“Braving the wilderness” is a metaphor that comes from the Bible, where it is used to describe how people need to survive in the world. It is also used in American culture, with its meaning of surviving outside society, with all of its rules and regulations.
The phrase has been popularized by Cheryl Strayed’s book “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.”
As well as Oprah Winfrey’s “Super Soul Sunday” episode “Braving The Wilderness.”
It has also been used in music lyrics by artists like Eminem and Kendrick Lamar.
The phrase has many interpretations, but in this blog post I will focus on how it can be related to life after college.
Braving the Wilderness Quotes
“People are hard to hate close-up. Move in.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“Stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that you don’t belong. You will always find it because you’ve made that your mission. Stop scouring people’s faces for evidence that you’re not enough. You will always find it because you’ve made that your goal. True belonging and self-worth are not goods; we don’t negotiate their value with the world. The truth about who we are lives in our hearts. Our call to courage is to protect our wild heart against constant evaluation, especially our own. No one belongs here more than you.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“When we engage in dehumanizing rhetoric or promote dehumanizing images, we diminish our own humanity in the process. When we reduce Muslim people to terrorists or Mexicans to “illegals” or police officers to pigs, it says nothing at all about the people we’re attacking. It does, however, say volumes about who we are and the degree to which we’re operating in our integrity.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“We are wired for connection. But the key is that, in any given moment of it, it has to be real.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
Braving the Wilderness Quotes With Page Numbers
“Conflict transformation rather than…conflict resolution. To me, the latter suggests going back to a previous state of affairs, and has a connotation that there may be a winner or a loser. [Conflict transformation has] the opportunity to create something new.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“The mark of a wild heart is living out the paradox of love in our lives. It’s the ability to be tough and tender, excited and scared, brave and afraid—all in the same moment. It’s showing up in our vulnerability and our courage, being both fierce and kind.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“The connection that we forge by judging and mocking others is not real connection,” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
Braving the Wilderness Summary
“You are only free when you realize you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“Stop scouring people’s faces for evidence that you’re not enough. You will always find it because you’ve made that your goal. True belonging and self-worth are not goods; we don’t negotiate their value with the world. The truth about who we are lives in our hearts.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“You will always belong anywhere you show up as yourself and talk about yourself and your work in a real way.”-Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“When the culture of any organization mandates that it is more important to protect the reputation of a system and those in power than it is to protect the basic human dignity of the individuals who serve that system or who are served by that system, you can be certain that the shame is systemic, the money is driving ethics, and the accountability is all but dead.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
Braving the Wilderness Dehumanization
“When we are in pain and fear, anger and hate are our go-to emotions.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“In order for slavery to work, in order for us to buy, sell, beat, and trade people like animals, Americans had to completely dehumanize slaves. And whether we directly participated in that or were simply a member of a culture that at one time normalized that behavior, it shaped us. We can’t undo that level of dehumanizing in one or two generations. –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“People often silence themselves, or “agree to disagree” without fully exploring the actual nature of the disagreement, for the sake of protecting a relationship and maintaining connection. But when we avoid certain conversations, and never fully learn how the other person feels about all of the issues, we sometimes end up making assumptions that not only perpetuate but deepen misunderstandings, and that can generate resentment.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
I Am the Wilderness Quote
“But what we know now is that when we deny our emotion, it owns us. When we own our emotion, we can rebuild and find our way through the pain.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“The foundation of courage is vulnerability–the ability to navigate uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. It takes courage to open ourselves up to joy…joy is probably the most vulnerable emotion we experience. We’re afraid that if we allow ourselves to feel lit, we’ll get blindsided by disaster or disappointment. That’s why in moments of real joy, many of us dress-rehearse tragedy…I call it foreboding joy. The only way to combat foreboding joy is gratitude.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“Dehumanizing and holding people accountable are mutually exclusive. Humiliation and dehumanizing are not accountability or social justice tools, they’re emotional off-loading at best, emotional self-indulgence at worst. And if our faith asks us to find the face of God in everyone we meet, that should include the politicians, media, and strangers on Twitter with whom we most violently disagree. When we desecrate their divinity, we desecrate our own, and we betray our faith.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
Review of Braving the Wilderness
“Belonging so fully to yourself that you’re willing to stand alone is a wilderness — an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared. The wilderness can often feel unholy because we can’t control it, or what people think about our choice of whether to venture into that vastness or not. But it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it’s the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“So if we decide to be brave and stay in the conversation, how do we push through the vulnerability and stay civil? … explicitly address the underlying intentions. What is the conversation about, and what is it really about?” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. —JAMES A. BALDWIN” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
Braving the Wilderness Chapter Summary
“Carl Jung wrote, ‘Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life.’ We are complex beings who wake up every day and fight against being labeled and diminished with stereotypes and characterizations that don’t reflect our fullness. Yet when we don’t risk standing on our own and speaking out, when the options laid before us force us into the very categories we resist, we perpetuate our own disconnection and loneliness. When we are willing to risk venturing into the wilderness, and becoming our own wilderness, we feel the deepest connection to our true self and to what matters most. ” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“Sometimes the most dangerous thing for kids is the silence that allows them to construct their own stories—stories that almost always cast them as alone and unworthy of love and belonging.”-Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“Courage is forged in pain, but not in all pain. Pain that is denied or ignored becomes fear or hate.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
Braving the Wilderness Chapter 3 Summary
“Research shows that playing cards once a week or meeting friends every Wednesday night at Starbucks adds as many years to our lives as taking beta blockers or quitting a pack-a-day smoking habit.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“Joseph Campbell wrote, “If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“Never underestimate the power of being seen” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“Oprah. Her advice is tacked to the wall in my study: “Do not think you can be brave with your life and your work and never disappoint anyone. It doesn’t work that way.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“And if our faith asks us to find the face of God in everyone we meet, that should include the politicians, media, and strangers on Twitter with whom we most violently disagree. When we desecrate their divinity, we desecrate our own, and we betray our faith.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
Braving Quote
“Not enough of us know how to sit in pain with others. Worse, our discomfort shows up in ways that can hurt people and reinforce their own isolation. I have started to believe that crying with strangers in person could save the world.” –Brené Brown Braving the Wilderness
“Braving the Wilderness” is a book by Brené Brown that examines the emotions and experiences that come with living a wholehearted life.
Braving the wilderness is a book by Cheryl Strayed. It is a memoir of her solo backpacking trip on the Pacific Crest Trail in 1995. In this book, she shares her journey and how it helped her overcome the struggles in her life.
In this blog post, I will discuss why I think braving the wilderness is worth reading and how it can help you.
I will start with some quotes from the book that I found interesting.