“Be present as the watcher of your mind- of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations. Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react.” – Eckhart Tolle

“Avoiding triggers isn’t healing. Healing happens when you are triggered and you are able to move through the pain, the pattern and the story and walk your way to a different ending.” – Vienna Pharaon

“The moon does not fight. It attacks no one. It does not worry. It does not try to crush others. It keeps to its course, but by its very nature, it gently influences. What other body could pull an entire ocean from shore to shore? The moon is faithful to its nature and its power is never diminished.” – Deng Ming-Dao, Everyday Tao: Living with Balance and Harmony

What are the feelings you most repress trying to tell you?

“Have you ever found yourself angry at someone, only to find out some time later that they were not the real cause of your suffering? Something in them had triggered repressed feelings or memories deep within you, taking you back to your past, to a place you were still not comfortable in visiting. You were only blaming them for something, someone else did to you a long time ago. They became a lightning rod for your repressed anger.” – David Scott

Repression, like the pent up energy of a volcano, is the psychological attempt to direct one’s own desires and impulses toward pleasurable instincts by excluding them from one’s consciousness and holding or subduing them in the unconscious. According to psychoanalytic theory, repression plays a major role in many mental illnesses, and in the psyche of the average person.

“You don’t fear the future, you fear the past recurring.”

“A big part of healing, is just giving yourself permission to feel.” David Scott

“We fear most in life, not what we can see in the light of day, but what is unseen, hidden from view, lurking in the dark shadows of our existence” – David Scott

“Emotional pain lingers when it is not given a voice.”

“The brighter the light, the more our shadow appears as if to contrast it.” David Scott

“We can only bury toxic waste within us for so long. At some point its hold is full and compressed. Then only a spark and we witness a huge eruption of explosive energy, much more powerful than had we taken the time to individually detonate each charge.” – David Scott

“If you carry around a lot of suppressed or repressed anger (anger you have unconsciously buried) you may lash out at people, blaming or punishing them for something someone else did a long time ago. Because you were unwilling or unable to express how you felt in the past, you may overreact in the present, damaging a relationship.” – Beverly Engel

“There is no great reward for being emotionally withdrawn, no pity prize for bottling your frustration. No one is coming to congratulate your chronic self-repression. By opening up, maybe you will inconvenience some people. Maybe you will trigger some conflict. Maybe you will be rejected, criticized, judged. Everything comes with a price and everything has its compensation. Authenticity may require pain, but it also opens the doors to joy, creativity, self-respect, empathy. Self-repression, on the other hand, costs you all the beauty of the world in exchange for a prison of comfort. Is it really worth it? Isn’t it time to break free?” – Vironika Tugaleva

“Sadness will not kill you. Depression won’t either. But fighting sadness will. Ignoring depression will. Trying to escape it rather than confront it will. Denying it will. Suffocating it will. Allowing it no place to go other than your deep subconscious to embed and incubate within you will. Repression will not kill you today in the physical way, but it will rob you of every bit of life you feel in your heart.”