Tag: Adversity

How to Transition From Cancer to Calm

In 2013, our dreamy life changed dramatically when my husband’s barber asked, “What’s that on your neck?” David saw three doctors and had six procedures by the time we heard the five words that rocked our world, “You have stage IV cancer.” The lump protruding from his neck was a malignant growth that had metastasized from the base of his tongue. Four days prior, our thirteen-year-old son was diagnosed with Lyme Disease. “What’s happening to our family?” I thought desperately, trying to make sense of it. Life was going along nicely, when suddenly our roles changed: husband and son became…

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5 Ways You Can Stand Up to Challenges

I started writing inspirational poetry for people 30 years ago. It wasn’t because I was a master of the English language; it was because I heard the poems when people would tell me about things in their lives. I didn’t pay much attention to it at first. But after the first hundred you start to notice that there’s something more going on. Over the years I’ve written poems for people facing just about every challenge imaginable. I’ve seen the same themes repeat themselves. For anyone facing challenge in their life, here are 5 things I’ve found to be true for…

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Invite the Lightning Bolt of Change into Your Life

There is a moment when the dirt and the dust rises up in your life, maybe it is abuse, lack of money, lack of kindness, whatever it is. There is a turning point when you stand still in time. Everything stops. It is very quiet. You say, this is going to change. You become a radical demand for change in your life, and in that moment, the world shifts. It is a glorious shift into the light when you know you're knowing, again. When you stand in the brightness of you. This is you that everyone else always knew and you…

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Blessed With a Hard Life

In Zaatari camp, a young Syrian boy with a love for soccer invited me into his home to show off his extensive collection of soccer medals. He so valued them that he packed them into a small pack slung on his shoulder during his journey fleeing the violence of his Syrian home, by foot, seeking refuge and safety in the desert. As I was leaving, he motioned for me to bend down, slipping one of his gold medals around my neck. I didn’t understand the Arabic words he whispered, but the power, love, and impact I felt in that exchange…

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- The only reason we want to understand our problems is because we are planning to have them again.
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- When failure is not an option, any walls you hit are a mere challenge that needs a solution. And when you keep looking, there is always, always a solution.
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- You can’t control the curve balls life throws you, so you have to learn how to control yourself and change quickly to make sure the curve ball doesn’t knock you out.
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Achieving Your Potential, Despite Adversity

Life is an adventure, a journey through many valleys with many mountains to climb. You're going to get tired, you're going to be hungry, you're going to feel lost. Some nights will be cold and filled with scary things. Some days will be long, hot and without comfort. Take the time, even when it's hard, especially when you don't feel like it, to stop and look back to see how far you have come. Look at your life in awe for what you have accomplished and know that you have the ability, the grace and the wisdom to continue moving…

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- If you are not faced with tests throughout your life, there is no way to defend and clarify what you truly believe in.
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Ben Newman

Choosing Your Response to Challenges

We all inevitably face challenges in life. Situations that rock us to the core and challenge us to keep moving forward. I ask YOU the question, "If tomorrow wasn't promised, what would you do for today?" My mother's death, 11 days before my eighth birthday, left a cavernous hole in my universe. Yet though my mother passed away all those years ago, not a single day goes by without the reminder that she helped me become the man that I am today. Her strength, her love, her work ethic and her legacy live on through me, through the family I…

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A Blessing in Disguise

I have always had a fondness for inspiring legends or tales that have a nugget of wisdom attached. I recall a Chinese tale from Huai Nanzi about an old man who lost a horse. This fable seems very relevant in today's world: One night the horse broke out of its pen and ran away. The man's son cried, "Father, our prized horse has run away! How could this happen? This must be the worst day of our lives!" The father smiled and calmly replied, "Is that so? Are you so certain?" Shortly after the horse came back and along with…

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Share Your Gifts to Overcome Adversity

Over the past few years, every one of us has been through some form of adversity. In fact, many of us have been hit by more than one serious, disruptive challenge. In this "perfect storm", everything that we have come to trust and believe about ourselves and our lives has come under some form of attack. Whether it is an illness, loss of job, erosion of wealth, divorce, or a death in the family, it seems as though the path on our journey has gotten a little more difficult. As we stand here looking into the future, looking for answers,…

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Rehab for the Soul

Enjoy the brilliance of this world while you can, but more importantly learn to understand this world's limitation. The world is an amazing and inspiring place, but only for those who have the patience and the perseverance to truly understand the greatness behind the tests we face during our lives. Seeking to skip the struggle, is seeking to skip the meaning. In my experience, our lives have been conceived so that we may pull ourselves out of our old ways of being. It works to abolish these older versions of ourselves so that we may live a more inspired existence,…

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dr jacob liberman

Agitation is Evolution – Welcome Each Moment

In 2014, my cat had a stroke, rendering her blind and deaf with little memory left. On the advice of my vet, I made the difficult decision to have her euthanized. Her death was one among a sea of losses, which seemed to arrive all at once. That year, due to mounting expenses, I felt compelled to sell my home. This came on the heels of closing my business, which resulted in considerable financial loss. That same year, my literary agent died, and I parted ways with my then romantic partner who’d been by my side for more than a…

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Don’t Sabotage Your Attitude

Superstitions are irrational beliefs - beliefs that are held in spite of evidence to the contrary. Do you carry the daily burden of irrational beliefs and/or earlier life transgressions that work to sabotage your good efforts and attitude? Are you going through difficult times with family members in rehab or with you personally with your addictions, diseases and problems? In my own life I have seen (and participated in) failed relationships, drug addiction and errant business ventures. When these things happen, it is easy to let these "failures" weigh heavily upon your shoulders. Some go so far as to willingly…

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Happiness is a Choice

Here’s what I know for sure, Happiness Is A Choice. There is so much more we are capable of, and through mindset and beliefs, we have the power to design our life and choose happiness. The hustle of life is filled with people, events, and stimuli, there’s no avoiding it. The weather. Traffic. People at the coffee shop. Eating dinner with the family. Stimuli encountered throughout the day aren’t ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ they’re neutral, and often cannot be controlled. Everyday, we are presented hundreds of situations. The beautiful part is that based on our beliefs, we have total self-power to…

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Leverage Your Entourage To Shine Your Light

"They'll never make it through the night." That's what the doctors proclaimed when we were born. As identical twins, born nearly three months premature and weighing just two pounds each, that seemed appropriate, right? They read our last rites and waited. Nearly four decades later, they must still be waiting. Both of us weigh just slightly more than two pounds now (smirk), and we have had a lifetime to live with gratitude that we actually did "make it through the night." The road was not an easy one, though, and we have had to come through much adversity. But because we…

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The Hard Lessons in Life

Adversity happens to all of us. I have learned that you cannot control a lot of things that happen in your life and you cannot control the feelings that come over you. However, you can control what you do with those feelings. Only you control how you let the events in your life affect you, your future and the future of your family. It is interesting to me that two people can have similar adversity in their lives and yet each will come out of it differently. One may fall apart mentally and emotionally because of the difficult events they…

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- At an impasse, when some people just can’t or won’t, remember it defines them, not you.
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- When life dumps lemons in your lap, you can become bitter and sour or you can live the sweet life by turning those lemons into lemonade!
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- We can either allow our circumstances to make us miserable or we can choose to use it to make us strong.
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