Breakthrough Love Quotes

Even the smallest changes in our daily routine can create incredible ripple effects that expand our vision of what is possible.

The danger of venturing into uncharted waters is not nearly as dangerous as staying on shore, waiting for your boat to come in.

Before I can become an expert on anything, I must first become an expert on me.

Love, affection, even attention are not things that need pursuit. If they are not given freely, openly, willingly to you by another person, then stop trying to obtain them from that person. Someone else will gladly share theirs with you.

I will not allow my mistakes of the past compromise my hope for the future.

Do you know where your breakthrough begins? Your breakthrough begins where your excuses ends.

Sometimes what seems so right turns out wrong and what seems so wrong turns out right. What do I call this phenomenon? Life.

A healthy attitude is contagious; let others catch it.

Maybe it's wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.

When we worry about someone we send them a secret message – I don’t believe in you. When we worry about our life, we send ourselves a secret message – I don’t believe in me.

It is how we nurture the good and deal with the bad that ultimately shapes our destiny.

We attract what we are prepared to receive.

Today I acknowledge that I am not in position to judge what mistakes anyone is making or what lessons anyone needs to learn. I don’t know how far someone has come or when that person will have a breakthrough, I simply don’t know what other people should be doing. But when I think I do know, I clearly am not doing what I should be doing, which is taking responsibility for my own life.

Father God, we thank you for your grace and your mercy, for allowing us to be together under your covenant and God we thank you for the revelations and for the breakthroughs; for your direction and for your healing. We thank you God for the opportunity to just be a vessel for your kingdom. God we trust you, we love you, we honor you, and all glory is yours. Amen

Eliminate blame, guilt, and worry from your diet and watch your health improve.

By nature, your soul is soft, gentle, loving and kind. It is forgiving, peaceful, and humble. Confident and comforting in times of despair, your soul is strong, focused, and determined in the mission called life.

I am chic, sleek, and so unique.

Action, not philosophy will get you going. Pick yourself up and move forward. That is the only way you can still enjoy life while you are blessed to be living it.

Giving without expectation leads to receiving without limitation.

There is no breakthrough without breakage"--Love's Body

Patience is the glue that binds hard work and faith.

Making a decision based on fear is like painting a self-portrait of someone else.

Your blessings, your trials and triumphs, your journey of falling and rising, your gifts and talents—they are all connected. Your true calling is held in the arms of your deepest wounds. God only breaks you to remake you, because breakdowns come before breakthroughs. Everything that God has written into your path was meant to prepare you for this exact moment. God wants you to come as you are, not as you think you should be.

Being a good father to our children requires a few goals: 1. Be an example of personal responsibility 2. Display self-respect 3. Be an example of personal growth, passion, and perseverance 4. Recognize and accept your child’s particular gifts and nurture them, not wish they had others 5. Love and respect your wife

Respecting the opinions and beliefs of another, even if they differ from yours, is a genuine sign of love.

Don’t take for granted the effort of a person who tries to keep in touch. It’s not always that someone cares so much.

Fall in love with someone’s spirit and character, first, and watch how attractive they become.

By the time we grow up we become masters at dissimulation, at cultivating a self that the world cannot probe. But we pay a price. After years of turning people away, of protecting our inner self, of cultivating it by living in a different world, of furnishing this world with our fantasies and dreams—lo and behold we find that we are hopelessly separated from everyone else. We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority—it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are—only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional break-through only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself. We emit huge globs of love to our parents and spouses, and the glob slithers away in exchange of words that are somehow beside the point of what we are trying to say. People seem to keep bumping up against each other with their exteriors and falling away from each other. The cartoonist Jules Feiffer is the modern master of this aspect of the human tragedy. Take even the sexual act—the most intimate merger given to organisms. For most people, even for their entire lives, it is simply a joining of exteriors. The insides melt only in the moment of orgasm, but even this is brief, and a melting is not a communication. It is a physical overcoming of separateness, not a symbolic revelation and justification of one’s interior. many people pursue sex precisely because it is a mystique of the overcoming of the separateness of the inner world, and they go from one partner to another because they can never quite achieve “it." So the endless interrogations: “What are you thinking about right now—me? Do you feel what I feel? Do you love me?

oh this is how it starts lightning strikes your heart, and it goes off like a gun, brighter than the sun....

