day you take one step toward building a new life and then let yourself lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and cry for as many hours as you need”

 Best Brianna Wiest Quotes About Life

“Your impermanence is a thing you should meditate on every day: There is nothing more sobering, nor scary, nor a faster-way-to-cut-the-negative-bullshit than to remember that you do not have forever. What defines your life, when it’s all said and done, is how much you influence other people’s lives, oftentimes just through your daily interactions and the courage with which you live your own. That’s what people remember. That’s what you will be known for when you’re no longer around to define yourself.

 This is your reminder that whatever is in front of you will one day be behind you. Everything is temporary, everything passes. But it’s within this moment that you have the chance to see something differently, to do something differently. To change.

 The point is to find the hidden possibility — and to take it. Though this moment won’t be here forever, the person you become to get through it can be, and will. Even in the most unlikely moments, there is something to be found, something to be realized, something to be brought forward.

 And so if you find yourself at a crossroads where it seems as though all you are doing is wondering, and waiting, when everything will come into place, please know that it will. It already has. But this pivot period is not a purgatory, not in the way you think, not in the way it seems. It’s your chance to decide who is going to show up and meet your new life. Which version of you is going to walk through your days.

 In your quiet hours, in your uncertainty — please know that you’re doing better than you think you are. You’re closer than you think you are. What you have navigated, what you have managed, is greater than what anyone could fully imagine. You deserve to appreciate how strong you have been, how much you have held. And you deserve to realize it’s the strength of you that will keep you going forward, that will remain.

 The illusions pass, but the truth stands firm. Find it, and lean on it. It will move you to the other side.

 What is meant for you will arrive in your life and it will remain in your life. What did not transpire was not meant to; the end of that journey would not have led you somewhere you would have wanted or needed to be. If you are really honest with yourself, you know this on the inside. There were so many signs that you willingly brushed over in the heat of blind hope. If you spend your life fixated on the might-have-beens, you miss out on the steady currents that have carried you all this way. Notice what stays. Notice what is constant. Notice what perseveres. These are the things that the song of your life will be composed of.

 You cannot miss what is meant for you. You cannot lose what is yours.

 Any road you take in an effort to avoid your destiny will inevitably turn into a preparation period — a growth concourse — through which you are forced to face what led you astray in the first place. In the same way that you cannot hide from what is yours to have, you can also not run from what is yours to heal, to grow from, to grow into. And those things are very often intertwined.

 The things that are right for us are not just the ones that make us feel something special, something rare, something otherworldly — they’re the things that make us believe in ourselves again. The things that instill a hope so far gone, we thought we had lost it forever. They are the things that make us feel like we are approaching a light at the end of the tunnel, as though all the pieces have come together, and finally make sense.

 The things that are meant for us make us the people we are meant to be.

 When we try to move away from them, we are faced with additional lessons that prepare us in a way that makes the detour seem almost an essential part of the path. Sometimes, we are simply not ready to hold all that the world is trying to offer us, and the process of cleaning out our old habits, thoughts and attachments begins to open a space for us to finally receive. And receive we will, because what is ours never leaves us. It is connected to us a through a golden, invisible thread, one that pulls us and inspires us and calls our attention back to it, again and again. It is with us always.

 Because what is meant for us is a part of us. Part of our calling, our life, our reason for being here. Part of the mystical, untouchable, unfathomable unknown upon which we will one day reflect back and say — of course, I knew all along.

 We are meant for what we want, because it is an indicator of what we already have, but do not recognize, or have not fully materialized into the world outside of us, and still desire to.

 Our connection to our gentle, consistent wanting state often gets butchered when we live our lives out of integrity. That’s when our signals get caught in the crosshairs. If we are constantly trying to gather reasons to convince ourselves to want something more than we actually want it, we aren’t quite stabilizing ourselves or grounding in the way we might think we are. In fact, we are just confusing our inner guidance systems in our attempt to override them.

 There’s a deep sense of panic or uneasiness that can come with the recognition that you don’t know what you want, but the truth is that you do. There is no such thing as “not knowing what you want,” want is a part of your operating system, always. It’s the discernment process you’re struggling with, as you’ll want a variety of things throughout the course of your life, and in any given experience or time. So it’s up to you to choose what you’re going to prioritize, value or energize with your thoughts, focus or behaviors.

 Want exists in a hierarchy.

 What you are inspired by are the things you are aware you want. What you are envied by are the things you are not aware that you want. What you are triggered by are the inverse of the things you do not realize you want.

 Just because you come into a greater and fuller awareness of the breadth and depth of your wanting states does not mean that it is always time to act upon them. Sometimes, we are meant to gather more information, have more experiences, or explore. Sometimes, we just need to rest and recalibrate, allow our bodies to go through a winter, allow ourselves to reconnect to center. Sometimes, we don’t know what we don’t know. Connecting to our wants is as much about recognizing what lights us up versus what subtly turns us away as much as it is going out into the world and stumbling upon things that give us those same reactions, that we had maybe not considered prior.

 If you would like to change your life, you must first change the way you think about your life. Thoughts are not just thoughts. They are bridges and doors and entryways and foundations. They magnetize and repel. They can build a house and tear it down. They can energize momentum, or keep you idling within your own little world forever. Thoughts are investments, and they are decisions. The mind will generate an endless series of options —  some nice, and others terrifying —  and so you must choose. You must choose what you will return to, what you will believe in, what you will place weight on. Because thoughts create feeling, and feelings create desire, and desire creates action, and action craetes reward and reward creates more desire, and before you know it, a thought became the torch that led you down the path that is your life. If you would like to change your life, you must first change the way you think about your life. There was never another way.

 If you can look at your darkness and say: “Thank you for inspiring me to be greater than I ever would have possibly become had you not entered the room,” you will be able to dissolve it. Rather than an adversary, you will begin to see it as an ally within your own becoming. You will begin to see it as the catalyst point in which your old limitations broke apart, and a greater truth emerged in their place.

 Being in love with somebody that you only used to know is like falling in love with a book (which sounds like a dumb example but people really do fall in love with them). The point is: You can love it all you want, but it’s a story that runs parallel to yours. At the end of the day it’s static. It’s memory. It’s a sentence and you can’t change it. It ends how it ends. It says what it says

 Your job right now is not just to endure whatever you are going through and then move on, but to begin building a life beyond the confines you once knew so as to render them irrelevant. When life gives you a lesson, it is not giving you a punishment. It’s giving you an opportunity to embody the qualities of the person you have always wanted to be, not just so that the challenge in front of you transforms, but so that everything else does, too.

 the people you spend the most time with will shape your future irrevocably, and so you must choose them wisely.

 At the end of our lives, there is only one regret —  that we did not make the most of what we had, while we still had it. That we did not love the people we love, while they were still in front of us. That we did not recognize the opportunity, while it was still resting in the palm of our hands.

 What assets do you have right now that you are not taking advantage of? What answered prayers are going unacknowledged, what glimmers of progress are going unrecognized? What little sparks of interest, or possibility, are attempting to grasp your attention, and which heavier weights of fear and decided failure are bearing down upon them and extinguishing your consideration before they have really been seen?

You are not too broken to find someone who actually wants you, and when you begin to recognize that you are worthy of being committed to, you’ll start choosing partners who do just that.

An untamed mind is a minefield.

 No longer waiting for the breakthrough, but understanding that it is only a micro-shift that can set off a domino effect within our lives — that the biggest things begin with the smallest ones, and they’re all around us, quietly asking us to realize. To see.

 A mind-blowing, singular breakthrough is not what changes your life. A microshift is.

 Everything you do, see, and feel is a reflection of not who you are, but how you are. You create what you believe. You see what you want. You’ll have what you give.

Self-sabotage is what happens when we refuse to consciously meet our innermost needs, often because we do not believe we are capable of handling them.

 Trying to shock yourself into a new life isn’t going to work, and that’s why it hasn’t yet.

 You don’t need to wait until you feel like changing to start changing. All you need is to make one microshift at a time, and then let the energy and momentum build.

 Please, take this life while it’s still yours. Our time is too short, too fragile, to spend it imagining that our dreams will have a half-life, that somewhere along the line, we’ll get to pick up all the things that went untaken. We cannot save our presence for a better time; there are no future roots if there are no current threads.

 You are not meant to get comfortable somewhere you are not supposed to be — so go.

 You are not meant to have someone you loved pulled away from you — so trust.

 You are not meant to plant roots somewhere you will not blossom — so change.

 When we say to not settle, we often don’t account for how exhausting it is to keep going, how much it takes to keep mustering up the fortitude to keep trying, to keep grieving the losses of what we must place down in order to pick up what is ahead. But the alternative is that we spend our lives lukewarm, never quite initiated to go forward, but never quite able to settle all the way in either.

What qualities you admire most in other people. (This is what you most like about yourself.)

 The pieces become more beautiful than their parts, and you realize — every loss was a lesson that made this possible.

 Every step was meant to be.

Work on closing the gap between who the world thinks you are and who you know you are. Your mental health will change significantly.

 I hope you build a life that feels more beautiful than it looks.

 I hope you come to see that real happiness is when you stop prioritizing someone else’s eyes over your own heart. When you realize that the more you like something, the less you will need others to like it for you; and the less you need others to like it for you, the more they genuinely will.

lack of routine is just a breeding ground for perpetual procrastination.

To fully accept your life—the highs, lows, good, bad—is to be grateful for all of it, and to know that the “good” teaches you well, but the “bad” teaches you better.

 It’s often when we most want to give up that we are closest to the breakthrough. It’s often when we are most completely convinced that it is no longer worth our effort that it is actually an inch from arriving within the palms of our hands.

 Even if it takes you years longer than you ever dreamed, I hope you do not ever give up on arriving at your place of peace. The place that exists not in naive hope that everything is perfect, but in the way you let yourself fall into the perfect moments that arrive, scattered, but none-the-less, freeing in the way they evoke a remembrance, a truth. That we are both wonderful, and flawed. That the sun will always cave down past the horizon, and it will be night. That we can either grieve within the darkness or gaze at the stars and know — it is the light of day that keeps them visible, even from afar.

 We are often fractured in just the outline of our paths, our fates. We are often able to recognize what lacks in the exact spaces we are called to build. We are not less for the ways we are human, but more whole than before. Without what is imperfect, there would be nothing for us to form.

 We are never so concerned with how we are perceived as when we are not firm in our own knowing. When we are looking to reimagine what is in front of us through the perspective of someone who would see some goodness inside of it — the accolades, the impressiveness, the things that would make it all seem right and whole and well.

 “You are allowed to have everything you want.

The path forward is understanding that we are sometimes collateral damage to people’s own inner wars, and that we do not need to adopt their weapons as our own in order to fight back.

 Sometimes, we don’t get what we want because we are meant for things far greater than we’d ever let ourselves believe.

Eventually, you will have to stop pouring yourself into the things that will give nothing back, that take without any intent to give. You will have to stop trying to make yourself fit into places you are no longer meant to be.

 You are not behind for the ways in which life did not turn out the way you once wanted it to. The gap between where you are and where you most want to be will be filled by the person you become — and that is why we have dreams in the first place. Not so that we might arrive somewhere that is perfect, but that we will press up against the bounds that we think limit us and move beyond them. To see with crystalline clarity that we are limitless beyond even our own comprehension. That we are designed with the potential to fulfill what quietly inspires us, what motivates us, what interests us, what enlivens us, what awakens us in every sense.

when we start to deeply believe in an illusion, it becomes a delusion.”

 We reside, always, at the edge of everything — all of the past behind us, and all of the potential in front, and all of the doorways around. The humbling, the losing, the stopping, the releasing, the slowing and the stillness is just trying to give us the eyes to see.

 Maybe right now, you’re alone because whatever you need to learn about yourself can only be learned in solitude. Maybe right now, the pieces of yourself you’re finding are fusing a truer self into form, a kind of self that will become a more clear and recognizable match for the places and people and opportunities that are meant to come your way.

 Maybe right now, you don’t feel good enough because you’re going to bring someone to the places where you feel the most unworthy and let them love you there. Maybe right now, it’s quiet because you’re learning to hear the sound of your own voice. Maybe right now, you feel stuck because you have tried to force stillness when what you really need is to keep going. Maybe right now, you feel lost because you’re getting a chance to choose something greater than what you once assumed the best could be. 

 Maybe right now, you’re learning to see yourself with kinder eyes. To give yourself the benefit of the doubt. Maybe right now, you’re realizing the value in recognizing how far you’ve come, and allowing that to fuel you forward. Maybe right now, you’re giving yourself more credit. Maybe you’re giving yourself a second chance. Maybe you’re learning how to be with yourself in the quiet hours, the times when you’d rather fill the void with another person’s company. Maybe you’re learning how to enjoy your own presence.

 Maybe life is trying to show you how taking care of the person you are informs the one you will become. Maybe things are happening just as they need to, even if you don’t understand their sequence, or order, or reason. Maybe all you’re meant to do is take it one day, or even hour at a time. To greet the moment and ask what you should do with it, even if what you should do is sometimes the bare minimum, and sometimes the revolutionary.

 Maybe this is the time when you make space for all of those pieces of you to come together, to settle in and find their way home. Maybe in the midst of the uncertainty, this is life’s way of making sure you make peace with yourself.

 What you learn and who you become is more important than how you temporarily feel.

Brianna Wiest inspirational quotes

 A beautiful life is composed of the things our 90-year-old selves would have wished we’d done with the years in which we were so young but didn’t realize, before the decades piled up and passed us by and we came to find how little time even the luckiest among us have. It is made of all the little whispered prayers they’d have for us as they looked back, the same way we imagine our younger selves now and wish we could impart and instill so much guidance, so often leaning in the direction of — go where your heart already calls you, move toward the truth you already know.

What you learn and who you become is more important than how you temporarily feel

 You will know that it’s time to take your power back when there is no other viable choice, because in the aftermath of loss, you discovered that you unraveled your own existence so that nothing could be taken from you again.

 This is your sign that there are pieces of your life coming together right now that are bigger than you can see. That in the movements and changes and adjustments that feel so scary, so disappointing, so disconcerting, you are being intricately guided to exactly where you’ve asked, and envisioned, and worked so hard to be. You have not been forgotten. You are not falling behind. In fact, this is the moment when things are most coming together.

