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About Norman Vincent Peale



Norman Vincent Peale (1898 – 1993) was an American minister and author known for his work in popularizing the concept of positive thinking, especially through his best-selling book The Power of Positive Thinking. Wikipedia

Connect:  Encyclopaedia Britannica

  

Norman Vincent Peale (quotes)

Quotes by Norman Vincent Peale

  • It’s always too early to quit.
  • We tend to get what we expect.
  • Get a backbone, not a wishbone.
  • Your body is your own planet Earth.
  • Don’t take tomorrow to bed with you.
  • Get bored with your past, it’s over!
  • Imagination is the true magic carpet.
  • Be consistent and live what you believe
  • The love that flows through your heart
  • Intention without discipline is useless.
  • Belief in oneself is required for healing.
  • Spiritual connection does not mean romance.
  • You cannot make a miracle like love happen.
  • The forgiving heart is capable of anything.
  • This day of your life will never come again.
  • To heal illness, begin by restoring balance.
  • You change the rules or you are going under.
  • Perfectionism is the fear of being criticized.
  • Change your thoughts and you change your world.
  • You don’t need a wishbone, you need a backbone.
  • I hold myself accountable for my contradictions.
  • Keep the focus of your life in the here and now.
  • Change yourself and your work will seem different.
  • Whenever you become empowered, you will be tested.
  • Forgiveness is a mystical act, not a reasonable one.
  • Our lives change externally as we change internally.
  • I respect my life-force enough to no longer waste it.
  • If we let go of things, our life is going to change.
  • Practice the healing power of the compassionate mind.
  • I have yet to meet a person who has not felt betrayed.
  • Love is the fuel of our physical and spiritual bodies.
  • Forgive and call back the energy wasted on past events.
  • In order to heal oneself, we must learn how to forgive.
  • We evolve at the rate of the tribe we are plugged into.
  • Become mindful that remaining in a conflict is a choice.
  • How would your life change if your self-esteem improved?
  • Throw your heart over the fence and the rest will follow
  • Healing requires taking action-it is not a passive event.
  • There isn’t anything in your life that cannot be changed.
  • Four things for success: work and pray, think and believe.
  • If you have life, you have purpose. It can’t be otherwise.
  • The greatest gift you can give another person is strength.
  • Be interesting, be enthusiastic… and don’t talk too much.
  • Guidance requires action, but it does not guarantee safety.
  • We are actually more afraid of change than we are of death.
  • A soulmate is the person who makes your sould grow the most.
  • Human reasoning can never answer the mysteries of our lives.
  • I don’t do meditation. That’s not for me. It’s not my thing.
  • Life on Earth will never be fair the way we expect it to be.
  • You will soon break the bow if you keep it always stretched.
  • Between thinking and seeing, there is a place called knowing.
  • We struggle with the complexities and avoid the simplicities.
  • You cannot change anything in your life with intention alone,
  • Forgiveness is no longer an option but a necessity for healing.
  • Learn to trust what you cannot see far more than what you can see.
  • Whatever is in me is stronger than what is out there to defeat me.
  • Getting people to like you is merely the other side of liking them.
  • The strings to our past are burned because we need a new beginning.
  • Meeting the self activates the transformation of human consciousness,
  • When you do not seek or need approval, you are at your most powerful.
  • You have no right to feel entitled. You are not entitled to anything.
  • If anyone tries to complicate your life, turn and walk away from them.
  • purifies not only your own spirit, but the love you share with others.
  • The common ingredient in every single dysfunction is an issue of power.
  • Master your responses to external events–don’t attempt to control them.
  • One atom is as purposeful as our planet. What is in one is in the whole.
  • A breakthrough occurs when you recognize, you are more energy than matter
  • It is not what we choose that is important; it is the reason we choose it.
  • Life was never meant to be safe. It was meant to be lived right to the end.
  • Grace is a power that comes in and transforms a moment into something better
  • What the mind can conceive and believe, and the heart desire, you can achieve.
  • when you do not seek or need external approval, you are at your most powerful.
  • When you pray for anyone you tend to modify your personal attitude toward him.
  • If you put off everything till you’re sure of it, you’ll never get anything done.
  • Promises are like crying babies in a theater, they should be carried out at once.
  • Survival activates miracles when a person relies on the graces of hope and faith.
  • What drains your spirit drains your body. What fuels your spirit fuels your body.
  • And the reality is that we are actually more afraid of change than we are of death.
  • People suffer when they pursue a life or chase a dream that doesn’t belong to them.
  • Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.
  • Your biography—that is, the experiences that make up your life—becomes your biology.
  • Never, ever mistreat someone who loves you. Because you’re not entitled to that love.
  • The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind
  • It doesn’t matter what you choose, what matters is the energy with which you choose it.
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  • Imagine what a focused human being could do in a day to make a difference in this world.
  • The controlled person is a powerful person. He who always keeps his head will get ahead.
  • You never really know how or when your life is going to change, and that’s for the best.
  • Follow your pain as if it were a candle in the night, leading you to a place of decision.
  • Our lives are structured around power symbols: money, authority, title, beauty, security.
  • We fear our intuitions because we fear the transformational power within our revelations.
  • When your life begins to harm you, know that you have taken a detour from your true path.
  • Of course you battle despair. It is often a day-to-day fight, but it’s one that can be won.
  • The more you lose yourself in something bigger than yourself, the more energy you will have.
  • The trouble with most of us is that we’d rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.
  • Your spirit is the part of you that has to believe in something more. It’s the light of you.