Struggle is rooted in fear. Fear is the absence of knowledge. Breakthrough is rooted in love and grounded in the Truth.

Take time to feed your soul, compliment yourself, pamper yourself, smile at yourself, think positive thoughts and speak life. Watch how you talk to yourself – because you are listening.

If you ask me I think the greatest breakthrough each and everyone of us need is not on finance, marriage, work, relationship, own house, car but self. The first breakthrough should start from being selfish.

Sometimes, we expect life to work a certain way and when it doesn’t we blame others or see it as a sign, rather than face the pain of the choices we should or shouldn’t have made. Real healing won’t begin until we stop saying, “God prevented this or that.” Often in our attempt to protect ourselves from pain, we leave things to fate and don’t take chances. Or, we don’t work hard enough to keep the blessings we are given. Maybe, we didn't recognize a blessing, until it was too late. Often, it is the lies we tell ourselves that keeps us stuck in a delusion of not being responsible for our lives. We leave it all up to God. The truth is we are not leaves blowing toward our destiny without any control. To believe this is to take away our freedom of choice and that of others. The final stage of grief is acceptance. This can’t be reached through always believing God willed the outcomes in our lives, despite our inaction or actions. To think so is to take the easy escape from our accountability. Sometimes, God has nothing to do with it. Sometimes, we just screwed up and guarded our heart from accepting it, by putting our outcome on God as the reason it turned out the way it did. Faith is a beautiful thing, but without work we can give into a mysticism of destiny that really doesn't teach us lessons or consequences for our actions. Life then becomes a distorted delusion of no accountability with God always to blame for battles we walked away from, won or loss.

At times you’ve no one around to be blamed for all the shit you have to go through in life. It’s not always the mistake of the people of the world that you were not granted something you wished so bad to have. It’s just not written for you. It’s not as easy to feel as it sounds to hear this fact from your loved ones who’re trying to console you or read anywhere on a paper, unless and until you’re in those circumstances experiencing the thing you loved the most taken away from your hands. Every second feels like torture that you’ve never heard, never encountered, or experienced before.

love always desires to bless the object of its affection.

Opening the door to self-respect is a key of happiness.

The greatest courage is to allow the real you to show, with all your strengths, weaknesses, and love.

A lot of people pray for power, house, financial breakthrough, wealth etc. But only few ask God for wisdom. There are so many great power pack man and women of God who lack wisdom.

If you’re not there for yourself, how can you be there for others?

Loyalty strengthens love – be loyal to your lover, be loyal to your work, be loyal to yourself.

The creative process is lost in a toxic environment. The risk of staying is too great because in it you may never reach your full destiny.

Somewhere someone else’s break-through is hinging on you simply knowing that you matter. So please, remind yourself of this truth every single day.

All the breakthroughs and miracles you need are in people

God is in people. Miracles and blessings happen through people

Some minds, once cracked open, are lost forever, their prisons immune to breakthrough. But if there's a chance, that's how you bring your darlin' back to you from the inside the panic room in her head. With things she loved.