 The beautiful thing is also the hard one — that sometimes, we have to compromise what’s comfortable for what’s true. That we can grow so accustomed to the things that are not quite right for us, we can begin to confuse them for certainty, for home. That we could grow and wind roots around what was only meant to be temporary — a lesson, a learning period — and break our own hearts in the process of saving our souls.

 But those hearts are resilient, and they’re made even more so when we realize that the things we are most attached to are blank canvases upon which we have painted our love, and made them good. And that quality, that ability, goes with us wherever we are. It only grows as it learns, as it begins to discern, as it stumbles back into the things that are so undeniably right, so clearly meant for us.

 And those things that are so undeniably right and clearly meant? They aren’t that way because we find them and they are instantaneously perfect, but because the ground is clear enough and the perimeter is wide enough and the open possibility matches the vision we have of what it could be — and so we begin, and we continue.

 If we do not give up, we build the things we most want, from the inside out.

 So when life seems to be redirecting you — when the changes are swift and sudden, especially — remember that you have no idea what future pain your current discomfort is saving you from. Particularly when you consider that there is no greater regret than getting to the end of your days and realizing that you wasted your time; you did not do what you came here to do.

 You may not see it today or tomorrow, but eventually all the pieces will add up and bring you somewhere wonderful, or where you always wanted to be. You will be grateful that some things did not work out the way you once wanted them to.

What you learn and who you become is more important than how you temporarily feel.

 In so many periods of our lives, we often arrive at these resting places — these valleys between — that can feel like moments of full surrender. Moments when we have lost. Moments when we decide the fight isn’t worth it, the damage too severe and the outcome too far off. These places are where we either catch our breath and remember why we began, or where we begin to build a disjointed home. Where we decide that this far is enough, and we attempt to settle. It is exactly at that moment that you must decide not to settle.

 It’s often when we most want to give up that we are closest to the breakthrough. It’s often when we are most completely convinced that it is no longer worth our effort that it is actually an inch from arriving within the palms of our hands.

 We must be able to look under the surface rather than over-analyze it and delude ourselves into thinking we’re seeing beneath it.

 We are often fractured in just the outline of our paths, our fates. We are often able to recognize what lacks in the exact spaces we are called to build. We are not less for the ways we are human, but more whole than before. Without what is imperfect, there would be nothing for us to form.

 You cannot miss what is meant for you. You cannot lose what is yours. Any road you take in an effort to avoid your destiny will inevitably turn into preparation period —  a growth concourse —  through which you are forced to face what led you astray in the first place. In the same way that you cannot hide from what is yours to have, you can also not run from what is yours to heal, to grow from, to grow into. The things that are meant for us make us the people we are meant to be.

Motivational quotes by Brianna Wiest

You think your past defines you, and worse, you think that it is an unchangeable reality, when really, your perception of it changes as you do.

 There is a path to everything you know is waiting for you, even if you don’t know what that is right now.

 Sometimes, the paths we plan too intently end up limiting us in some way. There are possibilities available to your future self that your current self wouldn’t be able to consider. All your mind can pull from is what it’s known, and if you’re trying to build a life outside of that, then you’re going to have to open yourself to the possibility that not only is there a path forward, but that it may very well lead somewhere better than you thought.

 Sometimes, we don’t know because we can’t know. The very fact of us knowing would disrupt the timing of what is unfolding. The very fact of us knowing would prevent us from learning the lessons that are here for us today.

 And those lessons? They aren’t a due we have to pay or a purgatory we are being stuck in, they are the building blocks of the character of the person who is opening up to this next level of their existence. What’s here for you right now contains within it the wisdom and the growth needed to unlock the next phase.

Stop thinking that being sad or broken makes you unlovable or “bad.” Your honest moments don’t destroy relationships, they bond (as long as you’re being genuine).

 I hope you stop talking yourself out of the person you actually want to be.

Bad feelings should not always be interpreted as deterrents. They are also indicators that you are doing something frightening and worthwhile.

 I hope you will come to discover that the life you’ve always wanted has always just been waiting for you to start walking toward it, one step at a time.

 I hope you learn how to bring yourself home. I hope you learn to differentiate comforting yourself with coddling; I hope you stop negotiating your standards down to your familiarities.

 When good things are trying to find you, I hope you let them. I hope you leave room for things to turn out better than you had planned. I hope you do not deny yourself happiness because you know how human you are; because you are most familiar with your rough edges, your mistakes, your past. I hope when the sun is finally shining on you, you let yourself feel its warmth. I hope you don’t think your way out of every beautiful thing that is trying to reach you. I hope you don’t look back and realize you were the biggest thing standing in your own way.

 I hope you will take nothing for granted — no lesson, no person, no place. I hope you will see that everything was a teacher, even the most unlikely of experiences was in some way there to guide to your path. I hope you will have faith in the fact that everything that’s meant for you will find you, remain with you, or return to you, it is only a matter of when. I hope you will realize that when you ask for a bigger experience, you’ll first be handed the lessons that will grow you into the type of person who would have that life you want. I hope you’ll begin to see the purpose in what’s seemed meaningless, I hope you’ll never lose faith that your happy ending is still there, still waiting.

 I hope you allow your life to be more than you ever thought it could be. I hope you press back on the limiting thoughts that have made you cling so tightly to the worlds you’ve already outgrown. I hope you will listen to the little calling in your heart that knows what’s really true, even if your mind doesn’t yet understand how it might be possible. I hope you will consider that maybe there’s more available to you than you even know to ask for. I hope you will let yourself be expanded, to see that there are others just like you taking big leaps in the directions you always hoped to go, but have just been waiting on the courage.

 I hope you will remember that is no desire that can be within us without an equal amount of potential to make it reality. I hope you will let yourself dream. I hope you will let yourself consider more than you assumed you’d be able to have, not always in scale, but in depth and beauty and truth. I hope you will know that no experience will be wasted. I hope you know it will all eventually add up. Most of all, I hope you will realize that the journey was the becoming, not the arriving. I hope you’ll give yourself the chance to enjoy the journey while you’re still on it.

 Growth means letting go of the person who has kept you safe in order to become the one who can set you free.

 Growth is what happens when the selves we once were reach a threshold where they can no longer carry us forward, and in their place, new and truer selves must emerge, and form. When the old parts of ourselves that were constructed in response to fear and trauma resist their own alchemy, what rises within us is this sense of panic and disarray, and if we are not careful, it is the very moment where we are most at risk of adopting the most limiting beliefs of all: that what is most familiar to us is most correct for us; that who we have been is who we will always be.

 It is less important to ask “Who am I?” than it is to ask: “Who would I like to be?”

 Who you think you are is very often just who you’ve had to be. In some ways, that’s the truth of all of us — a patchwork of everyone and everything we’ve known, and loved, seen, and done. But we are also amendable, and as much as the outside world has nurtured our sense of truth, so can our internal ones. We are, in larger ways than not, of our own making.

 That is the most empowering notion, and also, the most terrifying. There is no more defaulting in this acceptance. There is no more looking around and blaming, or holding on. There is only the choice of whether we will hurt to stay as we’ve been, or hurt to become who we might be. There is no workaround for discomfort, the shadows are rendered by the light. What we get to decide is what we’re going to endure for. What our greater intention will be. What we are going to let ourselves get used to. What we are going to reorient our comfort zones around so often and so honestly that in time, we become known to the world as we only ever once imagined ourselves to be.

 Growth is when we let go of the known parts of ourselves — the accepted, the understood, the comfortable parts — in favor of building new ones. Parts that give us the inner sense of openness to love where we were once closed, respond where we once only reacted, choose where we once felt it was chosen for us, and become a kind of person that only once seemed viable in our wildest dreams.

 The breakthrough is not the moment when things finally fall into place, but the moment we are able to dance despite the unanswered questions, the unknown, the losses, the hurt. We have to move as though we have already arrived, as that’s the we we get there.

 When we find it too difficult to arrive fully into the present moment, it is almost always because the quiet is telling us something we are not yet ready to hear. The longer we avoid looking honestly at ourselves, the louder our inner worlds will become. When we find the courage to look long enough into the eyes of our demons, they dissolve into crying children just asking us to set them free.

 We don’t need a lot to be happy, but we do need things that are real. We do need things that grip our hearts and enliven us and make us feel like we are here for a reason, here to experience something that could only be touched by a human body, understood by a human mind, loved by a human heart. When we deny ourselves the authentic experience of being alive, we reach for more when what we really want is not to stretch wider but to go deeper.

 I hope you will discover that making it is not always about where you end up, but how you take each step. When you change your relationship with today, you change your relationship with tomorrow.

 I hope you learn to see yourself with kinder eyes. I hope you learn that your days do not have to be filled with everything the world says they must be. I hope you find the beauty in letting yourself rest, in letting yourself be. I hope you will nurture yourself in the simplest ways, I hope you will give yourself the benefit of the doubt. I hope you will see your strengths a little more than your weaknesses. I hope you know that you are more than you let yourself believe.

 I hope you learn to see yourself like someone who truly loves you does — someone who can see your imperfections but chooses you regardless, and forgives you regardless, and believes in you regardless.

 I hope you find the courage to change your life. In the small ways, in big ways, and in every way that matters. I hope you do not end this story with a heart full of regrets. I hope you do not spend your years just waiting for your life to begin. I hope you realize that this is not the practice run, this is not the preview. This is it. There is nothing to do but leap. There is nothing to do but allow yourself to exist boldly and honestly as you can. You will think you have forever, but you do not. It all happens, and it happens quickly.

 To each of us, a great life calls. A life where we are not pushed by our fears, but inspired by our visions. A life where we embrace what it is we have to offer the world, no matter how small, or simple, that may be. A life where we slowly realize that our experience is a blank canvas upon which our subconscious minds paint pieces of our souls. A life where we see everything as an opportunity to witness ourselves more clearly, to know the ways in which we need to heal, to grow, to become.

 To each of us, a deep life calls. A life where we are no longer defined by the spaces in which we lack, the things we cannot control, the people who have chosen not to walk the path with us. A life where we choose ourselves. A life where we act from our inner locus of control, where we realize that the limits of our lives are the limits of our perceptions. A life where we begin to understand that more is available to us than we’d ever think to consider, but the first and most fundamental step is to expand our view to see all the human beings that are already doing everything we think is impossible.

 To each of us, a beautiful life calls.

A life where we realize that the joy was always in the journey. That there are no destinations, no end-points, no finalities. There is only one experience, and then the next. There is only the constant of unfolding of what was already within. There is only the realization that everything we’ve ever loved has stemmed from our own participation and creation, and we become increasingly more capable of recreating that in bigger and better ways, no matter where we go, no matter who we’re with. A life where we come to understand that it was never about how we’d experience the world, but how we’d allow the world to experience us.

 The truth is that when we observe something for too long, we inevitably discover every microscopic fault line within it, and when we focus on those minor imperfections for too long, we begin to piece together an image of that thing as being unworthy and broken and flawed. The way we see ourselves functions so similarly. If we allot too much brain space to finding, and shielding, ourselves from the ways in which we might not be enough, we inevitably end up burying ourselves beneath the mountain of evidence we didn’t even realize we were gathering in an attempt to prove ourselves right.

 We enter a complete denial of the beautiful truth of all we came here to be, and most importantly — we lose touch with the way we are really known, with the way we are really seen.

 If you were to ask almost anyone in your life to describe you, you’d probably find that the way they’d depict you would vary incredibly from the way you imagine yourself. You are so much more inclined to give weight, and precedence, to the things you are still working on, the things you are insecure about, the ways in which you are not living up to your own standards. You are so much more inclined to define yourself by what you aren’t, while the rest of the world is actually seeing you for what you already are.

 Do you know how many perfect moments are unfolding before your very eyes? Do you know how much you already have? Do you know how many quiet nights of peace you have already experienced, how many hearts have loved you, how many people would love to see your name pop up on their phone right now? Do you know how much you matter? Do you know how good you are?

 Books are most impactful when they change the way we think. It’s not what we experience while we’re staring at the pages, but what we carry with us once we place it down and re-enter our lives, slightly altered and more open to a new line of inspiration, of hope, of interest, of anything that upends the way we were and begins to carry us into where we might be. We are moved by something when we see ourselves within it. When between the lines emerges some emotion that we had been hiding away, not fully able to understand.

 In this sense, I truly believe reading saved my life. I wouldn’t be here without such a simple practice and gift. I have such vivid memories of specific pages and passages that made my body lighten, as though that author’s experience mirrored mine in some mystical, impossible, perfect way, putting the puzzle pieces together and alleviating some fraction of what hurt by the sheer knowing that in some way, I was not alone.

 Books are companions, and they are guides. 

 Maybe you don’t need to find more energy, maybe you just need to find a dream that makes you actually want to get up in the morning. Maybe you need to find something that gives back more than it takes. Maybe you need to stop trying to be good at a hundred things that do not light up your soul and finally choose the one that does—the one that asks you to risk, to lay your heart bare, to try again, even though you’re scared. You’re not failing because you’re not motivated. You’re not supposed to get far on a path that was never yours to walk.

 The doors that are right for you will gently open—and you will not have to push or force them. Because the things that are behind them want you, and need you, as much as you want and need them.

 When it’s right, you won’t doubt it more than you trust it. When it’s right, you will be naturally motivated by it. When it’s right, the risk will seem worth it. When it’s right, you won’t delay more than you pursue. When it’s right you won’t spend more time unsure than certain.

 When it’s right, it will give as much energy as it takes.

 When it’s right, it will inspire you and encourage you as often as it challenges you and changes you.

 When it’s right, it will flow spontaneously and serendipitously, and it will guide you through a series of coincidences too meaningful to be coincidental. When it’s right, you’ll look back and realize that all the steps you took were leading you right to that one, that the signs were there all along. When it’s right, it will blossom without you having to force it. When it’s right, it will help you become more of the person you’re meant to be, not distract you from your own growth. When it’s right, what you reach for will reach back.

 You will know that it is right for you because it will just happen — even despite your fear and disbelief. You will know that it is right for you because it feels like a surprise and a certainty all at once. You will know that it is right because it doesn’t drain you, it fills you up from the inside with a sense of knowing, and truth, that cannot possibly be replicated any other way.

 When it’s right, the things you love will love you back.

 You are not supposed to be motivated to pursue a life you do not really want, you are not supposed to find endless energy within the things that are not what you’re really meant to do, you are not supposed to find the inspiration for the project you aren’t supposed to complete, you aren’t meant to have the wherewithal to fight for a relationship you do not really want to have.

