I believe that once you are grateful for life, seeing it as an opportunity to give love, your life is changed and lived as it was meant to be lived by our Creator.
— Bernie S. Siegel, M.D., Gratitude: A Way of Life, by Louise L. Hay and Friends, p. 252
I forgive other people. I won’t find forgiveness until I do. But I don’t use forgiveness to feed denial, and forgiving doesn’t mean I let someone hurt me again. Forgiveness is how I stop being victimized. It connects me with power.
— Melody Beattie, The New Codependency, p. 206
Nothing in the world can make you happy; everything in the world can encourage you to be happy….
The world cannot take away your right to happiness or sadness. It may often appear to be trying very hard to take this choice away, but truly it cannot. Events in life can so conspire that you may lose sight of this choice, but never is the choice destroyed. In truth, the decision to be happy or sad always rests with you, whether you can see it or not. It’s when you temporarily lose sight of this choice that you must ask for help.
— Robert Holden, PhD, Happiness Now! p. 48, 51
Our intimate partners are by and large our most important persons. Because we share responsibility for our lives with them, because they are magnets for our disappointments, it is all but written into our marriage contracts that we will blame them when things go wrong.
But what happens when we make a point of doing the opposite? What happens when we let go of our proclivity to blame and resent our lovers for our own disappointments? Every time we forgive and thank each other we teach each other critical, and generalizable, life lessons: There is no master plan. There is no life that we were supposed to lead. There is no good future in wishing for a different past. The assumption that things should always go our way, and that someone or something is to blame if they don’t, only leads us away from the path to our better selves.
— Mark O’Connell, PhD, The Marriage Benefit, p. 164-165
In spite of all my efforts as a mother, my children will not wake up one morning and be perfect. Just as I will never “arrive” as a mother, they will never “arrive” as children. My work is to companion them on their journeys, guiding, loving, and teaching them to love themselves along the way. Maybe that’s what our responsibility is to ourselves, too, as parents — loving ourselves at our best, in uncertainty, and in spite of flat-out failure.
— Lisa Groen Braner, The Mother’s Book of Well-Being, p. 168
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
What may we say was the reason for the lost sheep becoming found? Was the sheep saved by the doing of good works? Was the sheep saved by the following of law or commandment? Was the sheep saved because it recognised its own state of ‘lost-ness,’ and went searching for its shepherd? Heaven forbid! The lost sheep was found for one reason and one reason alone. The lost sheep was found because the Good Shepherd came looking. The shepherd commenced a search and rescue operation that would never finish, until his sheep was found.
His is a personal search, a persevering search, a successful search. He will search until they are found. The lost sheep contributed nothing to its being found.
— Peter Gray, Until They Are Found, p. 26
Much as we would like, we cannot bring everyone with us on this journey called recovery. We are not being disloyal by allowing ourselves to move forward. We don’t have to wait for those we love to decide to change as well.
Sometimes we need to give ourselves permission to grow, even though the people we love are not ready to change. We may even need to leave people behind in their dysfunction or suffering because we cannot recover for them. We don’t need to suffer with them.
It doesn’t help.
It doesn’t help for us to stay stuck just because someone we love is stuck. The potential for helping others is far greater when we detach, work on ourselves, and stop trying to force others to change with us.
— Melody Beattie, The Language of Letting Go, p. 164
We cannot force others to change. We can offer them a positive mental atmosphere where they have the possibility to change if they wish. But we cannot do it for or to other people. Each person is here to work out his or her own lessons, and if we fix it for them, then they will just go and do it again, because they have not worked out what they needed to do for themselves. All we can do is love them. allow them to be who they are. Know that the truth is always within them and that they can change at any moment they want.
— Louise L. Hay, Heart Thoughts, p. 167
Take our eyes off the future and the enormity of the task. If we have envisioned the goal, it will be ours. We do not have to do everything today, or at once.
Focus on today. Focus on the belief that all is well. All we need to do to reach our goal is to focus on what presents itself naturally, and in an orderly way, to us today. We shall be empowered to accomplish, peacefully, what we need to get where we want to be tomorrow.
— Melody Beattie, The Language of Letting Go, p. 162