Love has no agenda …

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As long as we respond in love, we remain true to ourselves; and nothing can hurt us.

It’s when we get scared and let impatience, guilt, obligation, doubt, judgment, expectation, or blame in, that we also let pain and misery in.

Come home to love. Choose love.… More

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We are judged by the house we live in, the car we drive, the title we hold — and who is on our arm. The superficial stuff can be read at a glance … and people are generally in a hurry. Besides, they tend to play it safe with what can be quantified.

You don’t have to! It’s tempting, though, because even after you learn what matters, you still have an awareness of what is perceived.

I remember moving from a “big, beautiful house” into a condo after a divorce. I had never felt so happy and free in my life. Soon after that, I started writing full time, because that’s what I really wanted to do. Still, I remember people feeling a bit sorry for me … “losing the house and all.” I think I convinced them that I was OK!

When you are truly at peace, people know it. They see what you feel.

So, don’t worry about how people view you or the person on your arm. Don’t take on their criteria for what makes somebody a good catch. Use your own, and stick with it.

When you’ve been married for a while, you may find yourself picking at your partner — not based on what’s important to you, but based on what society gives the most points for.… More

Our unconscious keeps files, but it doesn’t date them or evaluate them for legitimacy first. The files don’t get dumped unless we dump them. So 20 years later, we still lug around these feelings … and let’s face it, some of them were ill-founded to begin with.

A client recently realized she had spent 12 years in a marriage that didn’t work for her or for her husband. She married him because he asked — right after she lost her high-school sweetheart.

She had wanted to marry her very first love. When he refused, she felt humiliated and rejected.

As an adult, years later, she could face her feelings and give them a context. She could stop personalizing his rejection and, thereby, soothe the pain that nobody else had soothed for her. She could, then, face the hard truth that she had married somebody she was ill-suited for because surely HE wouldn’t leave her.

We can “dump the files,” particularly the ones marked PERSONAL, that indicate we are somehow flawed. We don’t have to feel like our time was wasted, though. We can realize that whatever our experience was helped us to get where we are. We can move on with the freedom and peace and joy that we had almost given up on.… More