lara simmons

"Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heal that has crushed it." --Mark Twain Here's a story from the forgiveness files this week: FORGIVING WHAT YOU HAVE ALREADY FORGOTTEN   I am a member of a local free site where members gift items they are no longer using to their neighbors instead of sending them to the landfill. It feels so good to "gift" things to strangers in a way that I did not expect and a lot of the people on the site feel more like friends now that I have been doing this awhile.  Last week my husband and I did a huge garage clean-out and as a result we had lots of items to give away. I posted them on the site and then let my intuition and The Universe decide who should receive each item.  One of the items was a desk which we had not used in years and have no place for now or in the forseeable future. Only a couple of people were interested and when I looked at the comments I heard the name "Serena...

"You are the master of your own life; you are the master of your own future." -- Gautama the Buddha One of many quotes from the retreat whose basic message is: you create your reality. What the Buddha is saying here is that we decide each day, each moment what kind of life we want to live by HOW we live it. By how we act. By how we think. By how we treat others. By how we treat ourselves. Decide what kind of life you want to live and then plant the seeds of that life. At the retreat S.N. Goenka told a story during one of the nightly video-taped discourses , about a man who planted seeds from the Neem tree (known for its bitter fruit) on his land. When the tree grew and began to produce fruit he was very upset that the fruit it produced was bitter and not sweet like sugar cane. Of course we are meant to laugh at this man for his foolishness, but are we any different? We lie, we cheat, we steal (in large or in small ways), we give into anger and then we want life...