When clients relinquish symptoms, succeed in achieving a personal goal, or make healthier choices for themselves, subsequently many will feel anxious, guilty, or depressed. That is, when clients make progress in treatment and get better, new therapists understandably are excited. But sometimes they will also be dismayed as they watch the client sabotage her success by gaining back unwanted weight or missing the next session after an important breakthrough and deep sharing with the therapist. Thus, loyalty and allegiance to symptoms—maladaptive behaviors originally developed to manage the “bad” or painfully frustrating aspects of parents—are not maladaptive to insecurely attached children. Such loyalty preserves “object ties,” or the connection to the “good” or loving aspects of the parent. Attachment fears of being left alone, helpless, or unwanted can be activated if clients disengage from the symptoms that represent these internalized “bad” objects (for example, if the client resolves an eating disorder or terminates a problematic relationship with a controlling/jealous partner). The goal of the interpersonal process approach is to help clients modify these early maladaptive schemas or internal working models by providing them with experiential or in vivo re-learning (that is, a “corrective emotional experience”). Through this real-life experience with the therapist, clients learn that, at least sometimes, some relationships can be different and do not have to follow the same familiar but problematic lines they have come to expect.

Experiencing empathy, the freedom to explore, trust, and insight can reset your default reactions to a more curious, tolerant, and confident stance. Because our brains are plastic, consistently positive experiences do stimulate existing neurons to adapt and connect in different pathways. Nurturing relationships help us grow psychologically and neurally in ways that are not possible in nonnurturing relationships. As adults, our most important opportunity for a nurturing relationship comes through committed partnership. It’s a breakthrough to realize that the purpose of committed relationship is not to be happy, but to heal. And then you will be happy!

In hindsight, these observations are obvious. If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. But it’s not commonplace; it’s instead quite rare. This rareness, we now understand, is because these breakthroughs require that you first get to the cutting edge, and this is hard—the type of hardness that most of us try to avoid in our working lives. The

Many fathers who don’t have daily hands-on contact may fail to form the strong daddy brain circuits required for parent-child synchrony. The environment for eventually establishing such a close interaction may start before birth. During the last months of my pregnancy, my son’s father would play a tapping game with him. His dad would tap tap tap on my belly, and he’d tap tap tap back—kicking seemingly with the same rhythm. The father-son relationship had begun.

Scientific breakthroughs, as we just learned, require that you first get to the cutting edge of your field. Only then can you see the adjacent possible beyond, the space where innovative ideas are almost always discovered. Here’s the leap I made as I pondered Pardis Sabeti around the same time I was pondering Johnson’s theory of innovation: A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough—it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field. If you want to identify a mission for your working life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge—the only place where these missions become visible.

It is not the amount of friends that is important, but the amount of integrity, sincerity, and love in your friends

This year life may not go exactly as planned. But that’s okay; I love surprises.

Often, under the layers of our maturity is a child’s insecurity screaming for love and attention.

The language of love is unspoken. It is a feeling, an acknowledgment, and acceptance of not only our human frailties, but our divine eminence.

The principle component in any genuine friendship is compassion, not competition.

Love is growth, love is compassion, love is evolution, love is a lesson, love is allowing, love is granting life to be. I was in love, with all there was to be.

Breakdowns can create breakthroughs. Things fall apart so things can fall together.

Before you save the world, make sure your own house is in order.

Would we love the warm sunny days as much, if it were not for the cold rainy ones?

Peace and love start at home - peace f mind and love of yourself.

An unloved child will become an adult who will do anything to seek love and attention. Simple advice: love your children.

To see God as primarily loving, a person must embrace a liberal interpretation of the Bible, ignoring or rejecting the vindictive passages.

The arm of the flesh can never save us, but humility and dependance on a loving God can. When we become dependant upon God, and submissive to him as being the only one who can lift us up, then we are heading for a real spiritual breakthrough. Such a breakthrough will be like something, which we have never experienced before. And then everything in our lives will start to change.

I had to be self-sufficient, contented, and balanced before I could attract someone who had the same qualities. This was a key breakthrough: whatever you want in a relationship has to first be in you.

God always prepares you and gives you the signs when your breakthrough is about to show up on your doorstep: 1 The increase of compassion that leads you to a radical giving. 2 The heart of repentance that leads you to the heart of forgiveness. 3 The outpouring love that leads you to understanding and respect of humanity. 4 The overwhelming peace that leads you to calmness in the midst of the shakey grounds.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” —VIKTOR FRANKL, author, neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor

God will gracefully respond. When divine consciousness enters, the shift occurs and you will be engulfed by what will feel like the greatest love imaginable—a love in which your soul realigns with your spirit and they meet together as one.

