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Search Results for "peace " — 1998 posts

How Anger Leads to Anxiety and What to Do About It

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“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” ~Buddha

I have a confession: I’m mildly obsessed with anger.

Not the negative feelings, the volatile outbursts, or the fly-off-the-handle reactions, but rather how humans express anger.

I’ve largely made my living by dealing with various states of anger. More on that in a bit…

Years ago I was shopping at a bookstore with my friend Alex. We were first time parents with toddlers at home.

The idea was to find resources on …

Discovering the Elusive Truth and Falling in Love with Yourself

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“Pleasure can be supported by an illusion, but happiness rests upon truth.” ~Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

In today’s world, we are bombarded day by day and moment by moment with images and messages of who we should be, what we should be doing, and exactly how we should be doing it.

The promises of happiness and fulfillment in those mirages of ultimate perfection are all too often shallow and elusive, constantly evading us and leading us time and time again to nothing more than dead ends and empty hopes.

With a natural craving for transcendence and supremacy, we grab our …

5 Tips to Stop Making Comparisons and Feeling Bad About Yourself

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“The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.” ~Steve Furtick

I remember one day when I was around six years old, my older brother came home from school with one of those star-shaped highlighters that had a different color on each point. I laid my eyes on it and in that moment I wanted nothing more than I wanted that highlighter.

It didn’t matter that as a six year old, I had less use for it than paper shoes in rainy weather; I just simply had to have it.

Being the …

Today Can Be the Day You Turn Things Around

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“In chaos, there is fertility.” ~Anais Nin

How did I get to this point?

This question pulsed through my brain repeatedly as I drove to my parents’ house in a state of complete exhaustion. My young daughter was strapped in the back seat, my pregnant belly pushing against the steering wheel, hot tears streaming down my face.

I was done. I had nothing left to give. How did I get here?

Gradually, then suddenly.

With eternal gratitude to Hemingway, three simple words so elegantly summarize how I ended up in a situation I didn’t want or expect.

“How did you …

Don’t Respond to Drama and Drama Won’t Come Back Around

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“When you are not honoring the present moment by allowing it to be, you are creating drama.” – Eckhart Tolle

One day several years ago, I was fraught with anxiety over with how to handle an uncomfortable personnel situation at work. I had an employee that was borderline explosive and insubordinate. I was a wreck over how to best handle the situation because before I was this employee’s manager, I was her friend.

I found myself wanting to fix the problem by delving deeper into her drama, wanting to know why she felt a certain way, what I had …

Becoming More Positive When Negativity Feels Instinctive

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“Dwelling on the negative simply contributes to its power.” ~Shirley MacLaine

If you have ever felt the depths of depression, you know it’s not the same as being sad or having “the blues.” It’s the hopeless, overwhelming feeling of melancholy where nothing, not even the people you love, can pull you out.

It can feel like being under water in the ocean while the waves keep washing over you, pushing you further and further underneath, while no matter how hard you try, you can’t seem to break the surface to get that much needed air in order to survive.

Unfortunately, …

The Importance of Self-Love: See the Beauty Others See in You

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“When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.” ~African Proverb

A young woman in my town died recently. The cause was a drug overdose, although the precise circumstances of her death were unclear. She was a recovering addict, and the rumor was that she had relapsed. There was even some conjecture that her death might have been deliberate.

In the end, no one was sure of anything except that she had died.

The town in general and my family in particular were sent reeling. This girl was young, pretty, sweet—a talented artist who was loved by …

5 Ways To Embrace Ending Friendships and Relationships

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“Celebrate endings, for they precede new beginnings.” ~Jonathan Lockwood Huie

One day when I was a kid, my best friend and I decided that we were going to bury a time capsule in the backyard. We gathered an old shoebox, some glitter and paint, and then spent the whole afternoon decorating this box that was the symbol of our best friend status for life.

We filled it with some of our favorite items and pictures and then wandered around the yard in order to scope out the perfect location to bury our sacred box. We dug what we thought was …

7 Ways to be Happy from the Inside Out

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“All appears to change when we change.” ~Henri-Frédéric Amiel

We often start from the outside to try to make change on the inside. Scratch that. We pretty much always start from the outside, thinking it will make changes on the inside.

I am the retired queen of looking externally for internal satisfaction. I spent my most high-stress decade driven by a tantalizing dream. I wanted to be a magazine editor-in-chief, with an all-white office complete with a leather sofa, my name on a parking spot, and legions of underlings at my beckon call.

Pretty deep, hey?

And when I was …

Find Yourself Before You Find Love

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“Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.” ~Alan Watts

After a few years of living through the betrayal and anger of my divorce, my friends decided it was time for me to start dating again.

They took me out to the bars, dressed me up, bought me drinks, and showed all the men how cute I was.

I didn’t feel cute. I felt like a fraud.