 Sometimes, what does not flow is not something to be fixed — but something to be honored, to be seen, and to be trusted. Sometimes, what does not energize us gives us as much vital guidance as what does.

 The people, places, and things that are destined for you are the ones that give you as much energy as they take. What’s meant for us becomes a symbiotic force—when we move toward what’s right, what’s right moves toward us.

 Everything that is truly right for you will make you feel at peace.

 Everything that is meant for you will feel like a deep exhale, as though you are returning home to a place you forgot existed. We so often yearn and want for the things that help us escape who we are, but the things that are actually meant for us — the ones that arrive and stay — they make us feel a sense of steady calm. We do not need to be swept off our feet, but grounded through them. In the moment is where love really exists. In the moment is the only place we can come alive.

 Everything that is truly right for you will make you feel at ease. Everything that is truly right for you will seem so simple, so obvious, so comfortable. Everything that is truly right for you will choose you as quickly as you choose it. Everything that is truly right for you will happen serendipitously and spontaneously. It will come to you when you expect it and when you don’t, as both a surprise and a certainty. It will seem like such an obvious fact of your life and yet entirely new, all at once.

 The truth is that we often come to believe that the things that are most right for us are the ones that give us the biggest emotions, and that is a mistake. The things that are truly right for us give us the deepest emotions. Love is a pervasive, steady presence, not a heart-pumping dash of lust. Destiny is a subtle coincidence, it makes you stop and say, well, isn’t it funny how that worked out.

 The truth is that the things that are most right for us are also the easiest to miss, because they are often subtle at first.

 You can wait forever. What isn’t right for you will never remain in your life. There is no job, person, or city that you can force to be right for you if it is not, though you pretend for a while. The truth is that what is right for you will come to you and stay with you and won’t stray from you for long. The truth is that when something is right for you, it brings you clarity, and when something is wrong for you, it brings you confusion.

 Little things become big things over time, we just have to give them a chance. We just have to stay the course. We just have to realize that life will magnetize to us what is meant to be ours. Our only job is to step out of the way.

 Self-protection is learning how to take a pause between what you feel and how you react. When there is no awareness between what you perceive and the way that you respond, anything can control you. Practice the pause. Widen the space between what you sense and what you do about it. Decide what’s worth your energy, because what you engage with is what you empower.

 The space between what you feel and how you react is the golden window through which you can change your entire life.

 When you learn to practice the pause — to elongate the time between what you perceive and how you choose to respond to it — you give yourself a way out of the life you’ve been running on autopilot, and a way into one that is actually desired, one that is anchored by the person you decide to be. One that has not yet existed, but soon will. One where you are no longer living in a state of unconscious reactivity — where you are constantly going through the motions of whatever you’ve been conditioned to do — but truly choosing who you are, and who you’re going to be

Your calm is your power because it’s from that space of objectivity that you can actually decide who you’re going to be and what your life is going to amount to. This happens not in the overarching gestures of our lives, but the tiny ones that make up the patterns that become the conditioning that become the preferred state of being that become the actual reality of who we are.

 We change our lives in the inconspicuous moments where we decide to react just a little differently than we did before. That is what we are waiting for. That is the breakthrough. Not when we are firmly on the other side of the mountain and everything is different, but when we decide we are going to change the way we walk it, one quiet pause at a time.

 The road to your becoming is lined with this one question: “What is this trying to teach me?” When you start believing that life is working in your favor — even when it seems as though the only thing you are facing is uncertainty, discomfort, and change — you begin to look for the lessons. When you begin to look for the lessons, you lean into the understanding that your emotions are instructive, and feeling lost is only a product of not knowing how to interpret them, place them, or respond to them.

 If you adopt the mindset that life is inherently evolution-oriented, and that we are meant to be forever exploring, uncovering, discovering, building, enjoying, feeling and experiencing, your life shifts from one that you must only endure to one you are an active participant in, one that you are creating, even if you cannot create every single element within it.

 When you start to remember your power, you realize that the things you can control far outweigh the ones you cannot, but when you offer more of your focus to the latter, the former begins to disappear. Fortunately, the inverse effect can occur as well. What we focus on grows, and opens. What we take the time to think through is what becomes more available, more possible. We either harden the dead-ends, or turn around and see beside them new doorways, often the very ones that we’d been asking to find all along.

 Everything is a teacher, if you allow it to be.

 Often, the most unlikely people, places and experiences are our gurus in disguise.

 Every time you hit a tough patch, ask yourself what is here to be learned, to be grown from. Ask yourself how you could allow the loss to help you appreciate what you still have; accept that nobody has everything but everyone has something, and life is only about how well we care for our somethings. Ask yourself how you could allow the hurt to teach you grace and impermanence, and mortality, and humility, and humor, and strength, and grit, and peace. The valleys can either be a suffering, or a pivot period. You get to decide how the path turns.

 Not knowing what is next often indicates you’re embarking upon a more authentic path — no longer unconsciously going through the motions, you are now deciding who you want to be, and choosing where you want to go. The willingness to stop holding onto what is safe if it’s not also right indicates that you have started to uncover your own self-security within. The choice to prioritize how you feel over what other people think means that you are learning to value your own opinions, your own mental health, your own intuition — that you are finally learning to take care of yourself as much as you take care of all those around you.

 What sometimes looks on the outside as a setback, quieting, or loss is only a failure to the ego. The world will tell you that the longevity of a relationship is equivalent to the success of it, while the heart will tell you when your time together is complete. The world will tell you that a particular type of profession is equivalent to certain success, while the heart will tell you what you’re really meant to do, where you’re actually meant to be investing your time and life. The world will tell you that steadiness is the equivalent to strength, but the heart will tell you that it is the courage to feel, to process, to no longer hide or deny or run — is most indicative of character.

 Breakdowns contain within them the potential of our breakthroughs. In the same way a star must first implode before it goes supernova, we, too, often experience the absolute greatest growth when our paths and projections forward are disrupted and we are left with nothing but a blank slate upon which to build a new life. It is only within those unknowns that we are finally able to find our own truths.

 What we consider to be the ends are very often the beginnings. What we consider to be the lows are very often the opportunities for our greatest pivots, and change. What we consider to be our losses very often turn into our greatest and most profound gains.

Life Lessons Brianna Wiest Would Tell Her Younger Self

 Don’t save the good stuff. The good dress, the good wine, the good perfume. Joy has depreciating returns, you don’t earn more by postponing it.

 You know what doesn’t have deprecating returns? An index fund. Please open one.

 Everything is like inkblot test.

 Your dream career, your soulmate relationship, your sense of self… they’re all things you build, not things you stumble upon one day.

 The things that trigger you are messengers, here to help you break the pattern.

  Don’t shoot the messenger.

  If you think it’s a competition, you’ve already lost.

 If there is a competition, it’s only with the girl you used to be.

 If you came up with the biggest possible vision for your life, and then scaled it by ten, it would still not even come close to what is possible.

  Radically trust your intuition.

 You will only regret not doing what you knew you wanted and needed to do when you knew you wanted and needed to do it.

  If you force stillness before you’re ready, it creates stuckness.

 The doors that are meant for you are already open, keep walking toward them.

 Big destinies often require longer roads. This is not because the end-goal is far off, but because you are actually refining and developing yourself to be the kind of person who can materialize your gifts consistently.

 Your time is finite, make something beautiful.

 At every turn, ask yourself: “What would my 90-year-old self wish I had done?”

  Almost every answer is inside that question.

 You get what you’re given, it’s all how you use it.

Alright, let’s wrap this up with a little challenge: find that one quote by Brianna Wiest that feels like it speaks directly to your story.

Not just the one that sounds nice, but the one that nudges you, pokes at your thoughts, and maybe even shifts the way you see things.

When you find it, let it sit with you, let it work its magic, and then tell me, what did it change for you?

A list of people to thank this year —

The friends who healed hearts they didn’t break. Chosen family. The person who listened to you talk about the same situation over and over until you healed. The person who encouraged you. The person who pushed you. The person who loved you from a distance. The person who you could call at any hour. The person you grew closer to. The person you had to step away from. The person who inspired you to begin the next era of your life. The person who reminded you who you are. Yourself.

 The real love story is always you and you. It was how you walked alone and learned what you needed to carry. It was how you began to see through your own eyes and not someone else’s. It was how you began to dig joy beneath your cynicism, how you slowly built your desires into form. It was how you learned what you like and don’t, and what you came here to be. The real love story was always how you opened your heart to yourself.

 The practice of your own love is what builds inside you a landing place, a space within which you can meet the love that is trying to greet you, and accept it, and hold it, and grow with it. Your own love is the beginning, and the end, of it all.

 We are made to think that love is something we are given, when in truth it is something we create. It is something we offer out from inside of ourselves, something we allow to fuse and form with someone else’s. Our own love is the engine of our joy, and what we love well is what we find the most meaning in, the most beauty. The pieces of our lives that seem to overflow are the same ones that we have set an intention to seek the good within, though there is so much negativity that we could focus on instead.

 That is what it means to love ourselves first — to understand that in the end, the story of our lives is a journey of one. We come alone and we go alone, and though the chance to have our paths run parallel with other human beings is a beautiful gift, it is our own love that holds a torch through the unknown, through the mystery, through the lingering of questions and the finding of answers. It is our own love that will rise with us each morning and put us to bed each night. It is our own love that is an offering not only to ourselves, but to the ones we hold closest.

 It is our own love we must practice.

 It is the hardest thing you will ever have to do, and it will also be the most important: stop giving your love to those who aren’t ready to love you. Stop having hard conversations with people who don’t want to change. Stop showing up for people who are indifferent about your presence. Stop prioritizing people who make you an option. Stop loving people who aren’t ready to love you.

 I know that your instinct is to do whatever you can to earn the good graces of everyone you can, but that is also the impulse that will rob you of your time, your energy and your sanity.

 When you start showing up to your life wholly and completely, with joy and interest and commitment, not everyone is going to be ready to meet you there. It doesn’t mean you need to change who you are. It means you need to stop loving people who aren’t ready to love you. 

 The most precious, important thing that you have in your life is your energy. It is not your time that is limited, it is your energy. What you give it to each day is what you will create more and more of in your life. What you give your time to is what will define your existence. 

 Don’t waste another moment on those who treat you as an option when you have made them a priority. On trying to save those who don’t want to be saved, or convince them that they do. On trying to write a novel of justifications as to why you are or are not suited for one another.

 There are those who are simply not for you, and that is a truth that can stand alone. The sooner you accept it, the sooner you will be free to join the ones who are — the ones who have been waiting all along.

 The deepest form of self-care is building a life you are in love with, and that is very often an unbeautiful thing.

 It means making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer running from the problem and calling the distraction your solution. It means looking your failures and disappointments in the eye and restrategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living in a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t. It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life — not escape from it.

 It is the willingness to see loving yourself not as a matter of infatuation, but as caretaking, that will change your life. Seeing self-love not as eros, but something deeper than what’s on the surface, will tip the scales eternally in your favor. Because it is that love — the unconditional, practical, grounded kind — that does not just last, but roots, and makes you stronger than you were before. It is that kind of love that does not always give you what you want, but rather, supplies what you need. It tells the truth. It does not cater to your self-defeat, but reimagines your becoming, your way forward. It serves the sake of your future self, the person you most hope to be.

 This is the kind of love that can think long-term. The kind of love that knows what you need on the simplest and most fundamental level. Giving this to yourself requires the grace to endure the temporary discomfort in favor of the greater peace you foster by taking upon yourself your own real self-care.

 So rather than attempting to see yourself the way you’d want to imagine someone you are romantically in love with — as perfect, and beyond your own humanness — try to see yourself the way someone who actually loves you does. To take into consideration your goodness, and allow it to not erase the unseemly parts, but make them also worth loving, and holding, and seeing to the other side.

 This is your evergreen reminder that the greatest act of self-love is to no longer accept a life you do not like.

 And to remember that the pathway to that change — though inspired at the onset, is often more tedious, more unknown, and more challenging than most care to consider. However, there is nothing kinder you can do for yourself, or for your life, than to start organizing your feelings into what feels good and what does good, as opposed to just what feels good, or not. The very things that often bring us the greatest peace and wellness and stability long-term are uncomfortable at the start.

 We can only find what we are meant for, when we stop running from what we are not.

 It is hard to be in the wrong relationship, and it is hard to be in the right one. It is hard to stay at a job you hate, and it is hard to pursue your dreams. It is hard to be at war with yourself, and it is hard to heal. It is hard to resist your impulses, and it is hard to be controlled by them. It is hard to stay as you are, and it is hard to be vulnerable, to risk, to leap, to embrace the unknown.

 Everything is hard in some way, but you get to decide what you’re willing to hurt for, what you’re willing to try for, what you’re willing to work for. You get to choose your hard.

 We often organize experiences into “feels good” and “feels bad,” when we need to sort them into “feels good,” and “does good,” then “feels bad,” and “does bad.” Sometimes, the things that feel bad for us at the start are what are best for us in the long-run; and vice-versa. Sometimes, when we only live by what feels good in the moment, we lose our longevity, our foresight. In an attempt to be most free, we become more stuck. It’s a fine balance between trusting your instincts, honoring your heart, and still knowing that many of your feelings will continuously draw you back into the same old cycles, patterns and self-defeating habits that have kept you where you are. At times, you need to trust your emotions. At times, you need to trust your higher knowledge, your logic, your reason. You have to learn how to keep both aspects of your functioning within their own lanes. You will sabotage love if you overthink it, because it’s a matter of the heart. You will sabotage health if you trust your feelings over your knowledge, because it is a matter of the head.

 But everything comes with a cost. When you say “yes” to one thing, you say “no” to another. And that’s where the matter of your free will, your value system, your greater vision, must come into place. You have to decide what is going to matter to you, and what you are willing to fight for. Then you have to decide to let go of the rest.

 You are the most constant thing in your life. Befriend yourself first. Invest in yourself first. Become yourself first. The rest will come together in time.

 A book you read this weekend can teach you something that changes your life for decades to come. A decision you make tomorrow can do the same. When you get better at relationships, your entire life becomes more connected. When you get better at managing your emotions, your entire life becomes more leveled-out. When you get better at managing your money, your entire life becomes more stable. When you get better at managing your reactions, things last. They last because you know how to take care of them — because you first learned to take care of you.

