11 Quotes by Sheryl Paul

As the bride lets go of her singlehood identity, she prepares an internal space where her new identity as wife will eventually bloom.

All transitional times afford us the opportunity to redefine who we are; when we are in between identities, we become like a blank slate on which our past, present, and possible future are illuminated.

For it’s when you stop seeing your sensitivity as a burden and instead recognize it as the gift it is that you will begin to heal the hurt places inside you and bring your full presence into the world.

For anxiety is both the wound and the messenger, and at the core of the message is an invitation to wake up. In order to decipher the specifics of its messages, we have to shift from a mindset of shame, which sees anxiety as evidence of brokenness, to a mindset of curiosity, which recognizes that anxiety is evidence of our sensitive heart, our imaginative mind, and our soul’s desire to grow toward wholeness.

Resistance, which is a cousin of fear, manifests as feeling too lazy, scared, or tired to engage in the practices or actions that you know will serve your higher self.

Ego. The ego, which simply means “I” in Latin, is the part of ourselves that is conscious and of which we are aware. As Robert Johnson writes in Inner Work, When we say “I” we are referring to only that small sector of ourselves of which we are aware. We assume that “I” contains only this personality, these traits, these values and viewpoints that are up on the surface within the ego’s range of vision, accessible to consciousness. This is my limited, highly inaccurate version of who “I” am.

We’re so deeply conditioned to believe that there’s a right or wrong choice that when it comes time to make even minor decisions in life, we’re scared of messing up.

Many people are so identified with their shame-and-pain stories that they’re scared to shift out of that identity; they would rather remain miserable than take the risk of stepping into a new story. Remember: resistance clings to the familiar at all costs, even if what’s familiar is making you miserable.

Part of what trips us up is that we expect life and relationships to be easy. There is nothing easy about life, and relationships especially seem to stir up every hidden demon, every dusty complex, every latent unshed tear from our own life and our parents’ histories hidden away in the attics of their psyches. Relationships ask us to grow in ways that nothing else does or can.