The bar scene was not for me. I felt like a piece of meat wrapped in cellophane on the shelf waiting for a man to …

How We Can Embody Abundance Regardless of What We Have

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“Our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world as being able to remake ourselves.” ~Mahatma Gandhi

Embody abundance. I heard someone say those two words the other day. What does that mean, really? To truly embody abundance, do we need to have everything we want? Or can anyone who holds space for truth experience a way of being that is free of lack?

Maybe to embody abundance is to recognize the realness that underlies the illusory film that covers much of what we see in our day-to-day lives. Maybe abundance is always there, but we …

Becoming More Authentic: Accept Yourself and Forget Approval

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“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” ~E.E. Cummings

For most of my life, I was a chameleon. I stayed under the radar, hoping I’d blend in and not draw attention to myself. I was full of self-doubt, so I molded my personality and beliefs based on my company. I traded my authentic self for the security of being liked by my family and friends because of my fear of being judged.

By suppressing my opinions, I was perceived as easygoing, but at what cost? I disrespected myself by allowing others to influence major …

Why Being Scared Means You’re Fully Alive

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“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.” ~Pema Chodron

Last year I decided to do something I’d always longed to do but had never been brave enough to take the plunge: I started my own business. Not only was it a new venture, my business would be based around myself—my skills, knowledge, and experiences.

Holy crap.

My emotions swung from terrified to awkward and uncomfortable. Seriously, that’s how good it got, at least initially! It’s been exciting and exhilarating, but not in the least bit comfortable.

Here …

Learning to Trust Again When You’ve Been Hurt in the Past

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“The only way to know if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” ~Ernest Hemingway

In a world where it seems as though all we hear about and see is how one person betrayed another, how do we allow ourselves to trust someone to get close at all, let alone trust them to be near the most fragile parts of us?

Over the course of the last year, I’ve been working as an intern-counselor at a residential high school with around seventy teenagers. Many of them have come from unbelievably challenging backgrounds where they have had to learn to …

How I Found My Inner Balance When I Was Tired of Feeling Anxious

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“Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.” ~Hermann Hesse

As a child in ballet I was chastised for my inability to capture attitude or arabesque. With only one foot planted on the ground I reached for anything to prop myself up—the barre, the instructor, an unsuspecting fellow tutu-wearing classmate who would then lose balance herself.

My days at ballet were short lived, but my trouble balancing was not. This persisted for decades, through college and into the early years of my marriage.

Now I was no longer …

Why We Need to Create Our Own “Normal”

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“If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.” ~Maya Angelou

I had a glimpse of normal when I was a child. It looked like bright splodges of paint on pieces of cheap paper, animals made from bits of wool and odd buttons, and many, many books. Normal was taking exceedingly long suburban walks while pestering my father to supply me with mental arithmetic, to sate an insatiable love of numbers.

The most normal place in the world, my sanctuary, was the library. I loved the plastic covered window seats that would …

After Tragedy: 3 Reasons And 21 Ways to Find Joy Again

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“Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they’re supposed to help you discover who you are.” ~Bernice Johnson Reagon

My brother died suddenly, at just thirty-nine years old. One moment he was in the midst of a regular working day. Half an hour later he was gone. Twenty-four hours later he was buried.

With things happening so fast, I found myself alternating between paralysis and intense waves of pain, anger, guilt, sorrow, and devastation. I guess we all felt this way. Only it didn’t quite look like we all did/

In between waves of sadness and silence, my brother’s …

Don’t Let Anyone or Anything Dim Your Inner Light

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“The more light you allow within you, the brighter the world you live in will be.” ~Shakti Gawain

I was born with it. I know I was. There was a light within me that showed in my smile, my dancing around the house, my love for life, for friends, for family, and my bright future.

I don’t remember the exact day it happened, I don’t remember the last event that did it, but my inner light went out. I was no longer the happy-go-lucky girl I once was; I became lost in an abyss of darkness and sadness. Happiness …

How Simple Little Happy Habits Can Make a Huge Difference

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“Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness.” ~Charlotte Brontë

Habits are a double-edged human habitual practice—they can be healthy and unhealthy, and can bring us happiness and unhappiness.

We’ve all read about the importance of healthy and successful habits, and how to choose and practice them. But I’ve also recently read about how healthy and successful habits alone don’t necessarily lead to good health or real success. There’s more to it.

What I’m reading now shows that happiness appears to be just as important to well-being and success as lifestyle choices, that happiness alone may actually lead to the …

Who to Fall in Love with First: 6 Ways to Love Yourself

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“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ~Rumi

Most of us are so busy waiting for someone to love us that we’ve forgotten about the one person we need to love first—ourselves.

Ironically, it was when my ten-year marriage fizzled that I began the innermost process of self-discovery about love.

While discouraged and saddened at the crumbling of our relationship, I began to explore love more. How had it fizzled? Why had we stopped loving each other, and what had happened to …