  • If you have zest and enthusiasm you attract zest and enthusiasm. Life does give back in kind.
  • A compromise is done willingly and out of love. You don’t go away thinking, I betrayed myself.
  • I don’t think most people know how to meditate – they fall asleep and they call it meditation.
  • Surrendering the need for an explanation represents a profound act of personal transformation.
  • The life of inner peace, being harmonious and without stress, is the easiest type of existence.
  • The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism
  • How can you live without knowing what your spirit is doing and what your spirit is saying to you?
  • The journey of consciousness, of mysticism, is to come to know yourself and your own motivations.
  • the reason you have descended into physical life is to unleash the power of your soul upon Earth.
  • You are afraid of your own empowerment as much as those around you are of you becoming empowered.
  • The more conscious we become the more consciously we choose that which we set in motion to create.
  • Understanding can overcome any situation, however mysterious or insurmountable it may appear to be.
  • We are not designed to be critical of others or ourselves; we think ill of others only out of fear.
  • Keep your honor code between you and God, you don’t break that, no matter who’s not looking. God is.
  • There is a real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment.
  • I deeply, deeply believe in the mystical laws. I know that every thought sends an eternity in motion.
  • It is your birthright to discover your sacred contract. It will guide you to find your divine destiny.
  • Have no judgments about your life, no expectations, and give up the need to know what happens tomorrow.
  • We are reluctant to live outside tribal rules because we are afraid of getting kicked out of the tribe.
  • When you approach intuitive methods with respect, you become open to hearing from your interior channels.
  • When you wholeheartedly adopt a ‘with all your heart’ attitude and go all out with the positive principle,
  • I firmly believe that intuitive or symbolic sight is not a gift but a skill – a skill based in self-esteem.
  • That which serves our spirits enhances our bodies. That which diminishes our spirits diminishes our bodies.
  • When every physical and mental resources is focused, one’s power to solve a problem multiplies tremendously.
  • Healing comes from gathering wisdom from past actions and letting go of the pain that the education cost you.
  • Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution. If you don’t have any problems, you don’t get any seeds.
  • We’re actually making not one but 30 choices at a time: Our mind is making a choice. Our heart’s making choices.
  • The women with high social pressure seem to be amongst the strongest carriers of the possibility of breast cancer.
  • When you get up in the morning, you have two choices – either to be happy or to be unhappy. Just choose to be happy
  • For me, all of the data that is contained in your cell memory, and in your energetic field, is able to be picked up.
  • I’m not born here to have a personality. I’m here to have a spirit. Each of us is born with a purpose for being alive.
  • Nothing exists without a purpose. And we humans are subject to the laws of nature just as everything else on earth is.
  • Healing is, by definition, taking a process of disintegration of life and transforming into a process of return to life.
  • Managing the power of choice, with all it’s creative and spiritual implications, is the essence of the human experience.
  • We are born intuitive, which is why for most people, their intuition is actually the source of their greatest suffering.
  • We have converted our wounds into a type of relationship currency that we use in order to control situations and people.
  • Becoming internally empowered shifts a person’s center of gravity from external to internal- a mark of spiritual passage.
  • Do you really want to look back on your life and see how wonderful it could have been had you not been afraid to live it?
  • Choice is your greatest power. It is an even greater power than love, because you must first choose to be a loving person.
  • I don’t ever want to humiliate a human being, and I don’t want the fear of being humiliated to participate in my thoughts.
  • Forgiveness, quite frankly, is the most selfish thing you can do. Because it is the greatest thing you can do for yourself.
  • The Gateway to Christianity is not through an intricate labyrinth of dogma, but by a simple belief in the person of Christ.
  • A great paradox of contemporary therapy is that it cracks open so many crises of the mind that can’t be healed with the mind.
  • Let me give up the need to know why things happen as they do. I will never know and constant wondering is constant suffering.
  • Your spirit is the part of you that seeks meaning and purpose. It’s the part drawn to hope, that will not give in to despair.
  • If you paint in your mind a picture of bright and happy expectations, you put yourself into a condition conducive to your goal.
  • Silence is a learned practice that requires far more than just not talking. Not talking is not silence; it’s just not talking.
  • Never blame another person for your personal choices – you are still the one who must live out the consequences of your choices.
  • Part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory.
  • To become a happy person have a clean soul, eyes that see romance in the commonplace, a child’s heart, and spiritual simplicity.
  • When you expect the best, you release a magnetic force in your mind which by a law of attraction tends to bring the best to you.
  • Intuition is natural by-product of flowering of a mature self-esteem and a sense of empowerment – not power over, but power to be
  • Wounds are the means through which we enter the hearts of other people. They are meant to teach us to become compassionate and wise.
  • The dark night of the soul is a journey into light, a journey from your darkness into the strength and hidden resources of your soul.
  • The purpose of writing inspirational notes is simply to build others up because there are too many people in the demolition business.
  • I think that the practice of medicine, the science of it, has become 50% pharmacological, so that doctors are like walking pharmacies.
  • It is our nature to defy gravity, to transcend the limitations of the reasoning mind and connect with the realm of the mystical truth.
  • People around the world are confusing the therapeutic value of self-expression with permission to manipulate others with their wounds.
  • Repetition of the same thought or physical action develops into a habit which, repeated frequently enough, becomes an automatic reflex.
  • I think every part of our lives begins at an energetic level. Like creativity. You can’t separate anything from that archetypal process.
  • Just let go. Let go of how you thought your life should be, and embrace the life that is trying to work its way into your consciousness.
  • Finding the right healing path requires all or nothing. Once you place conditions on healing, all you can achieve is conditional healing.
