You. Are. The. One.: A Bold Adventure in Finding Purpose, Discovering the Real You, and Loving Fully By Kute Blackson

You learn to go into survival mode.  You developed survival mechanisms that prevent you form feeling pain and layer these mechanisms one on top of another to help navigate the world as safely as you can.

In the fear, in the uncertainty, is the invitation of life.

You have to learn to trust life.  You have to learn to let go of safety and not to surrender to fear.

As a coping mechanism, we grow up, ultimately deciding that we have to be someone we're not in order to fit in, in order to be accepted, in order to survive.  We start to ask, Who do I need to be in order to be loved? You see the difference?  We learn to ask not Who am I? But Who do I need to be?  That's the moment we cut the ties with our soul and start to live a lie.

Day by day, experience by experience, we discover what persona gets us the attention we're so desperate for.  And in the process we get molded into people WHO WE ARE NOT.  This creates a pattern, a way of being that we call "Me".  And this limited expression becomes the whole of our personality. 

Everything  you put behind the words "I am" is a concept that someone else must tell you.

It's not about the persona.  It's about your relationship with the persona.  When your persona owns you, you have no ability to choose.

We've often gotten stuck in patterns that keep us powerless. In order to move forward in your life, you've got to bring to light the ways your past may be having an impact on your present.

When you dig down to the root of your conditioning, you will find…your parents.  Our parents set our navigational system.

Our personalities developed in reaction to how [our parents] treated us.

Maybe you think that is your voice in your head.  But if you start to dig deep, you'll realize it is probably the voice of one of your parents.

To the degree that you are run by your conditioning, you are not free to choose and create your future.

We cannot access the power of forgiveness until we first acknowledge the hurt and pain lying beneath the surface. 

Sometimes we refuse to forgive because deep down, remaining angry is our unconscious way to somehow stay connected with them.

Following your mind will lead to big trouble.  The mind should be a follower, not a leader.  Your heart and spirit must be the leader.

Just because you have a thought doesn't mean it's real.  Your thoughts are not real.  They are just energy.  Your thoughts aren't the issue.  The importance you give your thoughts is the real issue.

The mind spins a lot of fiction as reality.

Don't get negative about the negative thought.  Simply observe it and let it float by like clouds in the sky.  A new thought will emerge.

Just like clouds in the sky, thoughts will pass.  The more you fight thoughts, the more power you give them.

The reason your dream doesn't come true is never because you don't have enough money.  It's because of a lack of resourcefulness.

Fear is a sign that you are at your edge.  You are about to transcend your limits.

What if you could consider those moments when you want to give up as an invitation to stretch into your greatness.

Your mind will take all your power if you let it.

It's your ego that thinks you should be somewhere else doing something else with someone else as someone else.

The ego is constantly searching for something.  Its job is to seek but never to find.

We must learn to shed our obsession with getting someplace else.

When you move forward in faith, the universe is waiting for you.

How we wait reveals how we live life.

The only thing you take with you is the evolution of your soul and who you became in the process of life.

This belief is at the root of suffering.  The experience I'm having is not the experience I should be having.

Acceptance allows you to look for the intelligence of the universe at work.

It is easy to love those you like.  It is easy to love when life is going well. The true spiritual practice is learning to love no matter what.  Not when everything is perfect.  Not when you feel like loving.  This is the layer that we must peel in order to access our soul.

Unconditional love supports each person's soul journey.  Even if it doesn't match yours at this time.

Romancing the Ordinary: A Year of Simple Splendor by Sarah Ban Breathnach

Realize how much we shortchange our chances for real happiness when we insist on how “it” has to be done.

Heaven has always intended for us to become wonderfully whole and complete within ourselves before seeking the company of another.

Fear is always a future based phantom and a conscious choice. 

A Spirituality for Brokenness: Discovering Your Deepest Self in Difficult Times by Terry Taylor

The most important step: doing nothing.

The Love Diet: A Personalized, Proven Program That Changes the Way You Feel to Transform the Way You Look by Connie Guttersen and Mark Dedomenico

When you feel hopeless, it’s easy to convince yourself that there’s no solution – this self-defeating form of reassurance is what’s known as a closed loop.  When you’re in a closed loop, you eliminate any chances to take in new information or re-analyze your situation – and this is when you truly do become stuck.