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Sometimes things will not go as planned, but don't lose hope. Stay focused on whatever you are trying to accomplish. There will be a breakthrough soon. Understand that all things take time. You may not be there yet, but you're on the right path towards success.

Real shadow work does not leave us intact; it is not some neat and tidy process, but rather an inherently messy one, as vital and unpredictably alive as birth. The ass it kicks is the one upon which we are sitting; the pain it brings up is the pain we’ve been fleeing most of our life; the psychoemotional breakdowns it catalyzes are the precursors to hugely relevant breakthroughs; the doors it opens are doors that have shown up year after year in our dreams, awaiting our entry. Real shadow work not only breaks us down, but breaks us open.

By speaking the truth, we learn the difference between our authentic self and our facade. If we put our little masked self out there, the horror is that other people might accept and end up making love to it, while we starve and die of neglect behind it. It’s much richer to interact genuinely with the world. When you speak the truth, it feeds and brightens your Spirit. When you don’t, it dims your Spirit. Don’t you want to live in a way that brightens your Spirit? To take a deep breath and feel what’s rocketing and roiling around in your core? What a delight!

No one really just wakes up one day and decides to love themselves. It’s also rare for someone to be taught how to have self-love (unless you have a very self-aware parent, guardian or teacher in your youth). The choice is usually only made right after a significant moment. This is the moment I call the “Breakdown to Breakthrough.” There are typically tears, yelling, screaming (probably mostly to the air, or God, or the Universe—whatever you like to call it), or sometimes it can be a very deep and serious, “I’ve had enough, I can no longer live like this” moment.

A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough—it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field. If you want to identify a mission for your working life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge—the only place where these missions become visible. This

At long last I came to the breakthrough point, the surrender. I realized that her life, and my fury, were truly over. She was gone, and if I really loved her, I owed it to her to ensure that her passing would bear spiritual fruit in my life. For that to happen, I would have to let go. The relief was profound. There was nothing left to do.

I believe in a higher power, and I don’t think She’d want us to accept mediocrity. I don’t mean that everyone needs to dream of space, or scientific breakthroughs, or changing the whole world. Just that everyone should do what they love and do it as best they can. Whether you’re surfing, teaching, or collecting trash—and want to be—hold your head high and kick ass.

We come into contact with people only with our exteriors—physically and externally; yet each of us walks about with a great wealth of interior life, a private and secret self. We are, in reality, somewhat split in two, the self and the body; the one hidden, the other open. The child learns very quickly to cultivate this private self because it puts a barrier between him and the demands of the world. He learns he can keep secrets—at first an excruciating, intolerable burden: it seems that the outer world has every right to penetrate into his self and that the parents could automatically do so if they wished—they always seem to know just what he is thinking and feeling. But then he discovers that he can lie and not be found out: it is a great and liberating moment, this anxious first lie—it represents the staking out of his claim to an integral inner self, free from the prying eyes of the world. By the time we grow up we become masters at dissimulation, at cultivating a self that the world cannot probe. But we pay a price. After years of turning people away, of protecting our inner self, of cultivating it by living in a different world, of furnishing this world with our fantasies and dreams—we find that we are hopelessly separated from everyone else. We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority—it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are—only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional breakthrough only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself. We emit huge globs of love to our parents and spouses, and the glob slithers away in exchanges of words that are somehow beside the point of what we are trying to say. People seem to keep bumping up against each other with their exteriors and falling away from each other. The cartoonist Jules Feiffer is the modern master of this aspect of the human tragedy. Take even the sexual act—the most intimate merger given to organisms. For most people, even for their entire lives, it is simply a joining of exteriors. The insides melt only in the moment of orgasm, but even this is brief, and a melting is not a communication. It is a physical overcoming of separateness, not a symbolic revelation and justification of one’s interior. Many people pursue sex precisely because it is a mystique of the overcoming of the separateness of the inner world; and they go from one partner to another because they can never quite achieve “it.” So the endless interrogations: “What are you thinking about right now—me? Do you feel what I feel? Do you love me?

