You cannot save another person from his or her spiritual lessons, no matter how much you may want to or how hard you try….
For in the same way that we have seen that no one can steal your destiny, it is also true that you cannot force others to achieve their own destiny. You can merely provide gentle guidance and allow them to make their own choices.
— Kathleen McGowan, The Source of Miracles, p. 184, 185
Just to be clear, forgiving someone doesn’t mean you have to keep that individual in your life. Some people are simply going to have a toxic effect on you if you allow them to stay, and you will have to move away from them. It is how you end those relationships that will affect your spiritual progress. If you can love them, forgive them, and release them in a way that wishes them only healing, you will make excellent progress.
— Kathleen McGowan, The Source of Miracles, p. 137
One thing we’ve all learned along the way is that reinvention seems always to require some painful elements of rejection and tearing down. But as we change, so do all things change. To hold on tight is to miss out on opportunities for growth and movement. Letting go, stepping forward into the unknown, we discover our capacities for resilience and faith, and we begin to glimpse our unique potential, to realize it in ways we couldn’t have begun to imagine just a short time ago.
— Katrina Kenison, The Gift of an Ordinary Day, p. 172
You don’t have to let people control or manipulate you. You don’t have to scream and beat upon your breast, telling them they’re wrong, they cannot do that. That’s letting them control you.
— Melody Beattie, Journey to the Heart, p. 17
All the painful and horrendous things I was imagining were not present, and I realized suddenly and completely that it was my thoughts — and only my thoughts — that were tormenting me. If I stopped my thoughts, the pain stopped. And so it had. For about nine seconds. Then it all came flooding back, although from that moment on I understood one very, very important thing, perhaps the most important of all: learning to work with the pain of a broken heart was about learning to work with thoughts, not about changing any kind of reality. Because in reality, right this second now, nothing is happening.
— Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart, p. 25
There’s nothing but this moment. The past has gone and cannot be changed. The past is for us to learn from. No more. And the present? It’s to be lived to the full, every moment, one at a time. If I’m willing to be present, attentive and ready to learn, I can suck the juice out of every experience. Whether it feels good or bad, it always has something to teach me.
And the future? Well it isn’t here yet, is it, and if I dwell on it I’ll miss this moment and will never catch it again. I may think I can catch up, but I never can. Each moment I miss by worrying about the past or dreaming of the future robs me of the wonder and beauty of now….
Change is a constant. Nothing stays the same, but it can all get better. Even the experiences we don’t like are teaching us valuable lessons. Certainly I haven’t liked some of the changes in my life, and there’ve been times when I would have loved things to stay as they were. But that’s not what being alive is about. In the end it’s more comfortable and sensible to relax and allow change to occur with an open mind, welcoming whatever we can learn from it.
— Dr. Brenda Davies, Unlocking the Heart Chakra, p. 80-81
Sometimes, the picture isn’t finished yet. Ideas, possibilities, hopes, dreams float around, circling us like asteroids around a planet. We may think events in our lives are happening aimlessly, without purpose. All we see are disconnected, floating blobs. We reach for them, try to grab them in our hands so we can connect them, force them into a whole, force them into a picture we can see, something that makes sense.
Let the pieces be. Let yourself be. Let life be. Sometimes, chaos needs to precede order. The pieces will come together in a picture that makes sense, in a beautiful work of art that pleases.
You don’t have to force the pieces to fit together if it’s not time. You don’t have to know. There is power sometimes in not knowing. There is power in letting go. Power in waiting. Power in stillness. Power in trust. There is power in letting the disconnected pieces be until they settle into a whole. The action you are to take will appear. Timely. Clearly. What you’re to do will become clear.
— Melody Beattie, Journey to the Heart, p. 356
We’re all beautiful and unique, but none of us is perfect, thank God. What a pain that would be!…
So all this striving for perfection is a bit sad. How about settling for being a great human being with flaws like everything else, including your Persian carpet? The need to be perfect does nothing but restrict us: restrict us in our creativity, in relationships, in work, in dealing with our children (whom we then also expect to be perfect) and in dealing with others who can never live up to our expectations. Look at all we’re losing. Not satisfied to be ourselves, we’re in constant competition with others, looking over our shoulder at what everyone else is doing and how much better or worse it is than our effort, and the moment, the experience, the wonder and the juice are lost forever.
Try to accept life and yourself as a constantly changing masterpiece with shape and color and texture that offer you a new adventure every day. Not perfect. Not complete. But developing and exciting, with every day a new brushstroke and a step towards perfection. The masterpiece is not meant to be complete until the final brushstroke has been placed upon it and the artist finally retires.
So experiment with life and don’t worry about getting it wrong. You can’t! Whatever you do, no matter how it turns out, you’ll have learned something that you wouldn’t have learned had you done it differently. Nothing is a failure. And nothing is lost.
Dr. Brenda Davies, Unlocking the Heart Chakra, p. 80
There’s nothing to fear from thought itself, once we understand that it’s just thought.
Perhaps the greatest misinterpretation of this principle is to believe that the goal is to control what you think about. It isn’t. The goal is to understand thought for what it is: an ability you have that shapes your reality from the inside out. Nothing more, nothing less. What you think about is not ultimately going to determine the quality of your life, but rather the relationship you have to your own thinking — the way you manufacture your thoughts and respond to them. Do you hear your thinking as reality, or as thought?
— Richard Carlson, PhD, You Can Be Happy No Matter What, p. 16
The key to enlightenment might be simpler than we think. We’re here to experience joy. Look at each moment in your life and learn to say, How sweet it is.
— Melody Beattie, More Language of Letting Go, p. 379