Fear is related to two perceptions: 1. What others think of you, 2. What you think of yourself based on what they think of you.

The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity by Dr Norman Doidge

(this is book 500!)

The brain can shut pain off because the actual function of acute pain is not to torment us but to alert us.

The pain perception system is spread throughout the brain and spinal cord, and that the brain, far from being a passive recipient, controls how much pain we feel.

Chronic pain is plasticity gone wild.

When the neurons in our pain maps get damaged, they fire incessant false alarms, making us believe the problems in our body when it is mostly in our brain.  Long after the body has healed, the pain system is still firing. The acute pain has developed an afterlife: it becomes chronic pain.

The mind-brain-body healing process is not merely a general, non-specific process that resets the entire nervous system, the way relaxation does.  Mysteriously -- because we don't yet know the mechanism -- it targets only what the patient believes is the focus.

Exercise helps fend off degenerative disorders and can defer dementia.

Fifteen percent of our brain cells are neurons; the other 85 percent are glial cells.

Walking, so natural, so "pedestrian" (in the sense of the ordinary), may not be a high-tech neuroplastic technique, but it is one of the most powerful neuroplastic interventions.  When we walk fast, regardless of our age, we produce new cells in the hippocampus, the brain area that plays a key role in turning short-term memories into long.

Walking was a key contributor to a very simple program that reduced the risk of dementia by a staggering 60 percent.

In sleep the glia open up special channels that allow waste products and toxic buildups (including the proteins that build up in dementia) to be discharged from the brain through the cerebral spinal fluid, which bathes much of the brain.  This unique channel system is ten times more active in the sleeping brain than in the waking state. 

In China, acupuncture was routinely used to treat strokes.

When a human stands, a group of muscles --- the antigravity muscles of the back and the quadriceps -- holds a person up.

The Sting of the Wild: The Story of the Man Who Got Stung for Science by Justin O Schmidt

At this youngest stage of life, fear is muted.  Fear is mostly learned by play experiences and from nearby parents and adults.

Mammals' breath odor is the single strongest stimulus for bee defensive attacks.

Bees are a collective of 20,000 species, outnumbering all warmblooded animals on Earth.

Life as a Verb: 37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful, and Live Intentionally by Patti Digh

What does it take to fully inhabit your life? It takes realizing how important the I that is you is to the equation.

Change occurs at the edges, without permission.

The death rate for people who play it safe and for people who live boldly is the same: 100 percent.

Generosity, it turns out, is a way of being in the world, not a way of giving in the world.  It has little to do with giving gifts, and everything to do with giving space to others to be who they are.

Creating inclusion requires being generous.  Most often it consists of simply extending a hand.

What we believe is "normal" is simply "common". 

What we do everyday is often based on a pattern that we can no longer recognize because it is so ingrained over time -- or so unconscious.

We lose the ability to see things once we name them.

On this flight we call life, choose your seatmates wisely.  Sit with people you would embrace while going down, who won't hog the armrest or steal your peanuts or take your in-flight magazine.  Sit with people who will comfort you when you're scared. 

Become you, that You not shaped by outside forces, but the one standing up straight, a perfect balance of wind and still, of solid and sway.

Thinking In Indian: A John Mohawk Reader by José Barreiro

Indian nations are denied legitimacy solely because they committed the crime of owning land somebody else wanted and surviving after the land was waken.  Having failed to physically disappear, the Indian nation is now urged to disappear legally, culturally, and psychologically. 

Indian leadership needs to understand that when they stand as Indians for Indian rights, they are often in direct conflict with US aspirations, and that an Indian allegiance to the United States can be secondary to their allegiance to their own nations because the former, by nature, seeks to eliminate the latter.

The culture of Native nations was built around the knowledge of how to survive in an environment.  To continue the culture meaningfully requires that the people be free to continue to nurture the environment in which we live and grow. 

Colonization interrupts the pattern of learning to survive and substitutes learning to serve.

Awareness of something is not that thing’s reality.

