The Psychology of Wealth: Understand Your Relationship with Money and Achieve Prosperity by Charles Richards

What appears to have gotten us into trouble, both individually and collectively, is behaving unconsciously. 

Success does not require a great deal of money; what it requires is a belief in one’s inherent worth and a willingness to make a conscious investment in itself.

Just as a computer has an operating system, every family operates according to a set of spoken and unspoken rules.  I call this the family operating system. 

Your family operating system effectively helps to program your beliefs, attitudes, skills, anxieties, and expectations, both conscious and unconscious.

Today it would take at least $7.6 million to have the purchasing power of $1 million in 1959.

Change requires taking stock and recognizing our own creative responsibility. If we stay stuck in old concepts and do not take action, we may seek vicarious fulfillment or comforts.

We must be willing to let go of the old judgments, opinions, and worn-out attitudes that limit us.

When our basic human needs for self-esteem and self-respect are not met, we give up easily, blame others, strive for less, and often fail to achieve our goals.

Arrogance, self-righteousness, manipulation, and boastfulness actually betray low self-esteem, primarily in extroverts.  Such behaviors are futile attempts to compensate for a sense of unworthiness.

People who lack self-esteem avoid taking risks.

Creating a life you value requires accepting the idea that you’re completely responsible for yourself.  Such a good life also involves the realization that no one is going to come to your rescue – nor, in general, should they.

There’s very little that you cannot do or have after you accept that “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.”

No matter what situation or challenge we find ourselves facing, we can decide how to respond.

Approaching our finances consciously – with an awareness of our circumstances, motivations, and true aims – is a key. With this kind of consciousness, we assess what is meaningful to us and what we must do in order to bring that meaning to fruition.

Inertia can result from over attachment to our comfort zone.

What if This is Heaven? How Our Cultural Myths Prevent Us from Experiencing Heaven on Earth by Anita Moorjani

A great healer’s goal is to empower you by creating a channel for you to tap into you own natural healing abilities.

One of the vital differences between a good healer and a great healer is that a great healer guides you back to your own innate ability to heal and ultimately encourages your independence.

The healthiest thing I could do was to focus on what brings me joy, to follow my passion, and to make my choices from a place of love, not fear.

Unconditional love is a state of being.

Two very different people can love each other and coexist very happily if they truly accept each other and agree not to judge each other.  Problems arise only when one o both imposes their own values and preferences on the other, judging the other negatively.

In a mature relationship, there’s pure acceptance for both parties by both parties.  And paradoxically, when there’s acceptance, there’s usually no reason to leave the relationship even if the parties don’t share the same values.

True, authentic, unconditional love means wanting for others what they want for themselves, regardless of whether it goes against what we want for ourselves in the relationship.

Unless I love myself, nothing else in my life can function at its best.  The depth, meaning, and joy I experience everyday – and the amount of love, kindness, and patience I have for others – is in direct proportion to how much I have for myself.

Think less in terms of what I deserve and more in terms of who I am – pure love and pure consciousness.

If you can see what’s happening as an opportunity for growth instead of an oppressive burden, what you need to overcome the challenge will come quicker.

When others put you down in any way, realize their actions are direct projections of their own state of pain and confusion.

The only question you need to ask yourself when you are feeling defeated or lost is, where am I not loving myself?

You are serving no one when you get lost in the problems of the world.

Your only work is to love yourself, value yourself, and embody this truth of self-worth and self-love so that you can be love in action.

Just love yourself unconditionally, always, and be who you are.

Heaven is a state and not a place. 

It’s actually not relevant who your guides are because they’re all connected to us as one, presenting themselves in our mind’s eye in whatever form we feel most comfortable with.

See cancer and other illnesses as wake up calls to shift our life path.

Illness is our body’s way of communicating with us and showing us a better path.

Get into the habit of looking at your challenges as blessings.

The Nectar of Chanting: Sacred Texts and Mantras Sung in the Ashrams of Swami Muktananda

Swadhyaya [chanting and reciting sacred texts] increases inner radiance, mental vigour, and agility. 

The syllable gu is darkness, and the syllable ru is said to be light. There is no doubt that the Guru is indeed the supreme knowledge that swallows (the darkness of) ignorance.

Ganesha, you are served by the assemblage of ghosts, and you eat sweet wood-apples and blackberries. You are Uma's son, the destroyer of sorrows.

[Kubera] has eyes and mouths on all sides.  His arms and feet are everywhere.  He gives arms to men and wings to birds.  He is the one Lord who creates both heaven and earth.

There is one fire that enters the world and assumes the forms of the objects which it enters; likewise, the one inner Self of all beings assumes the forms of whatever It enters, while continuing to exist outside all forms.

Hari rooted out his own lotus-eye to replace a single flower that was missing from His offering of a thousand lotuses to Your feet.  His exuberance of devotion was transformed into the Sudarshana Chakra, the discus which remains alert to protect the three worlds.

