Tara Brach Quotes

There's no way to release yourself from a memory. It ends when it wants to end, whether it's in a flash or long after you've begged it to stop.

I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.

I was bullied; I was kind of a girl in the corner. So acting was a great outlet for me by pretending to be someone else.

I've been in therapy since I was five, but music goes way, way, way, way, way beyond therapy.

When I was in theater school, we did these relationship exercises - you would play my sister, and I'd give you all this information about my sister, and then we'd get up and perform this scene, and you'd pretend to react as my sister. It was like therapy!

Acting brings up a lot of the past. I use my memories, whether they're good or bad.

It doesn't matter if it's aliens or emotional weapons or whatever - it's still a real story about big feelings that have to come out.

A repressed person overcoming their repression always makes good music.

It's very important for me to do things like talk therapy. That's where you begin to see the walls that your illness has put up as a way to protect yourself... but of course, those walls also keep us from getting to the truth of things.

I don't really write for catharsis; I get that kind of work done in therapy.

I just put my anger and resentment into basketball. Even the stuff from my childhood.

By the time I got to songwriting, I had been faced with a lot of troubles as a result of my own collective of trauma. I was someone who instinctively figured out that writing songs about the struggle helps you with the struggle.

Once you realise you're carrying around lots of pain, I think go to therapy so you release yourself. You don't want to be a problem bore, poor me.

Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.

I just like the child's nightmares and therapy, once an experience has found the light of day I'm no longer under its spell, I'm free to tell it. I hope in telling honestly I can in some way help other people to do so also.

A journal is more than a memory goad. It's therapeutic. The simple act of opening a notebook to put words down stills the crosscurrents of worry, drawing to focus the essential though patterms that best defines us, intersecting those thoughts with the condition of our life at that exact moment. A journal is one of the few anchors the human condition allows us.

When we have painful memories from hurting experiences, we may feel justified in holding on to the resentment. But resentment is corrosive. It doesn't affect the person we feel anger toward, it destroys the host.

The only way to heal the pain which will not heal itself is to forgive the person who hurt you. Forgiveness heals the memory's vision. ... You set a prisoner free, but you discover the real prisoner was yourself.

My body Healed quickly. But the wound to my psyche was deep. Wide. First aid, too little, too late, left me hemorrhaging inside, the blood unstaunched by psychological bandage or love's healing magic. Eventually it scabbed over, a thick, ugly welt of memory. I work to conceal it, but no matter how hard I try, once in a while something makes me pick at it until the scarring bleeds. In my arms, Ashante cries, innocence ripped apart by circumstance. Bloodied by inhuman will. Time will prove a tourniquet. But she will always be at risk of infection. (124)

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.

It's always nice for me to get to explore somebody who's feeling that and then does something with it and takes it in a different direction or does something with it. It feels very powerful. It helps me with my own.

It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive, that the mind might perform its functions without encumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present.

Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me.

When the wound/ No longer hurts/ The scar does.

I had to really kill off all the religious myths. In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life - it's excruciating, you are forced to realise that your pain, the kind that makes you wake up afraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of somebody up in the sky. It's the result of your parents and your environment.