Individual human spirits combine to create the spirits of nations and families.

The process of colonization involves the imaginary transformation of the unfamiliar to the familiar.

The Wisdom of Sundays: Life-Changing Insights from Super Soul Conversations by Oprah Winfrey

"Multisensory perception doesn't make us more kind or patient or caring or less angry.  It makes us more aware.  And when you get that sense, the spiritual work begins." Gary Zukav

"Fear is the cheapest room in the house.  I'd like to see you in better living conditions." Hafiz

"The Buddhist teachings begin with this kind of exhortation: Do not forget your original wholeness, your original goodness and beauty, and turn yourself toward what is good." Jack Kornfield

The road to the spiritual path is to understand that you are a spiritual being. And the way to understand that you are a spiritual being is to know that you are not all of those thoughts.

If you want more love in your life, set your intention to be more loving.  If you seek kindness, focus your energy on empathy and compassion.

The consciousness or energy behind the motivation is going to determine the effect that occurs.

"I don’t think we realize that what follows "I am", we're inviting into our life." Joel Osteen

"We sin when we have our loves out of order".  Augustine

"The truth is, you and I are in control of only two things: how we prepare for what might happen, and how we respond to what just happened." Devon Franklin

"[Mindfulness is] a gateway into the full dimensionality of being human and being alive". Jon Kabat-Zinn

Art is prayer.

"Here's the lesson.  When you find yourself in a new situation, a new circumstance, a new life experience, everything that requires healing is going to rush to the surface." Iyanla Vanzant

"Silence can be prayer.  Rage can be prayer.  It's truth.  It's all prayer.  When we are talking to something that the rest of the world may not be seeing right then and when we're talking from the deepest part of our hearts, we're trying to tell the truth.  That's prayer." Anne Lamott

Every single choice we make is either going to enhance the spirit or it's going to drain the spirit.

"The keys to your happiness are no longer in somebody else's pocket".  Adyashanti

"God put a rainbow in every cloud. The rainbow is coming. Say thank you even though you can't see the rainbow.  It's already there." Maya Angelou

"The moment you appreciate, you get out of your own self.  You stop obsessing.  It's like I always tell people, most of your suffering comes from expectation. Right? Trade your expectation for appreciation.  Your whole life changes in that moment." Tony Robbins

"You can't be complaining and miserable ninety percent of your day and expect to feel passionate the other ten percent.  The willingness to take responsibility for your experience on a moment-to-moment basis is what we're missing.  Most of us don't realize passion is an inside job.  It's a muscle that gets stronger the more you use it." Marie Forleo

Ask yourself at the end of the day, "Was I better today than yesterday?".

"It takes fearlessness to seek after truth". Elizabeth Lesser

Love in the Present Tense: How to Have a High Intimacy, Low Maintenance Marriage by Morrie & Arleah Shechtman

The basis of any conflict is a gap between what you want and what you’re getting.  This gap does not lead to rage or crushing disappointment if what you want is arising from the present.

The emotional intensity of a conflict depends on whether it is rooted in the past or in the present.  Conflicts that are truly about the present are easily managed in the present.

Healthy, sane adults are capable not only of saying “No”, but also of taking “no” for an answer.

When marriage becomes a drag – when you conceive of it is something you have to work out and can’t seem to make any headway no matter how hard you work – you are attempting to solve the wrong problem.  If you are feeling unhappy in your marriage, then you are feeling unhappy, period.

To grieve is to revisit the old pain that gave rise to your negative familiars, acknowledge it, comfort it, and liberate yourself form it’s influence.

Everybody has a painful childhood because being a child is inherently painful.  It is a state of acute helplessness – helplessness to control your world and helplessness to interpret it correctly.

If we had to sum up in one word what makes a good marriage, the word would be courage.  Love isn’t compromise, sacrifice, or unconditional acceptance.  Love is courage.

Unexamined pain from the past amplifies and complicates pain in the present.

Trust is not about believing in other people.  Trust is believing in yourself.  It is knowing that whatever other people do, you can handle it.

