145 Posts found for Author: Maria Popova

What is so often mistaken for love of another is a projection of the unloved parts of oneself.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Relationships

James Hollis writes, “we all live out, unconsciously, reflexes assembled from the past.” Carl Jung termed such reflexes personal complexes — largely unconscious and emotionally charged reactions operating autonomously. Most of life’s suffering stems from the unexamined workings of these complexes and the conditioned choices they lead us to, which further sever us from our true nature.

Authors: James Hollis, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Haunting this conditional life are our psychic reflexes — the coping mechanisms developed for the traumas of childhood, which James Hollis divides into two basic categories: “the experience of neglect or abandonment” or “the experience of being overwhelmed by life,” each with its particular prognosis. The overwhelmed child may become a passive and accommodating adult prone to codependence, while the abandoned child may spend a … [ Read more ]

Authors: James Hollis, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

We cannot love whom we do not understand.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Personal Improvement, Relationships

All trust is, in a sense, a handshake of predictability, and every breach of trust is devastating precisely because the other person has unpredictably withdrawn their hand.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Relationships, Trust

We are always divided between our will and our personality, the conscious and the unconscious. Whenever we face the abyss between the two, we are overcome with an uneasy feeling the existentialists called Angst. [Iris Murdoch defines] it as the “fright which the conscious will feels when it apprehends the strength and direction of the personality which is not under its immediate control.” … … [ Read more ]

Authors: Iris Murdoch, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Paradoxically, while our illusions about ourselves and others are the work of fantasy, seeing clearly is the work of the imagination — of the willingness to investigate imaginatively what lives behind the masks people wear, what hides in our own blind spots.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

In the lifelong project of understanding ourselves, we are all reluctant visitors to the dusky and desolate haunts of our own nature, where shadows we do not want to meet dwell.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement

In any human association that has earned the right use the word love, we must be in relationship with both the light and the shadow in ourselves and each other. All authentic relationship is therefore a matter of clear sight — of seeing through the shining pane of the other’s self-concealment and removing the mirror of our own projections.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Personal Improvement, Relationships

More often than not, when a person breaks a promise, it is because they believed themselves to be the kind of person who could keep it and found themselves to be a person who could not.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

One of the hardest things to learn in life is that the heart is a clock too fast not to break. We lurch into loving, only to discover again and again that it takes a long time to know people, to understand people — and “understanding is love’s other name.” Even without intentional deception, people will surprise you, will shock you, will hurt you — … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

Myriad unchosen variables, from genetic and cultural inheritance to accidents and natural disasters, constrain our capacity for change. But beyond this question of whether and how we can choose our transformation is the question of what transformation to choose at all — a fundamental question of self-knowledge, riddled with all the ways in which we are fundamentally opaque to ourselves.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Personal Improvement

Change is often a consequence of, and a coping mechanism for, the contradictions we live with — an attempt at greater cohesion.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Psychology | Behavior

The profoundest changes tend to happen not willed but spawned by fertile despair — the surrender at the rock bottom of suffering, where the old way of being has become just too painfully untenable and a new way must be found.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Psychology | Behavior

Because our locus of choice is so narrow against the immensity of chance, nothing haunts human life more than the consequences of our choices, nothing pains more than the wistful wish to have chosen more wisely and more courageously — the chance untaken, the love unleapt, the unkind word in the time for tenderness. Regret — the fossilized fangs of should have sunk into the … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Pain & Suffering, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

There is, therefore, no mightier spell against unhappiness than moving through the present in a way that preempts regret in the future — with integrity, with humility, with wholeheartedness.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Happiness, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

If our earliest template of connection is marked by rupture and deficient co-regulation, our very notion of reciprocity may be warped, leading us to tolerate immense asymmetries of affection and attention, to mistake deeply imbalanced relationships for reciprocal.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

I am not sure what is more difficult — the heartache of enduring a change made against your will and without your consent, which is the foundation of all loss, or the inner turmoil of having to make a necessary change yourself, breaking the momentum of patterns propelled by a lifetime’s motive force, which in turn presupposes the loss of a familiar way of being, … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Confidence is simply a way of moving through the world with a correct view of your strengths and vulnerabilities, a correct measure of your depths and your limits, in order to face the possible with unstoried willingness.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement

All expectation is a story of the possible. Every person lives inside a story of who they are, what they are worth, and what is possible for their life, and suffers in proportion to how conscious they are of the story, how much credence they give those inner voices over the raw input of reality. It is often when life blindsides us with a bright … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Pain & Suffering, Personal Improvement, Possibility