  • In general, if a couple cannot expand their original rules and boundaries to accommodate personal growth, the relationship disintegrates.
  • Becoming adept at the process of self inquiry and symbolic insight is a vital spiritual task that leads to the growth of faith in oneself.
  • Therefore, when you enter into anything, as a frightened being, that contract you make with another person out of fear, has to fall apart.
  • Developing personal power includes learning not to negotiate your self-worth for the sake of someone else or sell yourself short for a job.
  • YOU DO NOT need to be a victim of worry. Reduced to its simplest form, what is worry? It is simply an unhealthy and destructive mental habit.
  • I don’t want to ever, ever give that kind of pain to one living mortal. And I will not give that thought power in my life. That’s my practice.
  • I have often imagined that people who carry on about how God thinks human beings should behave must appear to be complete fools to the divine.
  • Spirituality on the other hand, is a chosen path of developing intimate relationships with God. It’s chosen, it’s nurtured, and it’s optional.
  • While we measure our own success in terms of our personal comfort and security, the universe measures our success by how much we have learned.
  • You have resources yet to be unleashed. Make bold, courageous choices. Live as though you have the power to change the world – because you do.
  • Drop the idea that you are Atlas carrying the world on your shoulders. The world would go on even without you. Don’t take yourself so seriously.
  • Every single choice we make is either going to enhance the spirit or drain it. Every day, we’re either giving ourselves power or taking it away.
  • Power is at the root of the human experience. Our attitudes and beliefs–positive or negative–are all extensions of how we define and use power.
  • You can pretend to be something other than who you are but eventually you will run out of energy to continue because that’s not authentically you.
  • Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.
  • Forgiveness is your release from the hell of wanting to know what cannot be known and from wanting to see others suffer because they have hurt you.
  • One of the greatest struggles of the healing process is to forgive both yourself and others and to stop expending valuable energy on the past hurts.
  • Seeing and admitting the truth about ourselves, about our role in creating our own problems, and about how we relate to others is vital for healing.
  • I love myself enough-not in a schmaltzy garbage sense, Hallmark stuff, I’m talking respect myself-I respect my life-force enough to no longer waste it.
  • Fantasizing is one of the earliest languages in the child’s mind. We are in touch with our imagination and dreams before we engage with logic and reason.
  • There is no such thing as a simple act of compassion or an inconsequential act of service. Everything we do for another person has infinite consequences.
  • The goal of the human experience is to transform ourselves from being who long to attain power in the physical world to beings who are empowered from within.
  • Forgiveness is essential to healing, because it requires you to surrender your ego’s need to have life fall into place around your personal version of justice.
  • The journey of life is the unification of fragmentation. Fragments are units of power that are out of control. We make agreements to come and collect ourselves.
  • From a spiritual perspective every relationship we develop, from the most casual to the most intimate, serves the purpose of helping us to become more conscious.
  • Spiritual maturity is measured not by the sophistication of a person’s opinions, but by their genuineness and the courage necessary to express and maintain them.
  • You cannot come to know the depths of the purpose of your life, however, if you are not willing to release those parts of your life that are no longer necessary.
  • By learning to identify your energy patterns, you will be able to gain a much greater vision of the meaning and purpose of your many experiences and relationships.
  • It is of practical value to learn to like yourself. Since you must spend so much time with yourself you might as well get some satisfaction out of the relationship.
  • Take me away from my sense. I need to go away now, because I’m in chaos – take me down deep. Hover over me, because I need grace. I say that a lot, many times a day.
  • By far the strongest poison to the human spirit is the inability to forgive oneself or another person. Forgiveness is no longer an option but a necessity for healing.
  • If you betray yourself, you are no different from the people who hurt you. What’s the difference between those people who hurt you and what you are doing to yourself?
  • Act on your inner guidance, and give up your need for ‘proof’ that your inner guidance is authentic. The more you ask for proof, the less likely you are to receive any.
  • manipulation is the art of making another person’s spirit dance for personal amusement, and only through honoring oneself do we become strong enough to refuse to dance.
  • when the old fears, hates, and worries that have haunted you for so long try to edge back in, they will in effect find a sign on the door of your mind reading occupied.
  • I have since become convinced that when we define ourselves by our wounds, we burden and lose our physical and spiritual energy and open ourselves to the risk of illness.
  • Being of service is not an option, it is a biological necessity. Every kind of action we do for someone is a reanimation of our own life force – and of the other person’s.
  • Our sacred contract is not a literal document. That’s the first thing to understand. We could think of our sacred contract as a spiritual document that our soul recognizes.
  • The spiritual test inherent in all our lives is the challenge to discover what motivates us to make the choices we do, and whether we have faith in our fears or the Divine.
  • When I look at someone’s face, I look beyond that face and into the cellular memory in my heart that says, ‘Finally you and I have met again. And now we must find out why’.
  • Live one day at a time. Keep your attention in present time. Have no expectations. Make no judgements. And give up the need to know why things happen as they do. Give it up!
  • One of the greatest moments in anybody’s developing experience is when he no longer tries to hide from himself but determines to get acquainted with himself as he really is.
  • Knowing that every single day is so filled with potential – you cannot wait for life to give you anything. You have no right to feel entitled. You are not entitled to anything.
  • You cannot change anything in your life with intention alone, which can become a watered-down, occasional hope that you’ll get to tomorrow. Intention without action is useless.
  • Fate is how your life unfolds when you let fear determine your choices. A path of destiny reveals itself to you, however, when you confront your fear and make conscious choices.