There is always a storm before a calm. There is always a darkness before daylight. There is always turbulence before quietness. There is always sacrifices before a great victory. There is always awaiting before a breakthrough. There is always prayer before an answer. There is always pain before joy. There is always failure before success. There is always pregnancy before the birth of new born baby.

Confess your sins to one another” (James 5:16). Those who remain alone with their evil are left utterly alone. It is possible that Christians may remain lonely in spite of daily worship together, prayer together, and all their community through service—that the final breakthrough to community does not occur precisely because they enjoy community with one another as pious believers, but not with one another as those lacking piety, as sinners. For the pious community permits no one to be a sinner. Hence all have to conceal their sins from themselves and from the community. We are not allowed to be sinners. Many Christians would be unimaginably horrified if a real sinner were suddenly to turn up among the pious. So we remain alone with our sin, trapped in lies and hypocrisy, for we are in fact sinners. However, the grace of the gospel, which is so hard for the pious to comprehend, confronts us with the truth. It says to us, you are a sinner, a great, unholy sinner. Now come, as the sinner that you are, to your God who loves you. For God wants you as you are, not desiring anything from you—a sacrifice, a good deed—but rather desiring you alone. “My child, give me your heart” (Prov. 23:26). God has come to you to make the sinner blessed. Rejoice! This message is liberation through truth. You cannot hide from God. The mask you wear in the presence of other people won’t get you anywhere in the presence of God. God wants to see you as you are, wants to be gracious to you. You do not have to go on lying to yourself and to other Christians as if you were without sin. You are allowed to be a sinner. Thank God for that; God loves the sinner but hates the sin.

Metaphorically, in relation to the idea of heartbreak, we’re given lemons which are the experiences that cause the idea of heartbreak, then the water comes from our tears that may come during the seasons of our trials and finally the sweetener comes from the joy of the breakthrough and transformation, and in the end you end up with this metaphoric lemonade. When we have a better understanding of heartbreak we go from lemons to lemonade.

What is my goal, what is my task, what is my path through life? Must be this trail I thread upon, bringing hope to strife ... I was born with memory of the future world, the one of love and reverie, the one that once got sold ... I cried and shrieked, a little girl, when losing sight of you, disbelief at desert land that I was to walk through. Rivers, they again will flow, skies just open roads, hearts of men again will glow, light-immersed abodes.

Isabel had seen it happen to geniuses at her own high school, at Yale, and at NASA. Their talent for problem-solving brought them attention, and to some, that felt like love. So they threw themselves into their careers, leading more and more solitary lives, and taking on bigger and bigger professional challenges until--on the other side of that breakthrough--there was no one waiting for them to come back home. The love they had poured into their work, expecting it to boomerang back, never came back.

In ways both small and overwhelming, we all know what brokenness feels like. And sometimes our own brokenness—or the brokenness of those we love—seems like too much to bear. Whether it's buying more than we can afford or striking out in anger at the people we love or eating more than we want to or pushing people away when we need them most, we all have places where brokenness is painfully apparent in our own hearts. We all have parts of our lives where we are waiting for things to change. Whether we're waiting for physical healing or emotional wholeness or spiritual breakthrough, we are all waiting for our brokenness to be mended. We wait because we are broken, and we are broken because we are waiting.

healthy deep limbic pathways. Then a bond or connectedness between the parents and the baby can begin to grow. Without love and affection, the baby does not develop appropriate deep limbic connectedness and thus never learns to trust or connect. He feels lonely and insecure, and becomes irritable and unresponsive. Touch is critical to life itself. In a barbaric thirteenth-century experiment, German Emperor Frederick II wanted to know what language and words children would speak if they were raised without hearing any words at all. He took a number of infants from their homes and put them with people who fed them but had strict instructions not to touch, cuddle, or talk to them. The babies never spoke a word. They all died before they could speak. Even though the language experiment was a failure, it resulted in an important discovery: Touch is essential to life. Salimbene, a historian of the time, wrote of the experiment in 1248, “They could not live without

