Take the reins of your life in your hands every day. Get up and put a smile on your face, and feel grateful for this gift in your life.

We know that material things don't offer contentment, but we still buy more-more of the props and gadgets our culture tells us we must have in order to be happy and "happening." Our addiction to consumption distracts us from seeing that we are disconnected from ourselves, from our truth and from one another. Any euphoria we gain from our material gains is fleeting at best.

The balance and peace we seek for ourselves and our society won't be achieved through mental effort alone. Mind and spirit are meant to travel together, with spirit leading the way. Until we make a conscious commitment to understand and embrace our spiritual nature, we will endure the ache of living without the awareness and guidance of the most essential part of ourselves.

The more we nourish our internal world, the more powerful we grow in the external world.

Women work overtime, do double triple duty, juggle ten balls at once -- children, careers, husbands, schoolwork, housework, church work, and more work -- and when one of the balls drops, we think something is wrong with us.

Imagine how free we would feel and what we could accomplish if we could live without fear.

We each have a finite number of heartbeats, a finite amount of time. But we have enough heartbeats and enough time to do what is important.