there are no knights on white horses, no magical grandmothers in the sky watching, waiting to rescue us. Teachers may come our way, but they will not rescue. They will teach. People who care will come, but they will not rescue. They will care. Help will come, but help is not rescuing. We are our own rescuers. Our relationships will improve dramatically when we stop rescuing others and stop expecting them to rescue us.

Each life needs its own quiet place.

Gratitude isn't a tool to manipulate the universe or God. It's a way to acknowledge our faith that everything happens for a reason even if we don't know what that reason is. ~Melody Beattie, 52 Weeks of Conscious Contact, pg. 34.

Live your life from your heart. Share from your heart. And your story will touch and heal people's souls.

I know when to say no and when to say yes. I take responsibility for my choices. The victim? She went somewhere else. The only one who can truly victimize me is myself, and 99 percent of the time I choose to do that no more. But I need to continue to remember the key principles: boundaries, letting go, forgiveness after feeling my feelings—not before, self-expression, loving others but loving myself, too.

God loves me enough to let me go through all the lessons I came here to learn, even the ones that hurt the most. His presence doesn't deny me. It's always there to help me see and understand what I came to this planet to learn.

We don't want to give the controls to someone else; we want those reins ourselves. We want to get our way. And we get upset when things don't work out. . . . When we try to control someone else or events beyond the scope of our power, we lose. When we learn to discern the difference between what we can change and what we can't, we usually have an easier time expressing our power in our lives. Because we're not wasting all our energy using our power to change things we can't, we have a lot of energy left over to live our lives.