“Meditation is mental training. Meditation is a profound psychological technique to stop wrong conceptions and to start the correct way of thinking that leads to peace, happiness, and harmony.”  -Lama Zopa Rinoche, How To Be Happy, p. 7-8.

“The purpose of meditation is to stop thinking for a time, wait for the fog of thoughts to thin, and glimpse the spirit within.”  -Deepak Chopra, The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire, p. 170.

“Meditation is the art of opening to each moment with calm awareness.”   -Victor N. Davich, The Best Guide to Meditation, p. 31.

“Detailed analysis showed meditation produced important cardiovascular, cortical, hormonal, and metabolic benefits, along with several positive behavioral effects and significant beneficial alterations of interior experience, perception, and self-image.”  -Victor N. Davich, The Best Guide to Meditation, p. 28.

Beginners Meditation Class in Lexington, Kentucky, The first Thursday of each month, 2012,  from 6:00 – 7:30 P.M. Email: luannhamon@kyhypnosis.com. For more information see ” classes” at kyhypnosis.com.

“We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success; we often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do, and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.”  Samuel Smiles

“You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want or a grief. But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.”  Kahlil Gibran

“As a progressive and evolving being. Man is where he is that he may learn that he may grow; and as he learns the spiritual lesson which any circumstance contains for him it passes away to other circumstances.” James Allen, As A Man Thinketh.

“Regret is often a symptom of not being authentic in relation to a particular circumstance. When you fail to speak your truth or act in integrity with your own values and guiding  principles, you experience a measure of torment. While you may have difficulty in defining your own sense of authenticity, you are acutely aware when you are not being true to yourself.”

“Not speaking our truth is a strategy most of us learned as children. We all have been raised to blend in to some degree, or not feel our feelings. It is no wonder that so many of us have become so dependent in our relationships. We have found greater security and comfort in meeting other people’s needs, responding  to other people’s feelings rather than our own. Authenticity is a fundamental component of wholeness. It honors all that we are. With authenticity, we become cocreators of a fulfilling life that springs forth from all which is genuine and beautiful in us. Authenticity is the litmus test of our self-worth. When we truly value ourselves, we live in integrity with our spiritual nature.”

Gary Simmons, The I of the Storm, Embracing Conflict, Creating Peace, page 61.

“You can now begin to contemplate how you can deliberately will creative construction; you can do it by consciously formulating, thinking, and willing, a state of happiness, aliveness, fulfillment, truth, love, growth, both in general and in particular detail. The climate of this may first seem strange and unfamiliar. You need to acclimatize yourself to it. Picture yourself in such states and call upon the universal power within to fortify your conscious mind with the necessary creative energy. The will to happiness must be so strong  that the causes for unhappiness must be seen and eliminated, and this, too, must truly be wanted. Then the creative power will grow; the divine self will inspire you and show the way. You will learn to recognize it and receive it in your conscious brain.”

Eva Pierrakos, The Pathwork Of Self-Transformation, page 222.

“To have inner peace as our single goal we need to correct the erroneous belief that justified anger or grievances bring us peace. Anger and attack simply do not bring peace of mind.”  page 102

“Today, allow yourself to have the single goal of inner peace by putting all your attention on the following thoughts: Today I will view without judgment everything that occurs. All events provide me with another opportunity to experience Love in the place of fear.”  page 102

“Evaluating and being evaluated by others, a habit from the past, results at worst in fear and at best in conditional love. To experience unconditional Love, we must get rid of the evaluator, we need to hear our strong inner voice saying to ourselves and others, ‘I totally Love and accept you as you are.’”  page 98

Gerald G. Jampolsky, M.D., Love Is Letting Go Of Fear.

“Because everything you see or notice about yourself and your situation is viewed through the lens of self-worth, your seeing is incomplete.” page 105

“Misperception occurs when seeing is believing, which is what we call judgment, or when believing is seeing, which is what we call blind faith. All human perception is incomplete and is therefore misperception at the moment we say, “This is it!” page 106

“Quantum physicists assert that at any given moment, infinite possibilities are present. Some go as far as to say that there are infinite universes coexisting. The moment you act as if something is so, the universe of infinite possibilities collapses into one inevitable happenstance. When you look at something and say, “This is what it is,” you are pouring your creative energy (attention and awareness) into that specific perception. The moment your awareness locks on to one possibility, all other universes collapse. While in any given situation there may be many possibilities, innumerable paths, the instant you decree “This is it!” all others vanish. This is why it is so important not to give your power to your perceptions, as if they accurately describe what is going on. When you realize your perception is incomplete and mediated by your need to feel safe and okay, you will pause before drawing concrete conclusions.”  page 107

