Get Rich Lucky Bitch! Release Your Money Blocks and Live a First-Class Life by Denise Duffield-Thomas

Money is just a symbol for everything else in your life.

What gets measured gets improved.

The person who doesn't know where his next dollar is coming from usually doesn't know where his last dollar went.

Don't think you can only start when you have a "perfect" system.  That system doesn't exist, so it's just procrastination.

Self-awareness is the key to breaking free of old habits and allowing yourself to receive more.

It's most likely that your past experiences with money influence your income more than anything you're doing today.

In the world of manifesting, negative emotion is really the only thing that holds you back.

The basics work if you're consistent.

Money is just a tool to help us get what we want.

Money loves clarity, so define what wealth means to you.

What would happen if you decided to feel great about your money now, no matter what your current reality? If you allowed yourself to feel rich now?

Go and forgive every bad financial mistake you've ever made, find patterns to uncover your underlying beliefs about money, write out your goals, and then get more specific about them.

Nothing will feed the poverty of your own soul.

Feeling rich starts with your everyday thoughts and feelings. 

Become conscious and very aware of what you're saying to yourself about money every single day -- because that is your order for more of the same.

Write down everything in your life that you'll no longer put up with "when you're rich".  Anything that annoys you, embarrasses you, or makes you feel poor…. The next step is to simply pick one thing at a time, and upgrade it to the very next level.  Just a teeny tiny bit.

Each time you upgrade something small, it becomes part of who you are and crowds out your old poverty story.  It sends a clear message to the Universe that you're worth nice things, and that you acclimatize to being richer.  This new way of being then becomes your new minimum standard, your "new normal".

Nobody is going to give you permission to be a wealthy woman. You have to create that reality by feeling it in small ways on a day-to-day basis.

Each upgrade is practice: each upgrade helps you to become accustomed to your new life.  It layers in your capacity to receive, and creates a really strong foundation. 

You have to start before you're ready.  Show the Universe that you're worth it now.  If you're experiencing resistance around something like this, it's not because the Universe is saying, "That's for everyone else and not for you!".  Instead, the resistance is coming because there's still something there you haven't cleared.  Go back and declutter a belief or judgment that you have around money or rich people.

Your sabotages are your default fear pattern showing up when things are going too well.

Hitting resistance is a sign that it's time to go one step deeper, even deeper than before.

If you find it hard to save, see where else in your life you're uncomfortable with excess -- whether it's pleasure, gifts, time, or anything else.

Celebrating is a crucial part of receiving.

Foods of the Americas: Native Recipes and Traditions by Fernando Divina, Marlene Divina and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian

People of the wooded Northeast and Great Lakes regions created hundreds of recipes, both culinary and medicinal, for the nuts that grew around them in abundance. 

Italians might still be eating pasta sauces derived only from carrots and beets if New World tomatoes, sweet peppers, and zucchini squash hadn't appeared.  The fire in Asian and East Indian cookery would not exist if it were not for the spark of American chiles.

One of the oldest and most continuously inhabited regions in North America is located on the border of Washington and Oregon, on the Columbia River about ninety miles east of present-day Portland.  Dating as far back as 6000 B.C., a grand bazaar and trade market was located at Celilo Falls.  As many as five thousand people from indigenous and diverse cultures gathered year after year to trade, feast, and participate in games and religious ceremonies. 

The early Hohokam people, whose culture flourished from approximately 300 B.C. to A.D. 1500 in what is now Arizona… The Hohokam were highly skilled farmers.  The Hohokam introduced irrigation agriculture to the arid West, building hundreds of miles of canals to carry water from the Rio Verde, Salt, and other rivers to their fields of maize, beans, squash, and cotton around present-day Phoenix and Tucson.

Peanuts and potatoes were among the earliest crops developed in South America.

Eulachon, or candlefish, prized for its oil and once an important trade commodity, is still widely used among the peoples of the region.  Eulachon oil is eaten in the same manner as Europeans eat butter.

Dry farming is still practiced at Hopi.  Planting and maintaining a cornfield usually begins in early spring and is done by Hopi men, mostly by hand…. Throughout the summer months, the men laboriously care for them as such, hoeing weeds sometimes daily, singing to the corn plants, praying for their continued life and growth, and praying for the moisture that is needed in the arid landscape of Hopi.  Once harvested, the corn becomes the property of their wives or mothers.  It is they who will preserve, prepare, and use it throughout the year for meals and ceremony.

Quinoa, a grain, was a major agricultural commodity of the Aztec and Inka.

Jerusalem artichokes, also known as sunchokes, are indigenous to the eastern coast of North America and are related to the sunflower, which is native to Peru.

