The New Bohemians Handbook: Come Home to Good Vibes by Justina Blakeney

The only design mistake you can really make is to live in a space that doesn't reflect your personality, your desires, and your dreams. 

There is a deep connection between home décor and well-being.

Clarity is all about having an organized space filled with just the things you love.

Meditating on the large goals of your life will hep set intentions for your space.

"You can always put your crystal back into the earth to cleanse and recharge.  The longer you leave it there, the better!" Vanessa Knight

Quantum Love: Use Your Body's Atomic Energy to Create the Relationship You Desire by Laura Berman

The real you is the you who hears the thought, not the one who has the thought. 

The Mayans had a traditional greeting, “In Lak’ech”.  It translates to “I am another yourself.”

Our ability to influence through energetic connection is called coherence.  Coherence is a calm, peaceful, loving state of alignment within yourself that occurs when your heart is open.

“What is real?” the answer is: whatever we decide.

Your reality is malleable and you have the power to control it.

Find gifts in anything that bothers, stresses, or annoys you.

Surrender happens when you stop looking outside yourself for assurance, acceptance, and peace.  You stop trying to be worthy.  You stop trying to earn love.

Our goals should be about how we want to feel, not what we want to do.

Does it contribute to or detract from the feeling I want to create in my life?

Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker

PART ONE

Valedictorians rarely become millionaires.

Glenn Gould was such a hypochondriac that if you sneezed while on a phone call with him, he'd immediately hang up.

Most of life isn't zero-sum.  Just because someone else wins, that doesn't mean you lose.  Sometimes that person needs the fruit and you need the peel.  And sometimes the strategy that makes you lose small on this round makes you win big on the next.

Life is noisy and complex, and you don't have perfect information about others and their motives.  Writing people off can be due just to a lack of clarity.

Psychologist Shelley Taylor says that "a healthy mind tells itself flattering lies".

Instead of merely focusing on intentions, make sure that in your day-to-day actions you are being the main character in your perfect story.

Meaning keeps us going when stark reality says "quit".  Very often our stories are stronger than we are, and if they're meaningful ones, they can carry us through the tough times.

Luck isn't just serendipity or due to different results in life.  A lot of it is about the choice people make.

Lucky people don't dwell on failure; they see the good side of the bad and often learn from it.

People who expect a fairy-tale relationship experience a lot more disappointment than those who don't.

Dreaming ends up increasing depression later on.  Fantasizing gives us the reward before we've accomplished the task and saps the energy we need to realize it.  More dreams now mean less achievement later. 

Don't see bad things as permanent, pervasive, or personal.

Happy friends make you 15 percent more likely to be happy too.

People who live the longest aren't the ones who get the most help; they're the ones who give the most help.

Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez

Greed is one of the many strings in the human heart, and it can be pro-survival, but unchecked by a sense of fairness, balance, and love, it can gut our capacity for joy.

Common to all people who succeed are accountability, self-awareness, and empowerment.

The True Source of Healing: How the Ancient Tibetan Practice of Soul Retrieval Can Transform and Enrich Your Life by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

Cultivating a genuine sense of regret is not the same as feeling guilt.  Guilt is actually a block to transformation, but remorse can shift something deep within us and lead to positive action. 

Simply be still, silent, and open enough to allow positive qualities to emerge naturally.

You can access the first inner refuge, unbounded sacred space, through the stillness of your body.

Access to the second inner refuge, infinite awareness, is through the silence of your speech.  Here, infinite refers to the limitless possibilities of each moment.

What separates us from peace is our smart ego, with its endless judgments, opinions, and advice.

Any time you identify with a sense of "I"--- "I feel something"; "I have lost something"; "I am lost" --- you are identifying with the wrong person.  You are identifying with the ego, with your pain body, not with your true nature.

Through any external appearance -- any form, event, or relationship --- you can either become separate from yourself or connect with the richness of the inner refuge.

Often we project our distress onto people around us, particularly those we are closest to, thinking that it is their behavior and not our own discontent that is the source of our unhappiness.

Retrieving your soul starts with finding a deeper connection within.  From there, a deeper connection with others is possible.

The true medicine for loneliness is the connection with the inner refuge.  It's about feeling at home with yourself.

Changing our familiar habitual responses can seem difficult at first.  One common excuse is I don’t have the time.  I am constantly hearing this mantra from Westerners. They think a lack of time is a reasonable excuse, but it really makes no sense, especially when it comes to nourishing one's inner being.

Playing Big: Find Your Voice, Your Mission, Your Message by Tara Mohr

Many of us hold the belief that "realistic thinking" is skeptical if not pessimistic, but in fact realistic thinking is inquisitive, exploratory, and highly creative.

The inner critic is an expression of the safety instinct in us -- the part of us that wants to stay safe from potential emotional risk -- from hurt, failure, criticism, disappointment, or rejection by the tribe.