 You are the most constant relationship in your own life, you are the most constant presence in your own life, you are the most common denominator in every experience you have ever had, and will ever have. Investing in yourself is an evergreen task, the ripple effects of which are often greater than you can imagine. You have to decide how you want to be. What you are going to value, what is going to matter. You have to choose, and cultivate, the kind of person you are going to become, because a beautiful life rarely happens on accident. You are your own vessel, and the way you build it changes the way you experience everything — every last thing that will ever come your way.

 You have to decide which version of you is going to show up to the days you are dreaming about. Which version of you is going to meet the love of your life, which version of you will create your legacy project, which version of you will step on the flight or open the door to your future home for the very first time. And that work will not instantaneously click into place just because you have arrived at an end-goal, or a milestone. You are the foundational element of every single thing you will ever touch and see and feel and know, and that is why it matters.

 The variable is not whether or not the future will arrive — the choice is what version of you shows up to meet it.

 Real change is something that happens on the fringe of your life.

 It’s the tiny glimmers that peer through and reach you, unexpectedly. The small moments where you think of just one more thing you could try. Fate is often stumbled upon. The pieces pull together in ways that are often so quiet, so unassuming, in the heat of your fear, you can look right past them. You may know at the deepest level that you are meant for something more, or different, and yet don’t recognize that the journey of a hundred miles is composed of steps — small steps that are insignificant until they are taken consistently.

 These little things grow to become something bigger than the sum of their parts. Within your process, you rediscover your confidence, your motivation. The bigger picture begins to cohere itself, and once again, you have something to believe in, to fight for, to hold onto. You realize, slowly but surely, that the fork in the road was a matter of you not knowing how to engage with the life you have found yourself in, and learning to do so is the character development required to be able to immerse yourself in it completely.

 If you attempt to seek the greater purpose or impetus that this unlikely moment may be acting as, you will always find it. And you will find it not because it is always easily or inevitably there, but because that is what the human spirit does — it finds, it makes. And while your dead-end might seem like a road in which you were unceremoniously left at the end of, it’s more the result of a world that slowly taught you to deny the wiring in your brain that seeks to form connection, that recognizes opportunity, and acts. You have only ever been asked to do what you can with what you have, and what you have is exactly what you need, even in the lack, even in the blank spaces.

 What is not there, or has not been; what has left or has not seemingly come as easily as you imagined it would, is also offering a sort of framing, a contrast, a necessity.

 The most unlikely moments often contain within them a piece of yourself you have spent a lifetime looking for. Find it. Carry it with you toward your next horizon.

 I hope this is the year you change your life. Not in the superficial way. Not in the way of moving things around on the surface and wondering why nothing feels much different underneath. Not in the way of conformity. Not in the way that aligns you most closely with all of the traditional emblems of success, the ones that leave you smiling beside your accomplishments but feeling so pinched with regret.

 I  hope this is the year you change your life in all the ways you have always secretly wanted to. The year you discover that those quiet dreams that have lingered for so long are actually echoes of parallel lives, sister stories, asking you to tell them, to leap toward them, to move them out of your mind and into a touchable, physical reality.

 I hope this is the year you stop dancing around the perimeter of who you intended to be, of what you came here to do. I hope this is the year you learn to defy what’s reasonable and build sense into a world of your own design. I hope this is the year you discover that the floor does not only hold up if you remain where you are standing. With each step you take, and wherever you may go, it will rise to meet you — as it always has, and always will.

 I hope this is the year you find the bravest, boldest kind of courage. I hope this is the year you walk into the life that was always meant to be yours.

 Within you lives a great vision for your life, quieted over time by the world. It is once again time to listen. It is once again time to live.

 Not everything you lose is a loss. Some things are freedom. Some things are second chance. Some things are a miracl in disguise. Some things are a detachment long-needed, a clarity brought to blurry eyes. Some things are an intervention. Some things are the unexpected answer to a long chanted prayer. Some things are a healing. Some things are a becoming. Some things are planned long before you ever came to be. Some things are a devastation, but others are a kind of vital guidance, the kind of course-correction you did not even know you needed. The kind you did not even realize you were asking for all along.

 When we are not writing the story of this chapter, we give our minds no choice but to continue re-reading the last.

 We do not let go by standing in the ruins, running our minds in circles trying to more deeply understand how the pieces came apart. We let go when we clear what is beneath us and begin building a new life in its place.

 There is a time for sadness and at time to grieve. There is a time to feel and a time to reflect. A time to seek wisdom and a time to learn. Then there is a time to simply go on.

 And go on is what all of us will have to do, not just once, but at many points of our lives. Because the truth about loss is that it is not something that happens when we fail, but something that happens as we grow. It is as natural as the changing of seasons. It can be as effortless as an exhale, or as painstaking as a death to the selves we used to be.

 If we do not learn how to let go, we do not ever learn how to live. We did not come here to stand still. To hold within our hearts and heads the details of everything we have ever known and loved and wanted and felt and wondered about.

 We came here to experience, we came here to grow. We came here to learn that nothing presses us to release it unless something new is imminently waiting to arrive.

 It is very hard to show up as the person you want to be when you are surrounded by an environment that makes you feel like a person you aren’t.

 Either way, mental strength is not just hoping that nothing ever goes wrong. It is believing that we have the capacity to handle it if it does.

 The real glow up isn’t proving the people from your past wrong. It is finally feeling so content and hopeful about your future that you stop thinking about them entirely.

 Mental strength is a practice. Though many of us see it as a fixed trait — something we were either born with, or not — it is something that we can develop within ourselves over time.

 When we think of mental strength, we assume that it correlates with an emotional steadiness, as though we may be able to move through life less affected by what’s happening around us. The truth is that real mental strength is the capacity to respond to a range of human emotion and experience without becoming stuck in one or another. When we understand that it’s not about what we experience, but how we react to it, we begin to see the role we play in the unfolding of our own lives. We begin to see that though we cannot influence nor create objective reality indefinitely, we get an almost complete say over how we choose to interpret the moments that we meet, the things we go through, and the people we become because of them.

 Rather than assuming your inherent emotionality makes you weaker, understand that to be sensitized to life is a gift in itself. It means that you are aware and connected to what’s happening around you. It means you care. It means things matter. Now, you get to do the work of developing yourself into the kind of person who can build, and nurture, and repair, and move forward in authenticity.

 You receive opportunities to practice your mental strength every day. In the same way that your body must be both exercised and rested in order to achieve physical health, your mind operates similarly. When we choose to endure internal challenges for the sake of making ourselves stronger, what we avoid is the long-term challenges that inevitably arise because we did not take care of ourselves. The body, and mind, are not so different, in this regard.

 You are not failing because you are feeling. You are being presented with an opportunity to expand your consciousness, understand your power, and choose to become the person you know you really are inside — one day at a time.

 I am walking through a garden my younger self planted for me.

 If we want gardens, we must become the gardeners. If we want love, we must be loving. If we want change, we must alter our own course. If we want connection, we must reach. If we want place, we must be steady. If we want home, we must nurture a house. If we want to love who we are, we must become who we most respect, and admire.

 Everything heals and grows when it is loved well. People, too.

 Every piece of you that hurts is a part of you that wants to be loved but does not know how to ask for it, or how to receive it, or how to allow it to seep into the openings where the losses and the lessons left caverns the size of your hope, your wide-eye awe, your child self, your true self; and in their place left hardness, and avoidance, and cynicism, and fear.

 When we don’t know how to say that there’s a part of us that wants to be seen, we often find an unconscious way to require that it is noticed. But if we began to recognize the most unseemly parts of ourselves not as the pieces that need to be amended or corrected or rejected — rather, the ones that most need to be nurtured and nourished and loved — we would transform. It would all transform.

 Every piece of you that hurts is a part of you that is asking you to pay attention to it. By bearing witness, by being present, by spending time. We think that loving something means to be unconditionally permissive when it is often in fact just the willingness to pay attention to the pieces that nobody else notices. To give the light of our awareness in the most tiny, ordinary ways.

 Everything heals and grows when it is loved well because everything reveals its true and whole nature to us when we care enough about it to see the perfection within it. Things tend to meet us at the level of our expectation of them. When we decide to look at the ugliest parts of ourselves as the ones most deserving of love, they become the avenues to the deepest and fullest experience of being loved.

 We come to find that the purpose was never to reach a completed state and then allow the floodgates to open; rather, to open the floodgates and let them fill us up from the inside out. To show us that cheap love walks beside us at our easiest, but deep love finds us at our lowest, and brings us back out into the light.

 When things want to die, but you keep them alive, they slowly kill you inside.

 We often grip most tightly to the things that are not really meant for us because, at some level, we know that if we are unattached, they will fall away. But those are not the things investing in, anyway — the things that only exist because we force them. When we have the courage to let go, we see most clearly what is there because it is so essentially a part of us, so deeply and intricately and undeniably connected.

 When we let go, we get to see what is real.

 The right time to let go is always.

 The second you begin to wonder whether or not it is time for you to open your palms and stop gripping is the exact moment that you should.

 Because the things that are really right for you — the ones that resonate, and land — they will remain. They will not require closed fists to keep them. They will not need you to tint them with a rose-colored lens. They will not ask you to list off all the reasons that make them right. They will just be.

 Letting go is not an event, it is a practice.

 We learn how to do it with the small stuff, so when the big stuff comes, we are ready.

 Letting go is not actually a matter of releasing, or pushing away. It is a process of opening our hands and staying still and allowing things to show us their true nature. When we are no longer painting our love and hope and idealizations upon those things, we get to see what they actually are. From there, we get to choose.

 When you finally have the courage to stand in the quiet for a while, a new life often arrives to meet you at the doorway. You see things you hadn’t before. You imagine things you didn’t before. You try for things you wouldn’t before. In that surrendered place, you begin to find your way back to yourself.

 When you let go, you notice that the things that are right for you never leave you. They always return, clearer and stronger than they were before. The only thing you’re actually letting go of is the idea that you are not enough. The only thing you’re actually letting go of is the idea that life was meant to just be lukewarm. The only thing you’re actually letting go is the assumption that you could not stand on your own, even for the briefest period of time. The only thing you are letting go of is valuing how things appear behind other people’s eyes over how they feel in your own heart. The only thing you’re actually letting go of is the false assumption that in place of what has gone, new and greater things could not arrive. The only thing you’re actually letting go of is the idea that all you’d ever deserve are the things that do not reach back.

 When you do not know what to do next, you do nothing.

 You open up space and you redirect your attention and you let yourself get lost in something that is not the question for which there seems to be no clear or simple answer.

 Every time you move your focus onto something else, you let go a little more. That is when things will either fully release, or come back to you with complete clarity.

 When it is no longer you who is keeping something alive, you get to see whether or not it is viable on its own. You get to see what stays. What strengthens. What becomes something even better than it was before. What is easy. What is supportive. What guides you more deeply into the person you most intend to be. You get to see what rises back up to meet you.

 You start to let go on the day you take one step toward building a new life and then let yourself lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and cry for as many hours as you need.

 Happiness is not something you can chase. It is something you have to allow.

 Happiness is your natural state. That means you will return to it on your own if you allow the other feelings you want to experience to come up, be felt, be processed, and not resisted.

 Happiness is not an epiphany, it’s a practice. As much as your conscious mind may tell you that it’s all you want to feel, and as often as it tallies up and lists out all of the reasons for which you should already feel that way — all of the answered prayers, all of the opportunities, all of the facets of a genuinely good life that you logically know you have — the truth is that the subconscious mind, the greater piece of your inner working, wants to feel what is familiar. You’d be surprised at what it considers familiar.

 If you have spent years of your life on a healing journey, familiar is the breaking and the mending, the process of losing and finding, of ending and beginning. Familiar is healing, not being healed. If you have spent years of your life resolving the tension inside of you by solving other people’s problems, by being the universal sounding board, the unpaid therapist, the person in everyone’s life that becomes simultaneously responsible for them and their wellbeing and their future, familiar is the peace you find through changing what’s outside of you, not what’s within. Familiar is fixing, and fixing requires us to always see an issue, or to get very close to those who are likewise seeking a way to export their hurt onto a willing soul. If you have spent years of your life in fear, in lack, in a constant worry about what is next and whether or not you will be okay, familiar is uncertainty. Familiar is the state of acquiring, and still not having acquired enough.

 Mostly, if you have spent years of your life thinking that happiness is joyfulness — that high-like feeling you get when something truly tremendous is happening — then you have probably likewise spent all of the downtime between those peak states reaching, and wanting, and wondering, why they are not more quickly and consistently arriving. Familiar has become unhappiness, because you do not really understand happiness.

 It’s not whether you “feel” like putting in the work, but whether or not you do it regardless.

 You did not get it wrong. No, you did not make a mistake. You stumbled into just the person who would let you experience love at the level at which you were. You discovered that you could make a home in many houses; that no matter what you had to offer, there were others out there who needed to receive what you could create, what you could give. And that when it was time to let go of what was, the next thing would always catch you. The road would always rise.

 How beautiful, to think that you were given the chance to know love not as only the final and most perfect version of yourself, but other ones along the way, too. How beautiful, to think that you were able to know home not just as the final place you would ever exist, but in little alcoves, in little corners, in little flats and apartments and all the things that held you along the way. How beautiful, to realize that the world would be so eager to meet you no matter how you showed up, just as long as you did. And how beautiful, that when you had outgrown what you’d once been a match for, life would not allow you to settle, or to stagnate. That love would continue to pull you toward ever-brighter and more expansive horizons.

 Yes, the way you once saw something, or someone, may have changed. It may have changed faster than you ever anticipated that it could, or in ways that you never would have imagined that it might. But that does not lessen, and does not negate, what you thought you knew at the beginning, what you imagined that you saw. You were right — it was the next step, even if it was not the last step. There was something within that experience that you had to learn, needed to know — even if you are still uncovering what that is, even if you are still piecing together the clarity.

 So if you are gazing toward the future, and you do not know what to do, please remember that no matter what you choose, and no matter where you go — life will meet you there. It will meet you because it is within you, because it is you.

 Sometimes, you get what you want. Other times, you get a lesson in patience, timing, alignment, empathy, compassion, faith, perseverence, humility, trust, meaning, awareness, resistance, purpose, clarity, grief, beauty, and life. Either way, you win.

