Tag: Gratitude

6 Ways to Keep Life in Perspective

Here are the top six pieces of advice that can increase the quality of life and easily keep it in perspective: 1) Nothing in life has any inherent meaning; it only has the meaning you assign to it. Shakespeare once said, “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” You can actively change the meaning of any circumstance in your life to one that empowers you. The way to do that is by asking empowering questions. These questions will lead to empowering answers. Here are a few examples: What is good about this? What is funny about this?…

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Unleash Your Champion Within

When you wake up in the morning, express gratitude for another day. You came into this world with unlimited potential; don’t waste it on pursuits that fail to fill your mind, satisfy your heart and increase your character. Don’t base your value upon the flawed perspective of others. Your worth is divine, it is pure and you do not need approval to throw off the shackles of expectation and fly free from fear, insecurity and doubt. Listen to your heart; our noisy, busy society is far too loud and if we are not careful we can lose our ability to…

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The Unexpected Benefits of Contributing

I'd like to encourage you to notice, acknowledge and celebrate contributions of all kinds. It's amazing how this practice will enrich your life. Contribution is what creates relationships because it establishes a shared experience. Contribution nourishes both the giver and the receiver - a double gift that lasts forever in the heart. It's the little things you contribute that aggregate into really BIG things. Take a smile, for example. A simple smile can quickly build into an emotion of interest, of curiosity, of excitement - that inspires a reciprocal action! A contribution can be something very simple or something profound…

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5 Principles for Uncommon Success

Life is not that complicated, in fact it's fairly simple - not always easy - but fairly simple! When I woke up and realized a life full of uncommon success was not just for other people it was for me too, I began to apply these 5 principles into my everyday life. Awareness - If you don't get it, you can't change it. If you don't acknowledge it, you can't fix it. If you don't own it, you can't improve it. We have to take a good hard look in the mirror, acknowledge where we have room for improvement, recognize where…

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Paul Hoffman

Discovering How Beautiful Life Can Be

What inspires me is knowing anything is possible and that I am always being blessed with opportunities for growth, awareness and transformation. It is when we have an attitude of gratitude that we see the most beautiful vision of what life can really look like. You can make today and everyday the best day of your life by just beginning to think thoughts that are positive and empowering. Our natural state is one of excellence. We all have a calling in our hearts that is unique and special to who we are. The gift we bring to the planet has…

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You are Perfect and Whole Just as You Are – Right Here, Right Now

If today were to become my very last day to walk this Earth - if, in the next moment, I took my very last breath - I would want to instill into you a sense of peace and an urgency to love. Imagine what it would feel like to wrap yourself in a warm blanket of sparkling gold light.  As the light engulfs you, you become lighter.  You feel so warm, safe and free as you spin around and dance effortlessly.  The gold light is pure and radiant love.  It becomes you, and you become it.  Intertwined, you are one…

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Be Inspired By Your Life

We often look for inspiration outside of ourselves – from gurus, celebrities, Oprah, the Royal Family, the Pope, those who are unreachable. Inspiration has always been right in front of you and inside of you. The sun rises and sets every day without interruption and rarely do we take time to notice. What is the point? Inspiration is all around us. Today, you are where you are because you have absorbed inspiration along the way. Your third-grade teacher, your mother, a beautiful flower, the tree that you planted in your backyard, a pet, or the kids playing in the street…

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The Lessons Life Teaches Us

The more I move on in life, the more I realise that not only I am not in control, but that trying to be in control gets in the way of the gifts we are being offered. You might object that getting seriously ill or losing a loved one are far from being gifts. And anyhow, isn’t this fatalistic, resigned to being a puppet at the mercy of the winds? Shouldn't we do our best to avoid the calamities of life and go in search of happiness? I agree of course, and would never advocate suffering for the sake of…

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The Amazing Power of Gratitude

More and more, gratitude is being acknowledged as an amazing power for good and healing in many different areas of existence –from medicine and positive psychology to gardening and education. It is absolutely impossible, I repeat, impossible, to entertain a deep feeling of gratitude and the least trace of negativity. They totally exclude each other just as light annihilates darkness. Have you ever seen a candle of darkness (??!!) extinguish light? But the smallest candle will bring light to the deepest underground cavern. Such is the power of gratitude to your heart and soul. My daily bedside book – I…

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Be Grateful on Thanksgiving – and Every Day!

Happy Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving is my very favorite holiday as it serves as a reminder of the importance of gratitude. Since 1621, our ancestors in the United States have been celebrating Thanksgiving. Historically, throughout Europe, festivals were held after the harvest to give thanks and celebrate together as a community. Native Americans also celebrated the harvest season. We continue the tradition today nearly 400 years later, but for most of us, when we hear the word Thanksgiving, we usually think of turkey and stuffing, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, football and gatherings with family and friends. We all know that Thanksgiving…

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How to Achieve Ultimate Success

The ultimate success has nothing to do with money... Or career. It's not the car you drive. The size of your home. The gold and diamonds you collected. The ultimate success has nothing to do with material accomplishment and gain. It has nothing to do with anything outside of you. The ultimate success is to feel joy exactly where you are right now. No matter what your external life looks like. No matter your situation. The ultimate joy is to be complete and whole in this very moment. No matter who you are or where you are or why you…

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Welcome Yourself Exactly As You Are

Welcoming means accepting yourself exactly as you are and also accepting life exactly as it unfolds. It is the ability to allow all of it, including all the parts of yourself and your life that you don’t like, and letting it all flow without getting hooked into the stories created by your mind. Welcoming is not trying to make your life any different than it is.  Easier said than done, right? I know it's not always easy to welcome and accept life, especially your challenges, because you have been conditioned to continuously judge yourself and others. This is the inner voice…

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Do You See What You’re Missing?