When you hear the voice of self-doubt, ask that voice, "What are you trying to do? What are you trying to prevent or protect me from?"

The Hebrew Bible uses two different words for fear. The first word is pachad…. Pachad is the overreactive, irrational fear that stems from worries about what could happen about the worst-case scenarios we might imagine.

There's a second word used for fear, yirah.  Yirah has three different meanings: 1. It is the feeling that overcomes us when we inhabit a larger space than we are used to.  2. It is the feeling we experience when we suddenly come into possession of considerably more energy than we had before.  3. It is what we feel in the presence of the divine.

We feel pachad when the ego perceives something it feels will wound the ego's fragile self-concept in some way.  We feel yirah when the ego perceives that something has the potential to bring us into transcendence of the ego.

Fear is a state of consciousness.  When we consciously step into another state of consciousness, fear gets displaced.

Analyze truth, possibility, probability.  Often, we fear a very nonspecific outcome.  Get specific about the outcome you are worried about, assess the likelihood of its occurring, and check to see if you have any evidence that it's going to occur.

Fear paralyzes us by threatening the worst-case scenario outcomes, without having us think about what we would do if that outcome occurred.

Pachad causes the specific behaviors of escape and avoidance.

Criticism hurts when it mirrors what we believe about ourselves.

Becoming unhooked from praise and criticism is one of the major shifts we must make in order to play bigger.

Challenging and influencing authority are not skills we're taught in traditional education, but they are critical skills for playing big.

Drop the idea of "self-promotion" and think about the concept of visibility instead.  How can your talents and accomplishments and ideas become more visible to audiences, influencers, and decision makers within your organization or your field?

Hiding strategy #1: This before That.  "This before that" are the false beliefs we hold about the order in which things need to happen…. We come up with tons of these stories about sequencing around our playing big.  The problem is, they are usually false. 

Far more often, brilliant women feature others' ideas to sidestep claiming their own thought leadership.

A leap is never a decision.  It's the decision + the action.

Our callings challenge us to view our pain about the world differently -- not as something uncomfortable to turn away from but as an indication of the brokenness we're meant to help repair.

At the outset of work or a calling, you'll sense that you aren't the person you'd need to be complete the calling in your heart.  Perhaps you can see that you'd need far more courage, or comfort dealing with conflict, or patience.  That's not just your inner critic talking; it's true.  You aren't the person you need to be to complete the calling -- yet -- but pursuing the calling will develop those lacking capacities in you.  Herein lies the dual purpose of our callings: to enrich the world and to grow, in just the ways we need to grow. 

Where we think we need more self-discipline, we usually need more self-love -- not just self-love as an attitude, but self-love manifested through the routines and rituals that we set up to enable the changes we desire to happen naturally and with ease.

In Germany, where people have to opt in to being organ donors, 12 percent of the population opts in.  In Austria, people are automatically categorized as organ donors, per the public policy, and have to opt out if they so desire.  Only 1 percent of the population does so. 

We're more likely to be successful in achieving our goals if we are motivated by a spirit of self-care rather than guilt or self-criticism.

Excuses Begone! How to Change Lifelong, Self-defeating Thinking Habits by Wayne Dyer

End the blame game once and for all.  Begin to see all of your personal traits and the conditions you experience as choices rather than factors that came about because of some external circumstances.    Be willing to say these words and mean them: “I’m the product of all of the choices I’ve made in my life.  I have no one to blame for anything that isn’t going the way I’d like it to go, including myself.

Every self-limiting thought that you employ to explain why you're not living life to the absolute fullest -- so you're feeling purposeful, content, and fully alive -- is something you can challenge and reverse, regardless of how long you've held that belief and no matter how rooted in tradition, science, or life experience it may be.

Simply being cognizant of your excuse making will open you up to the vast arenas of new possibilities.

All excuses are avoidance techniques to keep you from taking charge.

Our relationship to the present moment defines our relationship to life itself.

Am I willing to shed all unwillingness?

The payoffs for having a blank unwillingness sheet are monumental.  The biggest and most basic one is that you have no excuses to fall back on when you're explaining what's missing in your life; there's nothing to find fault with and no one to blame.

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

PART ONE

Rather than domesticating animals for hides and meat, Indigenous communities created havens to attract elk, deer, bear, and other game.  They burned the undergrowth in forests so that the young grasses and other ground cover that sprouted the following spring would entire greater numbers of herbivores and the predators that fed on them, which would sustain the people who ate them both. 

By the time of European invaders, Indigenous peoples had occupied and shaped every part of the Americas, established extensive trade networks and roads, and were sustaining their populations by adapting to specific natural environments, but they also adapted nature to suit human ends.