 The hard truth is that we are often softened, and deepened, by the moments life doesn’t turn out the way we anticipated, the way we hoped, the way we planned. The truth is that we learn more from what we do not receive than what we do. The truth is that the contrasts make us more whole than we were before. The heaviness sensitizes us in such a way that we come to comprehend the light.

 The valleys in our lives can either be a waiting room, a suffering, or a preparation period. We get to choose what we do with defeat. We get to decide whether or not what hurts will simply burden and then jade us, or if it will catalyze us — if we will alchemize a sometimes brutal reality into an appreciation of our temporary, stinging, gorgeous, fleeting, surreal, confusing, perfect, chaotic, ecstatic time alive.

 What ails us gives us a chance to better understand, and empathize, with what it really means to be human. And though none of us will ever meet a day in which the pain is dissolved forever, we can arrive at one where the ease arises more often. Where we channel what hurts into what heals. Where we become more of who we intend to be, and not less. Where we are not dissuaded by what has not gone our way, but inspired by the spirit inside us still fighting, still nudging, still pushing us to realize — there is so much more than this. There is so much more to see.

 Temporary. Everything, all of it, even the best of it. We only have so many years to know human love, and do human things. Love them, all of them, even the painstaking ones. They, too, will not last. They are human. Ther are the experience. The insecurity? The experience. The heartache? the experience. The confusion? The experience. The joy? The experience. The risk? The experience. There is nothing lost if we learn something form it. Your willingness to fail is proportionate to your potential to gain and to grow. The timer never stops running. All you will regret is not reaching harder for the things you actually wanted, while they were still in front of you.

 I’m proud of you for being willing to lean into the unknown, for continuing to try even if you can’t quite imagine where you will ultimately land. I’m proud of you for leading with your heart, even when it’s trying to bring you somewhere your mind can’t completely comprehend. I’m proud of you for trusting that you’re not being pushed away from one thing, but called to another. For being willing to experience something you never have before, for practicing trust. I’m proud of you for living at the edge of your courage. I’m proud of you for letting yourself be guided. For remembering that the only regret is not making the most of what we had, while we still had it.

 You are not waiting on another person, or for the right timing, or for everything to magically fall into place. You are waiting until you feel ready to live within the questions, to not need every answer, and to know that this life does not come to us to be fully understood, but fully experienced — in every direction we can possibly reach.

 You are not for everyone, and everyone is not for you. That’s what makes it so special when you do find the few people with whom you have a genuine friendship, love or relationship: you’ll know how precious it is because you’ve experienced what it isn’t.

 But the longer you spend trying to force someone to love you when they aren’t capable, the longer you’re robbing yourself of that very connection. It is waiting for you. There are billions of people on this planet, and so many of them are going to meet you at your level, vibe where you are, connect with where you’re going.

 …But the longer you stay small, tucked into the familiarity of the people who use you as a cushion, a back burner option, a therapist and a ploy for their emotional labor, the longer you keep yourself out of the community you crave.

 Simone Weil once said that our attention is our fate. That if we turn our minds toward what is good, it is impossible that “little by little, the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.” And the amount of creative genius in any period exists in direct proportion to the amount of extreme attention. Our attention is our currency, and our forcefield. What we offer it to, knowingly or not, is what we make of our lives. Of ourselves. When we stop to ask: “How could I be more at peace?” What we are really meaning to ask is how might we give enough attention to peace, until it becomes us. We begin to see as peace would see, we begin to move as peace would move. If we are oriented toward solution, answers are everywhere. They are overflowing from every corner, every turn. Then we start wondering: What doorways are invisible to me? What goodness do I not see? What breakthrough is around the corner? What answered prayer is already here today? What ways could I circumvent or recreate or nurture or transform or transmute or alchemize or completely change my life? What if life is not trying to punish me, what if it’s just asking me to adapt? What is here? What is next? In what ways might my attention turn the river? In what ways has it already?

 Nobody in the history of existence ever experienced happiness because everything was perfect. Happiness is a state that only overcomes us when we pay attention long enough and deeply enough to all that’s temporary — how fleeting, how delicate, how fast it is passing us by. Only when we pay attention long enough to how many answered prayers we are living inside — how much we have, how much we can do. Only when we realize how little others are evaluating our path and place in life the way that we are — how free we are, how well received, how loved. It’s all that is not present, all that is heavy, all that is haunting, that contrasts the beauty and makes it more alive, recognizable, and real. Nobody in the history of existence experienced happiness because they had perfection, only because they developed the ability to see perfection within a moment before it passed them by.

 In retrospect, you will see how clearly and intricately you have been guided. How the right things always arrived at the right time, even when you were absolutely convinced that they would not. How the wrong things left no matter how tightly you gripped, how hard you tried, how much you attempted to force a lesson into a lifetime.

 How you were drawn to the experiences you most needed, even if they were not the ones you wanted. How life gave you the exact amount of space, and time, you actually required, even if you spent much of it wondering why things were happening too fast, or not quickly enough. How all that seemed so random, so ill-fated, so untimely, wove together into something greater than your conscious mind could have pieced together when you were just standing in the ruins, wondering how you would build the new city.

 Everything unfamiliar is also uncomfortable — no matter how good it is for us. That is what makes change so scary. Not that we are actually afraid to try new things or have new experiences or press up against the limits of our perception and defy them, but that we grow to prefer a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven.

 When we reestablish our comfort zones around the things we actually want, things start to come together effortlessly. It’s cause-and-effect. It’s inevitability. If we get comfortable with consistency, eventually, the right things align. The idea is born, the love is found, the next step is taken, and the new path has begun. In time, it culminates to becomes the foundation upon which we build our new lives — including all of the pieces of the past we’ve loved, and all the new ones we did not even know we would come to find.

 In a world where most people settle, happiness is a foreign thing.

 People can understand milestones more than they do meaning. They understand following the course over trailblazing toward your soul. They understand the love that looks right over the one that feels right. They understand what it is to pull your hope by the root, and plant sense in its place. They understand a plan that is followed, rather than a life that is engineered; one that is dreamt, and built.

 Because when you are following your heart, you are going to spend a lot of time in the unknown. You’re not always going to see what’s next because you’re working with an open-ended resource. You’re not always going to be able to move in a linear trajectory, because some things have to be revisited, revised, picked back up, and carried forward. Some things pique your interest and within them, a piece of your future is formed. When you are following your heart, you understand that you don’t always know what you don’t know. You’re not working just with the world you can see, but the one you might imagine.

 And so if you are in a place right now where you are convinced that nothing is going to work out, this is your sign that you will find everything you fear you won’t. That you will have love, have work, have home, have purpose, even if, right now, it feels as though more is coming apart than coming together.

 Because right now, the storm that’s formed did not arrive to obstruct your path, but to clear your vision. Right now, you are getting a chance to choose from your heart, and not your head. You are getting a chance to pick what’s real to you over what’s real to others. You are getting a chance to defy what you thought life would be, and enter an entirely new realm instead.

 You may believe that living life to the fullest is seeing every country in the world and quitting your job on a whim and falling recklessly in love, but it’s really just knowing how to be where your feet are. It’s learning how to take care of yourself, how to make a home within your own skin. It’s learning how to build a simple life you are proud of. A life most fully lived is not always composed of the things that rock you awake, but those that slowly assure you its’ okay to slow down. That you don’t always have to prove yourself. That you don’t need to fight forever, or constantly want more. That it’s okay for things to be just as they are. Little by little, you will begin to see that life can only grow outward in proportion to how stable it is inward—that if the joy is not in the little things first, the big things won’t fully find us.

 One day you will realize that true success is not the way things look, but how they feel. And a life that feels truly good will require you to be uncomfortable. It will ask you to stretch. It will force you to be vulnerable, to lay your heart bare. It will prompt you to make the hardest choices, and to reconcile the fact that sometimes, what’s hard is also what’s right. It will force you into integrity. It will open you where you’ve tried to build every wall. It will make you process every hurt you thought you had moved beyond, only to discover it’s been lingering somewhere inside, waiting to be felt, to be held.

 One day you will realize that true success is not someplace you might arrive one day, but the way in which you take each step in stride. It is the way you move forward, how you make the most of anything and everything around you. One day you will realize that the path to where you want to be is paved from the pieces that are already in front of you. One day you will realize that you were only ever meant to do what you can with what you have. One day you will know that if you keep reaching in the direction of your heart’s calling, eventually you will land.

 One day you will realize it is entirely possible to have everything on the surface, but an emptiness just beneath. This is because we can never have enough of what we don’t truly want, and the things we do want? They will require us to risk. To face. To be honest, and true. It will require us to ask for the love we are seeking, and to give all of it back, a thousand times over. It will shatter our egos and diminish our defenses and make us start over again and again, until we have built ourselves a little corner of the world we are proud of. Until we have arrived not at a place in the world where there is nothing but peace, but a place in our souls that is evergreen.

 One day you will realize that happiness is not what your house looks like, but how you love the people within its walls. Happiness is not finding success by a certain time, but finding something you love so much time itself seems to disappear. Happiness is not thinking you have earned the world’s approval, but waking up each day and feeling so at peace within your own skin, quietly anticipating the day ahead, unconcerned with how you are perceived. Happiness is not having the best of everything, but the ability to make the best of anything. Happiness is knowing you did what you could with what you were given. Happiness is not something that comes to us when every problem is solved and all things are perfectly in place, but in the shining silver linings that remind us the light of day is always there, if we slow down enough to notice.

 One day, you will look back on this time, and all you will see is magic.

 The person you become when you are on your own is a garden you will carry with you forever. Use the quiet. Even if single thing in your life works out exactly the way you want it to, you wake up with yourself every day. You have to know who you want to be.

 Though we may turn our roads to walk most closely with those who are tied deeply to our hearts, though we may intersect and collide and learn from others over the years, and though we may only ever know a few instances of complete, physical aloneness in our lifetimes, the truth is that our inner worlds are a place where there is only a voice of one. It is that voice narrating everything, and the essence of that narration dictates our experience. The level of its awareness determines not what we see, but how we see it. When we take time to adjust the way we perceive from that level, we actually change the moment we meet. We adjust what options we see, what we can create, what we are able to do.

 The idea that you might take your quiet hours to work on that self is not a throwaway option or a consolation prize for not being able to participate in external love the way you might want. It’s a lesson on ground zero of what it is to be human. You will wake up with yourself every day, and put yourself to sleep every night. You will be left with yourself when everyone around you goes to work and to school and grows up and moves on and once again, it is you and you. You will guide yourself through every heartache, every loss. You will also get to cherish every victory, every success, every resounding win. You are the undercurrent of your entire life experience, the most common denominator.

 The arena in which you have full and total control is that of yourself. You cannot control every passing thought or feeling that arises or experience that happens around you or to you, but you decide what you do, regardless of how you feel, or have been made to feel. And so that place becomes the most critical, the most potentially world-altering. It’s the only thing you can actually, fully assert your will upon and over, and so it is funny to consider that it’s the very same place that most people avoid. We spend eternity gazing outward and identifying all that’s wrong, but nothing too much changes, because there is little relief in realizing — perhaps my purpose is something far more difficult. Perhaps my offering must begin with me.

 All the pieces of your story that have not made sense, that have left you with more questions than answers, that felt like false starts and endless cycles, will eventually reveal themselves to you as perfectly sequenced, perfectly timed, perfectly destined to set you up for all that you would one day come to know and be.

 Sometimes, you don’t know because you can’t know. The virtue of you knowing where it all ultimately leads would short-circuit the process, and the process? It’s a regathering. It’s where you wake up the parts of yourself that had been laying dormant as potential, where you recover the parts of yourself that you lost to the past, to grief, to fear; where you begin to uncover who you really are, and what you really want to be. Your path has taken you to the exact people, places and experiences that can give you that knowledge. The losses were lessons, written by your own subconscious mind, with the intention of bringing you to your edges and allowing you to see past the walls you had been quietly living inside.

 The life you are meant for is the life you actually want. Not the life you are settling for because it feels easiest, because you want to feel safe more than you want to actually experience this world while you are still in it. Not the life that makes your ego feel as though it can compete, but the one that makes your soul recognize that there was never a competition in the first place. The only measure is how fulfilled we are, how much we can appreciate the day we have, the opportunities we’re being given, those who have chosen to walk alongside us — all we have, all we are, and all we will one day be.

 It is in our highest interest to listen to the discomfort, as it is attempting to lead us to peace. To honor what is not working so we may keep reaching toward what will. To remember that if something is not bringing us wholeness, it is trying to bring us to the piece of ourselves we first must self-realize in order to heal, in order to truly, and completely, be.

 Almost when you least expect it, things fall into place. You realize that what left was making space for what was about to arrive. The quiet let you hear the guidance. The unhappiness forced you to make a move. The unsettledness made you keep seeking. The end ushered in a new beginning. The doors that closed turned you towards the ones that were opening. The lessons were always leading you. Every time you got it wrong — you were one step closer to arriving, having it right..

 I know it is hard to have faith in a universe that does not seem to live up to its promises. One that has killed your dreams more than it has held your hope. One that has given you so few reasons to truly trust in it, that has so often seemed to withhold everything you needed.

 What I hope you will come to see is that your faith was actually in the things that were not meant to stay, the things that were not intended to remain. Your faith was in the lessons, the things that were meant to teach you something bigger than yourself, to show you back to a light within that you forgot existed. Your faith was in the idea that you would always know what was best, that you could see the full picture. Your faith was in the fact that you did not get what you wanted, when you were being handed what you actually needed.

 The universe does not have any one fixed agenda, there is no external source of consciousness deciding when, and for how long, you will be withheld from your heart’s desires. There is only evolution, and growth. There is the subconscious mind, and the superconscious one. There is the people we believe ourselves to be, and the parameters through which we have come to form our image of them. There are our past experiences and our blind spots. There are the things we learn from getting what we want, and the things we learn from getting what we don’t.

 Instead of focusing all of your attention on what has cycled out of your life, what has not held up the way you thought or hoped that it would, consider instead all that has. All the love that you have carried, all of the dreams that have not died. All of the people who have found you at every iteration of your journey, whose paths have magically seemed to curve and twist alongside your own. All of the things you were right about. All of the things that remained.

 There are always things to grieve over, and things to be grateful for. We get to decide what we pay attention to. We get to decide what we believe in. We get to decide what we see.