“What inner quality or resource are you missing? As you look inside yourself, you will see that you are missing a clear connection to your own sense of worth. If you felt whole and confident, you could see that the judgment is about what the other person needs or that it is about what the relationship needs or that it is about what you said or did which created some tension.” page 112

“Shifting your attention from the feeling of defensiveness to the question “What am I making this mean?” allows you to reframe the experience as an opportunity to discover what’s missing in the relationship. In Principle, no one is against you; therefore, what you are making this experience mean is the true enemy.” page 112

Read more about the Truth Principles in, The I of the Storm, Embracing Conflict, Creating Peace by Gary Simmons.

“To accept the innate godlike power of our Spiritual Self is very frightening to the ego mind, and we will often fight for the viewpoint that various things are impossible and that our powers are limited. Such power is actually the opposite of the ego, which feels its boundary to be of the body. But remember that our ego has no power beyond that which we give it, and in the moments we come to this full realization, then the ego will cease to exist, or at least for that moment will loose its primary place in our thoughts. By recognizing our own potential divinity, we will loose nothing but our mistaken sense of littleness, the feeling of being out of control of our lives, and our fears and suffering in relationships.”  Henry Grayson, PH.D, Mindful Loving, page 85.

“The connection between our thoughts and our lives is inseparable. The degree to which our thoughts are out of control is the degree to which our lives and our relationships feel out of control. Just as we can easily understand that an athlete or musician cannot perform well if his thoughts are out of control-that is, not focused-so it is true in every arena of our lives. A person with angry thoughts is likely to be an angry person. A person who houses fear thoughts is likely to be a frightened person; and, as we saw above, this often attracts like a powerful force field what he is afraid of into his life. A person with a disorganized mind is likely to be disorganized in his life. A person with hopeless, judgmental, guilty, or powerless thoughts is likely to be depressed. And on it goes, all affecting how our relationships progress.”  Henry Grayson, PH.D., Mindful Loving, page 85.

“What we need to experience, and what we can experience, is a saner and gentler state of mind. This experience is not found in something outside of us…We must work with our minds, with our abilities, in order to have peaceful, rich minds.”  Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, Transforming Mental Afflictions and Other Selected Teachings.

“As a man thinketh in his heart, so he is.”   Jesus

“Change your thoughts and you change your world.”   Norman Vincent Peale

“Give your thoughts no tongue.”  William Shakespeare

“When we direct our thoughts properly, we can control our emotions.”  W.Clement Stone

“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”  Albert Einstein

“The more man meditates on good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.”  Confucius

“We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.”   Swani Vivekananda

“Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.”  Soren Kierkegaard

“It takes but one positive thought when given a chance to survive and thrive to overpower an entire army of negative thoughts.”  Robert H. Schuller

Photo taken at Yuko-En by Robin Hamon

“You can be sure that God did not create relationship so that we would betray ourselves. Indeed, it is quite the opposite. The purpose of relationship is to insure that we learn to be faithful to ourselves.  One of the paradoxes of relationship as a spiritual path is that we give our power away to others in order to learn to honor ourselves more completely. We become co-dependent with others in order to learn how to have better boundaries. We blame others so that we can learn to be gentle with oursleves and forgive our own mistakes.”

“It is all a set-up. We look for love and happiness through other people only to learn that we can find love and happiness only in our own hearts and minds. That is the recognition in which the ‘We’ is born.”

Paul Ferrini, Creating A Spiritual Relationship, A Guide To Growth And Happiness For Couples On The Path, page 101

Taken at Yuko-En, The Kentucky - Japan Friendship Garden.

“If you’ve been practicing thought monitoring, erasing your core beliefs and traumas, and making perceptual shifts in order to remove barriers to love that interfere with your relationships, then you have begun to unblock your flow of love. As I’m sure you see by now, this work you’ve been doing not only lifts the stress and conflicts out of your relationship, it also-and necessarily-begins to heal the self.” page 237

“When we begin to see how the promises of the ego are untrustworthy and unworkable, and that they actually cause many of our problems, we begin to break out of its illusion and enter into the realm of the True Self.” page 237

“And once you live in this place, you are living in a spiritual way, and your relationships are increasingly transformed from ego–based to spiritual.” page 238

Henry Grayson, PH.D., Mindful Loving, Ten Practices for creating Deeper Connections.