Your feeling patterns as an adult were shaped by the way you felt on the average days of your childhood, days when nothing especially memorable or out of the ordinary occurred.  The familiar – a mood or feeling that you never especially note because it was so habitual, so ordinary – shaped your expectations of what is ordinary to feel as an adult… when you feel like that now --- even if it’s not an especially good feeling – you feel safe.

Living Your Yoga: Finding the Spiritual in Everyday Life by Judith Hanson Lasater

PART ONE

Whenever we step into the light, our shadow side also becomes more apparent. 

The path toward yoga's lofty goal of self-realization (atmajnana) is not in the least glamourous.  On the contrary, it is quite humbling.  For we must constantly, bravely, and compassionately face our limitations in order to realize our unlimited potential as spiritual beings.

Practice has a different meaning.  It is the consistent willingness to open to life in all of its joy and pain.

Thoughts are the sensations of the mind just as sensations are the thoughts of the body.

Practice...can be understood as a willingness to return to the reality of this very moment, that is, to observe with dispassion and clarity exactly what is -- right now.  Does this moment call for silence or for answers?

Paying attention to the thoughts and sensations of the moment will give me a chance to respond to life less from my patterns of defense and more from integrity. 

Consider removing the layers of doubt, fear, and denial that keep you from experiencing connection with your own wholeness. 

Whether we seek something called spirituality, holiness, or enlightenment, the route to it is through our humanness, complete with our strengths and our weaknesses, our successes and our failures.... We use ourselves to discover ourselves.

When you are in a state of yoga, or wholeness, you rest in your own true nature.... When carving stone, the sculptor removes everything that is not the statue. She does not add anything to create it, except the willingness to do the work.  The art of revealing beauty lies in removing what conceals it. 

Suffering differs from pain.  Suffering is caused by the emotional reaction we lay on top of our pain.

Each moment is holy and holds the potential for self-transformation.

Spiritual seeking is not what we do outwardly but what we acknowledge inwardly.

To practice yoga in the deepest sense is to commit to developing awareness by observing our lives: our thoughts, our words, and our actions. 

The real beginning of spiritual practice is evident when we accept responsibility for ourselves -- that is, when we acknowledge that ultimately there are no answers outside of ourselves, and no gurus, no teachers, and no philosophies that can solve the problems of our lives.  They can only suggest, guide, and inspire.

Most daily activities are goal oriented.... We all spend most of our time forgetting to feel, to sense, and to know life -- moment by moment.

Do what you can and do it fully.

AI: Angel Intelligence: How Your Consciousness Determines Which Angels Come into Your Life by Yehuda Berg

Mishaps like these that cause physical or emotional pain come from an energy force that Kabbalah calls angels.

What science calls particles and what Kabbalah calls angels are one and the same.

Angels are packets of energy that affect you whether or not you are conscious of their influence.  Even if you don't "believe" in them, they will still impact your life.  Angels are not just passive entities.  They exert energy. 

We die for one of two reasons: Either we have completed our Tikkun -- our correction -- and our soul's purpose on Earth is fulfilled, or our body can no longer perform the role our soul requires of it, and we must return later for another round.

Reinventing Medicine: Beyond Mind-Body to a New Era of Healing by Larry Dossey

Prayerfulness allows us to reach a plane of experience where illness can be experienced as a natural part of life, and where one’s acceptance transcends passivity.  If the disease disappears we are grateful; if it remains, that too is reason for gratitude.

What is not broken cannot be fixed.  Therefore, healers cannot bring about wholeness, for it already exists.  The proper goal of healing is to facilitate this awareness in the person needing to be healed.

The Zohar by Michael Berg

Meditation can be thought of as digesting wisdom – becoming it.

The utter one-pointedness that follows is meditation, which at its deepest levels is a pure communion between Self, Soul and Creator – a communion that occurs outside of Time altogether.  We become the still point in a turning world.  When thoughts are stilled and desires transcended, we realize the deathless being that we really are, and then everything appears as it truly is: infinite.

Angels are distinct energy components, part of a vast communication network running through the upper worlds.  Each unique angel is responsible for transmitting various forces of influence into our physical universe.

As a seed contains the entire flower, the original thought of creation contains the creation as a whole.