 Eventually, you will worry about whatever is haunting you for the last time and you will not realize it is the last. Eventually, you will place down your fear and you will not pick it back it up. Eventually, what once was ritual will become routine. Eventually, you will stop feeling your phantom limbs, your thought-form afflictions. Eventually, what was once foreign will become familiar. Eventually, you will find yourself on the other side of doors you once only prayed would open. It will happen slowly, and then all at once.

 You do not have to instruct the flower on how to bloom. You do not have to will or affirm it into existence. You just have to arrange the environment so that growth is the inevitable outcome. You just have to allow it to do what it is designed to do at its deepest and most invisible levels. You do not have to feel deserving of a garden to have one, you just have to plant the seeds. It will happen, even if you are afraid that it will not. You will get there, even if you feel like you won’t. Things will be different, even if it seems as though they have always remained the same.

 You do not have to impose your will upon the outcome, you have to trust the process. You do not have to force a change, you have to engineer it phase by phase. You do not have to hope that things will be different, you just have to change them in the quietest, most unsuspecting ways, and then continue. The horizon is your inevitable destination as long as you keep walking toward it. We do not fail unless we stop, or until we do. You don’t have to feel good enough. You don’t have to be certain. You don’t have to be without any fear or hesitation. You just have to keep going. You have to keep listening to the version of you that is waiting, that is calling to you from the other side.

 If you are in a season of growth, keep growing. If you are in a season of lessons, keep learning. If you are in a season of trial and error, keep trying. Because the growth you do within yourself will be yours forever. The wisdom gained from your introspection will be, too. The truths you uncover about who you are and what you really desire — they will guide and carry you forward.

 If life has handed you an opportunity to change, I hope you take it. We are not challenged for no reason, we are not tested for nothing. We are given chances to prove our own self-trust, to show ourselves that we are ready to leap.

 If you are worried will not do anything but make us feel worse than we already do.

 One day, the mountain that is in front of you will be so far behind you, it will barely be visible in the distance. But the person you become learning to get over it? That will stay with you forever. That is the point of mountain.

 This is your reminder that whatever is in front of you will one day be behind you. Everything is temporary, everything passes. But it’s within this moment that you have the chance to see something differently, to do something differently. To change.

 The point is to find the hidden possibility — and to take it. Though this moment won’t be here forever, the person you become to get through it can be, and will. Even in the most unlikely moments, there is something to be found, something to be realized, something to be brought forward.

 And so if you find yourself at a crossroads where it seems as though all you are doing is wondering, and waiting, when everything will come into place, please know that it will. It already has. But this pivot period is not a purgatory, not in the way you think, not in the way it seems. It’s your chance to decide who is going to show up and meet your new life. Which version of you is going to walk through your days.

 In your quiet hours, in your uncertainty — please know that you’re doing better than you think you are. You’re closer than you think you are. What you have navigated, what you have managed, is greater than what anyone could fully imagine. You deserve to appreciate how strong you have been, how much you have held. And you deserve to realize it’s the strength of you that will keep you going forward, that will remain.

 The illusions pass, but the truth stands firm. Find it, and lean on it. It will move you to the other side.

 What is meant for you will arrive in your life and it will remain in your life. What did not transpire was not meant to; the end of that journey would not have led you somewhere you would have wanted or needed to be. If you are really honest with yourself, you know this on the inside. There were so many signs that you willingly brushed over in the heat of blind hope. If you spend your life fixated on the might-have-beens, you miss out on the steady currents that have carried you all this way. Notice what stays. Notice what is constant. Notice what perseveres. These are the things that the song of your life will be composed of.

 You cannot miss what is meant for you. You cannot lose what is yours.

 Any road you take in an effort to avoid your destiny will inevitably turn into a preparation period — a growth concourse — through which you are forced to face what led you astray in the first place. In the same way that you cannot hide from what is yours to have, you can also not run from what is yours to heal, to grow from, to grow into. And those things are very often intertwined.

 The things that are right for us are not just the ones that make us feel something special, something rare, something otherworldly — they’re the things that make us believe in ourselves again. The things that instill a hope so far gone, we thought we had lost it forever. They are the things that make us feel like we are approaching a light at the end of the tunnel, as though all the pieces have come together, and finally make sense.

 The things that are meant for us make us the people we are meant to be.

 When we try to move away from them, we are faced with additional lessons that prepare us in a way that makes the detour seem almost an essential part of the path. Sometimes, we are simply not ready to hold all that the world is trying to offer us, and the process of cleaning out our old habits, thoughts and attachments begins to open a space for us to finally receive. And receive we will, because what is ours never leaves us. It is connected to us a through a golden, invisible thread, one that pulls us and inspires us and calls our attention back to it, again and again. It is with us always.

Everything that is meant for you will feel like a deep exhale, as though you are returning home to a place you forgot existed.

Another person’s progress is an affirmation of what’s possible, not a reason to doubt your own. The people you envy are not your competition, they are your mentors.

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

 There’s a deep sense of panic or uneasiness that can come with the recognition that you don’t know what you want, but the truth is that you do. There is no such thing as “not knowing what you want,” want is a part of your operating system, always. It’s the discernment process you’re struggling with, as you’ll want a variety of things throughout the course of your life, and in any given experience or time. So it’s up to you to choose what you’re going to prioritize, value or energize with your thoughts, focus or behaviors.

 Want exists in a hierarchy.

 What you are inspired by are the things you are aware you want. What you are envied by are the things you are not aware that you want. What you are triggered by are the inverse of the things you do not realize you want.

The key to finding peace in this life is realizing that the only way to overcome is to transcend; to find happiness in the simple pleasures, to master the art of just being.

People will come and go as they are scheduled to. Let them. Holding on does not affect them, only you.

The things you love about others are the things you love about yourself. The things you hate about others are the things you cannot see in yourself.

 Inspirational Brianna Wiest Quotes About Life (HAPPINESS)

One day you will be grateful you kept going. Stay for that day.

If you take the first step today, you have already changed your life. If you are willing to see your life change, it is already different.

Accomplishing goals is not success. How much you expand in the process is.

The point of anything is not what you get from having done it, it’s who you become from having gone through it.

“Happiness, if you think about it, is the biggest conundrum we face. The pursuit of it is why we do basically everything that we do, and yet, none of that effort is necessary: it’s the simplest choice of changing our state of mind.

 Your job right now is not just to endure whatever you are going through and then move on, but to begin building a life beyond the confines you once knew so as to render them irrelevant. When life gives you a lesson, it is not giving you a punishment. It’s giving you an opportunity to embody the qualities of the person you have always wanted to be, not just so that the challenge in front of you transforms, but so that everything else does, too.

Be willing to see the impossible change. Consider things you never have before. Blow the lid off your life.

 What assets do you have right now that you are not taking advantage of? What answered prayers are going unacknowledged, what glimmers of progress are going unrecognized? What little sparks of interest, or possibility, are attempting to grasp your attention, and which heavier weights of fear and decided failure are bearing down upon them and extinguishing your consideration before they have really been seen?

 In what ways are you shortchanging your potential, in what ways have you taken yourself out of the arena before you were ever really in? In what ways are you guarding your heart by hurting it, as though you could safeguard by desensitizing, when your disproportionate focus upon the ways in which you might not be enough are scar tissuing them into your head enough to start fighting with your heart? In what ways are you already playing dead?

 If you could imagine that it was all taken away from you tomorrow, what would you most regret not being grateful for? Not seeing for what it was, while it still was there? In what ways are the doorways of opportunity outlining themselves along the closed walls of your perception, and what courage might you need to muster in order to realize that this very moment contains within it the unlikely entryway to what you’ve been asking for all along?

 We live as though it’s all a given, an endurance game — that life is something that is only to be tolerated. As though we could shield ourselves from the hurt by not taking the risk when the only real risk is not giving it all, while we still could. Failing to live on the edge of our hope, our faith. Not doing what we wanted to do, while we could still do it. Not loving the people who were in front of us, while they were still there. Not being who we had the capacity to be, while we were still in the moment.

 No longer waiting for the breakthrough, but understanding that it is only a micro-shift that can set off a domino effect within our lives — that the biggest things begin with the smallest ones, and they’re all around us, quietly asking us to realize. To see.

 A mind-blowing, singular breakthrough is not what changes your life. A microshift is.

 You don’t need a breakthrough, you need a microshift. If you’re stuck in life, it’s probably because you’re waiting for the big bang. The breakthrough moment in which all your fears dissolve and you’re overcome with clarity. The work happens effortlessly. Your personal transformation rips you from complacency, and you wake up to an entirely new existence. That moment will never come. Breakthroughs do not happen spontaneously, they are tipping points. Revelations occur when ideas that were sitting in the margins of your mind finally get enough attention to become a dominate thought.

 The idea is what science philosopher Thomas Kuhn calls a “paradigm shift.” He shares that we don’t change our lives in flashes of brilliance, but through a slow process in which assumptions unravel and require new explanations. It’s in these periods of flux that microshifts happen and breakthrough-level change begins to take shape. Making those changes is not difficult because we’re flawed, incompetent beings. It’s difficult because we’re not meant to live outside our comfort zones. At our most instinctive, physiological level, “change” translates to something dangerous and potentially life-threatening. No wonder why we build our own cages and stay in them though there’s no lock on the door.

 Trying to shock yourself into a new life isn’t going to work, and that’s why it hasn’t yet.

 You don’t need to wait until you feel like changing to start changing. All you need is to make one microshift at a time, and then let the energy and momentum build.

 Please, take this life while it’s still yours. Our time is too short, too fragile, to spend it imagining that our dreams will have a half-life, that somewhere along the line, we’ll get to pick up all the things that went untaken. We cannot save our presence for a better time; there are no future roots if there are no current threads.

 You are not meant to get comfortable somewhere you are not supposed to be — so go.

 You are not meant to have someone you loved pulled away from you — so trust.

 You are not meant to plant roots somewhere you will not blossom — so change.

 When we say to not settle, we often don’t account for how exhausting it is to keep going, how much it takes to keep mustering up the fortitude to keep trying, to keep grieving the losses of what we must place down in order to pick up what is ahead. But the alternative is that we spend our lives lukewarm, never quite initiated to go forward, but never quite able to settle all the way in either.

 Can you remember how it felt when you’ve gotten it right before? It’s not overthought. There’s an offhandedness about it. It’s a simple yes, not a complicated yes. Not a yes that’s arrived at or rationalized to. It’s not a yes that is a conclusion, it’s a yes that’s an initial knowing, the details of which surround and fill with time. There are no justifications. There is no inner nagging, no pulling away. You are simply in a state of arrival, and then your gears switch. The days become about living, not deciding where to land.

 The pieces become more beautiful than their parts, and you realize — every loss was a lesson that made this possible.

 Every step was meant to be.

 I hope you allow your life to be bigger than you ever thought it could be. I hope you allow it to embody more beauty than you ever thought possible. I hope you don’t get trapped by the small stories, the little ideas you had about what the future would be. I hope you don’t long for the things you’ve outgrown just because they are familiar. I hope you don’t consider everything you lose to be a loss. I hope you don’t define yourself only by the limits of what you’ve known. I hope you don’t cap your potential at what others have said is possible. Most of all, I hope you recognize the light when it hits you. I hope you let yourself do more than you ever thought you could.

 I hope you build a life that feels more beautiful than it looks.

 I hope you come to see that real happiness is when you stop prioritizing someone else’s eyes over your own heart. When you realize that the more you like something, the less you will need others to like it for you; and the less you need others to like it for you, the more they genuinely will.

 I hope you keep going. I hope you come to see that the difference between the things we keep and the ones that slip away from us are often distinguished not by how perfectly they come together without difficulty, but what we do with the fragmented parts. How we respond, and how we fight to keep going. We succeed at what we continue with — what we have enough care for, enough love, enough meaning to carry on with — even when it’s hard, even when we’re tired, even when we’ve lost our resolve.

 In so many periods of our lives, we often arrive at these resting places — these valleys between — that can feel like moments of full surrender. Moments when we have lost. Moments when we decide the fight isn’t worth it, the damage too severe and the outcome too far off. These places are where we either catch our breath and remember why we began, or where we begin to build a disjointed home. Where we decide that this far is enough, and we attempt to settle. It is exactly at that moment that you must decide not to settle.

 It’s often when we most want to give up that we are closest to the breakthrough. It’s often when we are most completely convinced that it is no longer worth our effort that it is actually an inch from arriving within the palms of our hands.

 Even if it takes you years longer than you ever dreamed, I hope you do not ever give up on arriving at your place of peace. The place that exists not in naive hope that everything is perfect, but in the way you let yourself fall into the perfect moments that arrive, scattered, but none-the-less, freeing in the way they evoke a remembrance, a truth. That we are both wonderful, and flawed. That the sun will always cave down past the horizon, and it will be night. That we can either grieve within the darkness or gaze at the stars and know — it is the light of day that keeps them visible, even from afar.

 We are often fractured in just the outline of our paths, our fates. We are often able to recognize what lacks in the exact spaces we are called to build. We are not less for the ways we are human, but more whole than before. Without what is imperfect, there would be nothing for us to form.

 We are never so concerned with how we are perceived as when we are not firm in our own knowing. When we are looking to reimagine what is in front of us through the perspective of someone who would see some goodness inside of it — the accolades, the impressiveness, the things that would make it all seem right and whole and well.

 This only ever leads us to a life in which we are only able to move through the motions. A life where we are confused by the juxtaposition of how everything is right on the surface and everything is empty just beneath. It takes a lot of soul to move from the well-worn ways of the world and seek solace in what really lights us up, that makes our days feel exciting again. Within that is our own small callings, the way life is asking us to reengage with what matters, to find our hope again.

 If you really pay attention, you will find that the beginning of every great story was that someone had the courage to give themselves to what they knew, before anyone else could see it, or feel it, or affirm how good it might or would be. That self-knowing, that faith, is the engine and birthplace of creativity and love and everything worthwhile. It is the acknowledgement that there is a feeling within you that you cannot shake — and the bravery to say that you will follow it, even if it does not make sense to anybody but you, at the start. I hope you give that to yourself. A life that you’re actually living, not one you are engineering so as to win a game that only you are playing with your own mind.

 Sometimes, we don’t get what we want because we are meant for things far greater than we’d ever let ourselves believe.