I’ve something to show you in here,” he murmurs and opens the door. The harsh light of the fluorescents illuminates the impressive motor launch in the dock, bobbing gently on the dark water. There’s a row boat beside it. “Come.” Christian takes my hand and leads me up the wooden stairs. Opening the door at the top, he steps aside to let me in. My mouth drops to the floor. The attic is unrecognizable. The room is filled with flowers... there are flowers everywhere. Someone has created a magical bower of beautiful wild meadow flowers mixed with glowing fairy lights and miniature lanterns that glow soft and pale round the room. My face whips round to meet his, and he’s gazing at me, his expression unreadable. He shrugs. “You wanted hearts and flowers,” he murmurs. I blink at him, not quite believing what I’m seeing. “You have my heart.” And he waves toward the room. “And here are the flowers,” I whisper, completing his sentence. “Christian, it’s lovely.” I can’t think of what else to say. My heart is in my mouth as tears prick my eyes.

Everybody needs a place where they feel protected, secure, and welcome. Everybody yearns for a place where they can relax and be fully themselves. Ideally, the childhood home was one such place. For those of us who felt accepted and loved by our parents, our home provided this warmth. It was a heartwarming place—the very thing that everybody yearns for. And we internalize this feeling from childhood—that of being accepted and welcome—as a fundamental, positive attitude toward life that accompanies us through adulthood: we feel secure in the world and in our own life. We’re self-confident and trusting of others. There’s the notion of basic trust, which is like a home within ourselves, providing us with internal support and protection. Many people, however, associate their childhood with largely negative experiences, some even traumatic. Others had an unhappy childhood, but have repressed those memories. They can barely recall what happened. Then there are those who believe their childhood was “normal” or even “happy,” only to discover, upon closer examination, that they have been deluding themselves. And though people may attempt to repress or, as an adult, downplay childhood experiences of insecurity or rejection, there are moments in everyday life that will reveal how underdeveloped their basic trust remains. They have self-esteem issues and frequently doubt that they are welcome and that their coworkers, romantic partner, boss, or new friend truly likes them. They don’t really like themselves all that much, they have a range of insecurities, and they often struggle in relationships. Unable to develop basic trust, they therefore lack a sense of internal support. Instead, they hope that others will provide them with these feelings of security, protection, stability, and home. They search for home with their partner, their colleagues, in their softball league, or online, only to be disappointed: other people can provide this feeling of home sporadically at best. Those who lack a home on the inside will never find one on the outside. They can’t tell that they’re caught in a trap.

The final examination came and my mother came down to watch it. She hated watching me fight. (Unlike my school friends, who took a weird pleasure in the fights--and more and more so as I got better.) But Mum had a bad habit. Instead of standing on the balcony overlooking the gymnasium where the martial arts grading and fights took place, she would lie down on the ground--among everyone else vying to get a good view. Now don’t ask me why. She will say it is because she couldn’t bear to watch me get hurt. But I could never figure out why she just couldn’t stay outside if that was her reasoning. I have, though, learned that there is never much logic to my wonderful mother, but at heart there is great love and concern, and that has always shone through with Mum. Anyway, it was the big day. I had performed all the routines and katas and it was now time for the kumite, or fighting part of the black-belt grading. The European grandmaster Sensei Enoeda had come down to adjudicate. I was both excited and terrified--again. The fight started. My opponent (a rugby ace from a nearby college), and I traded punches, blocks, and kicks, but there was no real breakthrough. Suddenly I found myself being backed into a corner, and out of instinct (or desperation), I dropped low, spun around, and caught my opponent square round the head with a spinning back fist. Down he went. Now this was not good news for me. It was bad form and showed a lack of control. On top of that, you simply weren’t meant to deck your opponent. The idea was to win with the use of semicontact strikes, delivered with speed and technique that hit but didn’t injure your opponent. So I winced, apologized, and then helped the guy up. I then looked over to Sensei Enoeda, expecting a disapproving scowl, but instead was met with a look of delight. The sort of look that a kid gives when handed an unexpected present. I guess that the fighter in him loved it, and on that note I passed and was given my black belt. I had never felt so proud as I did finally wearing that belt after having crawled my way up the rungs of yellow, green, orange, purple, brown--you name it--colored belts. I had done this on my own and the hard way; you can’t buy your way to a black belt. I remember being told by our instructor that martial arts is not about the belts, it is about the spirit; and I agree…but I still couldn’t help sleeping with my black belt on that first night. Oh, and the bullying stopped.

