33 Dreams #1

What would you say was the best day of your life?

What memories do you hope to make with or when you have a family?

What good can come from the bad days we’ve experienced?  Explain.

If you’re going to create the life of your dreams, eventually you have to stop thinking about it, dreaming about it, imagining it, hoping, planning, or even praying, and you have to actually do something.  You have to act.  You have to execute.  You have to step into the real world and bring the change that you can only see through the eyes of believing.

Life is a work of art. 

The canvas you paint first is your life.

Then your life becomes the brush from which you paint that part of the world you touch while you are here on this planet.

What work of art will you leave behind?

What you HOPE from yourself and your life has a direct effect on what you will get out of life.

Where there is HOPE, There is Life

Sometimes our capacity to dream of a different us, of a different life, is beaten up and left broken by people and pain and disappointment.

What Do You Want?

You start with your deepest longing—the dream that seems too good to be true, the dream that seems too good to come true.

Your dreams are a product of your longings.  The dreams that fuel your life are fueled by your desires, by your passions, by your cravings.  (Remember the movies you love?)

Once the dream is in your HEART it is in your hands.

Is it possible that when we begin to find the dreams for our lives, it always involves helping others live their dreams?

You cannot even begin to live the dream until you stop caring about only yourself,

32 Getting Rid of the Gorilla #8

You can’t shake it and can’t leave it behind, so then eventually what happens is REVENGE becomes our only hope.

Have you ever really gotten REVENGE?

If so, how did it make you feel afterwards?

Revenge fixes your attention at life’s ugliest moments.  Score-settling freezes your stare at cruel events in your past.

Is this where you want to look?  Will rehearsing and reliving your hurts make you a better person?  By no means.  It will destroy you.

Describe the gentlest person you ever knew.  What kind of influence did this person have on others?

Think of someone you know whom you would describe as a revengeful, score-settling person.  How happy do you think that person is?  Explain

So may you forgive as you’ve been forgiven, may you give to others what’s been given to you, may you set someone free and find out that it was you, and may you do it today, because you might not have the chance tomorrow.

What will you do with these fears and with the unkown?  We have three choices - (1) to shrink back, as so many of us have done before, and reject the invitation to adventure; (2) to try to reach for some sort of formula that will give us a sense of control; or (3) to simply venture forward.  

This is the moment our true strength begins to be released. This is where our strength will be crystallized, deepened and revealed.  A man or woman is never more a man or woman than when they embrace an adventure beyond their control, or when they walk into a battle they aren't sure of winning.

Are you willing to RISK to free your heart and find your true strength?

31 Getting Rid of the Gorilla #7

WHAT FORGIVENESS IS

The first stage of forgiveness is the decision not to try to inflict a reciprocal amount pain on everyone who has caused hurt.  When I forgive you, I give up the right to hurt you back.

When I forgive you, I set you free from the little prison I have placed in my mind for holding you captive.  I seek to stop entertaining fantasies of vengeance in which you are tortured.

Forgiveness begins when we give up the quest to get even.  This is difficult, because getting even is the natural obsession of the wounded soul.

The next stage of forgiveness involves a new way of seeing and feeling.  One thing that happens when we get deeply hurt is that as we look at the one who hurt us, we don’t see a person—only the hurt.  

If you do not feel ready to forgive at this time, what do you think is holding you back?

When we hold fast to unforgiveness toward another person, we tend to believe only bad things about them.  We want to think of them only in terms of the hurt they have caused us.  We want to forget their humanity.  They are a product of a fallible mother and father; they are lonely or hurting or weak nearsighted—just as you are.

What do you think happened in this persons past that caused them to act that way?

Don’t wait to forgive until you feel like forgiving; you will never get there.  Feelings take time to heal after the choice to forgive is made.

This is an act of will—not a feeling.

We CHOOSE to forgive.

Forgiving is not saying, It didn’t really matter; it is not saying, I probably deserved part of it anyway. Forgiveness says, It was wrong, it mattered, and I release you.

Forgiveness does not necessarily remove negative consequences for the one forgiven, nor does it automatically grant trust and reconciliation.

Can we forgive somebody without being able to be around them?