You Are Your Choices: 50 Ways to Live a Good Life by Alexandra Stoddard

The good life demands that we make the right choices most of the time, no matter how difficult they may be.

You are unique.  You ought to do what no others can do, fulfilling your needs in vastly different ways.  Your destiny is not predestined.  You create your destiny every day, not by chance, but by choice.  Destiny is an achievement.  The power to achieve it is in your choices.

A well-lived life is not an accident.

Never mistake your choice to live a good life for selfishness.  This is what all of us ought to be choosing.

Be honest with yourself and learn the difference between your needs and your wants.  All of our real needs are good for us.

Say yes to the best choice while remaining flexible.  Stay attuned to whether your choice continues to be appropriate and in your best interest.

Our power and strength lie in our ability to discipline our passions, to react in the right manner as we meet circumstances head on.  You are choosing your ideal way of life, breath by breath, choice by choice.

Use No as your teacher.

Until you exercise your power to be honest with yourself and others, you are going to feel trapped, believing you have little control over your destiny.

When you say no to something, someone else will gladly embrace saying yes.  The universe will provide for everyone who makes sincere choices.

What you don't do is as important as what you do.

A well-lived life is not always about winning or losing, but playing the game, doing our best learning from the process, and accepting that there is grace and dignity in being a good loser.  The good life doesn't require us to be number one. 

When you greet life choice by choice, detail by detail, aware of how much more happiness you can experience when you deliberately make the most of every human experience, you will be living a good life.

When we ritualize our life, we expose goodness and hidden beauty everywhere.

There's no place to go and hide in life.  Your job, your duty, your responsibility is to make the most you can of you.

Life is going to naturally cause us discomfort over the years, no matter what our choices.

We can change our life by as much as 50% by retraining our minds and attitudes.

The world may or may not be a good world overall, but it is possible, in fact it is vital, to make that part of the world where you live as good as it can be. 

There is always a bigger picture than we are aware of.  We never see the complete picture, though through thoughtful contemplation of the ultimate mysteries, we experience a more spacious awareness.

Opportunity comes to us in times of chaos and crisis.

A ten-minute brisk walk produces positive feelings and increased energy for up to two hours afterward.

People who participate in an aerobics class 2-4 times  a week for 8 to 10 weeks have an increased set point of happiness and reduced clinical depression and anxiety.

The most intelligent way to move in the direction of a good life is to live each day, each experience, as authentically as we can, with integrity, honesty, and courage.

Matrix Healing: Discover Your Greatest Health Potential Through the Power of Kabbalah by Dr Raphael Kellman

Every encounter with another human being is a choice point, offering us the opportunity for profound spiritual growth.

The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere by Pico Iyer

In an age of speed… nothing could be more invigorating than going slow.

Kindness is like water, religion is like tea.  It’s a great luxury.  It increases the savor of life.  It’s wonderful if you have it.  But you can survive without tea, and you can’t survive without water.

Everyday kindness and responsibility is the starting block for every life.

One is reminded, at a level deeper than all words, how making a living and making a life sometimes part in opposite directions.

We’ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off—our holy days, as some would have it…. More and more of us feel like emergency room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter.

So much of our lives takes place in our heads --- in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation.

Finding what feels like real life, the changeless and inarguable something behind all our shifting thoughts, is less a discovery than a recollection.

A life of stillness can sometimes lead not to art but to doubt or dereliction; anyone who longs to see the light is signing on for many long nights alone in the dark.

You don’t get over the shadows inside by simply walking away from them.

In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. 

How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease by Dr Michael Greger

As soon as we stop eating an artery-clogging diet, our bodies can start healing themselves, in many cases opening up arteries without drugs or surgery.

Our diet is the number-one cause of premature death and number-one cause of disability.

Many people assume that our manner of death is preprogrammed into our genes…. But for most of the leading causes of death, the science shows that our genes often account for only 10-20 percent of risk at most.

Smoking cigarettes is associated with triple the rate of telomere loss.

Three months of whole-food plant-based nutrition and other healthy changes could significantly boost telomerase activity, the only intervention ever shown to do so.

A healthy lifestyle can boost telomerase enzyme activity and reverse cellular aging.

Most of our leading causes of death and disability are more preventable than inevitable.

The primary reason diseases tend to run in families may be that diets tend to run in families.

Your family history does not have to become your personal destiny.

Three hours after eating a cup of broccoli sprouts, the enzyme that cancers use to help silence our defenses is suppressed in your bloodstream to an extent equal or greater than chemotherapy agent specifically designed for that purpose, without the toxic side effects.