Portable flatbreads were made with other flours such as cattail and acorn before the introduction of wheat.

Cattails were a staple commodity for many early cultures, used to make not only bedding and clothing but also delicious foods…. It is possible to cook and eat the cob-like spikes just as one eats corn.

Cattail pollen, high in niacin, has a texture similar to finely milled flour, and it lends a slight floral flavor.

Pre-Conquest chocolate was almost always a drink, which had many forms and flavorings (chile powders were among the most popular).

Chocolate also was of major ceremonial importance to the Maya and the Aztecs. It was served at lavish banquets, buried with the dead, and used to anoint newborn babies.

Cree, Assiniboine, and Anishinabe people of central Canada have prepared a form of [maple syrup pie] for centuries.

The beverages that Native people consume today are similar to those their early ancestors enjoyed. Chocolate, herb teas, cranberry juice, and even soft drinks such as Coca-Cola are derived from indigenous foods.

Beyond Blame: A Full-Responsibility Approach to Life (Technology for the Soul) by Yehuda Berg

Instead of saying, "Why me?" when something happens, suppose you cut out the "me," and ask, "Why? What's the real reason this situation has come into my life? If I restrict my negative impulse to blame something or someone outside of me, what positive responses open up to me?" 

Part of our spiritual work is to overcome the force that leads us in the opposite direction.

Problems in our lives are really messages that need to be heard and addressed.

Tao Te Ching: A New English Version by Stephen Mitchell

What we are tempted to call a disaster is sometimes the first, painful stage of a blessing.

Let your workings remain a mystery.  Just show people the results.

We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move.  We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.  We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable.  We work with being, but non-being is what we use.

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

PART TWO

When we listen closely to what hurts, we learn what life is asking of us.

The common denominator in our emotional education is suppression, intolerance, sharing, punishment, and neglect.

It is in our families we first learn to distrust our feelings and to be shamed by them.

Ignoring, stopping, and shaming or punishing emotion are the three parenting styles that most often result in emotional illiteracy in children.

Ours is a dissociative culture – a culture that separates body from mind, body from spirit, feeling from thinking.

Emotional vitality and authenticity, a mature sense of emotional wholeness and freedom – these human capacities are hard to come by in a culture that doesn’t honor the body and the heart. 

We must learn to listen not only to our bodies but to the wider social context if we want to find the larger roots of our pain.

We live in the world and the world lives in us.  The dark emotions that our bodies carry are transpersonal energies housed in our flesh and rooted in our responses to the world – to the inevitable pain of being alive and being humanely connected to others.

It is in the spirit that emotional alchemy takes place – a spirit not divorced from the body but that flows from what the body knows.

Our aversion to pain actually sabotages our search for happiness.

Painful emotions challenge us to know the sacred in the broken; to develop an enlarged sense of self beyond the suffering ego, an awareness that comes from being mindful of life’s difficulties, rather than disengaging from them; to arrive at a wider and deeper perspective not limited by our pain but expanded by it.

Whether we listen to them or not, the dark emotions will emerge one way or another, they exert their call through the body – as an act of grace or an act of violence, a cancerous growth or a surge of creative energy.

Life is larger than our ego’s agenda.

There is no safety net against vulnerability so long as one has a body and an ego.

Vulnerability is not just about hurting. It is about openness.

It is through surrender to the unwanted that we embrace our vulnerability.

Conscious surrender is often what life asks of us in those times when we most want to control the outcome.

Embracing vulnerability does not mean wallowing in passivity, abdicating responsibility, or relishing being a victim.  It means being fully present to what is happening and staking no claims on the outcome.

 To become larger spiritually, it is often necessary to get smaller.

What vulnerability asks of us, ultimately, is not control of our emotions but transformation of our consciousness through emotional openness.

The ego can’t see beyond its own pain.

Life hurts. We are not here to be free of pain.  We are here to have our hearts broken by life.

Grief arises because we are not alone, and what connects us to others and to the world also breaks our hearts.

Emotions are energies in the body that convey information, seek expression, and motivate action.

Emotions, while “inner”, are responses to the larger world.

Human beings have the capacity to feel mindfully and to act consciously, informed by our emotions.

The essence of emotional alchemy is the mindful flow of emotional energy – a process in which we are consciously attentive to what is happening.

Stuck, toxified emotional energy is an important aspect of what keeps the physical ailments in place and prevents healing.

Natural Brilliance: A Buddhist System for Uncovering Your Strengths and Letting Them Shine by Irini Rockwell

We don’t discover wisdom by avoiding pain and confusion.

