Snips

Take time to celebrate. Celebrate your successes, your growth, and your accomplishments. Celebrate you and who you are.For too long you have been too hard on yourself. Others have spilled their negative energy - their attitudes, beliefs, and pain - on you. It had nothing to do with you! All along, you have been a gift to yourself and to the Universe.You are a child of God. Beautiful, a delight, a joy. You do not have to try harder, be better, be perfect, or be anything you are not. Your beauty is in you, just as you are each moment. Celebrate that.When you have a success, when you accomplish something, enjoy it. Pause, reflect, and rejoice. Too long you have listened to admonitions not to feel good about what you have done, lest you travel the downward road to arrogance.Celebration is a high form of praise, of gratitude to the Creator for the beauty of God's creation. To enjoy and celebrate the good does not mean that it will be taken from you. To celebrate is to delight in the gift, to show gratitude.Celebrate your relationships! Celebrate the lessons from the past and the love and warmth that are there today. Enjoy the beauty of others and their connection to you.Celebrate all that is in your life. Celebrate all that is good. Celebrate you!Today, I will indulge in the joy of celebrating.Melody Beattie ©

The work toward enlightenment often entails a painful and not very pretty arousal of the worst of which we're capable, made plain to both ourselves and others, in order that might consciously choose to release our personal darkness.Marianne Williamson

AA Though of the Day / This is the exact point at which we abandon limited objectives, and move toward God's will for us. / 12 & 12, pg. 69
You'll always have passion if you have a beginner's mind. If your passion starts to die, it won't be because of your spiritual work, your friends, your lover, or because of life's down times. Your passion will die because you have bought - hook, line, and sinker - an attitude that was sold to you by your parents, your school teachers, and this society. You've bought the attitude that you've got to look like that Playgirl man (if you're a man) or that Playboy woman (if you're a woman). You think you've got to be cool and cultured, that you've got to dress right and smell like the corporate world wants you to smell. If your passion dies it will be because you've bought that appearances are everything, including the appearance of your worldview, politics, opinions, and beliefs.Lee Lozowick

Part of the work in this stage is to take a deeper look not only at what the thoughts swirling just below the surface of our consciousness are but also at what they are doing to us daily. Those pesky little shoulds "I should lose weight... I should stop smoking... I should have a bigger house... I should spend more time with my kids... I should be making as much money as my sister... " - that keep nipping away at our psyches are the psychic equivalent of Chinese water torture. Every time we use the word should, either mentally or verbally, not only are we giving our power away, we are also losing energy that is vital to our ability to take creative ownership of our careers and our lives.
Maggie Craddock

As an adult seeking to know and do what's important now when facing uncertainty, you must rediscover this child-like state of mind. You will find it when you know in your heart that you are already prepared for this moment. Then you will be free to be true to who you really are at any-time, anywhere.
John Kuypers
The crux issue, dear friend, is desire and the consequent lack of inner peace. Desire for the rewards of your acts brings worry about failing, which pulls you from the present into an imagined, usually fearful future. This robs your energy, and you become miserable and lapse into inaction.
Bhagavad Gita

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.Antoine de Saint-Exupery