Heart disease may be a choice.

Given the right conditions the body heals itself.

Women who consumed at least one serving of blueberries and two servings of strawberries each week had slower rates of cognitive decline.

People who drank fruit and vegetable juices appeared to have a 76 percent lower risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. 

The barrier separating your bloodstream from the world is many times thinner than a single sheet of tissue paper.

If you let kids run around for just six minutes, the levels of immune cells circulating in their blood increases by nearly 50 percent.

Type 2 diabetes, previously known as adult-onset diabetes, accounts for 90-95 percent of diabetes cases.

Type 2 diabetes is almost always preventable, often treatable, and sometimes even reversible through diet and lifestyle changes.

A high-fat diet can impair the body's ability to handle sugar.

Drinking just one can of soda a day appears to raise the odds of getting fatty liver disease by 45 percent.

Kiwi is one of the fruits I've prescribed to my patients with insomnia (two an hour before bedtime appears to significantly improve sleep onset, duration, and efficiency).

If just half of the U.S. population were to increase fruit and vegetable consumption by a single serving per day, an estimated twenty thousand cancer cases might be avoided each year. 

When you eat nuts, you burn more of your own fat.

A New Buddhist Path: Enlightenment, Evolution and Ethics in the Modern World by David R Loy

When Buddhism has spread to a new culture, it has interacted with the indigenous traditions of that society, and the result of their encounter has been something better suited to that culture. 

In developing nonattachment, one can come to experience serenity and loving-kindness now.

Realize here and now that there is no "you" that was ever born or can pass away.

Wise people don't waste their time trying to fix an unreal reality.  To awaken is to realize the really Real, which is something other than its appearances.

Meditation by itself is sometimes insufficient to resolve deep-rooted psychological problems and relationship difficulties.

We need such fictions because our minds do not function in a vacuum but are activated by their constructs. 

Pursuing our own well-being cannot be sharply distinguished from promoting the well-being of others.

Rather then devaluing this world by trying to end rebirth into it, or attempting to make the best of our lives within it as it is (or as it seems to be), there is a third possibility: we can "wake up" by realizing something usually unnoticed about the nature of this world, right here and now, and integrate that realization into our daily lives.

Another word for Buddhist enlightenment is liberation: freedom from the delusion of self, and from the conditioned tendencies that largely compose it.

The solution to our festering sense of lack is deconstructing and reconstructing the sense of self, so it doesn't feel so separate.

The self is composed of mostly habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, reacting.

Wisdom lived is love.

It is not merely that we are a way that the universe can become self-aware.  We are not only creatures that know we are creatures: we are creatures that create and know that we create.  If the cosmos is the creative process, we are its epicenters.

We are free to derive the meaning of our lives from delusions about who we are -- from dysfunctional stories about what the world is and how we fit into it -- or we can derive that meaning from insight into our nonduality with the world.  In either case, there are consequences.

Thich Nhat Hanh has recently suggested that the next buddha may appear as a sangha --- as a community rather than as an avatar who will come to save us from ourselves.

Greed, aggression and delusion are the main sources of evil.

Doing Good Better: How to be an Effective Board Member of a Nonprofit Organization by Edgar Stoesz

Big people respond to big challenges. Small bait only attracts small fish. 

Vision statements are strategic.  They look past the daily routine and identify something to grow into.

Once a vision statement is adopted, it becomes the standard against which actions are measured.

The challenging reality of our world is that about the time we get comfortable with what we are doing, it is moving toward extinction.

Mission is what an organization commits itself to do.  It identifies a clear, compelling, and achievable goal.  Whereas vision is a dream, a stretch, mission is a commitment.

Values inform how the goal is achieved.

Planning is the link between what is and what is to be.  It is the gateway to the future.

Planning is not an event.  It is an ongoing process that identifies what is working well and builds on that, while weeding out what is no longer contributing to the identified mission.

Planning can be thought of as walking a dream into existence. 

Whereas a long-range plan is vision, the annual work plan is a commitment.... The annual work plan establishes specific goals and activities by which the vision will be realized. It states what will be done (outcomes), who will do it, where, how, by when, and with what.  Its progress can be monitored and measured.

Committees...do not act for the board. They prepare issues for the board to then act on.

If someone brings issues that are not ready for board action, consider it raw meat and send it back to the kitchen!

There is a place for dissent, but dissent can also be a little more than stubborn negativism.

Think of policy as an instruction to the future, based on experience.

Collaborators willingly risk divergent points of view in their search for the best solution.

