Agape

Agape, a Greek word meaning unconditional love, is the single most powerful tool in existence for changing one’s life and the lives of those around you. Unconditional love changes your heart rate, your skin temperature and even the dilation of your pupils. It softens your perspective on the world around you, which of course softens the perspective of others toward you.

You might ask, how is it possible to have agape (unconditional love) in such an angry world? The answer is quite simple… if you live your life in the instant moment, not what was, or what might be, there is actually only a moment of drama.

Drama both comes and departs in a moment. It is either in the past or the future. Love unconditionally and live for right now… this minute, this moment, for right now is really all there is.

Forgiveness purges your life of misery. Forgiveness allows you to breathe a full breath. Think about it… when you are angry, how does it feel to breathe? Do your lungs fill with air and your body experience a deep sense of relaxation? That is the way it is supposed to feel.

When you harbor anger, a number of events occur in your body and the best way I can describe it is like this: if you have ever been driving, looked in your rear view mirror and saw the blue lights of a police car flashing, the typical response is a subtle sense of heightened awareness in the gut.

This sense of subtle heightened awareness in the gut (now also known as the “second brain”) is neurons firing. Neurons are nerve cells and nerve cells talk. Once these neurons fire, signals much like Morse code are sent through your autonomic nervous system to the brain.

The brain then interprets the length of and space in between each signal and the amount of voltage (voltage being equivalent to emotion) pushing the signals through your body. This interpretation in turn causes the release of chemicals and hormones such as cortisol and norepinephrine that promote inflammatory processes in your body, ultimately causing dis-ease.

Be acutely aware of what you are thinking. By doing so you can control both your happiness and your health! Your reality will be created by your emotions coupled with the background noise of mind such as “I am sick of this. I am sick of that. I hate this. I hate that.” In other words, you are your emotions!

Science, via physics, has now proven that there is no matter on the quantum level. What does this mean? It means that regardless of what you might think, we are one energy with everything that is. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, separating us from anything else. Therefore, what we do to another, we are literally doing to ourselves and the entire world.

Be of service to others. By being of service to others, you fill the void for love in your own life and the lives of humanity as a whole.

Eva Herr | Inspire Me Today

Ways To Stay Happy in a Complicated World

Reader, you are a hearty specimen. We often aren’t pitching sunshine here —  we tell the stories of what is wrong in the world, stories of pain and tragedy  and injustice. But it’s not just us — life away from the computer screen can  also be a depressing thing.

How do you keep it from getting to you? What can you do to avoid becoming depressed yourself, or better yet, to keep yourself happy?

Ignorance of evil and misfortune isn’t the answer. By visiting Care2 Causes  you educate yourself, which leads you to take action to make things better — by  signing petitions, sending letters and spreading the word to your friends and  connections to do the same. You are a part of the solution. Losing you to  depression or evasion of reality just won’t do. So keep reading the website.

No, we’ll need a different path to happiness. Not that happiness will  completely insulate you from pain or sadness. Rather, I’m defining happiness as “a long-term sense of emotional well-being and  contentment — a broad ‘feeling’ that one is happy.” It is an overall feeling  about life, not a guarantee that every moment will be Hallmark-worthy.

Two approaches to the eternal question of happiness seem prevalent today. One  is positive psychology. I’ll call the other the “set point” theory.

Positive psychology is Oprah. The premise is that we can make ourselves  happier by doing certain things and cultivating certain attitudes. For instance,  this theory holds that appreciating our strengths and accepting our limitations  will help make us happier.

Positive psychology expert Tal  Ben-Shahar says that academic studies have found that resilience is one key  to happiness (and, perhaps not coincidentally, success). Resilience has five  components:

1. setting future goals 2. maintaining an  optimistic outlook 3. identifying role models 4. focusing on your  strengths 5. staying physically active

Other believers in positive psychology focus on reciting affirmations, as Al  Franken’s character Stuart  Smalley used to do on “Saturday Night Live” (“I’m good enough, I’m smart  enough, and doggone it, people like me”).

While positive psychology promises that we can make ourselves happy, a  competing theory contends that each of us is programmed with a default happiness  level that we always revert back to. Psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky  explains, “[w]e’re born with a genetically determined  happiness ‘set point,’ meaning that even though our happiness will seesaw  following pleasing or traumatic life events, it will inevitably shift back to a  natural level.”

