It takes great courage and personal strength to hold on to our center during times of great hurt. It takes wisdom to understand that our reactiveness only fans the flames of false drama.

I've come to trust not that events will always unfold exactly as I want, but that I will be fine either way. The challenges we face in life are always lessons that serve our soul's growth.

Carrying the past in to the present, we program the future to continue the past. Letting go the past in the present, we free the future to be something else.

King Solomon, who supposedly was the wisest of all men, described his youth as his winter and his advanced years as his summer. We can be older than we used to be yet feel much younger than we are.

Sometimes you are lifted up to the mountaintop as a gift from the universe, so you can see what is possible. Then you are put down back at the bottom: Now you have to earn it for yourself.

It's tempting to think that decisions that are not life-and-death are therefore unimportant, and that the little compromises we make don't matter to our bottom line or our spiritual selves. How many of us are tempted, in business, to make a less-than-ethical decision? To appropriate someone else's idea or fudge some numbers? We have to remember that maintaining our ethical and spiritual selves is absolutely linked with achieving the degree of success we're working toward.

You can learn a lesson the first time, when it's presented in a package that is joyous - or at least palatable. But if you don't learn the lesson the first time, then there will be a second time and a third time. And each time it will just get harder and harder.