eat pray love.. and read

I have been having a rough week and I came across a few things that cheered me up.


Scriptures: Moroni 10:20 'Wherefore, there must be faith; and if there must be faith there must also be hope..' Moroni 10:32 'Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God.'


Eat Pray Love (the book)-it is really really good! It has some amazing advice and insights


-You are what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions. You are never where you are. You are always digging in the past or poking at the future, but rarely do you rest in this moment. There's a reason they call God a presence-because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.


-I am That. I am divine, I am with God, I am an expression of God, I am not separate, I am not alone, I am not this limited illusion of an individual.


-Devotion is diligence without assurance. Faith is a way of saying. "Yes, I pre-accept the terms of the universe and I embrace in advance what I am presently incapable of understanding. There's a reason we refer to "leaps of faith"-because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don't care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove to you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational; it isn't. If faith were rational, it wouldn't be-by definition-faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our soul, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be... a prudent insurance policy.

-There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction....I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities (and on the occasions when I can't rise to the most optimistic viewpoint, because I'm feeling too sorry for myself, I can choose to keep trying to change my outlook). I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts... "You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you're gonna wear every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control. Drop everything else but that. Because if you can't learn to master your thinking, you're in deep trouble forever."


-I repeat this vow about 700 times a day: "I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore."


-As smoking is to the lungs, so is resentment to the soul; even one puff of it is bad for you. 


-We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. That's our privilege. That's the joy of a mortal body. And that's why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands.


-God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.


-...all the pain of a human life is cause by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendance emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras and we become monuments to them.


-..my heart...its love was infinite. I knew then that this is how God loves us all and receives us all, and that there is no such thing in this universe as hell, except maybe in our own terrified minds. Because if even one broken and limited human being could experience one such episode of absolute forgiveness and acceptance of her own self, then imagine-just imagine!- what God, in all His eternal compassion, can forgive and accept.


The book was good! The pray section was AMAZING! The love section had a few awkward moments of too much information and the eat section was great because I was just in Italy and it made me want to go back so bad.  I highly recommend it-just skip the few love pages that are a little extreme.