Some studies suggest that genetics account for more than 50 percent of our  happiness levels. Psychologist Dr. Edward Diener “cites data showing that lottery winners are  no happier a year after their good fortune than they were before. And several  studies show that even people with spinal-cord injuries tend to rebound in  spirits.”

Even the things that most of us accept as keys to happiness don’t have much  effect on set points: “Studies of happiness in several  countries have found that money makes little difference to perceptions of  happiness, except among the very poor. Nor do education, marriage and a family….  Each factor may make a person a little happier, but it has a minor impact,  compared with the individual’s” genetic set point.

The two theories, positive psychology and genetic set point, aren’t mutually  exclusive. Tal Ben-Shahar believes that all his teaching about choices can  account for only about 40 percent of a person’s mood. Another 10 percent is  environment, and, as Professor Lyubomirsky agrees, 50 percent is  genetic.

Since there is no changing your genetics, you might as well focus on positive  psychology. One of the exercises positive psychologists recommend is keeping a  gratitude journal in which, every night, you record five things you are grateful  for. Thanksgiving is the perfect time to start.

Piper Hoffman | Care2

It is not the length of your experience that qualifies you – it’s the depth of it!

True success is not defined by external factors – it is defined from within. One major life lesson I have learned is that no one can define success for me. I must do it myself.

Regardless of what society, the media, family, friends, co-workers, or colleagues say, I am the one who has the final word. When I learned to own my identity and control my words, thoughts, actions, behaviors, attitude, and beliefs, I experienced a major life shift that was more powerful than anything I could ever imagine.

For many years, I was defined by others and validated by things. But when I released the hold external “things” had on my life, I learned why I am here. I was not born by accident. There is an assignment that belongs to me and only I can carry it out.

We are all born with assignments, and when we discover what it is, our entire life will shift, change, and re-arrange. Our mindset will no longer focus on superficial tangible things. Our attitude, outlook, perspective, and energy level will shift. We no longer have the victim mentality. We suddenly realize why all the painful life experiences happened in their sequential order. The puzzle pieces will begin to align and the image and vision for your life will become clear.

As you begin to see the vision, you will embrace it, embody it, and become it. As you become one with the vision, your wisdom will begin to align with your beliefs, thoughts, and actions. Then you will begin to go about your business of carrying out your own unique life assignment.

Living your purpose is the most powerful and successful accomplishment you could ever have. It gives your life meaning, fulfillment, joy, peace, and happiness that you cannot get from any external source. You shift from being self-conscious to self-confident. The light that shines within you will align with the universe, and everything you need will be supplied.

As obstacles enter your life, you will connect to your inner voice and receive the answers. You will never be alone. This is when you begin to know that success happens IN you before it happens TO you.

Once you’ve made this life-changing discovery, you can now help others along the critical life journey of self-discovery. This is a journey we must all travel alone. There will be mentors, coaches, visionaries, and luminaries along the way to inspire, motivate, and elevate. But the journey belongs to you.

As we continue on our journey, there will be naysayers, obstacles, and even failures. But failure isn’t final – it is feedback. You will strive to be better each day along your journey. Don’t allow fear to control you, because F.E.A.R is simply Failure Expected and Received.

Cathy Hill | Inspire Me Today

Impossible is just an opinion

If you have ever hit a wall of failure at top speed, you know the paralyzing feeling that takes place inside your body.

That paralyzing feeling stops you in your tracks, turns a great thing into your worst nightmare. If you have ever poured your heart and soul into something and somehow, someway, it failed, you know what it feels like.

This feeling of defeat can lead you down two roads. One is the road to nowhere, this road is the road that keeps you from getting out of bed in the morning, changes your beliefs about yourself, changes the beliefs you have about others, and sends you into a spiral of depression.

The second road is the road that leads you from a feeling of defeat to a feeling of triumph. This is the road less traveled, the road to understanding that you and you alone can overcome any failure. If you choose to!

This road is the hardest road to walk. It means being triumphant over your thoughts of total defeat. It means changing those crippling thoughts that always seem to pop into your head when you lie in bed at night, drive to work or have a quiet moment alone.

To overcome these feelings, we need to dig deeper than we have ever dug into our hearts and soul. We have to understand and believe that this defeat was for a reason, but what reason? Did you learn something in your journey? Did you meet interesting people? Did you become a stronger person? Or did you force feed yourself the needed knowledge on how to do it a different way?

Try to stay focused on what you learned in the process. If the journey to reaching a goal is the big prize, the greatest feeling, then the journey to failure should be looked at the same way, no? Any defeat you meet is simply temporary if you keep striving toward your success – whatever your definition of success is.