 Sometimes, we fail not because we are lost or inept or in some other way lacking, but because some deeper knowing inside of us is beginning to take hold, and some greater vision is beginning to take shape, and instead of a life we can tolerate, we begin moving toward one we can’t get enough of. Instead of a consolation prize, we start preparing for the victory lap. Instead of believing that we are not enough because we could not thrive within what was not meant for us, we begin to realize that we are not meant to excel at a life that is not designed to make the most of who we most essentially are, what we most fundamentally love, what we are most inherently born to be.

 You are not behind for the ways in which life did not turn out the way you once wanted it to. The gap between where you are and where you most want to be will be filled by the person you become — and that is why we have dreams in the first place. Not so that we might arrive somewhere that is perfect, but that we will press up against the bounds that we think limit us and move beyond them. To see with crystalline clarity that we are limitless beyond even our own comprehension. That we are designed with the potential to fulfill what quietly inspires us, what motivates us, what interests us, what enlivens us, what awakens us in every sense.

 We don’t only have to grow, we also have to learn. We have to confront our shadows and our demons. We have to know the ways in which we are inclined to self-destruct. We have to understand what we do not want life to be before we can grasp what we do. Becoming the whole of who we are is not a matter of solely embodying the beautiful things in our hearts, but also befriending the hard ones.

 We reside, always, at the edge of everything — all of the past behind us, and all of the potential in front, and all of the doorways around. The humbling, the losing, the stopping, the releasing, the slowing and the stillness is just trying to give us the eyes to see.

 Maybe right now, you’re alone because whatever you need to learn about yourself can only be learned in solitude. Maybe right now, the pieces of yourself you’re finding are fusing a truer self into form, a kind of self that will become a more clear and recognizable match for the places and people and opportunities that are meant to come your way.

 Maybe right now, you don’t feel good enough because you’re going to bring someone to the places where you feel the most unworthy and let them love you there. Maybe right now, it’s quiet because you’re learning to hear the sound of your own voice. Maybe right now, you feel stuck because you have tried to force stillness when what you really need is to keep going. Maybe right now, you feel lost because you’re getting a chance to choose something greater than what you once assumed the best could be. 

 Maybe right now, you’re learning to see yourself with kinder eyes. To give yourself the benefit of the doubt. Maybe right now, you’re realizing the value in recognizing how far you’ve come, and allowing that to fuel you forward. Maybe right now, you’re giving yourself more credit. Maybe you’re giving yourself a second chance. Maybe you’re learning how to be with yourself in the quiet hours, the times when you’d rather fill the void with another person’s company. Maybe you’re learning how to enjoy your own presence.

 Maybe life is trying to show you how taking care of the person you are informs the one you will become. Maybe things are happening just as they need to, even if you don’t understand their sequence, or order, or reason. Maybe all you’re meant to do is take it one day, or even hour at a time. To greet the moment and ask what you should do with it, even if what you should do is sometimes the bare minimum, and sometimes the revolutionary.

 Maybe this is the time when you make space for all of those pieces of you to come together, to settle in and find their way home. Maybe in the midst of the uncertainty, this is life’s way of making sure you make peace with yourself.

 A beautiful life is not stumbled upon, it is built. It is chosen. It is nurtured over the years. A beautiful life is made from the heart, not the head. It is not one we can rationalize our way into, it’s the one that must be felt. A beautiful life is not one that is immediately comfortable, but one grown through the acknowledgement of what is worth being uncomfortable for. It is not that is easy, it is one that is worth it.

 A beautiful life is composed of the things our 90-year-old selves would have wished we’d done with the years in which we were so young but didn’t realize, before the decades piled up and passed us by and we came to find how little time even the luckiest among us have. It is made of all the little whispered prayers they’d have for us as they looked back, the same way we imagine our younger selves now and wish we could impart and instill so much guidance, so often leaning in the direction of — go where your heart already calls you, move toward the truth you already know.

 A beautiful life is made with someone who not only makes you fall in love with them, but makes you fall in love with the person you become because of them. The kind of human being they push and inspire you to be. The kind of person who loves you as you are while still holding space for your growth. The kind who would carry you down the steps if you could not walk anymore, who would hold your hand until the last minute of the last hour, with whom you could have nothing, but it would still feel like everything.

 Happiness is not how your life appears, it is the quality of your connection to it. How deeply and intimately those bonds run. How much you truly cared about what you were doing and the people around you and the memories you made and how bravely you put your heart into your days, rather than hiding yourself away and wondering if you could make things appear full on the surface, while it all sits empty just beneath.

 What if there were only sixty more holidays left in your life, and fifty more or ten more times you’ll wake up early enough to watch the sunrise? What if there were only fifteen more times you’ll fall asleep listening to the ocean beat against the shore? What if you’ve already read your favorite book? What if you only have three more times to see someone you love? What if you only have one? How fast does that change things—to think that maybe you do not have forever, though it feels like you have so much longer to survive? How differently will your eyes set their gaze next time you arrive at one of those sacred moments, those irreplaceable days? How much more will you pay attention? How much more will you see?

 This is your sign that there are pieces of your life coming together right now that are bigger than you can see. That in the movements and changes and adjustments that feel so scary, so disappointing, so disconcerting, you are being intricately guided to exactly where you’ve asked, and envisioned, and worked so hard to be. You have not been forgotten. You are not falling behind. In fact, this is the moment when things are most coming together.

 The beautiful thing is also the hard one — that sometimes, we have to compromise what’s comfortable for what’s true. That we can grow so accustomed to the things that are not quite right for us, we can begin to confuse them for certainty, for home. That we could grow and wind roots around what was only meant to be temporary — a lesson, a learning period — and break our own hearts in the process of saving our souls.

 But those hearts are resilient, and they’re made even more so when we realize that the things we are most attached to are blank canvases upon which we have painted our love, and made them good. And that quality, that ability, goes with us wherever we are. It only grows as it learns, as it begins to discern, as it stumbles back into the things that are so undeniably right, so clearly meant for us.

 And those things that are so undeniably right and clearly meant? They aren’t that way because we find them and they are instantaneously perfect, but because the ground is clear enough and the perimeter is wide enough and the open possibility matches the vision we have of what it could be — and so we begin, and we continue.

 If we do not give up, we build the things we most want, from the inside out.

 So when life seems to be redirecting you — when the changes are swift and sudden, especially — remember that you have no idea what future pain your current discomfort is saving you from. Particularly when you consider that there is no greater regret than getting to the end of your days and realizing that you wasted your time; you did not do what you came here to do.

 You may not see it today or tomorrow, but eventually all the pieces will add up and bring you somewhere wonderful, or where you always wanted to be. You will be grateful that some things did not work out the way you once wanted them to.

 The difference between the things we keep and the ones that slip away from us are often distinguished not by how perfectly they come together without difficulty, but what we do with the fragmented parts. How we respond, and how we fight to keep going. We succeed at what we continue with — what we have enough care for, enough love, enough meaning to carry on with — even when it’s hard, even when we’re tired, even when we’ve lost our resolve.

 In so many periods of our lives, we often arrive at these resting places — these valleys between — that can feel like moments of full surrender. Moments when we have lost. Moments when we decide the fight isn’t worth it, the damage too severe and the outcome too far off. These places are where we either catch our breath and remember why we began, or where we begin to build a disjointed home. Where we decide that this far is enough, and we attempt to settle. It is exactly at that moment that you must decide not to settle.

 It’s often when we most want to give up that we are closest to the breakthrough. It’s often when we are most completely convinced that it is no longer worth our effort that it is actually an inch from arriving within the palms of our hands.

 Even if it takes you years longer than you ever dreamed, I hope you do not ever give up on arriving at your place of peace. The place that exists not in naive hope that everything is perfect, but in the way you let yourself fall into the perfect moments that arrive, scattered, but none-the-less, freeing in the way they evoke a remembrance, a truth. That we are both wonderful, and flawed. That the sun will always cave down past the horizon, and it will be night. That we can either grieve within the darkness or gaze at the stars and know — it is the light of day that keeps them visible, even from afar.

 We are often fractured in just the outline of our paths, our fates. We are often able to recognize what lacks in the exact spaces we are called to build. We are not less for the ways we are human, but more whole than before. Without what is imperfect, there would be nothing for us to form.

What if you’ve already received everything you’ve ever wanted, but you’ve been so focused ahead that you haven’t even noticed?

“Most people prioritize being liked over being happy. Likability is very much about how you fit into someone else’s projection of themselves, so being disliked is somewhat inevitable. Choose your happiness.

 Piece by piece, you are going to build a life for yourself. Not because you have finally arrived at a place where everything is perfect, but because you have allowed flowers to grow between the concrete of your grief. Because you have chosen to believe in hope for just one more second than you have indulged your fear. Because you learned to stop holding yourself to your own impossible standards, and began to practice following your heart through each hour of each day, letting it lead you to the greatest revelations, and the smallest pleasures, and the quiet salve of healing hours at which you remembered—it was always going to be okay.

 There is a path to everything you know is waiting for you, even if you don’t know what that is right now.

 Sometimes, the paths we plan too intently end up limiting us in some way. There are possibilities available to your future self that your current self wouldn’t be able to consider. All your mind can pull from is what it’s known, and if you’re trying to build a life outside of that, then you’re going to have to open yourself to the possibility that not only is there a path forward, but that it may very well lead somewhere better than you thought.

 Sometimes, we don’t know because we can’t know. The very fact of us knowing would disrupt the timing of what is unfolding. The very fact of us knowing would prevent us from learning the lessons that are here for us today.

 And those lessons? They aren’t a due we have to pay or a purgatory we are being stuck in, they are the building blocks of the character of the person who is opening up to this next level of their existence. What’s here for you right now contains within it the wisdom and the growth needed to unlock the next phase.

 I hope that instead of wondering and worrying how you will ever move forward, you can simply recall all the other times you feared you never would… and did. You can remember that you never would have imagined exactly what led you to most good things in your life, and I hope that will inspire you to keep your heart open to wonder, to mystery, to the infinite unknown through which everything beautiful and important will emerge.

 I hope you stop talking yourself out of the person you actually want to be.

 I hope you will realize how often things meet you at your expectation of them. How presence is everything, but you also have a choice in what moment you meet. How the way you set your gaze is often how you find the view. That you can decide, in any second of that infinite now, to look for the silver linings, the glimmers, the doorways that are cracked open, inviting you to see the possibility, the potential, the goodness.

 Most of all, I hope you will understand that you become the person you condition yourself to be. You are a work of your own making, a nurturing that does not only happen by chance, but also, by choice. I hope you will start to see how all those tiny revolutions add up to something greater than their parts. I hope you will begin to realize the power you’ve always had deep inside.

 I hope you will come to discover that the life you’ve always wanted has always just been waiting for you to start walking toward it, one step at a time.

 I hope you learn how to bring yourself home. I hope you learn to differentiate comforting yourself with coddling; I hope you stop negotiating your standards down to your familiarities.

 When good things are trying to find you, I hope you let them. I hope you leave room for things to turn out better than you had planned. I hope you do not deny yourself happiness because you know how human you are; because you are most familiar with your rough edges, your mistakes, your past. I hope when the sun is finally shining on you, you let yourself feel its warmth. I hope you don’t think your way out of every beautiful thing that is trying to reach you. I hope you don’t look back and realize you were the biggest thing standing in your own way.

 I hope you will take nothing for granted — no lesson, no person, no place. I hope you will see that everything was a teacher, even the most unlikely of experiences was in some way there to guide to your path. I hope you will have faith in the fact that everything that’s meant for you will find you, remain with you, or return to you, it is only a matter of when. I hope you will realize that when you ask for a bigger experience, you’ll first be handed the lessons that will grow you into the type of person who would have that life you want. I hope you’ll begin to see the purpose in what’s seemed meaningless, I hope you’ll never lose faith that your happy ending is still there, still waiting.

 I hope you allow your life to be more than you ever thought it could be. I hope you press back on the limiting thoughts that have made you cling so tightly to the worlds you’ve already outgrown. I hope you will listen to the little calling in your heart that knows what’s really true, even if your mind doesn’t yet understand how it might be possible. I hope you will consider that maybe there’s more available to you than you even know to ask for. I hope you will let yourself be expanded, to see that there are others just like you taking big leaps in the directions you always hoped to go, but have just been waiting on the courage.

 I hope you will remember that is no desire that can be within us without an equal amount of potential to make it reality. I hope you will let yourself dream. I hope you will let yourself consider more than you assumed you’d be able to have, not always in scale, but in depth and beauty and truth. I hope you will know that no experience will be wasted. I hope you know it will all eventually add up. Most of all, I hope you will realize that the journey was the becoming, not the arriving. I hope you’ll give yourself the chance to enjoy the journey while you’re still on it.

 Growth means letting go of the person who has kept you safe in order to become the one who can set you free.

 Growth is what happens when the selves we once were reach a threshold where they can no longer carry us forward, and in their place, new and truer selves must emerge, and form. When the old parts of ourselves that were constructed in response to fear and trauma resist their own alchemy, what rises within us is this sense of panic and disarray, and if we are not careful, it is the very moment where we are most at risk of adopting the most limiting beliefs of all: that what is most familiar to us is most correct for us; that who we have been is who we will always be.

 It is less important to ask “Who am I?” than it is to ask: “Who would I like to be?”

 Who you think you are is very often just who you’ve had to be. In some ways, that’s the truth of all of us — a patchwork of everyone and everything we’ve known, and loved, seen, and done. But we are also amendable, and as much as the outside world has nurtured our sense of truth, so can our internal ones. We are, in larger ways than not, of our own making.

 That is the most empowering notion, and also, the most terrifying. There is no more defaulting in this acceptance. There is no more looking around and blaming, or holding on. There is only the choice of whether we will hurt to stay as we’ve been, or hurt to become who we might be. There is no workaround for discomfort, the shadows are rendered by the light. What we get to decide is what we’re going to endure for. What our greater intention will be. What we are going to let ourselves get used to. What we are going to reorient our comfort zones around so often and so honestly that in time, we become known to the world as we only ever once imagined ourselves to be.

 Growth is when we let go of the known parts of ourselves — the accepted, the understood, the comfortable parts — in favor of building new ones. Parts that give us the inner sense of openness to love where we were once closed, respond where we once only reacted, choose where we once felt it was chosen for us, and become a kind of person that only once seemed viable in our wildest dreams.

 The breakthrough is not the moment when things finally fall into place, but the moment we are able to dance despite the unanswered questions, the unknown, the losses, the hurt. We have to move as though we have already arrived, as that’s the we we get there.