  • You will always receive help within a second of a prayer. To recognize the help, you must see everything in your life from that second on as a part of the answer to your prayer.
  • I prefer a kind of sweet, deep, rich prayer in which a person goes in and says, Take me down deep into the reason you gave me life. Take me down deep. It silences the chaos in me.
  • It’s easy to get lost in endless speculation. So today, release the need to know why things happen as they do. Instead, ask for the insight to recognize what you’re meant to learn.
  • Achieving the impossible requires that you outwit your voice of reason and access the whimsical part of your nature that inherently delights in the possibilities of the imagination.
  • Faith is the power to stand up to the madness and chaos of the physical world, while holding the position that nothing external has any authority over what heaven has in mind for you.
  • whether that truth is about personal honesty and integrity or a divine revelation that organizes your place in the universe. This is why people run from the truth than move towards it.
  • Having to say, If this is what I must accept, so be it, can feel like chewing glass, but not being able to accept what you cannot change is like having to swallow those shards of glass.
  • Self-examination is the process of accountability to your soul…It is far better to become your truth than to speak your truth. Self-examination is the practice of becoming your truth.
  • If you sincerely believe that God loves you, then you’re not a victim of anything anymore. It’s happening to open up opportunities for us to become more aligned with our higher purpose.
  • If you don’t appreciate what you have in life right now, whatever it is, you will never realize your purpose. Without appreciation, you will never become strong enough to respect yourself.
  • Self-love means caring for ourselves enough to forgive people in our past so that the wounds can no longer damage us – for our wounds do not hurt the people who hurt us, they hurt only us.
  • People define their life by what they want versus what they have. People get fixated on something and they have to have it, even though that voice inside tells them it’s not meant for them.
  • We’ve all heard that we have to learn from our mistakes, but I think it’s more important to learn from successes. If you learn only from your mistakes, you are inclined to learn only errors.
  • I do a lot of reflection. I do. I spend a lot of time in reflection and contemplation. I guess the way the old mystics used to do. I don’t do meditation. That’s not for me. It’s not my thing.
  • I have to trust that there is a force greater than me that also knows and sees this, and breathes with it and knows that it’s part of a grander plan, and all the good things people do matter.
  • Your biography becomes your biology. This biography includes the totality of your choices, the things you feed your body – you thoughts, your actions, your food – the thing you feed your life.
  • Grant me the grace to dissolve my negative thoughts about myself today. I breathe the grace of kindness into my heart. And may the grace of healing flow abundantly to every one in need of help.
  • Those who are fired with an enthusiastic idea and who allow it to take hold and dominate their thoughts find that new worlds open for them. As long as enthusiasm holds out, so will new opportunities.
  • Watch your manner of speech if you wish to develop a peaceful state of mind. Start each day by affirming peaceful, contented and happy attitudes and your days will tend to be pleasant and successful.
  • People know when they’ve betrayed themselves. They are very much aware when they are not honest with themselves. They hear the voice that says, You shouldn’t have said that or You know that’s not right.
  • I can sense and feel this wretched compassion that I don’t want. But it’s there. It’s a very painful kind of compassion. It’s not one you look for. You don’t want this kind of compassion; it just happens.
  • Intuition is neither the ability to engage prophecy nor a means of avoiding financial loss or painful relationships. It is actually the ability to use energy datato make decisions in the immediate moment.
  • Commitment to an idea that has the power to transform you personally in any way is a vision worth nurturing. The bottom line is,you need to remain committed to a vision long enough to see it vome to fruition.
  • So long as we use comfort and security as our criteria of success, we will fear our own intuitive guidance because by its very nature it directs us into new cycles of learning that are sometimes uncomfortable.
  • The way to happiness: Keep your heart free from hate, your mind from worry. Live simply, expect little, give much. Scatter sunshine, forget self, think of others. Try this for a week and you will be surprised.
  • We grow primarily through our challenges, especially those life-changing moments when we begin to recognize aspects of our nature that make us different from the family and culture in which we have been raised.
  • Faith in anything, be it positive or negative, produces results. Putting faith in fear generates destructive results, beginning with the disintegration of our ability to relate confidently to the external world.
  • To love yourself, truly love yourself, is to finally discover the essence of personal courage, self-respect, integrity, and self-esteem. These are the qualities of grace that come directly from a soul with stamina.
  • We are beginning to comprehend a basic truth hitherto neglected, that our physical condition is determined very largely by our emotional condition, and our emotional life is profoundly regulated by our thought life.
  • We are also very presumptuous to negate the possibility that an illness may be a gift. It’s a neutral experience is what I’m trying to say. It should be viewed in some regard as no different than any other experience.
  • of God in my life. I surrender my mind, my heart, my need for safety, and my need for rational explanations and orderly instructions to God’s will for me. I trust that all that is in my life is as it should be. I release
  • You know an action is the correct one for you because you don’t think, This is costing me my power. I can be tired after a day’s work at the right job, but I’m not psychically drained to where I feel like I’m losing life.
  • The moment you come to trust chaos, you see God clearly. Chaos is divine order, versus human order. Change is divine order, versus human order. When the chaos becomes safety to you, then you know you’re seeing God clearly.
  • Women most certainly carry a more sympathetic heart in the traditional, classic sense the mother archetype. They have been given the role to carry the heart energy of the human community, whereas men carry the survival energy.
  • The act of forgiveness is the act of returning to present time. And that’s why when one has become a forgiving person, and has managed to let go of the past, what they’ve really done is they’ve shifted their relationship with time.
