“Now I tell you this: The essence of love is freedom. Anyone who says they love you, and that they are looking out for you, will grant you freedom. It is as simple as that. You do not have to look further or deeper for more sophisticated understanding.

I have told you before and I will tell you again. There are only two energies at the core of the human experience: love and fear. Love grants freedom, fear takes it away. Love opens up, fear closes down. Love invites full expression, fear punishes it.

By this measure you can know whether someone is loving you, or fearing you. Do not look to what they say. Look to what they do.”

God, as spoken to Neale Donald Walsch, in “Communion with God”

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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.

“Our culture is obsessed with planning, and much of it is inspired by fear. Heavy scheduling is a formidable way to avoid intimacy. If we are constantly busy, we do not have to face our feelings and deal with our issues I relationships. “Oh, I’m just too busy to be with a woman,” is a clear indication that the speaker is terrified of love and is willing to erect an array of barriers to protect himself from feeling the loneliness that is actually running him. A saturated day planner is often a symptom of weighty denial, and it should be recognized immediately as a warning flag of great psychic distress that is not being acknowledged or dealt with. (The insidious twist in the planaholic’s plight is that nearly our entire culture is heavily hypnotized to avoid intimacy through busy-ness. It is much more difficult to become free when most of the people around you share your form of insanity and call it reality.)

Someone who is heavily overscheduled is usually seriously threatened by absence of structure or quiet time alone. Such a one realizes that given even a little bit of space, she will have to face her feelings, and that kind of intimate confrontation is to be avoided at all costs. Sorrowfully, those costs include aliveness, health, and fulfilling relationships. You cannot be intimate if you erect a calendar as a wall between you and a potential beloved. And neither will you ever get to know yourself.”

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.

“Enjoying your life is easy when you’re having fun. The challenge is enjoying being part of it when the going gets tough. Of course, it doesn’t mean that you have to enjoy tragedies. It’s knowing that you can choose to be happy with yourself no matter how miserable you feel or how terrible the circumstances that help you connect with your soul energy. It means learning to love yourself when you’re feeling angry, grief-stricken, or a failure.

It means finding humor in the cosmic joke, which is believing that truth, love and your fulfillment are not within you and that something could take them away.”

Michael J. Tamura, in “You Are the Answer”

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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.

“The story you’re dreaming today is not the same story that you were dreaming yesterday, or even half an hour ago. Every time you talk about your story, it changes depending on who you’re telling the story to, depending on your physical and emotional state at the time, depending on your beliefs at the time. Even if you try to tell the same story, your story is always changing. At a certain point, you find out that it’s nothing but a story. It isn’t reality; it’s a shared dream because all humans are dreaming at the same time. The shared dream of humanity, the dream of the planet, was there before you were born, and this is how you learned to create your own art, the story of you.”

Don Miguel Ruiz and Don Jose Ruiz, in “The Fifth Agreement”

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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.

“As an adult, you must rediscover
the moving power of your life.

Tension, a lack of honesty,
and a sense of unreality
come from following
the wrong force in your life.

Work begins
when you don’t like
what you’re doing.”

Joseph Campbell, in “Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion” by Diane K. Osbon

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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.