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.

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.