When we live with grateful hearts, fear cannot enter, guilt is dissolved, and there is only peace, love, forgiveness, and understanding. To me, that’s what life is all about.
— John Randolph Price, Gratitude: A Way of Life, by Louise L. Hay and Friends, p. 217
To love others without feeling the need to trap or control them requires trust that your needs will all be met, withor without the other person’s cooperation. You must be absolutely sure that loving connection can encompass any level of difference without disappearing. You don’t have to trust the other person. You must only trust that your needs will be met no matter what that person may do.
— Martha Beck, Steering by Starlight, p. 198
Being judgmental is a habit, and it can be changed….
Training ourselves to feel and then express unconditional love, the antidote to judgment, is possible, particularly with God’s help. We can choose to bring God into our minds whenever we find ourselves in the act of judging; this changes our experience and our perspective instantly. Practicing gratitude is another simple way to escape from the habit of being judgmental.
Let’s try to remember that we choose all our relationships for the lessons they bring. Being willing to accept these lessons and the people who bring them can change our minds from judgment to love and acceptance.
— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 139
It’s amazing how many people believe that suffering is a proof of love. If I don’t suffer when you suffer, they think, it means that I don’t love you. How can that possibly be true? Love is serene; it’s fearless. If you’re busy projecting what someone’s pain must feel like, how can you be fully present with her? How can you hold her hand and love her with all your heart aas she moves through her experience of pain? Why would she want you to be in pain, too? Wouldn’t she rather have you present and available?…
You don’t have to feel bad to act kindly. On the contrary: the less you suffer, the kinder you naturally become. And if compassion means wanting others to be free of suffering, how can you want for others what you won’t give to yourself?
— Byron Katie, A Thousand Names for Joy, p. 73, 74
I don’t know what’s best for me or you or the world. I don’t try to impose my will on you or on anyone else. I don’t want to change you or improve you or convert you or help you or heal you. I just welcome things as they come and go. That’s true love. The best way of leading people is to let them find their own way.
— Byron Katie, A Thousand Names for Joy, p. 24
If you believe that you are the beloved, you can offer forgiveness, even when it cannot be received. For still you say, “I set you free and I am willing to forgive you even when you cannot forgive me, because I claim my belovedness.” And you can move on, saying, “I can ask your forgiveness even though you cannot give it to me yet, and perhaps ever.”
— Henri Nouwen, Turn My Mourning Into Dancing, p. 80
When I embrace the practice of unconditional love — seldom an easy exercise, I might add — I am able to see how similar I am to those around me, and my habit of judgment lessens. Please note the word “habit.” Judgment does become a habit, and so can unconditional love, though it is more difficult to perfect. A tool that has worked for me (when I remember to use it) is to express a statement of unconditional love out loud every time a judgmental thought crosses my mind. Try it next time you find yourself gripped by judgment. As soon as you catch it, state your unconditional love. It works….
It’s easy to tell ourselves that we are not judging, we are merely observing. But most often this is just a lie. Our minds are quick to judge, and just as with any other thought, that which we focus on becomes magnified. When it’s the failings of others or missed opportunities or cynicism or mean-spiritedness that we choose to focus on, these are the attitudes that are magnified, thus injuring all the people on our path and on their paths too.
Of course the reverse is likewise true. If we choose to see the good in others, which is abundantly there, we will help to increase it in them, in ourselves, and in our communities as well, widening the circle of good with every glimpse. The choice to see the good is always available to us. It’s a mindset we can practice to the benefit of all….
As long as we sit in judgment of someone, we cannot experience peace. With each judgment we make, we hurt all our relationships.
— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 55-58
Giving up judgmental attitudes requires that we replace them with some other attitude. Our minds will not remain idle. The best attitude to cultivate and the one that changes everything and everyone — you and all of the people you formerly judged — is gratitude. Having an attitude of gratitude is what allows us to see everyone in our path as necessary and an opportunity for us to express unconditional love. You see, judgment and love cannot coexist, and we’re expressing one or the other almost all the time. Seldom are we indifferent to our experiences, to the people we are sharing those experiences with, and to the set of expectations we have created around those experiences. Becoming more loving, attempting to develop the attitude of unconditional love, in fact, is the real assignment we have been given in this life. No one can do the work for us. No one can prevent us from doing the work. And everyone benefits every time any one of us makes even a tiny effort to grow in our willingness to love rather than judge.
— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 53-54
Reading the Bible with others does not mean only that we read together in a small group, or that we read commentaries to benefit from the wisdom of great teachers, or that we listen to the Bible read and reflected on in worship or other gatherings. It also means reading the Bible through the lens of others’ experiences, in the knowledge of others’ stories, in the midst of immersion in others’ lives. For all this is in the service of loving God and loving one another. It is not to make us more knowledgeable about the Bible’s text, although that is helpful. It is not to make us more culturally sophisticated, although that is a benefit. It is to plunge us deeper into life with God, and therefore deeper into life with one another, that we might take one more step toward the beloved, all-inclusive community centered in Christ.
— Richard J. Foster, Life with God, p. 105-106
Loving others will definitely improve your life right now. Take that passion that is God’s gift to you and lavish it on others. Think of yourself as being loved, because you are. God loves you, and probably many others do as well. Once you move from focusing on an absence of love to recognizing the abundance of love already within, you will stop postponing happiness. A life of loving is available now.
— Mary Manin Morrissey, No Less Than Greatness, p. 72