My eyesight, or lack thereof, has always taught me lessons. Back in 2008 and in my recent book, From Type A to Type Me: How to Stop “Doing” Life and Start Living It, I shared my experiences of having poor eyesight before receiving my first glasses. I learned a lot about myself through my microscopic view of the world due to my near-sightedness. Then, once I had the right glasses, I began to see the beauty and interconnectedness of the world. Now my eyes are ready to teach me the next lesson. A few years back I received Lasik surgery. For…

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How You can Find Healing that Lasts

How would your life change if you trusted that your challenges are a part of your journey home – back to yourself and back to Life – instead of feeling that your challenges are here because you have done something wrong or you are being punished or God fell asleep on the job? What would happen if your illness, your difficult relationship, your demanding boss, your compulsions, and maybe even your troublesome dog were showing up in your life to help you heal? The healing you long for comes when you discover how to play the warmer, warmer/colder, colder game. Remember that…

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Allow Kindness to Heal Your Struggling Self

With the return of my son’s cancer, I have had lots of opportunities to be with fear and despair.   Sharing this journey with my son has taken me to a deeper level of presence than I have ever known. My body has been a very dear friend throughout this fierce process, especially my belly and my breath. Whenever I am caught in the fear-based mind, sometimes all I can do is soften my belly and allow a deeper breath. The belly is one of the best biofeedback mechanisms we have.  If it is tight, we are up in our…

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How to Honor Your Survival System

We all created a finely-crafted survival system to bury or numb our pain when we were young.  We had to, as it was absolutely necessary for survival.  Life was too scary, and we didn’t have the skills to meet ourselves in our hearts. Our survival system can include compulsions, such as drug and alcohol abuse, shopping, work, sex, the Internet, busyness, self-judgment, and chronic worry.  I think about all of those years that I shut down the pain with food, drugs and alcohol.  In one year alone, I gained 97 pounds.  I would have died of the pain if I…

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My Gratitude List

Every morning I sit outside on my high-floor terrace in South Florida, sip my coffee, and read an uplifting pamphlet or two. Then I write out my day’s schedule. Too often, despite the uplifting material, I start worrying about this client or that deadline or the seemingly endless list of tasks on the schedule. And my quiet time erodes into anxiety. The activity that’s supposed to help me ease into the day with a positive outlook has the opposite effect. Instead of returning to my home office refreshed and ready to work, I’m drained and irritable. As I kept noticing…

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An Open Heart Heals

The willingness to meet whatever is showing up in our lives takes courage.  Did you know that the root for the word courage means “of the heart”?   It takes an open heart and deep compassion to see all of the conditioned stories in our heads that keep us separate from life.  It takes courage to see them, love them and, under that gaze of compassion, allow them to evaporate like the summer fog when it is touched by the morning sun. I have been experiencing a lot of pain in my back and leg for quite some time now. …

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Winning The Lottery Of Life

I’m in Las Vegas for a few days, taking a speaker’s training workshop with the incomparable, Les Brown. As I was walking to our conference room this morning, I had to walk through the casino. I’m not a gambler, rarely walk through casinos, and I felt like I was experiencing sensory overload on this short walk. There were slot machines everywhere, and at each, someone was already aimlessly feeding its voracious appetite. The vast majority of the folks there were over 70, obese, smoking, drinking (in the morning!) and looked haggard and defeated by life. Perhaps they'd been gambling all…

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How To Let Your Brilliant Being Shine

I recently came across one of my favorite poems, My Brilliant Image, by the fourteenth century Persian Poet, Hafiz: One day the sun admitted, I am just a shadow. I wish I could show you The Infinite Incandescence That has cast my brilliant image! I wish I could show you, When you are lonely or in darkness, The astonishing Light Of your own Being! Hafiz is telling us that the astonishing light, the brilliance of our own being, is already with us.  We are filled with great light that permeates everything.    Brian Swimme, Evolutionary Philosopher and Co-Collaborator of the documentary…

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7 Ways to Slow Down and Live Full Today

Often times, our days get ahead of us and by the time night falls, we cannot even remember what we did or how the hours passed by so quickly. Here are some ways you can catch yourself from running blindly through your day like a tornado, missing everything, so that you can live fully and with intention.  Set intentions. This may sound silly, but the way in which you wake will determine much of your day. When you open your eyes (before anyone - human or companion animal - notices you are awake), take a few moments to pay attention to…

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