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

[Chris] Christie viewed Jared [Kushner] as one of those rich people who thinks that, because he's rich, he must also be smart.

They needed to fill all the cabinet positions, of course, but also a whole bunch of others that no one in the Trump campaign even knew existed.

Roughly half of the DOE's [Dept of Energy] annual $30 billion budget is spent on maintaining and guarding our nuclear arsenal.  Two billion of that goes to hunting down weapons-grade plutonium and uranium at loose in the world so it doesn’t fall into the hands of terrorists.  In eight years alone -- 2010-2018 -- the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs.

It is what you never learned that might have saved you.

Into USDA jobs, some of which paid nearly $80,000 a year, the Trump team had inserted a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at AT&T, a gas-company meter reader, a country-club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scented-candle company, with skills like "pleasant demeanor" listed on their resumes.

In 1872, the average American farmer fed roughly four other people; how the average farmer feeds about 155 other people.

Every inch of snow cost the city of New York $1.8 million dollars.

One hundred Americans were dying every day in car crashes.

Repetition: Past Lives, Life, and Rebirth by Doris Eliana Cohen

We can change ourselves and our world by taking personal responsibility for our stories.  The goal is to shift our consciousness: to move away from the mentality of the perpetrator and the victim, the accuser and the accused, the judge and the one who is being judged.

Only when we change our reactions to our situations can we begin to let go of the patterns we've established and embrace healthier ones.

Acceptance without judgment is vital not only for owning our story, but also for healing ourselves.

When we're caught in our patterns, we lose sight of our ability to exercise free choice and thus we feel victimized.

At an unconscious level, we repeat patterns, playing out themes in various ways so that we can experience the emotions attached to those patterns again and again.

Once we've healed the emotions connected to our traumas, we can begin to exit our patterns because we've learned that needed to learn.

When viewed without judgment or guilt, our emotions serve as indicators of our patterns, giving us the opportunity to recognize that we're back in the same old classroom and have a choice to change our reaction this time so that we may begin to exit the pattern and move on.

The story we tell about who we are and why we experience life the way we do locks us into our patterns, which we reinforce each time we tell it.

The template of the wave, found in nature and in our bodies, is reflected in our behavior and in how we learn.

We must first recognize how we've cast ourselves in the role of victim, and then we must own our part in the story and do something to change it.

Acknowledge and affirm that we are the author of our story.  It's difficult for us to do this because our tendency is to blame and judge ourselves and others.  We also have trouble owning up to our responsibility because our repetitive behaviors are quite often unconscious.  We don't want to believe that we're actually choosing to create situations that are causing us to suffer -- but we are.

The only way you can heal is by owning your story.

Working with the child self allows you to heal self-defeating patterns by going to the source.  When you love, nurture, and recognize this part of you, you begin to heal yourself of past trauma.

Positive change occurs when we take responsibility for our own lives.

The Meaning of Mary Magdalene by Cynthia Bourgeault

Out there in the wide world of contemporary pop spirituality she is hawked about as everything from an archetypal goddess of wisdom to a sexualized consent. The shadow side of Christianity's notoriously undealt-with issues around human sexuality and the feminine get projected directly onto her.

Contrary to usual expectations, true beloveds do not live in peace and acquiescence.

The spiritual identity forged through kenotic self-surrender survives the grave and can never be taken away.

Never before in the history of Christianity have the tools and insights been so readily at hand to address the areas of dysfunction and to begin to rebuild the church from the ground up or its authentic foundations.

The male-dominated versions of Christianity are a luxury the world can no longer afford.

It is not obligatory for Jesus to be celibate in order for the path he teaches to hold integrity.

Present, intimate, creative, "closer than your own heartbeat", accessed through your vulnerability, your capacity for intimacy.  The imaginal realm is real, and through it you will never be separated from any one or anything you have ever loved, for love is the ground in which you life and move and have your being.

The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying by Nina Riggs

The weekend air is medicine.

I feel like I've been granted access the mecca of unexpected intimacy.

Cancer removes whatever weird barriers we sometimes have with others.  A mastectomy of bullshit, my mother suggests. 

When it comes to illness, dying, death -- those darknesses -- it seems we are still so very much Plymouth Pilgrims -- all fear and fretting and fortifications, and a strong sense of our own alienness in a hostile land.  We don't begin to know what to do with ourselves.  We cross our arms over our chests and try to look on the bright side as we starve.

Try to see without understanding.

Waldeinsamkeit is the untranslatable German word for the feeling of divine solitude and contemplation in the woods.

Dying provokes nearsightedness in the caregiver.

One big upside of being told I have incurable cancer is that after all these years, my husband has finally stopped smugly saying, "It's your funeral", when I make a decision  he doesn’t agree with.

Buying a sofa online, like many of life's biggest decisions, takes research and trust, but mostly trust.

The Fountain: A Doctor's Prescription to Make 60 the New 30 by Dr Rocco Monto

While life span has increased, our health span hasn't kept pace.

