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" and over, the job you go to day in and day out, the status of your bank account. Now consider what you believe is missing in your life . . . Everything you are experiencing is a function of your files, or what you are thinking. Another way to increase your awareness of your dominant negative thought patterns is to closely examine what you think about other people. Here is a series of truths that is often difficult for people to recognize or accept: if you can see it out there, it exists—or has at some point existed—within you. Some of what you see, you have been or don’t want to be. Most of what you see, you believe you are. All of what you see—out there in the world or attached to other people—is a thought that is already present in your mind. “I give meaning to everything I see” is a lesson from A Course in Miracles. It can be translated to mean the following: “I see it because I recognize it. I recognize it because I believe I am it. Because I believe I am it, the ego demands that I hide it and make it all about you.” Making your life conditions and experiences about something or someone other than yourself “trumps” the truth that thoughts, not people, create the "
― Iyanla Vanzant , Get Over It!: Prayers and Affirmations for Healing the Hard Stuff
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" The greatest service I can offer is … willingness to do things in a new way. Some of us are given the awesome task of breaking our family’s pattern of poverty, pain, suffering, ignorance and fear. Some of us come into life for the sheer purpose of guiding our family into a new way of thinking, living and being. For this reason, your family may think you are weird or different. They may accuse you of doing things that are not right. They may even tell you that what you are doing is wrong. You may feel that you are wrong. If everyone is content going right, who are you to go left? If everyone in your immediate family has made it through life in a cold-water flat, who are you to want a town house? Should you find yourself in this predicament, stop trying to convince them, show them! We are living in a new age, a new time, when things must be different. You cannot continue to do what has always been done. Something or someone must change! It might as well be you! You have the visions. You have the opportunity. The only thing you need is the strength and courage to recognize that you have been chosen for the awesome task of implementing change. If you follow your own inner guidance, your progress will be the only evidence you need. Your life will provide a new direction for the generations that will follow you. Your job is to bring about change in a loving, gentle and harmonious way. You may have to leave some people behind. Should that be the case, bless them and keep on moving. Until today, you may have been so loyal to your family patterns that you would not step beyond what you have been taught to believe. Just for today, dare to be different! Dare to introduce a new way of living and being. Dare to climb out of the family tree. Today I am devoted to recognizing that the patterns of my family tree may be a noose around my neck! "
― Iyanla Vanzant , Until Today!: Daily Devotions for Spiritual Growth and Peace of Mind