AOM Meditations: Be Beautiful YOU! 022013

Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans.  We have learned to live our life trying to satisfy other people's demands.  We have learned to live by other people's points of view because of the fear of not being accepted and of not being good enough for someone else.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

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All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: that I am nobody but myself.

~Ralph Ellison

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By being yourself, 

you put something wonderful in the world 

that was not there before.

 ~Edwin Elliot

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You have a masterpiece inside you, you know.  One unlike any that has ever been created, or ever will be.  If you go to your grave without painting your masterpiece, it will not get painted.  No one else can paint it.  Only you.

~Gordon MacKenzie

AOM Meditations: 010413

I am shocked to have discovered this morning that I am the only me there is.  I think this is the key to everything--compassion, kindness, trust of life, mystery.  A genuine and not inflated sense of importance and self-value.  I've spent most of my life comparing myself to other men.  Are they ahead of me in Forbes?  Do they sit on more powerful boards?  Are they smarter? Sexier?  Do they have more hair?  And all the time there is this other way of seeing things.  I am not one of the motors my company produces by the hundreds of thousands.  I am handmade.  Less than perfect but more a work of creation than a product of technology.  And I am not alone in this. Everyone is the only "me" there is.

~unattributed (an unknown cancer survivor)

related by Rachel Naomi Reme

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There comes a time when you have to stand up and shout:  This is me damn it!  I look the way I look, think the way I think, feel the way I feel, love the way I love!  I am a whole complex package.  Take me... or leave me.  Accept me - or walk away!  Do not try to make me feel like less of a person, just because I don't fit your idea of who I should be and don't try to change me to fit your mold.  If I need to change, I alone will make that decision.  When you are strong enough to love yourself 100%, good and bad - you will be amazed at the opportunities that life presents you. 

~Stacey Charter