Sonya Renee Taylor

Both purpose and destiny allude

Both purpose and destiny allude to a place we might, with enough effort, someday arrive. We belabor ourselves with all the things we must do to fulfill our purpose or live out our destiny. Contrary to purpose, natural intelligence does not require we do anything to achieve it. Natural intelligence imbues us with all we need at this exact moment to manifest the highest form of ourselves, and we don’t have to figure out how to get it.

The work is to crumble the barriers of injustice and shame leveled against us so that we might access what we have always been, because we will, if unobstructed, inevitably grow into the purpose for which we were created: our own unique version of that oak tree

Radical self-love is an engine inside you driving you to make your calling manifest

After all, you would have to think you’re the bee’s knees to entertain the idea of single-handedly dominating the entire planet

We have accepted lousy partners because their lousy presence was better than the hollow aloneness of their absence

You were an infant once, which means there was a time when you thought your body was freaking awesome too. Connecting to that memory may feel as distant as the farthest star. It may not be a memory you can access at all, but just knowing that there was a point in your history when you once loved your body can be a reminder that body shame is a fantastically crappy inheritance.

for overcoming obstacles placed on them by the very society that fails to acknowledge or appropriately accommodate their bodies.9

There is no wrong way to have a body,” we learn to love bodies even when we don’t like the humans inhabiting them

That small radical step illuminated a path toward her purpose that would have remained obscured, camouflaged behind years of shame, if not for a series of small but life-altering acts. I