 When we find it too difficult to arrive fully into the present moment, it is almost always because the quiet is telling us something we are not yet ready to hear. The longer we avoid looking honestly at ourselves, the louder our inner worlds will become. When we find the courage to look long enough into the eyes of our demons, they dissolve into crying children just asking us to set them free.

 We don’t need a lot to be happy, but we do need things that are real. We do need things that grip our hearts and enliven us and make us feel like we are here for a reason, here to experience something that could only be touched by a human body, understood by a human mind, loved by a human heart. When we deny ourselves the authentic experience of being alive, we reach for more when what we really want is not to stretch wider but to go deeper.

 I hope you will discover that making it is not always about where you end up, but how you take each step. When you change your relationship with today, you change your relationship with tomorrow.

 I hope you learn to see yourself with kinder eyes. I hope you learn that your days do not have to be filled with everything the world says they must be. I hope you find the beauty in letting yourself rest, in letting yourself be. I hope you will nurture yourself in the simplest ways, I hope you will give yourself the benefit of the doubt. I hope you will see your strengths a little more than your weaknesses. I hope you know that you are more than you let yourself believe.

 I hope you learn to see yourself like someone who truly loves you does — someone who can see your imperfections but chooses you regardless, and forgives you regardless, and believes in you regardless.

 I hope you find the courage to change your life. In the small ways, in big ways, and in every way that matters. I hope you do not end this story with a heart full of regrets. I hope you do not spend your years just waiting for your life to begin. I hope you realize that this is not the practice run, this is not the preview. This is it. There is nothing to do but leap. There is nothing to do but allow yourself to exist boldly and honestly as you can. You will think you have forever, but you do not. It all happens, and it happens quickly.

 To each of us, a great life calls. A life where we are not pushed by our fears, but inspired by our visions. A life where we embrace what it is we have to offer the world, no matter how small, or simple, that may be. A life where we slowly realize that our experience is a blank canvas upon which our subconscious minds paint pieces of our souls. A life where we see everything as an opportunity to witness ourselves more clearly, to know the ways in which we need to heal, to grow, to become.

 To each of us, a deep life calls. A life where we are no longer defined by the spaces in which we lack, the things we cannot control, the people who have chosen not to walk the path with us. A life where we choose ourselves. A life where we act from our inner locus of control, where we realize that the limits of our lives are the limits of our perceptions. A life where we begin to understand that more is available to us than we’d ever think to consider, but the first and most fundamental step is to expand our view to see all the human beings that are already doing everything we think is impossible.

 To each of us, a beautiful life calls.

A life where we realize that the joy was always in the journey. That there are no destinations, no end-points, no finalities. There is only one experience, and then the next. There is only the constant of unfolding of what was already within. There is only the realization that everything we’ve ever loved has stemmed from our own participation and creation, and we become increasingly more capable of recreating that in bigger and better ways, no matter where we go, no matter who we’re with. A life where we come to understand that it was never about how we’d experience the world, but how we’d allow the world to experience us.

 The truth is that when we observe something for too long, we inevitably discover every microscopic fault line within it, and when we focus on those minor imperfections for too long, we begin to piece together an image of that thing as being unworthy and broken and flawed. The way we see ourselves functions so similarly. If we allot too much brain space to finding, and shielding, ourselves from the ways in which we might not be enough, we inevitably end up burying ourselves beneath the mountain of evidence we didn’t even realize we were gathering in an attempt to prove ourselves right.

 We enter a complete denial of the beautiful truth of all we came here to be, and most importantly — we lose touch with the way we are really known, with the way we are really seen.

 If you were to ask almost anyone in your life to describe you, you’d probably find that the way they’d depict you would vary incredibly from the way you imagine yourself. You are so much more inclined to give weight, and precedence, to the things you are still working on, the things you are insecure about, the ways in which you are not living up to your own standards. You are so much more inclined to define yourself by what you aren’t, while the rest of the world is actually seeing you for what you already are.

 Do you know how many perfect moments are unfolding before your very eyes? Do you know how much you already have? Do you know how many quiet nights of peace you have already experienced, how many hearts have loved you, how many people would love to see your name pop up on their phone right now? Do you know how much you matter? Do you know how good you are?

 Books are most impactful when they change the way we think. It’s not what we experience while we’re staring at the pages, but what we carry with us once we place it down and re-enter our lives, slightly altered and more open to a new line of inspiration, of hope, of interest, of anything that upends the way we were and begins to carry us into where we might be. We are moved by something when we see ourselves within it. When between the lines emerges some emotion that we had been hiding away, not fully able to understand.

 In this sense, I truly believe reading saved my life. I wouldn’t be here without such a simple practice and gift. I have such vivid memories of specific pages and passages that made my body lighten, as though that author’s experience mirrored mine in some mystical, impossible, perfect way, putting the puzzle pieces together and alleviating some fraction of what hurt by the sheer knowing that in some way, I was not alone.

 Books are companions, and they are guides. 

 Maybe you don’t need to find more energy, maybe you just need to find a dream that makes you actually want to get up in the morning. Maybe you need to find something that gives back more than it takes. Maybe you need to stop trying to be good at a hundred things that do not light up your soul and finally choose the one that does—the one that asks you to risk, to lay your heart bare, to try again, even though you’re scared. You’re not failing because you’re not motivated. You’re not supposed to get far on a path that was never yours to walk.

 The doors that are right for you will gently open—and you will not have to push or force them. Because the things that are behind them want you, and need you, as much as you want and need them.

 When it’s right, you won’t doubt it more than you trust it. When it’s right, you will be naturally motivated by it. When it’s right, the risk will seem worth it. When it’s right, you won’t delay more than you pursue. When it’s right you won’t spend more time unsure than certain.

 When it’s right, it will give as much energy as it takes.

 When it’s right, it will inspire you and encourage you as often as it challenges you and changes you.

 When it’s right, it will flow spontaneously and serendipitously, and it will guide you through a series of coincidences too meaningful to be coincidental. When it’s right, you’ll look back and realize that all the steps you took were leading you right to that one, that the signs were there all along. When it’s right, it will blossom without you having to force it. When it’s right, it will help you become more of the person you’re meant to be, not distract you from your own growth. When it’s right, what you reach for will reach back.

 You will know that it is right for you because it will just happen — even despite your fear and disbelief. You will know that it is right for you because it feels like a surprise and a certainty all at once. You will know that it is right because it doesn’t drain you, it fills you up from the inside with a sense of knowing, and truth, that cannot possibly be replicated any other way.

 When it’s right, the things you love will love you back.

 You are not supposed to be motivated to pursue a life you do not really want, you are not supposed to find endless energy within the things that are not what you’re really meant to do, you are not supposed to find the inspiration for the project you aren’t supposed to complete, you aren’t meant to have the wherewithal to fight for a relationship you do not really want to have.

 Sometimes, what does not flow is not something to be fixed — but something to be honored, to be seen, and to be trusted. Sometimes, what does not energize us gives us as much vital guidance as what does.

 The people, places, and things that are destined for you are the ones that give you as much energy as they take. What’s meant for us becomes a symbiotic force—when we move toward what’s right, what’s right moves toward us.

 Everything that is truly right for you will make you feel at peace.

 Everything that is meant for you will feel like a deep exhale, as though you are returning home to a place you forgot existed. We so often yearn and want for the things that help us escape who we are, but the things that are actually meant for us — the ones that arrive and stay — they make us feel a sense of steady calm. We do not need to be swept off our feet, but grounded through them. In the moment is where love really exists. In the moment is the only place we can come alive.

 Everything that is truly right for you will make you feel at ease. Everything that is truly right for you will seem so simple, so obvious, so comfortable. Everything that is truly right for you will choose you as quickly as you choose it. Everything that is truly right for you will happen serendipitously and spontaneously. It will come to you when you expect it and when you don’t, as both a surprise and a certainty. It will seem like such an obvious fact of your life and yet entirely new, all at once.

 The truth is that we often come to believe that the things that are most right for us are the ones that give us the biggest emotions, and that is a mistake. The things that are truly right for us give us the deepest emotions. Love is a pervasive, steady presence, not a heart-pumping dash of lust. Destiny is a subtle coincidence, it makes you stop and say, well, isn’t it funny how that worked out.

 The truth is that the things that are most right for us are also the easiest to miss, because they are often subtle at first.

 You can wait forever. What isn’t right for you will never remain in your life. There is no job, person, or city that you can force to be right for you if it is not, though you pretend for a while. The truth is that what is right for you will come to you and stay with you and won’t stray from you for long. The truth is that when something is right for you, it brings you clarity, and when something is wrong for you, it brings you confusion.

 Little things become big things over time, we just have to give them a chance. We just have to stay the course. We just have to realize that life will magnetize to us what is meant to be ours. Our only job is to step out of the way.

 Self-protection is learning how to take a pause between what you feel and how you react. When there is no awareness between what you perceive and the way that you respond, anything can control you. Practice the pause. Widen the space between what you sense and what you do about it. Decide what’s worth your energy, because what you engage with is what you empower.

 The space between what you feel and how you react is the golden window through which you can change your entire life.

 When you learn to practice the pause — to elongate the time between what you perceive and how you choose to respond to it — you give yourself a way out of the life you’ve been running on autopilot, and a way into one that is actually desired, one that is anchored by the person you decide to be. One that has not yet existed, but soon will. One where you are no longer living in a state of unconscious reactivity — where you are constantly going through the motions of whatever you’ve been conditioned to do — but truly choosing who you are, and who you’re going to be

Your calm is your power because it’s from that space of objectivity that you can actually decide who you’re going to be and what your life is going to amount to. This happens not in the overarching gestures of our lives, but the tiny ones that make up the patterns that become the conditioning that become the preferred state of being that become the actual reality of who we are.

 We change our lives in the inconspicuous moments where we decide to react just a little differently than we did before. That is what we are waiting for. That is the breakthrough. Not when we are firmly on the other side of the mountain and everything is different, but when we decide we are going to change the way we walk it, one quiet pause at a time.

 The road to your becoming is lined with this one question: “What is this trying to teach me?” When you start believing that life is working in your favor — even when it seems as though the only thing you are facing is uncertainty, discomfort, and change — you begin to look for the lessons. When you begin to look for the lessons, you lean into the understanding that your emotions are instructive, and feeling lost is only a product of not knowing how to interpret them, place them, or respond to them.

 If you adopt the mindset that life is inherently evolution-oriented, and that we are meant to be forever exploring, uncovering, discovering, building, enjoying, feeling and experiencing, your life shifts from one that you must only endure to one you are an active participant in, one that you are creating, even if you cannot create every single element within it.

 When you start to remember your power, you realize that the things you can control far outweigh the ones you cannot, but when you offer more of your focus to the latter, the former begins to disappear. Fortunately, the inverse effect can occur as well. What we focus on grows, and opens. What we take the time to think through is what becomes more available, more possible. We either harden the dead-ends, or turn around and see beside them new doorways, often the very ones that we’d been asking to find all along.

 Everything is a teacher, if you allow it to be.

 Often, the most unlikely people, places and experiences are our gurus in disguise.

 Every time you hit a tough patch, ask yourself what is here to be learned, to be grown from. Ask yourself how you could allow the loss to help you appreciate what you still have; accept that nobody has everything but everyone has something, and life is only about how well we care for our somethings. Ask yourself how you could allow the hurt to teach you grace and impermanence, and mortality, and humility, and humor, and strength, and grit, and peace. The valleys can either be a suffering, or a pivot period. You get to decide how the path turns.

Usually when we have a problem that is circumstantial, we are facing the reality of life. When we have a problem that is chronic, we are facing the reality of ourselves.

 What sometimes looks on the outside as a setback, quieting, or loss is only a failure to the ego. The world will tell you that the longevity of a relationship is equivalent to the success of it, while the heart will tell you when your time together is complete. The world will tell you that a particular type of profession is equivalent to certain success, while the heart will tell you what you’re really meant to do, where you’re actually meant to be investing your time and life. The world will tell you that steadiness is the equivalent to strength, but the heart will tell you that it is the courage to feel, to process, to no longer hide or deny or run — is most indicative of character.

 Breakdowns contain within them the potential of our breakthroughs. In the same way a star must first implode before it goes supernova, we, too, often experience the absolute greatest growth when our paths and projections forward are disrupted and we are left with nothing but a blank slate upon which to build a new life. It is only within those unknowns that we are finally able to find our own truths.

 What we consider to be the ends are very often the beginnings. What we consider to be the lows are very often the opportunities for our greatest pivots, and change. What we consider to be our losses very often turn into our greatest and most profound gains.

Life Lessons Brianna Wiest Would Tell Her Younger Self

 Don’t save the good stuff. The good dress, the good wine, the good perfume. Joy has depreciating returns, you don’t earn more by postponing it.

 You know what doesn’t have deprecating returns? An index fund. Please open one.

 Everything is an inkblot test.

 Your dream career, your soulmate relationship, your sense of self… they’re all things you build, not things you stumble upon one day.

 The things that trigger you are messengers, here to help you break the pattern.

  Don’t shoot the messenger.

  If you think it’s a competition, you’ve already lost.

 If there is a competition, it’s only with the girl you used to be.

 If you came up with the biggest possible vision for your life, and then scaled it by ten, it would still not even come close to what is possible.

  Radically trust your intuition.

 You will only regret not doing what you knew you wanted and needed to do when you knew you wanted and needed to do it.

  If you force stillness before you’re ready, it creates stuckness.

 The doors that are meant for you are already open, keep walking toward them.

 Big destinies often require longer roads. This is not because the end-goal is far off, but because you are actually refining and developing yourself to be the kind of person who can materialize your gifts consistently.

 Your time is finite, make something beautiful.

 At every turn, ask yourself: “What would my 90-year-old self wish I had done?”

  Almost every answer is inside that question.

 You get what you’re given, it’s all how you use it.

Alright, let’s wrap this up with a little challenge: find that one quote by Brianna Wiest that feels like it speaks directly to your story.

Not just the one that sounds nice, but the one that nudges you, pokes at your thoughts, and maybe even shifts the way you see things.

When you find it, let it sit with you, let it work its magic, and then tell me, what did it change for you?

Conclusions

You can discover the insights of this eminent author, whose words represent authenticity and depth, providing the encouragement many need to navigate life’s difficulties. By exploring these quotes, you’ll find not just motivation but also a roadmap to self-discovery, wisdom and empowerment.