  • Every choice we make contains the energy of either faith or fear, and the outcome of every decision reflects to some extent that faith or fear. This dynamic of choice guarantees that we cannot run away from ourselves or our decisions.
  • Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture… Do not build up obstacles in your imagination.
  • God, or a source of divinity, put together a map for our lives. That map includes opportunities-not outcomes-but opportunities. And those opportunities are contracts [or] agreements-not that our ego or personality made, but our soul did.
  • To believe in an invisible order, a divine or implicate order, as quantum physics calls it, or the order beneath the disorder that chaos theory describes, is a healthier, more interesting choice than seeing no meaning in life whatsoever.
  • Dominant energy patterns that are contributing to the stress in a human being, are able to be picked up, if a person is open enough. And for me, as a medical intuitive, that’s where I focus my attention. That’s what the skill is all about.
  • Always go with the choice that scares you the most, because that’s the one that is going to require the most from you. Do you really want to look back on your life and see how wonderful it could have been had you not been afraid to live it?
  • When you are working well with your energy, you are also making the best expression of your personal power… By reading your own energy, by becoming aware of the lens through which you see your world, you can change your mind and change your life.
  • Our goal while on this earth is to transcend our illusions and discover the innate power of our spirit. We are responsible for what we create, and we must therefore learn to act and think with love and wisdom and live in service to others and all life.
  • The spirit for me is the eternal self. And when one incarnates, an aspect comes with that incarnation, that’s called the soul. And together the mind, the emotional body, and the soul form the energy field that lives within this thing called the human body.
  • If you want to know for sure that you are on the right path, here’s your clue: You’re not put in a position where you feel like you have to negotiate your sense of integrity, which is an act of betrayal. You don’t feel like you have to compromise who you are.
  • Healing is a different type of pain. It’s the pain of becoming aware of the power of one’s strength and weakness, of one’s capacity to love or do damage to oneself and to others, and of how the most challenging person to control in life is ultimately yourself.
  • The amount of suffering you actually can feel, you want to be able to do something about it. You want to be able to attend to it, to change the system that is making this happen. Because you are so aware of how unnecessary it is, and therein lies the deeper pain.
  • The way to happiness: keep your heart free from hate, your mind from worry. Live simply, expect little, give much. Fill your life with love. Scatter sunshine. Forget self, think of others. Do as you would be done by. Try this for a week and you will be surprised.
  • One has a more practical survival level, that’s the mind function. The heart function obviously has an internal level that has to do with the quality of developing perceptions, feelings, the self. And the spirit level has to do with the pondering part of our lives.
  • Action is a great restorer and builder of confidence. Inaction is not only the result, but the cause, of fear. Perhaps the action you take will be successful; perhaps different action or adjustments will have to follow. But any action is better than no action at all.
  • The greatest secret for eliminating the inferiority complex, which is another term for deep and profound self-doubt, is to fill your mind to overflowing with faith. Develop a tremendous faith in God and that will give you a humble yet soundly realistic faith in yourself.
  • The empowerment journey that is critical to your healing – and to your life – comes from progressing through the deep waters of your dark passions and continuing onward to discover not what has been taken from you, but what you have yet to give and who you have yet to become.
  • Through the years of my life, the older I’ve gotten, the more sensitive I’ve become to the suffering of people and to my inability to really fix that. I wish that proportion was different. I wish I could help more. Unfortunately, that’s not how the equation is working out here.
  • I think the idea that women have all this wonderful emotion is a myth, as well as the fact that men do not. I mean, people are people. What is happening across the board is that the recognition that emotions, and the spirit and soul play a fundamental part in the art of healing.
  • For me the information has to remain incredibly neutral. It’s what I would call ‘ice-like’ information. I receive very rapid impressions. I don’t have to sit there and concentrate. Because, if I start to really focus, my conscious mind begins to apply data, which is not accurate.
  • It’s two things: it’s totally impersonal and it’s totally personal, simultaneously. That’s the nature of the mystical experience of life. Everything about life is impersonal, but you have a personal experience. And the bridge between the personal and the impersonal is called prayer.
  • I have come to believe that energy medicine is a practice of healing that is dependent upon the energy of time. Whereas allopathic medicine uses linear time as a fundamental healing measure. Energy medicine needs to understand the dynamic of chiros time, that is the time without time.
  • I grew to understand or really grasp a sense of what the power of being humble is – that becomes a practice. Otherwise you’ll be crushed by your fear of being humiliated. It’ll control you the rest of your life. I really understood that. I haven’t mastered it, I haven’t come close to it.
  • I would remind people that this day of your life will never come again. Do not use one day of your life carelessly. It will never come again. You’ll never see the person you’re sitting across from in that light or in that way. You will never see the sunset twice. This day will never come again.
  • Every life has a purpose. We need to let go of the past. Live in the present. Do not waste today worrying about what will happen tomorrow. Embrace your true spirit, embrace and listen to grace and you be transformed in the moment. Do not fixate on what you want but give thanks for what you have.
  • Each of us has a dark side, along with our own grace and light. The extent to which we can acknowledge the former while maximizing the latter may determine how we choose to fulfill the terms of our Contract. When the shadow side takes over even one person, the consequences are tragically felt by many.
  • It is a rare person who can pierce the veil between ordinarly life, consumed with matters of physical survival, and pursuit of the empowered path of purpose and meaning unless he or she is motivated by a crisis. Most often we require the failure of some system of power that we rely on before we take action.
  • As I have often written, power is the fundamental ingredient of the human experience. Every action in life, every thought, every choice we make-even down to what we wear and whether we are seating in first class or coach-represents a negotiation of power somewhere on the scale of power that constitutes life.