You’ve heard this before, I’m sure. Everyone has heard it from the likes of Edison, Earl Nightingale, and Steve Jobs, but knowing that successful people say it doesn’t stop that crippling feeling from hitting you like a train, does it? You think, “Well it’s easy for them to say.” Just remember, it is easy for them to say, but it was just as difficult for them to overcome the feelings as it will be for you.

It is not an easy thing to do but you NEED to do it or else you risk the chance that these feelings of failure will destroy your vision, purpose, and goals. Whatever it is that you are fighting for, the people you are trying to help need you to succeed so you can help them.

Believe in yourself, your dream, your vision, and most of all seize the WOO, that window of opportunity that only temporary defeat can bring. It’s called growth!

Dan Deigan | Inspire Me Today

Care less. Love more.

Nobody can make you a victim but you. I get a lot of emails about men “making” women crazy or women “making” men miserable. But nobody can “make” you a victim, any more than they can “make” you happy.

99.99999% of what people say and do has nothing to do with you. Even something as awful as cheating often has nothing to do with someone’s partner. People do what they do. You react how you react. Your heart is yours and you’re the only one who can make it feel anything.

Never apologize for your emotions, but don’t assume that just because you feel something that makes it true and right. We are crazy animals evolved from beasts. Just because you feel something doesn’t mean you have to act on it. Feel it. Let it hum through your veins. Passion is infectious. Anger is useful. Pain is meant to teach. Feel everything as intensely as you can. And then pull it all back and make the choice that will make you happy.

Love is a choice, attraction isn’t. You don’t have any more control over who you fall for than you do over gravity. But when the chemical craziness of that first attraction wears off (after days or months or years), you wake up every day, look at the person in your bed and choose to be in love with them.

You can choose not to love someone too. Don’t be a love victim. Too many folks stay with men and women who are awful for them because they “love” them or because they’re afraid of “failing”. You have to love yourself first and sometimes that means walking away. You get this one life to be happy. Don’t waste it.

“Soul Mates” aren’t found, they’re made. There’s no “The One,” there’s dozens… hundreds of men or women out there who would be perfect for you. Finding “the one” means finding someone wonderful and working together to create something extraordinary.

Great relationship are about forgiveness. Forgive yourself for being human. Forgive your partner for being human too. Neither of you is perfect and you wouldn’t like it if you were anyway. (What would a perfect person want with someone as imperfect as you?) We don’t change as we get older, we just become more who we really are. Accept that. Love the changes. Laugh about them.

What you love about your partner is often what drives you nuts about them too. My own girlfriend is laid back, lovely and incredibly chill to be around. She’s also late for almost everything and sees “deadlines” as “suggestions.” It’s the same thing and I love her for it every day.

Care less. Love more. There’s only so much room in your heart for causes and passions and even people. Pick a few. Love them with intensity. Let the rest take care of themselves.

Michael Fiore | Inspire Me Today

Ready to take these first steps?

Let’s start with your first job: learning. Your earliest learning is informal, becoming more structured when school begins. All of your learning, though, helps you to grow. The first step in living well is to do everything you can–formally, informally, and lifelong–to extract from all of this learning not just job training that makes you functional in a certain role, but an education.

Educate yourself to become a whole person. Learn to read, write, speak and understand at least your native language, and the language of the country in which you live, well. It’s your lifeline, your means of communication. Learn the cultural references that demonstrate your interest in the world around you.

Take a course in basic logic and learn to distinguish sense from nonsense; learn about the teachings of ancient and modern philosophers. Learn to think. Then take that learning out of the classroom and carry it with you wherever you go. Never use it to lord it over others, but never dumb yourself down for fear of not “fitting in” somewhere where you used to be.

Your second job is developing the ability to discriminate. Shocked? Don’t be! Anyone who can’t or won’t discern good from evil, truth from falsehood, quality from shoddiness, enduring values from politicized trends, and priorities from time-wasters will never even survive in this world, let alone achieve a life of joyfulness and abundance. All things and all ideas are not of equal value. Look deeply into what’s set before you. Don’t bother grabbing for the brass ring–go for the gold!

I’ve heard this quotation many times before, but have never known its source: “When life is too interesting to worry about how my face looks, that’s how I like it.” Like any woman, I care to some extent about what I wear and how my face looks.