Think about it,” Obama said to us on the flight over. “The Republican Party is the only major party in the world that doesn’t even acknowledge that climate change is happening.” He was leaning over the seats where Susan and I sat. We chuckled. “Even the National Front believes in climate change,” I said, referring to the far-right party in France. “No, think about it,” he said. “That’s where it all began. Once you convince yourself that something like that isn’t true, then…” His voice trailed off, and he walked out of the room. For six years, Obama had been working to build what would become the Paris agreement, piece by piece. Because Congress wouldn’t act, he had to promote clean energy, and regulate fuel efficiency and emissions through executive action. With dozens of other nations, he made climate change an issue in our bilateral relationship, helping design their commitments. At international conferences, U.S. diplomats filled in the details of a framework. Since the breakthrough with China, and throughout 2015, things had been falling into place. When we got to Paris, the main holdout was India. We were scheduled to meet with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. Obama and a group of us waited outside the meeting room, when the Indian delegation showed up in advance of Modi. By all accounts, the Indian negotiators had been the most difficult. Obama asked to talk to them, and for the next twenty minutes, he stood in a hallway having an animated argument with two Indian men. I stood off to the side, glancing at my BlackBerry, while he went on about solar power. One guy from our climate team came over to me. “I can’t believe he’s doing this,” he whispered. “These guys are impossible.” “Are you kidding?” I said. “It’s an argument about science. He loves this.” Modi came around the corner with a look of concern on his face, wondering what his negotiators were arguing with Obama about. We moved into the meeting room, and a dynamic became clear. Modi’s team, which represented the institutional perspective of the Indian government, did not want to do what is necessary to reach an agreement. Modi, who had ambitions to be a transformative leader of India, and a person of global stature, was torn. This is one reason why we had done the deal with China; if India was alone, it was going to be hard for Modi to stay out. For nearly an hour, Modi kept underscoring the fact that he had three hundred million people with no electricity, and coal was the cheapest way to grow the Indian economy; he cared about the environment, but he had to worry about a lot of people mired in poverty. Obama went through arguments about a solar initiative we were building, the market shifts that would lower the price of clean energy. But he still hadn’t addressed a lingering sense of unfairness, the fact that nations like the United States had developed with coal, and were now demanding that India avoid doing the same thing. “Look,” Obama finally said, “I get that it’s unfair. I’m African American.” Modi smiled knowingly and looked down at his hands. He looked genuinely pained. “I know what it’s like to be in a system that’s unfair,” he went on. “I know what it’s like to start behind and to be asked to do more, to act like the injustice didn’t happen. But I can’t let that shape my choices, and neither should you.” I’d never heard him talk to another leader in quite that way. Modi seemed to appreciate it. He looked up and nodded.

I admit there are some beliefs upon which I do pass judgment and this is one of them: any belief that calls for the enslavement, maiming, or killing of another is corrupt, primitive, and never divinely inspired.

How would you like a friend or loved one talking to you only when they needed something? That’s kind of how most of use prayer or meditation. Since there is ALWAYS something for which to be grateful, how about praying or meditating on that?

