Excerpt: What holds us back isn’t our problems—we can overcome those. The real demon is the false solutions we use to try to solve our problems…
Excerpt: These 25 Quotes from The Gift Of A Year will replenish your soul and put the emphasis of your focus back to where it’s most important—on you.
“Do you need to give yourself permission to do something big for your special year? Just imagine, as an alternative, spending the rest of your life being dragged behind the Great Dane of your overcommitments to others. For five minutes it’s cute. Over a lifetime, it destroys what’s best in you and what’s unique about you. If you don’t care about that, it’s too bad. Maybe they got you, all those voices working away from the time you were a little [child], trying to convince you that your only needs were to meet other people’s needs. But I think you do care. A lot.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 151)
“All kinds of strange things happened to shape you as you were growing up. Your parents pushed you. Or they ignored you. Your mother was overinvolved. Or your father was underinvolved. Your older sister was bossy. Or your younger brother was bratty. Your family had too much money. Or not enough money. But none of these things that happened to you are you. Otherwise you and I would be nothing more than the pretzels fate twisted us into when the dough of the self was still soft.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 149)
“Every couple of years a farmer lets his fields go fallow so the soil can replenish itself. Why should we be any different?”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 127)
“We can’t play out the stories of our lives according to the script other people have for us. That script may say we can’t get anything we need unless we’re sick. But you and I know that a life can be sick even when the mind and body are healthy. And sometimes the only way to heal a life is to give yourself the gift of a year in which you have an adventure where you make a dream come true. So what if you have to fight to win the freedom to give yourself that? Suppose you don’t do it. You’ll regret it forever.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 117)
“If you let fear be a reason not to explore what life has to offer, you will never explore what life has to offer. A little shiver of fear is a necessary price you must pay to give yourself the gift of a year that involves trying something new. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. If you’re not trembling just a little bit, you’re not really venturing anything either. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to remember to not be afraid of fear.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 117)
“You cannot explore the world and the possibilities life has to offer without moving outside the safe neighborhood of your life as it is, without wandering into some new and dangerous neighborhoods where anything can happen. Let’s tell it like it is. If it’s a real adventure, if it’s something really new, there’s got to be an element of danger somewhere. Otherwise you’re not really trying anything new at all. You’re just playing around with the edges of your old life.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 116)
“We never lose the good parts of ourselves we really care about. All the parts of yourself you’re wanting to put back in your life are there waiting for you. The pain you feel comes from the way these missing parts of yourself slowly choke from lack of oxygen when they’re buried. All you have to do is identify what’s really missing. Then make sure you find room for it in your life.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 111)
“We all need a time and place for ourselves where the walls of our usual lives disappear. Sometimes taking yourself out of the hypnotic context of your everyday life is the only way to begin to be able to listen to the still voice within. When you do, listen carefully. Listen for the ways you whisper to yourself, ‘This is who I really am. This is what I need. This is what I want to do.’ When you hear new whisperings about these things, your gift of a year has rescued some lost piece of yourself and made it possible for you to put more of the you back in your life.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 110)
“We all need balance in our lives. That’s a given. Work and play, friends and family, romance and finance all must be given their due. So far, so good. The problem comes when we put too much on our plate and then insist that everything still has to balance out. It’s simple arithmetic. When you’re overcommitted and insist on balance, everything gets short shrift. When one thing needs special attention, you can’t pay attention to it if you’re insisting on balance.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 96)
The French have an expression: Reculer pour mieux sauter. This means that you have to step back, retreat a little, if you’re going to successfully jump over something. Want to jump across a ditch? You don’t just walk to the edge and then leap. You walk to the edge, gauge the distance, and then retreat a bit to give yourself room to get a full running start before you leap. Sometimes we can’t take the next leap forward unless we take the time to step back first. Where will you get the strength to sauter (leap forward) if you can’t allow yourself to reculer (pull back)?”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 87)
Keep moving forward is the motto, yes. But, how to move forward if you walked yourself up to a ditch (as is often the case in life)? Moving forward in that case is to fall into the ditch and get stuck (or worse). So, as Kirshenbaum illustrates above, we move backwards so that we can gain the strength and momentum needed to run and jump over the ditch. In other words, sometimes the best way to keep moving forward is to move backwards, first.
Read More »Mira Kirshenbaum Quote on Retreating Back So That You Can Keep Moving Forward in Life“You need to find out what juices your batteries. You need to do more to a battery than simply leave it alone to fill it up with electricity again. You have to fill it with what it needs. To recharge spiritually, you need to put yourself into a new context where you can get new answers. That way you can get plugged in to something that has the power you need.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 91)
“Recreation doesn’t just mean enjoying yourself. It literally means re-creating yourself. It’s almost a way of taking yourself apart and putting yourself back together again so that you feel better and function better. And so that you’ve worked out some of the glitches in your system.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 88)
“Rest doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means lying fallow, and that means restoring the nutrition you’ve lost. It’s about building yourself up. Reculer means retreating so you can advance. And retreating carries with it all the implications of a religious retreat—a way to spend energy to get more energy.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 88)
![The Ten Dream Discovering Questions For Women [Excerpt]](https://movemequotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/IMG_6952-930x620.jpg)
Excerpt: The following is an excerpt from The Gift of a Year by Mira Kirshenbaum. In it she lays out ten dream discovering questions for women that might help reshape the focus of their lives. Enjoy!
“Time ripens desires. It validates desires. Maybe you sort of feel like eating a cookie right now. If you get distracted, you’ll most likely lose your desire for that cookie. It didn’t stand the test of time. But when there’s something you want that you’ve kept on wanting for a long time, even if you’ve forgotten how much you want it, then that’s something you really want. And that will be something that will really satisfy you when you get it.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 67)
“There was so much in my life I cared about—and of course I really loved being a therapist. But on another level there wasn’t anything in it I wanted just for me. It was as if my life had turned into a motel room and the truth was I could walk out of it without any sense that I was leaving anything of my own behind. A stranger could easily move into my life, and nothing would be different. I was happy as long as I didn’t think about who I was and what I really wanted for myself.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 44)
“The people in your life are truly interested in your being happy. The confusing thing is that they don’t go around advertising this. Your boss, your kids, your husband mostly talk about how they need this and they need that from you. But when you’re unhappy, a part of their world collapses. So if you have to shuffle your priorities around and put someone last who’s been coming first, and some of the people in your life start giving you grief, just remember how happy they’ll be when you’re happy.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 37)
“I remember a long period when it seemed like all I did was bounce back and forth between my patients and my children. They all needed every ounce of what I had to give. I didn’t even feel I had time for my husband. It was as if I were surrounded by a wall of people who saw me as nothing more than the person who took care of them. Emotionally I didn’t feel I had room to breathe.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 34)