The culture of conquest didn’t start with Europeans crossing the Atlantic.  European institutions and the worldview of conquest and colonialism had formed several centuries before that. … In addition to seeking wealth, colonizers expressed a Christian zeal that justified colonialism.

Part of the Christian colonizers’ outlook was a belief in white supremacy…. Whiteness as an ideology involves much more than skin color.

According to current consensus among historians, the wholesale transfer of land from Indigenous to Euro-American hands that occurred in the Americas after 1492 is due less to European invasion, warfare, and material acquisitiveness than to the bacteria that the invaders unwittingly brought with them. … Such an absolutist assertion render any other fate for the Indigenous peoples improbable. … If disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the European colonizers in American found it necessary to carry out unrelenting wars against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of land they took from them – nearly 300 years of colonial warfare.

Gold fever drove colonizing ventures…. Thus was born an ideology:  the belief in the inherent value of gold despite its relative useless in reality. … Subjugating entire societies and civilizations, enslaving whole countries, and slaughtering people village by village did not seem too high a price to pay, not did it appear inhumane.  The systems of colonization were modern and rational, but its ideological basis was madness.

With the onset of colonialism in North America, control of the land was wrenched away from the Indigenous peoples, and the forest grew dense, so that later European settlers were unaware of the former cultivation and sculpting and manicuring of the landscape.  Abandoned fields of corn turned to weeds and bushes.  Settlers chopped down trees in New England until the landscape was nearly bare. … Anglo-Americans who did observe Native habitat management in action misunderstood what they saw.

Native peoples had created townsites, farms, monumental earthworks and networks of roads, and they had devised a wide variety of governments, some as complex as any in the world.  They had developed sophisticated philosophies of government, traditions of diplomacy, and policies of international relations.  They conducted trade along roads that crisscrossed the landmasses and waterways in the American continents.  Before the arrival of Europeans, North America was indeed a “continent of villages”, but also a continent of nations and federations of nations.

The US still invades countries under the guise of rescue.

Bounties for Indigenous scalps were honored even in absence of war.  Scalps and indigenous children become means of exchange, currency, and this development may even have created a black market.  Scalp hunting was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but also a means to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous populations of the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard.  The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp hunts:  redskins.

Neither superior technology nor an overwhelming number of settlers made up the mainspring of the birth of the United States or the spread of its power over the entire world.  Rather, the chief cause was the colonialist settler-states willingness to eliminate whole civilizations of people in order to possess their land.

The continuity between invading and occupying sovereign Indigenous nations in order to activate continental control in North America and employing the same tactics overseas to achieve global control is key to understanding the future of the United States in the world.

The Science of the Sacred: Bridging Global Indigenous Medicine Systems and Modern Scientific Principles by Nicole Redvers

PART ONE

Trauma can induce epigenetic changes that can affect our physiology -- which can then be passed down to future generations, increasing their susceptibility to disease.

If trauma can affect the very expression of our genes, then so must happiness.

"Your genes are not your destiny but they are your tendency".  Andrew L Rostenberg

Mitochondria are interesting cellular organs containing their own DNA, and once upon a time they lived independently as separate living entities.

If you look through old Western medical books from the 1700s to the 1900s, you will see very clear descriptions of patients that include how they look, how they smell, and their temperaments.  Before the advent of modern medical tests, doctors had to rely on signs that the body gave, in addition to symptoms, to be able to help with a diagnosis. 

Due to the residential-school period, when Indigenous children were taken away from their home communities and families with the purpose of taking the "Indian out of the child", we have missed key generations of passing on traditional healing knowledge.

Sweating was a key part of many traditional societies for cleansing the mind, body, and soul.

Regular sweat bathing will help you keep up with the needed discharge of the thousands of combined chemicals we are exposed to from year to year, in addition to toning your cardiovascular system.

If a sedentary person can commit just to walking like our ancestors (even for one hour, or meeting ten thousand steps per day), they will reduce their likelihood of obesity by 24% and diabetes by 34%).

There seems to be an increasing disconnect between the material we choose to put in our mouths and the type of body (or spirit house) we assume we are building.  We consciously choose the building materials for our bodies each and every day, and yet we are often surprised when our bodies don't function the way we think they should.

I therefore put forward the concept of the "grandmother diet", which essentially means utilizing the historical eating patterns of our grandmothers when they were young (and not in residential schools).

What is brilliant about the concept of seasonality, aside form its rationality and practicality, is that eating with the seasons brings variety to the diet.

Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After (How to Break Up in a Whole New Way) by Katherine Woodward Thomas

PART ONE 

Love's opposite is not hatred, it's indifference.

A poorly navigated loss, and its resulting poorly healed heart, can make you a lifelong victim to the darker side of love, and keep you locked into a lesser life with a diminished capacity to love and be loved moving forward.

At the heart of all attachment is fear regulation, and our closest relationships serve the purpose of calming us down when we're in danger of spinning out of control.