Some directors resist fundraising because they view it as begging. Fundraising is secondarily about raising money.  It is first about raising friends for the cause.

The first responsibility of a leader...is to define reality. Leaders accept the present as their starting point.

The best leaders are service driven, not power driven.

Leadership requires people who are able to see and believe in things before they exist.

A leader must be bold and ready to trade the present, with which it is comfortable, for something that has the potential to be better.

Leadership involves managing where there is no map and sometimes even no road.

To get improved results, you need some new thinking, and that is most likely to come from new people.

The Death & Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan

A normal lake, if things get really rough, might tip a boat.  A Great Lake can swallow freighters almost three times the length of a football field; the lakes' bottoms are littered with an estimated 6,000 shipwrecks.

Erosion has been having its way with Niagara Falls.  It is expected the falls will disappear in about 50,000 years.

Chicago workers reported within the month [July 1968] that they alone had disposed of enough alewives [river herrings] to cover two football fields -- 500 feet high.

Winds churning deep cold water from the bottom can drop Great Lakes temperatures by as much as 20 degrees in just a matter of minutes.

The current pulsing through Lake St Clair is so strong that if you were to hop in an inflatable raft at the top of the lake you'd flush out the other side in about two days -- without having to paddle a stroke.

In the early 1970s two-thirds of America's lakes, rivers and coastal waters were unsafe for fishing or swimming.

Lake Erie, which holds only 2 percent of the overall volume of Great Lakes water, is home to about 50 percent of Great Lakes fish.

Cleveland had incorporated as a city just eight weeks before the Olin family pulled into town behind their four horses.  What struck young Chauncey most about the place was not Clevelanders' industriousness but the old-growth poplars with smokestack-like trunks so tall that their lowest branches were still 70 feet off the ground.

[Lake] Superior's temperature bump, for example, means on hot summer nights oceanographer [Jay] Austin can take his boy swimming at a beach near downtown Duluth, something most people would never do a generation ago because the lake stayed so cold year-round that even summer swimmers risked hypothermia.

Penetrating Wisdom: The Aspiration of Samantabhadra by Dzogchen Ponlop

All that appears and exists, all of samsara and nirvana, has one ground, two paths and two results.

The connate ignorance is a distracted, mindless cognition.  The labeling ignorance is holding self and other to be two. The two ignorances, connate and labeling, are the ground of the confusion of all beings.

From the emergence of subtle clinging coarse habit gradually develops.

Beings are tormented by attachment to the pleasant.

Through the emergence of a subtle, fearful cognition of externally-apparent objects the habit of aversion grows, coarse enmity, beating, and killing are born. 

Even if you don't have complete faith and trust, it is important to have some sense of openness to the possibility. 

The manifestations we experience as outside appearance are a simple manifestation of luminous mind.  This luminosity, the clarity nature of our mind, gets to a point of intensity.  When we don't recognize that intensity as the clarity of mind, it is projected outside and duality begins.

Buddhas manifest in accordance with the situation.  They manifest in whatever way they can in order to tame the suffering of sentient beings.

Connate ignorance is actually the nature of not recognizing.

Unclarity is the nature of doubt.

If you conquer just one enemy, your aggression, it is like conquering all the objects of this anger. 

The main thing that we need to learn is how to be in whatever state we are in.

The main problem of jealousy is lack of appreciation.

Money: A Love Story: Untangle Your Financial Woes & Create the Life You Really Want by Kate Northrup

The first stage to becoming financially free is to tell the truth of your story to yourself, and feel your feelings around it.

You have to feel it to heal it.

Our power in any moment lies in our ability to get into agreement with what's happening -- to fall in love with your story.  The more we push up against something, the more we find it wrong, the more we wish it were different, the more powerless we are to create the reality that we desire.

The more we embrace the here and now and find ways to appreciate it, and perhaps even be grateful for it, the more power we have to move forward.

Part of claiming our freedom in any area of our lives is looking at our stories through a lens of seeing the positive lessons, taking responsibility for our part, and finding ways to grow as a result of our experiences.

When you find yourself feeling victimy and whiny and hear yourself say the words "I can't afford that", remember: it's not about the money.  If you really wanted it you would figure out a way to get it.  If it were that VALUABLE to you, you would make it happen.

When we sacrifice our own well-being in the hopes that our sacrifice will help someone else, we just get two people who are living sub-optimal lives.

God Saves Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State by Lawrence Wright

The number of Texans is projected to double by 2050, to 54.4 million, almost as many people as California and New York combined. 

Texas has practically no laws regulating exotic animals.