  • You should see everything about your life as a lesson. Ask, Am I empowering myself? Even for a tiny thing, like if you’re in the grocery store and you’re thinking, Should I buy that? And your gut says, You know you can’t eat that. If you decide not to listen, you’ve harmed yourself by blocking your intuitive voice.
  • If you know your archetypes – and not just yours, if you know how to perceive the world in archetypes, through archetypes – everything changes. Everything. Because you have two things: you can see through one eye which is impersonal, and through the other, which is personal. That’s the way the game is written down here.
  • According to energy medicine, we are all living history books. Our bodies contain our histories- every chapter, line and verse of every event and relationship in our lives. As our lives unfold, our biological health becomes a living, breathing biographical statement that conveys our strengths, weaknesses, hopes and fears.
  • Choice is born out of opposites, and the duality of the second chakra is forever challenging us to make choices in a world of opposing sides, of positive and negative energy patterns. Every choice we make contributes a subtle current of our energy to our universe, which is responsive to the influence of human consciousness.
  • Healing requires far more of us than just the participation of our intellectual and even our emotional resources. And it certainly demands that we do more than look backwards at the dead-end archives of our past. Healing is, by definition, taking a process of disintegration of life and transforming into a process of return to life.
  • Your identity, self-esteem, and awareness of your ego lay the groundwork for your life. How you conduct yourself with others, and whether you have the strength to make your way without needing to ask for another’s permission, depends on how well you succeed at the many challenges that awaken your need to take charge of who you are.
  • Managing the power of choice, with all its creative and spiritual implications, is the essence of the human experience. All spiritual teachings are directed toward inspiring us to recognize that the power to make choices is the dynamic that converts our spirits into matter, our words into flesh. Choice is the process of creation itself.
  • Do not assume that divine guidance flows only when you are in need of help. Guidance continues to flow whether or not you have problems. It transcends problems, heartbreaks, and traumas,flowing through dreams and illuminations. Whether guidance comes during times of tranquility or trauma, however,it is up to you to have the courage to acknowledge it
  • I love hanging out with my friends and family. I really, really, really love articulating original thought. That’s probably my core, my biggest buzz. Because then it makes me feel like I know why I was born. Reaching original thought, where I know that I’m perceiving something that only I have seen, and I need to incarnate that. That’s it right there.
  • The wounded child sees the Divine as operating a reward and punishment system, with humanly logical explanations for all painful experiences. The wounded child does not understand that within all experiences, no matter how painful, lie spiritual insights. So long as we think like a wounded child, we will love conditionally and with great fear of loss.
  • You can eat beef on a weekly basis and become a genius intuitive if your energy is in present time.You can consume only organic food while running thirty-five miles a day and om-ing until dawn, but if your spirit is raging about your history and is saturated in regrets and unfinished business, you won’t be able to intuit your left hand from your right.
  • Think about the number of times someone will say to herself, I want to get out of this circumstance, but I’m too afraid. I’ll lie about how happy I am in this marriage, and I’ll put up a front. But she’s betraying everything that’s in her heart. She’s making choices that are harming her, and that’s why she’s hurting. Her intuition is trying to tell her that.
  • Facing personal truths and purging yourself of addictions or manipulative habits require strength, courage, humility, faith, and other qualities of a soul with stamina, because you are not just changing yourself; you are changing your universe. Your soul is a compass. Change one coordinate in your spiritual compass and you change your entire life’s direction.
  • If you are committed to creating value and if you aren’t afraid of hard times; obstacles become utterly unimportant. A nuisance perhaps; but with no real power. The world respects creation; people will get out of your way. – Candice Carpenter Always go with the choice that scares you the most, because that’s the one that is going to require the most from you.
  • I cannot take you out and say you are separate from the whole. If someone says to me, Well, how do I find my life purpose? I first say, You’ve never lost your life purpose. Number two, I say, Have no judgments about your life. No expectations. Give up the need to know what happens tomorrow. Just be fully present and appreciate all that is in your life right now.
  • There is nothing easy about becoming conscious. My own life was much easier before I knew about the deeper meaning of choice, the power of choice that accompanies taking responsibility. Abdicating responsibility to an outside source can seem, at least for the moment, so much easier. Once you know better, however, you can’t get away with kidding yourself for long.
  • There are no insignificant relationships. Every experience that we have contains purpose and meaning. Each event, each person in our lives embodies an energetic fragment of our own psyche and soul. Our individual spiritual task is to recognize and integrate all of them into our awareness so that the greater pattern of our mission can shine forth in its full dimensions.
  • Someone asks me what’s my practice? I don’t want the fear of being humiliated to have authority over me. I don’t want it to come near me. I don’t want it to have a voice in my decisions. I don’t want it to be anywhere near me. What’s my practice? That one. I don’t ever want to humiliate a human being, and I don’t want the fear of being humiliated to participate in my thoughts.
  • Intuitive guidance means having the self-esteem to recognize that the discomfort or confusion that a person feels is actually directing him to take charge of his life and make choices that will break him out of stagnation or misery. And, while we measure our own success in terms of our personal comfort and security, the universe measures our success by how much we have learned.
  • I think energy medicine is a field that is probably for me the most authentic level of medicine that there is, because it takes into account what I would call ‘square one of creation’. Which is where energy meets the process of incarnating. So I think it is very much going to become the dominant practice of medicine in this next millennium. We have no other place to go but there.
  • The Soul is a fact, but it is not physical. … Survivors of near-death experiences attest that some part of them apparently detaches from their physical bodies following the death of the body, but while that is proof of the soul for them, it does not prove it to us. The Soul is like divine music that only God can hear; it is the force of endless resurrection; the soul is like a fire that never goes out.
