Forgiveness seems to be one of the hardest behaviors for us to practice. We refuse to forgive those who have hurt us in fear of being weak or unintelligent. True unconditional forgiveness doesn’t mean you’re less intelligent or weak. It simply means you have matured enough to realize people make mistakes, even if it’s on purpose.

When you choose to be unforgiving, you have given away all your power to the person who wronged you – which I’m sure isn’t your intention. If you truly want to live a life filled with peace, success, and happiness, then you must learn to forgive and let go.

Release all your hurts. Give them away. Give them to God. He can bear them. It’s time for you to let them go. It’s time for you to stop being weighed down in life. Step into your perfect peace which the world can’t penetrate. Your greatness is on the other side of unforgiveness. Why risk it all, the beauty, riches, happiness, and pure joy?

Failure is the precursor to success. If you change the way you view failures, mistakes, and mis-steps, your life will greatly change. A setback is nothing more than your set-up for greatness. Some of the most valuable lessons are learned through failures: failed marriages, businesses, and relationships. This is the time when you truly learn what you are made of. It’s when you discover your compelling reason to keep pushing.

Failure shouldn’t be shunned but embraced. You can’t win until you fail. Success comes from perseverance and the sheer determination to keep going in spite of. Don’t worry about yesterday’s failures. Sometimes you have to just learn the lesson, readjust your plan, and get back out there.

Giving of yourself is one of the keys to lasting happiness. Selflessness goes much farther than selfishness. A sincere giving heart is never weary but one that’s constantly taking is hurting. When you give of yourself to others, it inspires others to give of themselves to you. It’s one of the basic laws of humanity. It revives our soul and connects us to our Creator. It’s the heartbeat of life. To truly experience all that life has and can be, you must look past yourself.

Belief is the most powerful glue in existence. It doesn’t matter what is thrown your way, when you believe, there is nothing that can tear you away from your greatness. It’s that feeling that pushes you to fight when the world tells you it’s over. Without belief, life has no true purpose.

While you’re on your journey, remember: Embrace today! Release yesterday!

Senica Evans| Inspire Me Today

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

Achieving this balance is a tricky task—regardless of your circumstances. But  it becomes even more difficult if you’re responsible for taking care of an  ailing loved one.

How do you tell friends and family about mom’s declining health? Do you have  to adopt a false, ‘Positive Polly’ attitude for the sake of appearing  calm and in control? What do you say to family members who you feel have  abandoned you?

Make your own rules for the holiday

The first step: stop, take a deep breath, and decide whether or not you  really want to write a holiday letter.

Even if your yearly missive has been a fixture of the family festivities, you  shouldn’t feel as though you have to keep doing it just because it’s a  “tradition.”

“The holidays are a great time to stop and reflect on life,” says Cindy  Laverty, caregiver coach, radio talk show host, and author. “The year I chose  not to get caught up in all the hype, everything changed for me. I made the  rules.”

Make sure you’re writing your letter for the right reasons—to update family  and friends, to reminisce about the events of the past year, and to re-connect  with people you may have fallen out of touch with.

What story do you want to tell?

Before you put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), Laverty says you should  ask yourself one question: “What would I write about my life if this was the  last holiday that I would ever have with my loved one?”

Use this question as a starting off point to determine the purpose of the  letter, and do some brainstorming and outlining to clarify your topics and tone  before you begin writing.

Some letter writing dos and don’ts

Laverty offers a series of suggestions for how to appropriately address  sensitive caregiving topics in a holiday letter:

1. Do: discuss your  caregiving responsibilities. While it’s important to realize that you  are more than just a caregiver,  it’s equally as important to acknowledge the valuable role you play in  safeguarding your loved one’s health and wellbeing. As long as you feel  comfortable talking about the caregiving aspects of your life, don’t hesitate to  include them in your letter.

2. Don’t: engage in a gripe session. According to Laverty  it’s essential to avoid using a holiday letter to lash out at those who may have  been less than supportive of your caregiving. “This is not the time to try and  make people feel guilty for not being there for you,” she says. This doesn’t  mean you have to make caregiving sound like a breeze. Laverty offers the  following prompt to get you started: “As many of you know, I’ve been my ________  (fill in the blank) caregiver for the past ____ (fill in the blank) and it  hasn’t been easy. But the good news is that I’ve learned a lot about ______  (fill in the blank) and about myself. If you ever become a caregiver, I’ll be  able to help you out with some interesting insights. Truthfully, some days are  easy. Others are more difficult and some days, I’d rather forget.”

3. Do: talk about how your loved one is doing. Friends and  family—especially those who don’t communicate with you very often—will  appreciate being updated on how a loved one is faring.

4. Don’t: go into the gory details. Again, toeing the line  between being honest and sharing too much information can be challenging.  Because you are the one on the front lines, dealing with your loved one’s health  issue on a daily basis, it can be hard to take a step back and figure out what  to tell and what to leave out. Laverty suggests keeping things simple: “____  (fill in the blank) continues to struggle with his/her ______ (fill in the  blank) and that probably won’t change (if the condition is chronic). If you are  reading my letter and you know my ____ (fill in the blank), I can tell you that  he would love to hear from you.” If you want to give family and friends an  easy-to-understand update on your loved one’s overall condition (i.e. mood,  memory, eating, sleeping, finances, etc.), you may want to consider filling out  and including an AgingCare.com Care Report in your letter.

5. Do: Send your letter to family and friends. The main  thing to consider when figuring out whom to send your holiday letter to: Would  you enjoy reading a holiday letter from them? If the answer is yes, then they’d  probably be a good addition to your mailing list.

6. Don’t: include everyone. When it comes to holiday  updates, close friends and family members should make up the bulk of your  audience.

7. Do: reach out. One great thing about sending out a  holiday letter is that it can help you reconnect with people you may have fallen  out of touch with. It can also provide you with the perfect entrée to casually  ask for help or support. Laverty suggests sending a personal note along with  your letter to certain people, saying that you’d like to get together and catch  up over a cup of coffee.

8. Don’t: assign blame. While it may be tempting to do so, a  holiday letter is not the appropriate place to engage in a gripe session. If it  helps, you may want to go to an online forum or caregiver support group to vent  before sitting down to write your letter. As Laverty says, “If there is bad  blood between family members, a holiday letter is not the place to express  yourself.”

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

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

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

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

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 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

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