To draw the soul you desire, you need to become that level of soul yourself.

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from A Secret World by Peter Wohlleben

When you know that trees experience pain and have memories and that tree parents live together with their children, then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives.

When trees grow together, nutrients and water can be optimally divided among them all so that each tree can grow into the best tree it can be.

Without bark the tree cannot transport sugar from its leaves to its roots.

Modern forestry targets a maximum age of 80 to 120 years before plantation trees are cut down and turned into cash.  Under natural conditions, trees that age are no thicker than a pencil and no taller than a person.

A mature beech tree can send more than 130 gallons of water a day coursing through its branches and leaves, and this is what it does as long as it can draw enough water up from below.

If trees are capable of learning (and you can see they are just by observing them), then the question becomes: Where do they store what they have learned and how do they access this information? After all, they don't have brains to function as databases and manage processes.

When trees are really thirsty, they begin to scream.  If you're out in the forest, you won't be able to hear them, because this all takes place at ultrasonic levels. 

A tree contains almost as much liquid inside it as we do.

Moss grows very slowly and takes decades to get established.

Beeches harass other species, such as oaks, to such an extent that they weaken.

Spruce store essential oils in their needles and bark, which act like antifreeze.

Dwarf trees on the tundra, which are sometimes trampled to death by travelers who don't even know they are there. It can take these trees a hundred years to grow just 8 inches tall.

We know less about the ocean floor than we know about the surface of the moon.

The older the tree, the more quickly it grows.  Trees with trunks three feet in diameter generated three times as much biomass as trees that were only half as wide.  So, in the case of trees, being old doesn't mean being weak, bowed, and fragile.  Quite the opposite, it means being full of energy and highly productive. 

Love, Medicine & Miracles: Lessons Learned About Self-Healing from a Surgeon's Experience with Exceptional Patients by Dr Bernie S Siegel

I have found only one bit of information that could help change you.  It is that you are mortal and will die some day.  Therefore, don't do things to not die but do things to enhance the quality of your life and you may be surprised by how long you do live.  Accept that you will die and make decisions about how you want to spend the limited amount of time you have.

Medicine still focuses on disease, giving it a failure orientation.  Its practitioners still act as though disease catches people, rather than understanding that people catch disease by becoming susceptible to the seeds of illness to which we are all constantly exposed.

The state of the mind changes the state of the body by working through the central nervous system, the endocrine system, and the immune system. 

Peace of mind sends the body a "live" message, while depression, fear and unresolved conflict give it a "die" message. 

One problem with cancer statistics is that most self-induced cures don't get into the medical literature…. A person who gets well when he isn't supposed to doesn't go back to his doctor.

Exceptional patients refuse to be victims.  They educate themselves and become specialists to their own care.  They question the doctor because they want to understand their treatment and participate in it.  They demand dignity, personhood and control, no matter the course of the disease.  It takes courage to be exceptional.

Hope is not statistical.  It is physiological.

Refusal to hope is nothing more than a decision to die.

Beliefs are a matter of faith not logic.

One of the most common precursors of cancer is a traumatic loss or a feeling of emptiness in one's life.

Emotional growth toward greater self-acceptance and fulfillment helps keep the immune system strong.

To become exceptional in caring for the body, one must take stock of the beliefs one has about it, especially those so ingrained that they're normally unconscious. 

Affirmation aids the body, fear is destructive.  Treatment chosen out of fear is unlikely to be helpful.

The most important thing is to pick a therapy you believe in and proceed with a positive attitude. 

We must learn to give fun a high priority in life.

Visualization takes advantage of what might almost be called a "weakness" of the body: it cannot distinguish between a vivid mental experience and an actual physical experience. 

We prepare our future by what we think and do each day.

People who always smile, never tell anyone their troubles, and neglect their own needs are the ones who are most likely to become ill.  For them, the main problem often is learning to say no without guilt.

People heal doing something they believe in, something that gives them hope. 

Our emotions don't happen to us so much as we choose them.

Resentments and hate are the obstacles that keep many people from clearing up their unfinished emotional business and achieving harmony with others. 

You create your own opportunities out of the same raw materials from which other people create their defeats.