The Humane Society of the United States estimates that there are more tigers living in captivity in Texas than the three thousand that are thought to be living in the wild.  Some are kept as pets in backyards.

For the first time ever, the United States holds more proved oil reserves than either Saudi Arabia or Russia.  More than half of the U.S. total is in shale.

The central fact about boom societies is that they inevitably go bust.

Nebraska has more millionaires per capita than Texas.

Houston is the only major city in America without zoning laws.  You can build pretty much anything you want anywhere you want.

Most of the day was spent learning the Texas general firearms laws, which are more nuanced and confusing than I expected.  One can't carry a gun in amusement parks, hospitals, sporting events, school buses, bars, a polling place, a court, a correctional facility, or "within 1000 feet of a correctional facility designated as a place of execution on a day of execution if proper notice is posted".

Texas has the highest rate of uninsured people in the nation.

There are more than six hundred varieties of bird species in Texas, a greater number than any other state, thanks to its biological diversity and the fact that it sits in the middle of the central migratory flyway.

Imagine the wealth and power that would have been Mexico's had Texas remained a part of it.

Bullets from gunfights in Juarez [Mexico] fly over the border.  In 2012, a woman was pushing a stroller in downtown El Paso when a stray shot hit her in the leg.  Bullets from Mexico also struck a building at the University of Texas branch in El Paso, and another broke a picture frame in the city hall.

I suppose many people live in places they're not especially attached to, or that they actually hate.  Marriages are like that as well.  There's a high level of discontent even in enduring relationships, together with long periods of stagnation and moments of shocking intimacy.  You acquire a private library of memories.  Arguments are born that last for the rest of your lives among the touchstones of joy and revelation.  The commonalities draw you together or suffocate you.

15 Things You Should Give Up to Be Happy: An Inspiring Guide to Discovering Effortless Joy by Luminita D Saviuc

The story of your past doesn't have to become the story of your life.

The moment you decide that you have had enough of everything, enough of stress and anxiety, enough of anger and resentment, enough of struggle, lack, pain and poverty, enough of tears, heartbreaks, self-destructive thoughts, behaviors and relationships and enough of all that is negative and toxic, that will be the moment you will finally be ready to take charge of your life and take the necessary steps toward a better and happier life.

Your past doesn't have to equal your future, unless you want it to.

If you cling to the past and keep on using it as an excuse for not moving on with your life, then yes, your future will be similar to your past.

We cling to the past because the past gives us a sense of identity; it makes us who we are, or at least that's what we think.  Because we haven't yet learned how to be present and engaged in our day-to-day lives, we continue to craft our lives from a place of limitations -- the past -- instead of doing it from a place of infinite choices and possibilities -- the present moment. 

The moment you become attached to how things should be, how people and life should treat you and how your happiness should be packaged and delivered your way, you create a lot of resistance and unhappiness in your life.

Don't let your mind trick you into thinking that forgiveness is an act of weakness.

When you get your sense of identity from your past hurts, your wounds and your struggles, it can be quite impossible to acknowledge the fact that maybe you are using what happened in the past as an excuse for why you are not living a happier and more meaningful life in the present.

Whenever you choose to use all kinds of excuses for why you can't be, do or have something, you are in fact moving away form your true power, disconnecting from your true self and building a false identity for yourself.

Relationships aren't about making an unhappy person happy nor are they about making an unloved person feel loved.  Relationships are about sharing the love and happiness that is already present within you with each other, growing, improving and evolving together.

The life you are now living is the result of all the thoughts you have thought up until this moment.  

Even though things might not always go the way we want them to go, and even though life might not always give us the experiences we want to have, it doesn't mean that life isn't offering us the experiences  we need to have -- the experiences that are beneficial for the evolution of our consciousness, the growth of our own souls and the expansion of our whole beings. 

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After by Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil

My own life story feels fragmented, like beads unstrung.  Each time I scoop up my memories, the assortment is slightly different.

Taking care of loved ones in my world was not based on affection.  It was based on the fear of losing them.

That's life in a refugee camp: You're not moving toward anything.  You're just in a horrible groove. You learn skills that you wish you did not know.

Rwandans take the dream world seriously.  When you wake up, people ask, "What did you dream about last night?"  It's like saying good morning.

I want to make people understand that boxing ourselves into tiny cubbies based on class, race, ethnicity, religion -- anything, really -- comes from a poverty of mind, a poverty of imagination.  The world is dull and cruel when we isolate ourselves.  Survival, true survival of the body and soul, requires creativity, freedom of thought, collaboration.