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.

Take Time for your Life: A Personal Coach's 7-Step Program for Creating the Life You Want by Cheryl Richardson

Creating a life that you love takes courage, commitment, and hard work.

The most important part of your life is you.

Make the quality of your life your top priority.  A high-quality life starts with a high-quality you.

When a relationship is strong, it enriches your life and provides you with a sense of security. When it's weak, it wears you down and drains your energy.

You have a choice about how you live your life, about how you spend your time.  You can either continue with the way things are and hope it gets better, or you can do something about it.

Don't confuse tough choices with no choices.

You have choices about how to live your life -- it's just a question of how ready, willing, and able you are to make them.

How you spend your time reveals your true priorities. 

You deserve to live your life exactly the way you want.  If you don't pilot your own plane, someone else will.

The amount of energy used in holding back the truth and avoiding conflict is significant.

Self-care includes taking care of your financial health.

Each time you neglect to handle your finances in a responsible way, you send a direct message to your Wise Self that you are not a good candidate for more.

I began instead to help clients eliminate anything that stood in the way of living the spiritual, authentic life they desired. 

The care of your soul is a lifetime journey.

When the foundation of your life is in good shape (your priorities are straight, you've eliminated what drains you, you're developing financial reserves, etc.), you can begin to let go of setting goals and start to actually life a "goal-less" life.  Instead of deciding what you want, you can let Divine guidance direct you to what's next.

Nurture your soul with the "little things".

The Play of Consciousness: A Spiritual Autobiography by Swami Muktananda

Sleep is a precious treasure.  Its center lies in the throat, which is also the seat of the vishuddha chakra and its deity.

Whether you are in hell or in heaven depends entirely on you.  Begin at once to seek your true well-being.

The aspirant should never forget that each of his sense is presided over by a deity.

God loves all without motive.

Love is a motiveless tenderness of the heart.

Even one's thoughts become mean in poverty.  One becomes poor not only in gold or money but also in noble thoughts.

As long as you oscillate between possession and renunciation you will remain chained to the world.

The instability of your mind makes you desperate.

Kintsugi Wellness: The Japanese Art of Nourishing Mind, Body, and Spirit by Candice Kumai

Kintsugi is the self-care we all need and deserve.  Kintsugi is applied to vessels that are not just broken, but beloved.

It is through a process of self-care and self-acceptance that we can heal, flourish, and grow.

See the broken, difficult, or painful parts of you as radiating light, gold, and beauty.  Kintsugi teaches you that your broken places make you stronger and better than ever before.

Sometimes, the goal of living isn't all about winning. Sometimes it's about being, enduring, experiencing, learning, trying, failing.

Do your best to eat fresh foods at every meal.  Food is information to the cells in your body.

The Japanese idea of hari hachi bu means to eat only until you are 80 percent full.

You are able to add more to your life when you've subtracted something.

It is [an Okinawan] belief that you must physically move your body every twenty minutes or so to push aging away.

Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair by Miriam Greenspan

PART FIVE

Look for the context of your despair in the larger world around you: in relation to your family, your community, your society, the earth. 

Be aware of the difference between contextualization and blaming.

Try accepting how you feel without condemning yourself.

Ask questions of your despair: what do you want of me? What are you asking of me?

Fear arises in any situation where there is a threat of loss or harm to body, mind, and spirit.

It’s not fear but avoiding fear that leads to phobias. Because we are scared to feel fear, we avoid what triggers it. It’s the avoidance that locks the phobia in place.

It’s not the fear that stops you. It’s the fear of feeling the fear that stops you.

Acting out is about skipping a step in awareness, moving from repressed, shamed emotion to an act that expresses unconscious feelings in behaviours that we don’t consciously connect to the emotion.

Violence is often a direct consequence of denied fear, fear acted on because the person has lost the ability to feel it authentically and mindfully, and to express it without shame.

People act out because they are afraid to feel, afraid to speak, afraid of their fear.

Being aware of fear makes you stronger than pretending you don’t feel it.

Giving voice to fear goes a long way when it’s most needed. It’s a crucial key to the transformation of fear to joy.

The heart heals itself when it’s open to pain.

Being with fear in a state of awareness in which we don’t avoid, cling to, try to fix, or even try to understand, but are simply present: this is the precondition that makes the alchemy of fear possible.

When we master the way of non-action, we hear what fear is asking of us.

The Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right by Julia Cameron

Writing makes us conscious.  Once we are conscious, it is difficult to act in any unconscious ways.

Writing is a way to metabolize life.

Passion Capital: The World's Most Valuable Asset by Paul Alofs

The value of passion capital is that it is the foundation upon which all other forms of capital are built. With passion capital, you can acquire the others.  Expressed as a formula, passion capital looks like this: Passion Capital = Energy + Intensity + Sustainability.

Passion is an emotion, but passion capital is an asset.  It is the energy, intensity, and sustainability that leaders use to build lasting values.

Passion capital is created by applying seven principles: creed, culture, courage, brand, resources, strategy, and persistence.

A creed is a focused statement of beliefs that create clarity, unity, and inspiration.

Your brand is your reputation.

Persistence is the vehicle that transports us from loss, blockage, and defeat to a fresh starting point.

