People respond better to kindness than cruelty. Why, it's even caught on in the workplace, that bastion of self-hatred and disrespect.

Here is my wish for you and every other child, woman, and man on the face of the earth: Spend one week saying only kind, caring things to yourself. Say thank you at least ten times an hour, direct five toward yourself and five to the world at large. Compliment yourself (and others) each time an effort is made. Notice all the wonderful qualities and characteristics about yourself and those around you. One week. You will never go back. And your whole life will be a glorious meditation.

If you want to feel a certain way, feel it now.

Fear forces us to spend our lives dealing with it, ostensibly to overcome it. But that is a trick. Only fear (the illusion of separation) would want us to work to be unafraid, precisely because it is not possible for a separate self to be unafraid!

We have a choice. We can love our lives trying to conform to some nebulous standard, or we can live our lives seeing how everything works. When we step back and look at it that way, it is obvious that the attitude of fascination is the only intelligent one to bring to anything.

It is not my experience that we are here to fix the world, that we are here to change anything at all. I think we are here so the world can change us. And if part of that change is that the suffering of the world moves us compassion, to awareness, to sympathy, to love, that is a very good thing.

If you want to know what you were conditioned to believe as a child, look at how you treat yourself now.