Tag: Gratitude

3 Ways to Live Happy and Healthy

When my mother died, I was filled with such pain that I yelled at God and said I wasn’t going on until I understood what was happening. I could not see the sense of loving a mother and then losing her. What a painful joke. That night God’s messenger came to me and explained everything about life. As the years unfolded, I have been gently led to more and more understanding. As I sit here today, I believe there are 3 things that are helping me to live a happier, healthier, prosperous, and meaningful life. I have been learning that…

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Sweet Gratitude, So Underrated

People that know me know that I live an active life. I love tennis; I try to play an average of 6 hours of the game every week, which comes up to about 3 times a week. I work out quite regularly: a good number of push-ups and squats most mornings. I have no trouble in using the stairs, even when there is a lift. I used to go to spinning classes. I take long walks. I like taking my phone calls on my feet. I enjoy all these. They keep me healthy, allow me to believe I am in…

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Why Being Grateful is Just as Important as Breathing

Being grateful is just as important as breathing. Every human alive right now is breathing, but the act of breathing alone does not make for a happy, fulfilled person. It’s unfortunate how many people allow for their fear-ridden thoughts to control their lives and reality, when really ALL of us have the power to take back our mind and direct our energy in a positive way that serves our life and those around us. Gratitude is a major step in unwinding our negative mental habits. If a person lives their entire life not realizing how precious, miraculous and unique this life…

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The Secret to a GREAT Day

How did you start your morning? Pondering your “to do” list? Feeling frustration with a work challenge? Feeling overwhelmed with life? What if there was a way to change the course of your day so that by every evening, you end the day with a smile? It turns out we all have the ability to find the best in every day. Remember the giddy excitement you felt as a child the morning of your birthday and holidays? You KNEW it was going to be a great day and you took notice of all of the wonderful things that happened throughout…

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Ego Is Not My Father!

What is ego? I have found for myself that it is nothing but fear. It is simply a thought system we have mis-created. We have allowed it to separate ourselves from the Prime Creator (the thought of separation itself is an illusion). It keeps us a prisoner or slave to habits and personal thought patterns. It keeps us stuck in day-to-day life situations until we say, "Enough! I surrender all illusions about myself to the Holy Spirit." Ego blocks us from accepting our good because we do not feel we deserve our good or deserve to be loved. I am the Christ…

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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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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 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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