Leaders keep their eyes on tomorrow, and managers keep their eyes on today.

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

The star's life history will depend primarily on its birth mass: how much stuff it contains at the start.

A neutron star just twenty kilometers across would weigh as much as our sun, and a teaspoon of neutron-star stuff would weigh a billion tons.

Gold makes up less than a trillionth of the mass of the sun.  But the sun is so large that extracting all that gold would make you extremely rich, because it would yield much more gold than exists on planet Earth.

Intuiting the thoughts and feelings of others may have been an important step toward consciousness, the enhanced awareness of what is happening in our own minds.

Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears by Pema Chodron

Our resentments and self-centeredness, as familiar as they are, are not our basic nature.

In the face of anything we don't like, we automatically try to escape.

Unconsciously we expect that if we could just get the right job, the right partner, the right something, our lives would run smoothly.

Shenpa itself is not the problem.  The ignorance that doesn't acknowledge that you're hooked, that just goes unconscious and allows you to act it out --- that's the problem. 

Rather than getting so caught up in the drama of who did what to whom, we could simply recognize that we're all worked up and stop fueling our emotions with our stories.  It's not so easy to do, but it's the key to our wellbeing.

Our repetitive suffering does not come from this uncomfortable sensation but from what happens next, what I've been calling following the momentum, spinning off, or getting swept away.  It comes from rejecting our own energy when it comes in a form we don't like.

How we relate moment by moment to what is happening on the spot is all there really is.

Being able to acknowledge shenpa, being able to know that we are getting stuck, this is the basis of freedom.

The ideal spiritual journey needs the balance of "gloriousness" and "wretchedness".

Each of us has our own capacity for prejudice, and it's very common to justify it when it comes up.  Our fixed ideas about "them" arise quickly.

When we pause, when we touch the energy of the moment, when we slow down and allow a gap, self-existing openness comes to us.

Usually when we're all caught up, we're so engrossed in our storyline that we lose our perspective.

The natural warmth that emerges when we experience pain includes all the heart qualities:  love, compassion, gratitude, tenderness in any form.  It also includes loneliness, sorrow, and the shakiness of fear.  Before these vulnerable feelings harden, before the storylines kick in, these generally unwanted feelings are pregnant with kindness, with openness and caring.

The life span of any particular emotion is only one and a half minutes.  After that we have to revive the emotion and get it going again.  Our usual process is that we automatically do revive it by feeding it with an internal conversation about how another person is the source of our discomfort.

The peace that we are looking for is not peace that crumbles as soon as there is difficulty or chaos. 

We have the opportunity to lead our lives in such a way that year by year we'll be less afraid, less threatened, and more able to spontaneously help others without asking ourselves, "What's in this for me?"

The boddhisattva or spiritual warrior begins the journey by looking honestly at the current state of his or her mind and emotions.  The path of saving others from confusion starts with our willingness to accept ourselves without deception.

The Road to Character by David Brooks

They had to humble themselves in self-awareness if they had any hope of rising up transformed.

Character is not innate or automatic.  You have to build it with effort and artistry.

No one wants to self-deceive, but we rationalize all the time.

Humility is the freedom from the need to prove you are superior all the time.… Humility is infused with lovely emotions like admiration, companionship, and gratitude.

We have seen a broad shift from a culture of humility to the culture of what you might call the Big Me, from a culture that encouraged people to think humbly of themselves to a culture that encouraged people to see themselves as the center of the universe.

The person leading the Well-Planned Life emphasizes individual agency, and asks, “What should I do?” The person leading the Summoned Life emphasizes the context, and asks, “What are my circumstances asking me to do?”.

Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved by Kate Bowler

"Everything happens for a reason" or "God is writing a better story".  Apparently God is also busy going around closing doors and opening windows. He can't get enough of that.

I became certain that when I died some beautiful moron would tell my husband that "God needed an angel", because God is sadistic like that.

In a spiritual world in which healing is a divine right, illness is a symptom of unconfessed sin -- a symptom of a lack of forgiveness, unfaithfulness, unexamined attitudes, or careless words.

We were comically poor. Not poor like sweet church mice.  Poor like people who worried we would get scurvy because we couldn't afford to buy oranges.

They are teaching me the first lesson of my new cancer life -- the first thing to go is pride.

Perhaps that is the most oddly comforting thing about joining the Mennonite club: they insist that suffering never be done alone.

There are no setbacks, just setups.  There are no trials, just tests of character.  Tragedies are simply opportunities to claim a bigger, better miracle.

I don’t know what the word "trust" means anymore, except there are moments when I realize that it feels a lot like love.

I read an article about how people in grief swear because they feel the English language has reached its limit in a time of inarticulate sorrow.

Whiskey in a Teacup: What Growing Up in the South Taught Me About Life, Love, and Baking Biscuits by Reese Witherspoon

If you get invited to something, it's incumbent upon you to RSVP as soon as possible.  A quick "no" is better than a long "maybe".

The best way to describe my mother is sunshine in human form: smiling, laughing, always dancing while practicing the deepest gratitude for life.

Grace is a time to raise the kids' awareness that we must take care of others who are not as fortunate and to remind them to think of the big picture.