Every day 10,000 people turn 60.  Every single day.  By 2050, the global population over 60 will double to more than 2 billion people.

Of all the tools to combat the crappy way we age, exercise is the most powerful.  There is no food, pill, or procedure that affects the body as powerfully as exercise. It truly is medicine.

Lungs with a 1,500-mile network of airways exchange toxic carbon dioxide for oxygen across a surface area the size of two tennis courts.

The liver serves more than 500 different functions.

A billion brain cells fit in a grain of sand, and each feed a trillion neural connections.

Our bodies are made from more than 37 trillion cells organized into 250 different types.

Cigarette smoking leads to fundamental genetic changes that can last 30 years after you quit.

The number one consumer of energy in our body is our brain.  It sucks up 80 percent of our caloric resources.

We metabolize all the food we consume to a sugar, glucose, to produce all the energy needed for life.

Sugar consumption in Britain rose from 18 pounds per person per year in 1700 to 100 pounds by the end of the 20th century.

While it was slow to take off in North American, sugar beet farming now makes up 55 percent of the 8.1 million tons of sugar produced every year in the United States.

Glucose is a critical part of our cellular metabolism and design.  The human body contains about 4 pounds of sugar.

Obesity and physical inactivity cause insulin resistance.

The first artificial sweetener was lead acetate (lead sugar).  It was first used by the Romans.

There is mounting data that habitual use of diet sodas containing artificial sweeteners causes obesity and increased blood sugar levels.

Your metabolism struggles to balance the battle between energy and error in an environment that provides only finite natural resources.

Exercise is medicine.  There isn't a drug, stem cell, gene editor, supplement, or diet with more widespread, positive effects on health and metabolism than exercise.

Exercise increases telomere length.

Regular exercise increases longevity by reversing the effects of aging at the chromosomal level.

When it comes to genetic architecture, exercise makes the cells appear younger.

For every minute of moderate to vigorous exercise you do, you can gain up to 7 minutes of extended life.

Exercise yields a host of changes at the genetic level, including preservation of telomeric length and suppression of genes that can cause cancer.

[Breast cancer] patients who used mindfulness-based therapy demonstrated signs of improved genetic fitness and prognosis, including longer chromosomal telomeres, improved cytokine production, and healthier immune systems.

Graceful aging requires generational cohesiveness.

One of the best ways to live longer is to be able to recover quicker after you've been sick or injured.

The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron

Part Two

Survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention.

Success or failure, the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality.

The quality of life is in proportion always, to the capacity for delight.  The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.

The reward for attention is always healing.

Even the slightest attention to our impoverished areas can nurture them.  

Anger is meant to be listened to.  Anger is a voice, a shout, a plea, a demand.… Anger is a map.

Anger is not the action itself.  It is action's invitation.

The universe is prodigal in its support.  We are miserly in what we accept.

Those of us who get bogged down by fear before action are usually being sabotaged by an older enemy, shame.  Shame is a controlling device.  Shaming someone is an attempt to prevent the person from behaving in a way that embarrasses us.

When people do not want to see something, they get mad at the one who shows them.

This surge of sudden disinterest ("It doesn't matter") is a routine coping device employed to deny pain and ward off vulnerability. 

Many blocked people are actually very powerful and creative personalities who have been made to feel guilty about their own strengths and gifts.

Growth is an erratic forward movement; two steps forward, one step back.

Very often, a week of insights will be followed by a week of sluggishness.

Easy does it is actually a modus operandi.  It means, "Easy accomplishes it". 

Okay is a blanket word for most of us.  It covers all sorts of squirmy feelings; and it frequently signals a loss.

Extreme emotions of any kind -- the very thing that morning pages are superb for processing -- are the usual triggers for avoiding the pages themselves.

Kriya, a Sanskrit word meaning spiritual emergency or surrender…. We all know what a kriya looks like: it is the bad case of the flu right after you've broken up with your lover.  It's the rotten head cold and bronchial cough that announces you've abused your health to meet an unreachable work deadline.

When the search-and-discard impulse seizes you, two crosscurrents are at work: the old you is leaving and grieving, while the new you celebrates and grows strong.  

The desire to worldly sophisticated, and smart often blocks our flow.

Spirituality has often been misused as a route to an unloving solitude, a stance where we proclaim ourselves above our human nature.  This spiritual superiority is really only one more form of denial.

All too often, we become blocked and blame it on our lack of money.  This is never an authentic block.  The actual block is our feeling of constriction, our sense of powerlessness.

Creativity lives in paradox:  serious art is born from serious play.

Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right.  It has northing to do with fixing things.  It has nothing to do with standards.  Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead.

We must be alert to flag and mourn our losses.

Every end is a beginning.  We know that.  But we tend to forget it as we move through grief.

Whenever I am willing to ask "What is necessary next?" I have moved ahead.

"I'm too old" is an evasive tactic.  It is always used to avoid facing fear.

The grace to be a beginner is always the best prayer.

There is a connection between self-nurturing and self-respect.