-With the voice of conscience as your centre, all the elements of your being are in harmony. When you lose the centre the parts scatter and begin to war with one another.
-To go through life without ever knowing or expressing your talents is the worst form of poverty and self denial.
-A life’s work is created from the inside out, from your innate talents and interests, not by holding your finger up to the wind.
-Fear scatters and squanders your energy. It paralyses action and dizzies the mind, sending it hurtling off in a hundred directions that lead nowhere. Shake off your doubts and fears; dare to dream your dream and live it. You beat fear with desire, knowledge, planning, and constructive action.
-To the extent that your work takes into account the needs of the world, it will be meaningful; to the extent that through it you express your unique talents, it will be joyful.
-As corny as it may sound, giving is what it is all about.
-Determining to live your life to the fullest, to follow your dreams and express yourself, is the greatest gift you can give to those you love-and to yourself.
-Committing yourself to your life’s work, then, fosters good health by reducing negative stress and by strengthening your will to live.
-Your creative powers grow and develop through use; the more you are challenged, the more you grow.
-People who take the plunge, who commit themselves to going after what they really want, often receive a kind of invisible support they had no idea was there for them.
-It is low expectations more than any lack of talent, character flaw, or external barrier, that keep us from realizing our full potential.
-Creativity is a function of the nature within us; call it intuition, native intelligence, or the subconscious mind. The rational conscious mind can intend, but it cannot, of itself, create.
-As we develop confidence in our ability to learn, we become students of creative change, confidently creating the transformations (inner and outer) we desire.
-To perceive any problem clearly is to begin to create its solution. All we need is the wisdom and patience to keep looking, and the love to hold what we see up to the light of understanding.
-Questions are central to creative work. In every creative medium, we find creative work formed, fired, and glazed by questions.
-There is mystery, magic, and creative power in the emptiness. Think of the creative artist. She knows that for all her searching, concentrating, and disciplined effort, the really exciting breakthroughs will come as inspirations from the emptiness.
-In my youth, I spent a portion of my spare time visiting the elderly in nursing homes. I was struck, time and again, by how many of these people expressed regret about things they had always wanted to do with their lives, but hadn’t. It wasn’t just that they had failed to achieve their dreams: They had never even worked on them. Many had secretly cherished an idea of something they wanted to do for thirty or forty years or more, but had never taken even the first step. On the other hand there were a relative few who had lived their dreams and followed their heart’s desire. They had an energy, a vitality, and a sense of humour others lacked. Moreover they seemed more at peace with themselves and with the prospect of death. As one man told me when I asked him if he feared dying, “Death is not a problem if you have lived first. Yet this man and the few like him were rare exceptions, bright spots in a sea of despair.
-Failure to find the work you love has costs, not only to your self-esteem, relationships, health, and creativity, but to your world.
-You cannot receive from others anything you are unwilling to give yourself.
-In your relationship with life, you attract happiness by embracing life as a gift and accepting responsibility to live it with joy, meaning, and purpose. You push away happiness and ease by believing that life is a burden or struggle, or that you are owed something from it.
-There is no purely objective measure of enough. The subjective component is a function of the individual’s state of mind — his thoughts and feelings. The unhappy individual, craving more, feels lack, even in the most opulent environment.
-Don’t worry about what you don’t have; use what you do.
-The psychology of plenty differs fundamentally from the psychology of scarcity. Where the psychology of scarcity is based upon fear and fosters conflict, struggle, poverty, and oppression, the psychology of plenty is based upon love and fosters thanksgiving, cooperation, abundance, and reverence for life. It recognizes life as a gift to be enjoyed rather than as an account to be settled.
-The psychology of plenty receives the gift of life, of material things, and of the support of others, and so experiences a fullness and abundance. Clearly, it makes a difference whether we feel owed or grateful.
-Synchronicity can be defined as a non-causal but meaningful relationship between events or states of mind within the human psyche and events in the outside world. More simply, we could call it the experiences of “meaningful coincidence”. We have all had experiences that we intuitively recognize as meaningful, though we would be hard pressed to explain them in rational terms. In fact, these “meaningful coincidences” are not coincidences at all but spontaneous realizations of the underlying interconnectedness of all things within the Universe.
-Societies arrange their games to give the appearance that things have to be a certain way—the way they are.
-The primary means of getting people to take the game seriously is social ridicule. Social ridicule is based upon shame, the shame of being a loser. To the degree that you can be shamed, you will be manipulated by ridicule.
-The hook is your desire to be approved of by others. The bait is any kind of reward. The minute you go for the bait, the game is playing you. You are no longer playing the game. You get serious.
-The simple truth is that playing a game that you have chosen in order to demonstrate values, express purposes, or effect results that you have chosen is a very different process from having to play the game to win approval.
-People who view the current game as placing human survival in jeopardy are attempting to rewrite the game rules. They see the current consumption and hoarding model as a dead end, ultimately leading to the end of all play on earth.
-For whatever reason, Western people tend to feel owed. Life owes us, nature owes us, society owes us, our parents or children owe us, our mates owe us. It is difficult for us, then, to feel real joy, for we cannot simply receive.
-We cannot will the Tao into our lives. We can only open to receive what is of-itself-so and, in so doing, consciously participate in its mystery.
-The intuitive intelligence that spontaneously arises from an experience of oneness with all of life is superior to reasoned, ethical judgment.
-Love is superior to any ethical code. When we open ourselves to receive the innate, intuitive intelligence of the heart, we can respond freely and spontaneously to the events of our lives.
-We impede our capacity to receive by holding limiting beliefs about what, when, and how we should receive.
-The truth is that the love that pervades the universe is of-itself-so. Nothing must happen first before you can receive it. Nothing must happen before you can receive the abundance of the universe.
-First receive, then give; first be, then do.
Laurence Boldt
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