Negative states of mind are two-sided: they express our bewilderment, but they are also a cry, a demand, for deeper insight.

What keeps us from having more successful relationships is our deeply ingrained tendency to defend ourselves.

At the deepest level, we are healthy, whole, clear-sighted, and deeply loving.

Our defensive strategies are covering old wounds.

Our ability to be sensitive to others involves our whole being.  To fully experience another, we need two things: energetic resonance and unbiased perception.  We must feel and see.

Daring to go first is being generous.

We tune into ourselves to resonate with another.  There is a constant inward and outward oscillation of awareness.  Joining with another in energetic oscillation requires a willingness to suspend our protective shield.

We can learn to use ourselves as a highly sensitive instrument to gauge the climate of energetic states in the environment. Moments of intuition and insight arise…. We tune in to what is rather than to our version of reality.  We see how our projections, interpretations, opinions, and judgments get in the way.

Nobody is doing anything: whatever is happening is happening.  We are just sharing the space of the happening.

We need to see each individual as a full person, not just a set of problems…. We tend to label and dismiss the other…. We just cover up the wound instead of seeing how it fits into a larger picture.  Although we need not go into the history of the problem, we acknowledge the history that is energetically present in the moment.

In any relationship, there are four people: ourselves our version of the other person, the other person, and his or her version of us.

When our perception is unbiased, there is a sense of space around our perception.  There is room for natural intelligence to arise, in an ever-shifting pattern.

We accumulate knowledge, but we discover wisdom.

Outbreak: 50 Tales of Epidemics that Terrorized the World by Beth Skwarecki

Ebola killed more people in 2014 than in all of its previous outbreaks combined.

One of the guests was a Taoist nun who lived in one of the temples on Mount Emei.  She showed Wang Dan how to inoculate a person against smallpox, grinding up the scabs from a mild case of the disease and puffing them up the person's nose. 

This outbreak of flu [1918] turned deadly, killing more people than the war itself did.  It struck the young and healthy, leaving their deceased bodies a discolored shade of blue.

In necrotizing fasciitis, bacteria don't actually "eat" flesh. They secrete toxins that destroy connective tissue, which begins to rot inside the body.  Without surgery to remove the dead tissue, death or the need for amputation can result.

Ebola survivors often have pockets of virus living in their eyes or other body parts.

The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael A Singer

Part 1 of 2

Eventually you will see that the real cause of problems is not life itself.  It's the commotion the mind makes about life that really causes problems.

In some cases the mental voice talks for the same reason that a teakettle whistles.  That is, there's a buildup of energy inside that needs to be released.

You re-create the world within your mind because you can control your mind whereas you can't control the world.  That is why you mentally talk about it.  If you can't get the world the way you like it, you internally verbalize it, judge it, complain about it, and then decide what to do about it.  This makes you feel more empowered.

In the thought world there's always something you can do to control the experience.

True personal growth is about transcending the part of you that is not okay and needs protection.

You're ready to grow when you finally realize that the "I" who is always talking inside will never be content.

To attain true inner freedom you must be able to objectively watch your problems instead of being lost in them.  No solution can possibly exist while you're lost in the energy of the problem.

The first problem you have to deal with is your own reaction.

When you go to sleep every night, do you dream? Who dreams? What does it mean to dream? Your answer, "Well, it's like a motion picture plays in my mind and I watch it." Who watches it? "I do!" the same you who looks in the mirror? The same you who is reading these words also look in the mirror and watch the dreams?  When you awake, you know you saw the dream.  There is a continuity of conscious awareness of being.

At each stage of your life you have seen different thoughts, emotions, and objects pass before you.  But you have always been the conscious receiver of all that was.

If you ever want to re-center, just start saying "hello" inside, over and over.  Then notice that you are aware of that thought.  Don't think about being aware of it; that's just another thought.  Simply relax and be aware that you can hear "hello" being echoed in your mind.  That is your seat of centered consciousness.

What differentiates a conscious, centered being from a person who is not so conscious is simply the focus of their awareness.

When you start to explore consciousness instead of form, you realize that your consciousness only appears to be small and limited because you are focusing on small and limited objects. 

Have you ever noticed that when you are mentally and emotionally drained, food doesn't help that much?

You have a phenomenal amount of energy inside of you.  It doesn't come from food and it doesn't come from sleep. This energy is always available to you. 

Energy doesn't get old, it doesn't get tired, and it doesn't need food.  What it needs is openness and receptivity.… When you close, the energy stops flowing.  When you open, all the energy rushes up inside you. 

You stay open by never closing.  It's really that simple.

We are programmed to open or close based upon our past experiences.

