1.
To make the quickest progress, you don't have to take huge leaps. You just have to take baby steps-and keep on taking them. In Japan, they call this approach kaizen, which literally translates as 'continual improvement.' Using kaizen, great and lasting success is achieved through small, consistent steps. It turns out that slow and steady is the best way to overcome your resistance to change.
Marci Shimoff
2.
Love is your job description - no matter what you do for a living. If you ever feel unsure of what you're supposed to do in a situation, here's a good rule of thumb: always do what leads to greater love.
Marci Shimoff
3.
When you forgive, you heal your own anger and hurt and are able to let love lead again. It's like spring cleaning for your heart.
Marci Shimoff
4.
When you're Happy for No Reason, you bring happiness to your outer experiences rather than trying to extract happiness from them. You don't need to manipulate the world around you to try to make yourself happy. You live from happiness, rather than for happiness.
Marci Shimoff
5.
The best way to keep relationships happy, healthy, and supportive can be summed up in one word: appreciation. What you appreciate, appreciates. When we demonstrate our appreciation for the support we receive from others, it reinforces that behavior and deepens our connection to them.
Marci Shimoff
6.
Gratitude is absolutely the way to bring more into your life
Marci Shimoff
7.
The sixth doorway is the Doorway of Vision. This relates to seeing with the eyes of love and corresponds to the energy center located in the third eye area of our forehead. When this doorway is open, we're more able to see life through love instead of differences.
Marci Shimoff
8.
Once you begin to understand and truly master your thoughts and feelings, that's when you see how you create your own reality. That's where your freedom is, that's where all your power is. That's when you see how you can become a deliberate creator of your life. And when you are a deliberate creator of your life, and you use this law of attraction, you will have a life that is beyond what you can possibly imagine right now.
Marci Shimoff
9.
Go for the sense of inner joy, of inner peace, of inner vision first and then all the other things from the outside appear.
Marci Shimoff
10.
HeartMath found that five minutes of feeling love and care can strengthen your immune system for up to six hours, whereas five minutes of feeling angry can weaken and suppress the immune system for six hours. Love releases very powerful, beneficial chemicals into the body.
Marci Shimoff
11.
In an experiment by Dr. Robert Emmons at the University of California–Davis, people who kept a ‘gratitude journal,’ a weekly record of things they felt grateful for, enjoyed better physical health, were more optimistic, exercised more regularly, and described themselves as happier than a control group who didn’t keep journals.
Marci Shimoff
12.
When you're happy for no reason, you're unconditionally happy. It's not that your life always looks perfect - it's just that however it looks, you'll still be happy.
Marci Shimoff
13.
We're all here to live a fabulous life... a life of love, truth, and joy.We have the power to wake up to that. We have the power to say "I'm not just here to survive, I'm here to live the greatest life that can be lived".
Marci Shimoff
14.
Once you begin to understand and truly master your thoughts and feelings, that's when you see how you create your own reality.
Marci Shimoff
15.
Everything we think and feel is creating our future. If you're worried or in fear, then you're bringing more of that into your life throughout the day.
Marci Shimoff
16.
If you think about the times in life when you've been the most deeply fulfilled, they're the times that you've felt love. Whether it's watching a sunset, spending time with a pet or being with a partner with whom you feel an intensely deep connection.
Marci Shimoff
17.
Many people in Western culture are striving for success. They want the home, they want the great business. They want all of these outer things. But what we found in our research is that having those things, certainly doesn't guarantee what we really want, which is happiness. And that's when all those outer things come. They don't come from going after them first to get the happiness, it's backwards; you go for the sense of inner joy, of inner peace, of inner vision first and then all of the other things from the outside appear.
Marci Shimoff
18.
Love isn’t just something we feel for others, it’s who we are. Though we usually think of love as a stream of emotion flowing between two people, love is more like an ocean that’s inside and all around us. Instead of walking around with a little cup, begging for a few drops of love from others, recognize that you’re the huge ocean of love.
Marci Shimoff
19.
Practice experiencing your feelings directly and completely by observing them as they move through your mind and body and then letting them go.
Marci Shimoff
20.
Taking ownership of your happiness has two aspects: Accepting that being happy is up to you and that you have the ability and power to be happier by changing your habits. Taking "response-ability": responding to all the events in your life in a way that supports your happiness.
Marci Shimoff
21.
I've come to see that I have two choices in how I approach change: I can either resist change or be open to what's ahead and feel the peace that "all is well in the universe." When I lean into the latter, I feel excited about the future.
