“Resentment or grudges do no harm to the person against whom you hold these feelings but every day and every night of your life, they are eating at you.”
— Norman Vincent Peale

I was asked the other day, what is the one thing that I would rank as the most important thing for personal growth. Easily and instinctively I said, “Forgiveness”.

When I look at the world, when I talk to my friends and neighbors, the majority of the time I can hear situations where grudges, resentment, anger, and even hatred rule their lives more than they even realize.

Some ask, why should you forgive if someone has deliberately harmed you? Take a look at what non-forgiveness does to your life and you won’t need to ask. I have a friend who says there is barely a minute of the day that goes by where he isn’t thinking about how much he was hurt. Then there are the sleepless nights and nightmares that haunt as well.

Why put yourself through that? Aren’t you worth more than that? How much more would you be able to accomplish if you could free your mind of those negative, resentful thoughts. How much better you would feel if you could get a good night’s sleep.

Therefore, forgiveness is really simply an act of self-love.

“You get what you think about, whether you want it or not.”
— Esther and Jerry Hicks, Ask and It Is Given

There is a device at the base of your brain called a reticular activating device whose job it is to filter out information that we have concluded is not important and assists you in noticing the things that you have decided are important. Another way to see it is that it works in conjunction with your belief system.

For example, if you have decided that the world is full of mean people, you will primarily notice all the mean people in the world. If however, you have made it a belief that the world is full of love and miracles, you will notice more love and miracles than someone who believes otherwise.

This is also the Law of Attraction in work. Because you get what you think about, even if it is a negative thought (mean people) you will actually attract (and notice) more mean people in your life.

So do this experiment: Focus only on the things that make you feel good. Take an important relationship in your life that may not be as optimal as you would like it to be and focus only on the positive aspects of that person for one week. You will notice their behavior will actually change positively as well.

“Do not protect yourself by a fence, but rather by your friends.”
— Czech Proverb

I know some people who have been hurt, emotionally, by people they thought loved them. And understandably they are now cautious of trusting again, loving again. So they put up their protection shields to keep people out. That way they won’t get hurt again, right?

But what are they keeping out? Perhaps they won’t get hurt by others, but the life they are now creating seems to be hurting their chances for joy, their chances for feeling love again. As much as we all would prefer to live without hurt, keeping everyone out for fear of them hurting us again will also keep out all who would love us again.

Instead of surrounding yourself with a fence of mistrust and fear, surround yourself with a circle of supportive and loving friends. Allow yourself to attract those that would love you by loving others first.

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity…. It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.”
— Melodie Beattie

Wow! The power of gratitude. Here’s a fun way to remember to be grateful everyday and to unleash this power for your life: Make a nice box, decorate it as you wish, or just buy one that you really like. Write little notes about all the things you are grateful for in your life and put them in this beautiful box. Now, everyday — you pick a time that works best for you — pull them out and think about each and every one of them with love and gratitude. Really feel each one.

Once you get the hang of doing it for the things in your life that you already have, throw in some things that you want to have in your life and feel the same feelings of gratitude. See what happens.

“The Law of Belief states that whatever you believe with emotion becomes your reality.”
— Brian Tracy

Your beliefs control your realities. You can see that a person acts in a manner consistent with their inner beliefs and convictions. You can understand what you or anyone else believes by looking at what they do. It is not what a person says, or hopes, or writes, or wishes that is a clear indication of his beliefs; it is only their actions.

There are things you can do immediately to use this law for your benefit. Create in yourself the beliefs you most desire — the beliefs that serve you the best. Meaning, if you want to be healthy — act healthy, talk about how healthy you are, think how wonderful it is to be healthy, and most importantly FEEL the feelings of being healthy.

Your behavior will build your belief system and will become your reality. This works with anything and everything you most desire — relationships, money, careers. You name it, believe it, act on it, and FEEL it.

“Know what you want to do, hold the thought firmly, and do every day what should be done, and every sunset will see you that much nearer to your goal.”
— Elbert Hubbard

It may seem like a simple question, “What do you want?”, but have you really sat down and figured out exactly what you want for your life? Sometimes when this question is asked, I hear a lot of what people don’t want: “I don’t want to be in debt, I don’t want to have a cheating spouse, I don’t want an apartment with cockroaches, I don’t want a lousy job, I don’t want to be fat, I don’t want to be shy”, etc.

But that doesn’t tell me what you want! If you don’t know what you want, how are you supposed to know how to get it? You want to be wealthy, you want a faithful spouse, you want a clean apartment, you want a good job, you want to be in shape, you want to be outgoing, etc.