Yet if I thought for a moment that these trappings, rather than what’s in my head and how I pursue my enthusiasms, were my image, I’d flee like a spooked deer and be off in search of a life that I considered to be real. So the last job I’m recommending to you is simply this: find your most important passions and pursue them full-tilt boogie. All of them.

Don’t put yourself on short rations in the enthusiasm department.

Don’t worry about how/whether your interests may be different from those of anyone around you.

Don’t be afraid that life is too short to explore all that attracts you. The longer you worry about this, the less of your life is left to you. The great Pablo Casals didn’t marry until he was in his sixties, and Grandma Moses didn’t start painting until she was in her eighties. There is world enough and time.

Ready to take that first step?

Sharon Chang | Inspire Me Today

The most privileged people who have ever lived on Earth

You, the young people of today, are the most privileged people who have ever lived on Earth. For the first time in history, one generation—your generation—holds the key to the greatest challenge humans have faced since they became conscious of themselves and the world. It’s the challenge of change: timely change.

The world your fathers and forefathers have created is no longer sustainable. This means that if it doesn’t change, it will break down. It cannot keep going as it is.

Financial crisis and climate change are just the most visible of the many untenable conditions in the world. Urban overcrowding, the breakdown of the health of vast populations, violence as a response to social injustice, and war waged to secure economic and political interests are additional threats on the horizon. Catastrophes resulting from commercially motivated reliance on inherently dangerous technologies are others.

We are seven billion humans on the planet. How many of us will survive the next twenty years? Or the next ten? And if some of us go under, how will the rest manage, given our interdependence and our ability to wipe out vast populations and entire ecosystems at the push of a button?

If the world continues its downhill slide, and if the mindset of the holders of power do not change in time, there will be a holocaust from which no one will emerge unscathed.

But why do you, the young people of today, hold the key to creating real change?

The answer to this question is straightforward. You were born at exactly the right time to catalyze change in the world, at the time when change is not only necessary, but is also feasible.

The powerful fear and resist change, and they do everything in their power to maintain the system that brought them to power. But they can no longer resist change effectively. The world—their world—is in crisis. And crisis, as the ancient Chinese knew, is both danger and opportunity.

The danger is breakdown, and that will surely happen if we do not change. But the opportunity is to change—to change before the breakdown.

In the transitory condition of a “worldshift” the old is in crisis and we can overcome the barriers that protect it. In today’s unstable conditions even seemingly minor and marginal movements can catalyze major change. This is the famous “butterfly effect,” the effect that always appears in conditions at the edge of chaos.

You can be the butterfly that brings in change. Flap your wings and create the tornado that wipes away the old and brings in the new.

You, the young people of the world, have an opportunity that no generation ever had before you. This is the opportunity to innovate: to create a world that can sustain seven billion and more in peace and wellbeing. Such a world is possible, but whether it will be our world depends on you—and nothing and nobody but you.

Dr. Ervin Laszlo | Inspire Me Today

Substance before style, always

Close your eyes and see your partner with your heart, soul and hands.

Follow your intuition.

Explore nature with your entire being. Forget about your sight for a few hours and use your other four senses.

Grant yourself the grace to simply be on your darkest days.

Realize that the only one you have control over is yourself and the only one you can help is yourself. You are not responsible for what other people think, say or do. They are walking their own path and you are walking yours.

Never lose your sense of humor. It may be the only thing you have left in a crisis.

Be gentle with your children. Speak kindly to them and reprimand them in a way that builds character.

Learn from your animals. Sometimes you need to just rub your head on the floor and put your tail in the air!

Say “I love you” every day and mean it. Hold tightly to your best friends.

Learn to see change as a positive force, something you can use for good.

When angry, learn to take five and return ready to talk calmly.

Speak without offending, listen without defending.

Share your opinions, but allow others to share theirs as well. Keep an open mind.

Love without reservation.

Learn from your past, but don’t hold it against your future.

Use your words so that you always retain your power.

No one can make you feel anything; you are allowing them to make you feel something.

Don’t be afraid to reach out to others and ask for help. Realize that when doing so, you are simply being human. You are not being weak.

Don’t use “work” to hide from yourself or isolate yourself from others.

Put away your cell phones during dinner, whether it’s at a fancy restaurant or McDonalds, please! Be present at all times, as much as you possibly can. Once this moment is gone, you can’t get it back, ever.

Don’t be afraid to cry, a full on wailing howling cry when necessary.

Inner beauty will always win out over outer beauty in the long run.