In the Tibetan language, the word karma is literally las.rgyu.abras, which means "action-seed-results".

With all of the darkness you may be walking through right now, it's good to remember that where there is no light, you have the choice to become it.

We human beings are actually a pretty needy bunch -- biologically and psychologically predisposed to bond in ways that make us strikingly reliant upon those we are close to, and particularly helpless when it comes to regulating our own emotions independent of each other.

In the aftermath of a traumatic event, our first task will be to restore a sense of safety.

When you're willing to be with your experience, simply naming your feelings and needs without frantically trying to get rid of them, you're practicing what Buddhist s call "mindfulness".  It is neither passive non active, but a deep honoring of your own humanity as you come to terms with the vulnerabilities of having a heart that loves.

Ineffective grieving happens when you allow your pain to calcify your heart closed and fixate your identity as someone who is alone, unwanted, or abused.  It threatens to doom you to living a contracted, lessened life for months or years to come.  Effective grieving, however, turns the love you've been giving another towards yourself.

You might think of your feelings of depression as life's way of preventing you from moving away in haste from your loving connection; it's an existentially enforced waiting period that mandates you to take downtime for reflection on the actions you're taking, the choices you're making, the changes needing to be made, and the lessons needing to be learned.

Though we may believe that slipping into a depression is bad, it can actually mean you're heading in the right direction by grappling with life on its own terms, as you crawl your way toward grief's final resting place: acceptance.

Release unconscious and habitual patterns of people pleasing; self-abandoning, overgiving, or tolerating less than you deserve, and begin showing up in ways that are reflective of your true value.

Learn how to make amends to yourself in a way that frees you from the residue of resentment and regret.

This question, where is my attention? needs to be your mantra as you continually turn away from the finger pointing that your mind will automatically gravitate toward.

Metaphysical Meditations: Universal Prayers, Affirmations, and Visualizations by Paramahansa Yogananda

Let us pray in our hearts for a League of Souls and a United World.

Meditation is that special form of concentration in which the attention has been liberated from restlessness and is focused.

Drop your mind into the bottomless well of your heart.

Loosen your mind from the consciousness of body-weight.  Relax the nerve-strings that are attached to the heavy muscles and bones of your body.

My earthly experiences serve as a process of destruction of my limiting mortal delusions.

The reality of my life cannot die, for I am indestructible consciousness.

Good-bye, blue house of heaven.  Farewell, stars and celestial celebrities and your dramas on the screen of space.  Good-bye, flowers with your traps of beauty and fragrance.  You can hold me no longer. I am flying home.

Let me not drug myself with the opiate of restlessness.

Within the soul is the joy that my ego is seeking.

Fix the gaze of your restless eyes on the spot between the eyebrows.  Dive into the sacred star of meditation. Keep broadcasting love thoughts to your dear ones of this world and to those who have gone ahead of you in robes of light.

During deep meditation, the single or spiritual eye (variously referred to in scriptures as the third eye, the star of the East, etc) becomes visible within the central part of the forehead.  The will, projected from this point, is the broadcasting apparatus of thought.  Man's feeling or emotional power, calmly concentrated on the heart, enables it to act as a mental radio that receives the messages of other persons, far or near.

Why tie the infinite soul to a bony post of flesh? Let go!  Cut the cords of flesh consciousness, attachments to the body, hunger, pleasure, pain, and bodily and mental involvements.  Relax.  Loosen the soul from the grip of the body.

Turning Confusion Into Clarity: A Guide to the Foundation Practices of Tibetan Buddhism by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

The essence of the guru is the guru.

With the tool of recognition, we have a choice.

It is very important to know that karma is not destiny.  Past karmic influences that contribute to our present circumstances do not determine the future.  Our behaviour determines our future; in other words, our future is determined by whether we engage in behavior that intends to harm or help ourselves and others.  We create our own karma, so the more we take responsibility for our actions, the more we increase our capacity to create the life we want to live.

The mind continuously reaches out to change outside circumstances or pulls back to avoid them.  Reaching out toward the new car or favorite food, reaching for a partner or prestige.  Grasping. Craving. A mind never content with the present.

Once we start our path to dharma, every practice is an awareness practice.

Whatever harm I caused or may have caused to any sentient being in all my past, whatever negative karma I have accumulated, I pray that I may now be purified for the benefit of all sentient beings.

Investigate the insecurities that make you reach for external reassurances.

The causes of bad karma are ignorance.  Ignorance is not realizing the true nature of reality; it is not realizing no-self, emptiness, or the nature of mind.  If ignorance remains, then duality remains, concepts remain, and negativity gets tuck.  That is samsara, the ways that we cling to false notions of reality; and when we function from our misconceptions and cling to them, we continue to create suffering for ourselves and others.