“To become all that you can be, you must welcome into you life people who ask more of you than you can ask of yourself. It is not healthy to surround yourself with people who always agree with you or play a game of littleness with you. A real friend values truth more than the charades that hold us back from shining as brightly as we can.

If you shelter yourself from challenge, your spirit will wither and you will grow weak of will. Your creativity will be reduced to a trickle. You will become bored and wonder what you are doing here. Learn to recognize boredom as a sign that you must escape the shell in which you have become entombed. Let restlessness spur you to reach out and stretch to your next creative adventure. As Helen Keller said, ‘Life is a daring adventure – or nothing.”

Alan Cohen, in “Dare to Be Yourself”

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Jeff Maziarek, author of Spirituality Simplified and Codi’s Journey, launched Pondercentral.com in April 2007 as a Web-based forum for “PONDER on THIS,” a series of weekday inspirational email messages he began sending to subscribers in March 1999. A FREE service since its inception, “PONDER on THIS” provides subscribers with meaningful content to assist them on their individual paths of spiritual growth. In addition, it benefits subscribers, authors, and publishers by including links to Amazon.com where subscribers can learn more about the book being quoted, and also purchase it.

“Generally speaking, a person can’t really become a noticer of life until he or she stops being obsessed with self. Our modern societies train people to become unreasonably self-indulgent and self-centered. Now it’s good to look after yourself and honor yourself and to concentrate on your life, but there’s a fine line between what is reasonable and the way some people operate. If the only thoughts going off in your head star with “I this” and “I that,” then the ego has you in its grip. It will gradually shrink your world to where its whims and neuroses and its focus are all you ever see. It’’s much like a small child who will make a huge fuss and create a scene so that its mother will attend to it – putting aside whatever she’s doing to care for the child.”

Stuart Wilde, in “Sixth Sense”

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Jeff Maziarek, author of Spirituality Simplified and Codi’s Journey, launched Pondercentral.com in April 2007 as a Web-based forum for “PONDER on THIS,” a series of weekday inspirational email messages he began sending to subscribers in March 1999. A FREE service since its inception, “PONDER on THIS” provides subscribers with meaningful content to assist them on their individual paths of spiritual growth. In addition, it benefits subscribers, authors, and publishers by including links to Amazon.com where subscribers can learn more about the book being quoted, and also purchase it.

“Forgiveness means changing your misperceptions. When we forgive another for anything that he or she may have done to us, we are really saying, “I no longer give you the power to control who I am, how I think, and how I’ll behave in the future. I take responsibility for all of that now.” Thus we really have nothing to forgive, since we create our own reality by how we choose to process the behavior of others.

We processed it in a way that hurt us when we chose blame. We might have chosen not to have hatred within ourselves and simply let it go. Once we change our perceptions of life’s hurts and pains and see that we create all that we need for this dream, including the scoundrels, we no longer need to blame anyone for anything. This is the most freeing stage to reach that you can imagine.”

Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, in “You’ll See It When You Believe It”

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Jeff Maziarek, author of Spirituality Simplified and Codi’s Journey, launched Pondercentral.com in April 2007 as a Web-based forum for “PONDER on THIS,” a series of weekday inspirational email messages he began sending to subscribers in March 1999. A FREE service since its inception, “PONDER on THIS” provides subscribers with meaningful content to assist them on their individual paths of spiritual growth. In addition, it benefits subscribers, authors, and publishers by including links to Amazon.com where subscribers can learn more about the book being quoted, and also purchase it.

“Do not seek first to change the world. You will not change the world by trying first to change the world. You will change the world by first changing yourself. You must first decide some important things about yourself, come to some new conclusions within yourself about who you are, about God, and about Life, and then begin to live those decisions.

This inner process can, in fact, produce changes in the world around you, for the world that you touch is affected by how you touch it. Who you are, and how you are, affects the world to a much larger degree than you might imagine. Yet, remember this. You cannot achieve inner peace by being agitated if you do not achieve outer peace.

Therefore, do not tie your efforts at personal transformation to a result called planetary transformation, or you may achieve neither.”

God, as spoken to Neale Donald Walsch, in “The New Revelations”

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Jeff Maziarek, author of Spirituality Simplified and Codi’s Journey, launched Pondercentral.com in April 2007 as a Web-based forum for “PONDER on THIS,” a series of weekday inspirational email messages he began sending to subscribers in March 1999. A FREE service since its inception, “PONDER on THIS” provides subscribers with meaningful content to assist them on their individual paths of spiritual growth. In addition, it benefits subscribers, authors, and publishers by including links to Amazon.com where subscribers can learn more about the book being quoted, and also purchase it.

“We don’t need to push life so much as we need to experience it more elegantly, to be motivated more by inspiration than by ambition. Sometimes we’re so intent on moving up the ladder that we make compromises we know we shouldn’t make while we’re on the lower rungs. Yet faith is a ladder that leads to new heights. We are here to do what God would have us do; our prayer is to receive guidance not only as to what that is, but also how to do it in any situation. We can remain in the realm of divine understanding, for our depth of understanding is the key to the life we truly want.”

Marianne Williamson in “Everyday Grace”

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Jeff Maziarek, author of Spirituality Simplified and Codi’s Journey, launched Pondercentral.com in April 2007 as a Web-based forum for “PONDER on THIS,” a series of weekday inspirational email messages he began sending to subscribers in March 1999. A FREE service since its inception, “PONDER on THIS” provides subscribers with meaningful content to assist them on their individual paths of spiritual growth. In addition, it benefits subscribers, authors, and publishers by including links to Amazon.com where subscribers can learn more about the book being quoted, and also purchase it.