Never stop pushing yourself to grow.

Balance yourself evenly with work and play, whenever possible.

Learn how to truly accept compliments.

Feed your mind, nourish your soul, cherish your body, commune with your spirit.

Never give up on yourself; sometimes you may be your only supporter.

Michelle Medina | Inspire Me Today

Life is …

Life is a constant series of adjustments; it flows like a river, swelling with rain and receding with drought, with its banks reshaping in time. ~ Heather Reed

Thousands of years ago, the leaders of the Mayan culture created a deep-time calendar. We can only guess why they thought it so important. Perhaps our distant ancestors believed they could somehow control the future by mapping it.

Many have speculated whether or not this Mayan calendar points to the end of the world, as it appears to conclude with the date 12/21/12. Is it possible that this symmetric number, once so far into the distant future, represented a time after which the calendar’s creators saw no need to attempt any control over outcomes? They had to stop somewhere. Perhaps this date signified the infinite, a time so far away that actions would have no consequence – an infinity point where the need for answers would be moot.

The normal habit energy of the human mind is rarely aligned with the present moment. Our attention robotically drifts from analyzing the past to speculating about the future. How much of our life do we spend going along for the ride, reacting from past experience and anticipating the future? How often do we actually respond to what is right in front of us?

Here are a few questions to ponder:

Is there a date in the distant future after which you feel no need to anticipate outcomes? Is it related to your children’s or grandchildren’s life span? Is it some date far away, perhaps 100 or 200 years from now? This will be your “No Worries Number.”

Take some time to think about the worries, fears, joys, and concerns that dominate your life right now. Next, imagine how they might appear at the time of your “No Worries Number.”

Now here is the trick: Live your life right here and right now with these same thoughts and feelings, but instead of letting them drive you, gently notice when they grab the reins of your attention. Take time to stop and inhabit what is going on right now in your life.

Is there a way to enjoy your life more fully? Decrease anxiety? Can this new way of being impact others and help them to enjoy their lives and to ease their suffering?
The work of seeing things from a fresh perspective is vital if we are to live in a way that reflects the highest and best for our individual self and all of the people involved in our life. Presented with the dizzying array of possibilities from a mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, social, and environmental perspective, it is easy to lapse into planning or reacting mode.

But there is another way. There is a way to sustain balance while making conscious choices with the knowledge that we can never be totally in control of outcomes. A combination of self-knowledge and surrender can help us see that every moment offers us the chance to begin again.

Heather Reed | Inspire Me Today

Heather is the author of Sustainable Wellness: An Integrative Approach to Transform Your Mind, Body and Spirit.

Accepting ourselves is the first step of love

Love your cracks!
An elderly Chinese woman had two large pots, which each hung on the ends of a pole she carried across her neck. One of the pots had a crack in it while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water. At the end of the long walk from the stream to the house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.

The perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it could only do half of what it had been made to do.

After two years of what it perceived to be bitter failure, it spoke to the woman one day by the stream. “I am ashamed of myself, because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house.”

The old woman smiled. “Did you notice that there are flowers on your side of the path, but not on the other pot’s side? That’s because I have always known about your flaw, so I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back, you water them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the table. Without you being just the way you are, there would not be this beauty to grace the house.”

Like the cracked pot, I spent a lot of time trying to hide my flaws, change them or ignore them. This was very hard and in the end did not serve me or my environment.

Now I know that the only way to really allow our unique diamond to shine is to love it and accept it 100%. Love and accept ourselves 100%. Embrace every little flaw that we have. Speak to ourselves like we would speak to our dearest friend, or to our children. Ask ourselves what would make us happy and feel fulfilled.

While in an emergency case, on an airplane, it is crucial that we put on our own oxygen mask, before doing it for our child or the person who sits next to us. The same applies for ourselves. It is important that we first provide ourselves with the love we want to receive.

The meaning of loving ourselves is quite misunderstood. Selfishness and loving ourselves are two terms that are often confused. Loving ourselves starts from self-respect. It is important to respect our wants, needs and the moments we enjoy. It starts from us and within us. It is unnatural to expect other people’s respect and love when we don’t do it ourselves.

Most of us are wasting our lives, waiting to be loved by other people. But love comes the other way around. The first step is to love ourselves and only then, we are able to attract other people who have the ability to truly love us. Accepting ourselves is the first step of love. Only then do we allow ourselves to shine!

Jill Douka | Inspire Me Today