Posts tagged with “Love”
You Never Know What Someone Is Going Through, So Be Kind
“Give everyone the benefit of the doubt today…” ~Lori Deschene, Tiny Buddha’s 365 Tiny Love Challenges
Here’s something I’ve learned firsthand: No matter how someone looks or acts, you truly never know what’s happening in their lives.
Five years ago my husband Walter was dying from cancer. Twice during a thirteen-month period he was hospitalized, thirty minutes away from our home.
I spent about ten hours a day at the hospital, plus travel time during those long weeks. I was a wreck.
I don’t know what I looked like to the outside world. Inside, I felt impatient, angry, sad, out …
Why Playing Hard to Get Doesn’t Work (and What Does)
“Confidence isn’t ‘They will like me.” It’s ‘I’m perfectly fine if they don’t.’ ” ~Unknown
After the death of my husband, I spent my thirties as a single mother of four children. It was a tough decade. I often felt lonely and frustrated, and dating was a nightmare.
I constantly gorged on self-help books, hoping that they’d reveal whatever my “problem” was so that I could fix it and finally find the love I so desperately craved.
Many of these well-intentioned books contained dating tips designed to make someone fall in love with me. They invited me to …
Book Giveaway: Tiny Buddha’s 365 Tiny Love Challenges
UPDATE – The winners for this giveaway are:
- Melissa Ballinger Dees
- Julie C. Perry
- Bobby Irion
- Michael Jon Piper
- Hannah
Sometimes the world can feel like a lonely place. There are billions of people on the planet, and many of us encounter hundreds in the course of our daily lives. Yet it’s easy to feel disconnected from most, if not all of them.
The many strangers we pass on a given day, who may avert their eyes to avoid awkwardness, can start to feel like part of the scenery—like cars parked in a lot or leaves floating in the wind.…
3 Relationship Myths (and Why We Need to Stop Believing Them)
“Love isn’t always perfect. It isn’t a fairytale or a storybook. And it doesn’t always come easy. Love is overcoming obstacles, facing challenges, fighting to be together, holding on and never letting go.” ~Unknown
When I started dating, I idealized love. I had many false notions about relationships, which I formed from my friends, watching movies, and reading romance novels. Many of the beliefs I had about how relationships should work caused me pain and disappointment because reality turned out to be different from what I expected.
Dating became a journey of resetting my expectations and letting go of false …
Do You Constantly Think and Worry About Your Relationships?
“When you say ‘yes’ to others, make sure you’re not saying ‘no’ to yourself.” ~Paulo Coelho
Sometimes it’s easy to define ourselves by our roles and relationships.
We can look at ourselves as a daughter, or someone’s employee, or so in so’s husband. These things mean a lot to us, and we often subconsciously use a variety of behaviors and mental constructs to protect these roles and relationships.
It can take form in innocuous ways, like buying clothes you don’t really want or feigning interests in order to fit in. (Go sports team!) But it also affects more serious things, …
How to Prevent Fear and Insecurity from Ruining Your Relationship
“Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” ~Jack Canfield
Buried deep within the broken heart of every great loss is a nugget of wisdom. I experienced the greatest grief of my life just a few months ago, and with it came an opportunity to uncover ugly truths about myself I’d been hiding from.
In facing my pain, I have discovered that underneath the conscious, big-hearted, beautiful person that I am lives a small girl who is terrified of being misunderstood and abandoned by those she loves most.
The surface signs alerting me to these fears looked something …
4 Relationship Traps to Avoid & Other Ways to Keep Your Love Strong
“Love does not obey our expectations; it obeys our intentions.” ~Lloyd Strom
When I started dating, I did a terrible job of it.
I fell in love at the turn of a unique smile and fell out of it with the first sign of a stubborn bad habit. Despite that, I was a serial monogamist. I didn’t know how to develop the mental fortitude one needed to end things when they were ready to be ended, so I let them crawl on.
Teenage emotions are hard. Adult ones are hard, too.
Three years, four years, three and a half …
The Art of Being Happily Single
“Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.” ~John Allen Paulos
Over the past ten years, I always had a man by my side. I was always in a relationship.
I was in a relationship for eight years before my ex and I got engaged, then broke it off because of the distance—my ex’s reason. Not long after that I got into a two-year relationship with a man who loved, yet cheated on me. It was a messy breakup.
So after ten years in relationships, I found myself …
6 Empowering Lessons Death Taught Me About Life
“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss in life is what dies inside us while we live” ~Norman Cousins
I am not dead and I am not dying, so you may wonder why I write that death has taught me what I need to know about life.
I lost my mother when I was fifteen. Being a teenager, thoughts of anyone close to me dying had not entered my head. My mother had a brief illness and passed away unexpectedly at age forty-seven.
I remember that my schoolmates came to see me, and I kept thinking …
How to Defeat Your Insecurities and Tell Someone You Love Them
“Our own ego judges us, so we become afraid of self-awareness. If it’s not puffing us up to look better than others, it’s tearing us down—anything to block us from feeling at one with reality and who we are.” ~Beth Maynard Green
Have you ever had insecurities stand in your way?
Have you ever felt afraid to tell someone how you feel?
Have you ever felt like someone could never love you the same way you love them?
We all have insecurities that hold us back in our professional life, our social life, and most of all, our love life…
5 Ways to Show Your Love to Others (and Yourself)
“Love isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” ~Steven Hayes
Things go wrong in life. Distress and confusion can take root, sometimes leading to harsh self-criticism, depression, or anxiety.
We sense that love heals, and it does.
I once visited an orphanage for abandoned infants, and every toddler who I carried clung tightly to me. I can still feel their little arms clasping me desperately.
We crave love as we crave oxygen.
But what is love?
Is it something you wait for?
What if love is more than a feeling?
What if your choices and actions can bring the spirit …
Two Kind Words That Can Change or Save a Life
“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” ~Leo Buscaglia
My fiancé and I escaped to the northern wilderness. We wanted to build our home and our life off grid, off the beaten path, far from civilization.
It didn’t matter that I was a city girl who couldn’t handle a chainsaw, fix a pickup, or read the warnings of wind and sky. My fiancé was a mountain man, skilled in survival. …
7 Steps to Create More Love and Happiness in the Present Moment
“The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.” ~Abraham Maslow
It was 4:00am, but I was wide awake. I wanted to be a great achiever, a great partner, and a great parent. Instead, I had turned into an irritable insomniac who no longer knew how to relax.
I was trying to do everything perfectly and be everything to everyone. Demands kept piling up. This made it tough to focus on the present moment.
A wandering mind is less happy than a mind focused on what it is doing, according to scientific research. …
How I Think My Friend Who Died Would Want Me to Live
“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” ~Norman Cousins
Have you ever been there?
When someone you love suddenly disappears. When life, within a few seconds, turns upside down. When your biggest problems suddenly seem like nothing but drops in the ocean.
I know I have.
It was December 15, 2013. That was the day when everything changed, when her life came to an end, and many other lives were changed forever.
When they first told me she was gone, I couldn’t fully grasp reality. For a …
How to Transform Your Body by Coming from Love Instead of Fear
“Fear is the opposite of everything you are, and so has an effect of opposition to your mental and physical health.” ~Neale Donald Walsch
My initial foray into health and fitness started from a deep place of fear.
I feared my weight and my appearance, always wondering what new trend I’d encounter in a magazine or on social media that would point out the latest way I was inadequate.
I feared the big health scares that we’re told could kill us at any moment if we aren’t careful. Diabetes. High blood pressure. Cancer.
Many of us have all been on …
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