Take a moment and really figure this one out. Go all out and make it your big dream. Make sure you are writing out what you want and not the don’t wants. Then if you want to have some creative fun, do a vision board. Simply find pictures to cut and paste onto a board that give you a visual picture of exactly what you want in your life. I found it really clarifies my quest and gives me something to focus on when I wonder “What am I doing all this for?”

“The divine flow is like the flow of a river, however many rivers nowadays are polluted, full of junk or simply stagnating. It is time to take care of them - meaning it is time to take care of our emotional bodies and to look at them as rivers, where stuff got thrown in over the years. For some, there is so much built up, that it works like a big dam which does not allow any flow of energy. You can easily recognize the flow of energy, by looking at how much love is flowing in your life, how much happiness, how much time do you have available, how much money is flowing etc.”
— Quantum Angel

It may be time to ask yourself how polluted is your river of emotions? Has there been some junk and pollution thrown in there when you weren’t paying attention? Are my emotions contaminated and perhaps poisoning others that come in contact with them?

One quick way to figure out the answers is to look at how much discomfort or pain you have in your life. Is it all the time, only in certain situations, only dealing with certain people? We are like our planet, and over the years of use and misuse the environment now needs our protection.

Science shows us that we do release chemicals in response to our emotions. Over time, if these chemicals are not cleared out, they build up and can become toxic to us. So take action and break down the dams that are restricting the flow of energy in your emotional river and get the vitality of living back on track.

“Love fulfilled sees where we could have gone the way of love before, if we’d known how, and how insecurities limited many of our choices. Love fulfilled perceives new meaning and higher reasons behind many of the mysteries of why things happened as they did.”
— Doc Childre

Have you ever questioned why you have chosen to have certain people in your life — and more specifically in your romantic life? We all have very good reasons for making our love choices, even if we are not consciously aware of them. We may choose a relationship that will improve our life in some way, teach us something important that couldn’t be learned in any other way, or challenge us to become better people.

Today, take a closer look at the relationships you have chosen for yourself. What is the mirror in front of you trying to tell you, trying to teach you? Our relationships can be more than just a source of happiness (or pain) if we look at them from a different point of view. Why did you choose to be with this person? What are you getting out of this relationship that makes it so valuable to your life path?

Taking this moment to look deeper into the meaning of your partnering choices, you may be surprised at the deeper hidden messages that you have been sending to yourself over the years through your significant other. Give yourself the gift of self-awareness and accelerate your learning by opening up your mind to the possibilities of growth that your relationships give to you.

“I think I let go of the need for approval. It certainly feels good when you get it, but I used to be more desperate for it. Once I felt better inside about myself…I could do everything based on how I want to do things.”
— Ellen DeGeneres

Praise, appreciation, compliments. I was an approval junkie for many years. And like any other “addiction” I found myself needing it so much, I no longer knew how I felt about myself, unless someone told me how to feel. That meant that if someone thought I was great, I felt great. And when someone thought I was terrible, I felt terrible.

My inner guidance and self-esteem shut down and I was at the mercy of everyone else’s opinion. And with the amount of people I had to deal with everyday, my emotions and feelings about myself were in a state of constant yo-yo.

Thankfully, I have given myself a couple of well-needed gifts since those days. I have given myself the gift of forgiveness and I have given myself the much-needed gift of self-love.

I now allow myself to be my own guide to feeling good by doing good things. I still enjoy hearing positive feedback from others, but I don’t need it as I used to. Also, the good part is that when the occasional critique comes my way, I am less likely to take it personally. I have found the balance between outside opinions and my own internal guidance system.

“When we see men of worth, we should think of equaling them; when we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inward and examine ourselves.”
— Confucius

Every now and then we have moments where we come across people that we don’t agree with or their life situation seems so obviously easy to change or correct in our eyes. However, the reality is that we will never have enough information about people to judge them accurately. Judgment leads nowhere helpful as it blinds the person making the judgment.

It is not very easy to refrain from making quick judgments about others, especially when everybody else is doing it. But only you are responsible for your own growth and change, not others. The next time you are about to cast a quick judgment, ask yourself the following questions: Is it true? Is it useful? Is it necessary? Do I truly know that person’s life or their life journey?

Then the final step is to turn inward and ask yourself: What is it in that person or that situation that reflects my own life, or my own attitudes? Often we will surprise ourselves with the discovery that we are judging in others what we should be addressing in ourselves.