  • None of us needs instruction in how to recognize what your heart is saying. We do need guidance, however, on how to have the courage to follow those feelings, since they will force us to change our lives in any case. But consider the consequences of not listening to the heart’s guidance: depression, confusion, and the wretched feeling that we are not on our life’s true path, but viewing it from a distance.
  • We all share a type of physical body that becomes ill or heals for the same reasons. We also share emotional and psychological crises common to the human experience. Everyone fears abandonment, loss and betrayal; anger is as toxic within a Jewish body as it is within a Christian, Muslim or Hindu body; and we are all drawn to love. When it comes to health of our spirits and our bodies, we have no difference.
  • You are far more than your personality, more than your habits, more than your achievements. You are an infinitely complex human being with stories and myths and dreams- and ambitions of cosmic proportions.  Don’t waste time underestimating yourself. Dream big… Use the energy of your archetype to express the true reason you were born. Life was never meant to be safe.  It was meant to be lived right to the end.
  • We are not carelessly designed creatures. Everything about us has purpose, logic and intelligence built into it, including how and why we become ill. The emotional, psychological and spiritual stresses present in our minds travel, like oxygen, to every part of our bodies. When stress settles is a particular area of the body, it is because that part of the body corresponds to the type of stress we are experiencing.
  • When we harbor negative emotions toward others or toward ourselves, or when we intentionally create pain for others, we poison our own physical and spiritual systems. By far the strongest poison to the human spirit is the inability to forgive oneself or another person. It disables a person’s emotional resources. The challenge…is to refine our capacity to love others as well as ourselves and to develop the power of forgiveness.
  • The ability to know that your perceptions are accurate has to happen without others’ validation. Intuition is not the result of diet, rituals, or wind chimes. It’s the natural consequence of having self-esteem, the greatest power you can have. With self-esteem, your life can broaden into an adventure because you can know in your gut that you can handle the unknown. And you can handle helping others without fear, which is true liberation.
  • To feel the suffering and then to know the pain of the unnecessariness of it. That right there has me in its grip. The only way through that is serious prayer. I can’t get through it any other way. I’ve got to believe that that’s making a difference somehow. I can’t see the difference, but I’ve got to believe it does, because in some way it lets me sleep at night. My only other alternative is to become angry, and I can’t go that direction.
  • Our life crises tell us that we need to break free of beliefs that no longer serve our personal development. These points at which we must choose to change or to stagnate are our greatest challenges. Every new crossroads means we enter into a new cycle of change – whether it be adopting a new health regimen or a new spiritual practice. And change inevitably means letting go of familiar people and places and moving on to another stage of life.
  • I hold myself accountable for my contradictions. I deeply, deeply believe in the mystical laws. I know that every thought sends an eternity in motion. I mean, I know what I am capable of as a teacher; I know what I’m capable of because of my intelligence. But I also know that that’s useless if – I have been humiliated so often, when I think that I can combat the terrors of life with intelligence. Because you can’t. It’ll bring you to your knees.
  • I don’t think most people know how to meditate – they fall asleep and they call it meditation. I prefer a kind of sweet, deep, rich prayer in which a person goes in and says, Take me down deep into the reason you gave me life. Take me down deep. It silences the chaos in me. Take me away from my sense. I need to go away now, because I’m in chaos – take me down deep. Hover over me, because I need grace. I say that a lot, many times a day. So that’s my practice.
  • I am convinced that the deepest desire within each of us is to be liberated from the controlling influences of our own psychic madness or patterns of fear. All other things—the disdain of ordinary life, the need to control others rather than be controlled, the craving for material goods as a means of security and protection against the winds of chaos—are external props that serve as substitutes for the real battle, which is the one waged within the individual soul.
  • You are in the depths of despair because you locked in on something or someone that didn’t belong to you. I’ve met many people who have lost everything, especially in these times. People who survive devastating loss have the ability to let go of what they were doing, how much they were earning, and what they feel they are entitled to right now. They may well return to their former status, but their immediate task is to assess their skills and show resilience moving forward.
  • You know how we say things like I just have to be true to myself? What does that mean? Great people always say, There’s something I was meant to do. That knowingness is what the soul understands. You have fundamental agreements that you simply feel. You can’t put your finger on them because they reveal themselves to you within the context of your life through coincidence, synchronicity, and obligations you can’t get out of. Together, these things form the whole of your sacred contract.
  • My prayer today is to become more mindful of my personal actions. What motivates me to do what I do and to say the things I do to others? I often dismiss my actions because of stress or anger but the people I hurt along the way do not dismiss what I’ve said or done. Every action and every word carries a consequence. Every person has stress and every person has anger. I would not like to be someone’s target and I ask for the grace to become more mindful not to harm others just because I am having a bad day.
  • We are not meant to stay wounded. We are supposed to move through our tragedies and challenges and to help each other move through the many painful episodes of our lives. By remaining stuck in the power of our wounds, we block our own transformation. We overlook the greater gifts inherent in our wounds – the strength to overcome them and the lessons that we are meant to receive through them. Wounds are the means through which we enter the hearts of other people. They are meant to teach us to become compassionate and wise.
  • People want their reason for living to be a singular thing, like a career or a relationship, because this makes an individual feel secure in the physical world. We don’t fare well in the realm of the invisible – so telling someone that their purpose is multilayered and includes the arduous journey of discovering who they really are is not always the answer they want to hear. But consider the complexity of the question: What is my reason for living? How can that question not include a journey into the depths of your own life?