You should never leave something as important as your energy flow to chance.  If you like energy, and you do, then don't ever close.  The more you learn to stay open, the more energy can flow into you.

Long term, the energy patterns that cannot make it through you are pushed out of the forefront of the mind and held until you are prepared to release them.

The Magdalen Manuscript: The Alchemies of Horus & the Sex Magic of Isis by Tom Kenyon

One of the tasks for anyone faced with channeling is to separate the valuable from the inane, the uplifting from the dangerous.  Just because the information is coming from the other side should not imbue it with any more authority than the words from someone down the street.

The Sanskrit word, mantra, literally means protection of the mind (man meaning mind, and tra meaning protection). 

What do you do when things get psychologically too hot for your taste?  What do you do when you are on the verge of feeling something that you don’t want to feel?  For those in Sacred Relationship such feelings are a call to presence.  It is a time to be radically honest.

I've Been Thinking: Reflections, Prayers, and Meditations for a Meaningful Life by Maria Shriver

It's our life's work to figure out who we are, what we think, what our gifts are, and how we can make a difference in this world.

No one's life follows a linear path.  No one's life is devoid of mistakes, pain, and regret.

Faith comes directly from your own personal beliefs: knowing who you are and that there's a power greater than you at work in your life.

Life can either be limiting, safe, and secure or it can be wide open, creative, and sometimes scary.

Pausing gives us the power to change direction --- and with power comes responsibility. 

Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year by Linda LeGarde Grover

Where we walk, others will follow after we are no longer here.  What we live today we will leave to those who will continue our Ojibwe ways.

Mino-bimaadiziwin involves standards of behavior that include modesty, respect, thankfulness, generosity, and an awareness of one's ability and obligation to contribute to the well-being of others.

The passing of knowledge from one generation to another is the means by which we have survived as a people.  Teaching is, at its heart, an act of generosity.

The minds, hearts, and spirits of children, newer to Earth than ours, have been created with a purity that is the strength of childhood and the foundation of human existence.

Onishishin or "That's pretty" can apply to an attractive sight, a way of behaving, or something that is right or good, something that is nice.

I observed and listened, thought things over, and then tried things out for myself.  These are the first three steps of the Ojibwe tradition, which is the foundation of teaching and learning in cultures all over the world: intake of information, reflection, experience.  The fourth step is when the learner, with practice and ability, becomes the teacher.

Those floral designs of flowers, vines, and leaves… are more than just decoration: they have been put there to remind us of the living plants, flowers, and foliage that we walk on as we make our way through life on Earth.  Underfoot, those flowers and plants give of themselves to support us on our journey; the beadwork on our moccasins makes us aware of that, and appreciative. 

Before reservations, Ojibwe extended families lived off a land base that was large enough to support a lifestyle based on seasonal sustenance.

In Ojibwe language that is no word for good-bye.  We say in English, "See ya," or "See you soon".  The lovely word that is used in parting, gii gawaabimin, translates literally in English to "You will be seen again by me," but when we say it there is also a deeper, spiritual meaning.  We are taking leave of one another, but we will see each other again; and if we should not, then we will see each other some other time, perhaps in the next life.

Powwows carry on traditions that sustain us Anishnaabe people.  They are part of the community of Mino-bimaadiziwin, the living of a good life.

Manoomin, the good seed that is a gift of sustenance from the Creator, is a sacred food, its spiritual origin and purpose at least as precious as gold.  Mewinzhaa, the Great Migration guided by the Creator, the Great Spirit who sent the vision of a miraculous food that would grow right out of the water, brought us to this place.

Mino-bimaadiziwin, the living of a good life, is at the foundation of traditional Anishinaabe teaching and learning.  A lifelong process, this requires commitment to learning through attentiveness, honest reflection, and hard work.

Each person is created with the ability as well as the obligation to contribute something to the wellbeing of the group.

Like every American Indian person I know, I have been asked, "How much Indian are you?" many times.

During World War I, the U.S. Census recorded a Native population of less than 300,000 in the entire country, yet more than 12,000 served in the armed forces.  During World War II, the Native population according to the federal census was approximately 350,000; of those, more than 44,000 served.  More than 42,000 American Indians served during the Vietnam War; of these, 90 percent were volunteers.

A nice Ojibwemowin translation for Thanksgiving Day might be Migwechiwendam-Egiizhigad, the day of thinking thankfully.

In the way of Bimaadiziiwin, the living of a good life, a good Ojibwe is thankful. 

The four basic Ojibwe values are gratitude, modesty, generosity, and respect.

In Ojibwe, adding a vowel and -ns to the end of a noun lets us know that it is small and precious.