How would you like a friend or loved one talking to you only when they needed something? That’s kind of how most use prayer or meditation. Since there is ALWAYS something for which to be grateful, how about praying or meditating on that?

Practice the Three Breakthrough Actions: • Let go of your non-love feelings. • Hold in mind what you want. • Be positive and loving in spite of whatever happens.

I’m going to guess that in our seventeen years together, Joe and I have eaten an average of at least one meal out a week—plus at least one or two weeks a year when we are on vacation and we get to enjoy twenty-one restaurant meals. Using this rough calculation, I have heard my husband utter that exact line approximately one thousand four hundred times. If I didn’t madly love the man, or I had years of bitter resentment born of unmet needs and unheard desires festering in me, I can see where this might make me want to stick something sharp into his eye socket and twist it around a few dozen times for good measure. But I do and I don’t, respectively, so his attempted joke is actually endearing. It’s one of his things that I’d miss tragically if it went away. It would be that “Yeah, I hated it” line—not his dashing good looks or prowess with power tools or skills on the basketball court or anything else the rest of the world can plainly see—that I’d get most choked up on if I were delivering his eulogy today. There was a breakthrough, pivotal scene in the epically good movie Good Will Hunting, where Robin Williams plays a therapist reminiscing about his dead wife with his patient (Matt Damon). “She used to fart in her sleep,” Williams tells the clueless Damon character during an otherwise unproductive therapy session. “One night it was so loud it woke the dog up . . . She’s been dead two years, and that’s the shit I remember . . . little things like that, those are the things I miss the most. Those little idiosyncrasies that only I knew about; that’s what made her my wife. People call these things imperfections, but they’re not. No, that’s the good stuff.” That.

Love may begin with an admiration of one’s outer beauty, but it is the inner beauty, alone, that strengthens it, grows it, and makes it last.

Love knows not from where you came, what religion you are, or even your name. Discover it and you will be whole, for when you do you have found your soul.

Anywhere we enslave fear, love will run free.

DL PRESCRIPTION 6: RECOGNIZE THE IMPORTANCE OF PHYSICAL CONTACT The deep limbic system not only is involved in emotional bonding, it is also involved in physical bonding. Actual physical touching is essential to good health. It would probably surprise some people to know that there are couples who can go for ten years and longer without touching each other. I have seen them in my practice, and they invariably show such deep limbic system problems as irritability and depression. It is only after I help them correct their nontouching behavior that their depressive symptoms improve. Physical connection is also a critical element in the parent-infant bonding process. The caressing, kissing, sweet words, and eye contact from the mother and father give the baby the pleasure, love, trust, and security it needs to develop

petting.” This powerful finding has been rediscovered over and over, most recently in the early 1990s in Romania, where thousands of warehoused infants went without touch for sometimes years at a time. PET studies (similar to SPECT studies) of a number of these deprived infants have shown marked overall decreased activity across the whole brain. Bonding is a two-way street. A naturally unresponsive baby may inadvertently receive less love from its parents. The mother and father, misreading their baby’s naturally reserved behavior, may feel hurt and rejected and therefore less encouraged to lavish care and affection on their child. A classic example of this problem is illustrated by autistic children. Psychiatrists used to label the mothers of autistic children “cold” they believed the mother’s lack of responsiveness caused the autism. In recent times, however, it has been shown in numerous research studies that autism is biological and preceded any

relationship. The mothers of autistic children in their studies started out warm, but actually became more reserved when they did not get positive feedback from their children. The kind of love that is critical to making the parent-infant bond work is reciprocal.

You don’t need permission to empower people. You don’t need permission to bless. That is your soul extending its love and joy by including others in its well being. To wish well for another is an act of an enlightened soul. Remember your spirit. Bless and rejoice at every opportunity,

I am fortunate for the blessings I will receive today. I am looking forward to the opportunities that will come to me, today. I am grateful for the people I am about to meet who will help me forge a path of security, abundance, and love.