  • I’m working on forgiving myself for some not-so-hot choices I’ve made in my life. I neglected two people I loved dearly. They are both dead now and I obviously can do nothing to repair or change that, and I grieve every day for those choices. That grief can be paralyzing, but it has made me understand the pain of holding on to unfinished business. In my case, I had put work first. I will never do that again. Having made that choice, I find the grief in my heart finally abating. Now I teach the need to forgive yourself and others relentlessly.
  • Mystics knew how to channel grace through prayer and they knew the power of that. They knew how to receive guidance through reflection and contemplation; they knew how to share the gift of illumination with each other. These are great gifts of life and profound grace that we are capable of providing for each other and the world. This is what it means to be a mystic without a monastery. You make a commitment to your own interior illumination and through that discover the sacred part of your contract and the true meaning of your highest potential.
  • .. is an active and internal process that includes investigating one’s attitudes, memories and beliefs with the desire to release all negative patterns that prevent one’s full emotional and spiritual recovery. This internal review inevitably leads one to review one’s external circumstances in an effort to recreate one’s life in a way that serves activation of will – the will to see and accept truths about one’s life and how one has used one’s energies; and the will to begin to use energy for the creation of love, self-esteem, and health.
  • Expectations are usually predicated on the idea that the everyday things that happen to ordinary people shouldn’t happen to you. People hold the idea of being ordinary in absolute contempt, so when they face an illness, poverty, or any kind of catastrophe, they say, I can’t believe this happened to me. And who did you think it was going to happen to – the woman across the street? It makes them think, I must be on the wrong path. But what if something you thought was bad was the best thing that ever happened to you? What if that was part of your path?
  • My prayer today is to not be negative about anything for one day. It is so easy to be disappointed, critical, cynical. Nothing is easier than to be a negative person. It takes effort to be hopeful and positive. People will say that you have to have a reason to be positive – what reason do the poor or lonely have to be positive? If we all waited for perfect conditions in our life before we felt hopeful, we would have very few days in life to celebrate. Perfection is rare. Hope means no matter how bleak, all things can and do change in the blink of an eye.
  • If you actually get that you’re not entitled to be loved, not by one person, not by anybody, and if you get that and then you look at people who love you – who love you – who think, my life is better because you, you are in it – that they get up and think, my whole world is better because you’re in it, that for some reason they love you, and that they walk this world when you’re not around thinking, but you’re in it, and they come home and they want to call you, they want to come home and see you, your face – you can never make a person love you but somehow they do.
  • We often hesitate to follow our intuition out of fear. Most usually, we are afraid of the changes in our own life that our actions will bring. Intuitive guidance, however, is all about change. It is energetic data ripe with the potential to influence the rest of the world. To fear change but to crave intuitive clarity is like fearing the cold, dark night while pouring water on the fire that lights your cave. An insight the size of a mustard seed is powerful enough to bring down a mountain-sized illusion that may be holding our lives together. Truth strikes without mercy. We fear our intuitions because we fear the transformational power within our revelations.
  • This is a dynamic and mysterious universe and human life is, no doubt, conditioned by imponderables of which we are only dimly aware. People sometimes say, “the strangest coincidence happened.” Coincidences may seem strange, but they are never a result of caprice. They are orderly laws in the spiritual life of man. They affect and influence our lives profoundly. These so-called imponderables are so important that you should become spiritually sensitized to them. Indeed, the more spiritually minded you become the more acute your contact will be with these behind-the-scenes forces. By being alive to them through insight, instruction, and illumination, you can make your way past errors and mistakes on which, were you less spiritually sensitive, you might often stumble.
  • You need to challenge your fear of life becoming unreasonable – because it is already unreasonable. In truth, your life has never been reasonable, it’s just that you keep hoping tomorrow will be different and that you will find a way to bring more control into your world. Recognize that life will always be full of challenges and crisis. The wise way is not to attempt to find one path that promises you will never have to endure the pain of loss and illness, but instead to learn how to endure and transcend when unreasonable events come your way. Learning to defy gravity in your world – to think, perceive, and act at the mystical level of consciousness – is the greatest gift you can give yourself, because it is the gift of truth. And as we are bound to learn again and again in this life, the truth does indeed set us free.
  • Manipulating or controlling others through the use of one’s illness or suffering,for example,was-and remains-extremely effective for people who find they cannot be direct in their interactions,Who argues with someone who is in pain? And if pain is the only power a person has,health is not an attractive replacement. It was apparent to me that becoming healthy represented more than just getting over an illness. Health represented a complex progression into a state of personal empowerment in which one had to move from a condition of vulnerability to one of invincibility,from victim to victor,from silent bystander to aggressive defender of personal boundaries.Completing this race to the finish was a yeoman’s task if ever there was one.Indeed,in opening the psyche and soul to the healing process,we had expanded the journey of wellness into one of personal transformation.”
  • Spiritual depression presents itself in much the same way as clinical depression—but not quite. The marks of distinction are crucial, yet hard for the untrained to recognize. They make the difference between interpreting the source of depression as a problem that may require medication or as a process of transformation that is best served by reflection, discussion of the stages of the dark night, and understanding the nature of mystical prayer. I have met many people who have been treated for depression and other conditions when they were, in fact, in the deep stages of a spiritual crisis. Without the proper support, that crisis becomes misdirected into a problem with relationships, a problem with one’s childhood, or a chronic malaise. Spiritual crises are now a very real part of our spectrum of health challenges and we need to acknowledge them with the same authority as we do clinical depression.
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