Marci Shimoff
22.
It is support that sustains us on the journey we've started.
Marci Shimoff
23.
If you're having a hard time being compassionate to or forgiving of yourself or others, you repeat these four phrases directed to yourself or the other person: "I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you." And just by saying and feeling those phrases, you will find your heart starts to melt.
Marci Shimoff
24.
When people are deeply happy they bring a sense of purpose with them wherever they go, whatever circumstances they are in. So if they're changing the oil in the car, they bring a sense of joyful purpose even to that.
Marci Shimoff
25.
Put your attention on happiness by practicing the Happiness Habits each day.
Marci Shimoff
26.
The only difference between people who live in this way, who live in the magic of life, and those who don't, is that the people who live in the magic of life have habituated ways of being. They have habituated this process, and magic happens with them wherever they go. Because they remember and they do it all the time. Not just as a one time event.
Marci Shimoff
27.
Bring happiness to your everyday experiences rather than try to extract happiness from them and however life looks, you'll be happy.
Marci Shimoff
28.
So if you have over-indulged during the holidays, for example, please don't beat yourself up, but rather have compassion and forgiveness and perhaps, even try the Ho'oponono technique.
Marci Shimoff
29.
Jonas' music is inspiring, energizing, and spiritually uplifting. A brilliant songwriter, he writes music that reaches deep into the soul and awakens the best and highest in all of us. And Jonas delivers his songs with a power, joy, and grace that last long after the last note is played. The world needs this music!
Marci Shimoff
30.
It’s impossible to monitor every thought we have. Researchers tell us that we have about sixty thousand thoughts a day. Can you imagine how exhausted you’d feel trying to control all sixty thousand of those thoughts? Fortunately there’s an easier way and it’s our feelings. Our feelings let us know what we’re thinking.
Marci Shimoff
31.
The first doorway (or chakra) is what I call in the book, the Doorway of Safety. This doorway relates to feeling safe in life and being present in the here and now. It's only when we are really grounded and safe that we're able to relax and open up our hearts.
Marci Shimoff
32.
Like your weight set-point, which keeps the scale hovering around the same number, your happiness set-point will remain the same unless you make a concerted effort to change it.
Marci Shimoff
33.
When we're feeling fully alive, we're able to fully feel love. This doorway also relates to feeling our feelings fully. Not suppressing our feelings of anger, sadness or grief but allowing them to be felt. What's amazing is that when those feelings are felt, they actually dissolve into love.
Marci Shimoff
34.
There are fourteen keys to experiencing greater love and with each key, I offer what I believe to be the most effective tool out there. So this is a time when, if we're awake to it, we have an amazing opportunity to start living a different life. By that I mean the life that our souls came here to live. We're all being propelled forward and it's not always easy, but through supporting one another we can do it.
Marci Shimoff
35.
I've found the best thing to do is to really be loving, kind, forgiving and compassionate with yourself. There are some wonderful practices for that which I talk about in Love For No Reason.
Marci Shimoff
36.
So the difference between most books about love and Love For No Reason is that traditional love books focus on love as a stream of energy between two people, whereas this book focuses on love as a deep state of being that you can live in no matter what's going on in your life.
Marci Shimoff
37.
The fourth doorway is the Doorway of Openness located in our heart center. It has to do with being open to both giving and receiving love. It's not just about being able to give, but it's also about the ability to be open to receive. There's a certain vulnerability in receiving. When we truly take in and appreciate all of the gifts of life, then our hearts are truly open in love.
Marci Shimoff
38.
There's a beautiful forgiveness practice I love which is quite simple. It's called "Ho'oponopono" (pronounced: ho-o-pono-pono) and it's a lot easier to do than it is to say. It's a Kahuna Hawaiian technique, which involves repeating four phrases internally toward yourself or the person whom you're having a hard time forgiving.
Marci Shimoff
39.
The third doorway is the Doorway of Unconditional Self-love, which corresponds to the energy center located in the solar plexus area. As I said earlier, the key to feeling love and living in love is having self-love. I mean real unconditional self-love, not "I love myself because I'm a good wife" or "I love myself because I do a good job at work" or "I love myself because I look a particular way." It's because I love myself no matter what. That's where our real power lies, in the ability to love ourselves unconditionally.
Marci Shimoff
40.
I did some more soul searching. I asked myself, "What do I want more than happiness?" and there was only one answer - the only thing that trumps happiness is love. Not the kind of love we are normally taught about, but the kind of unconditional love that is a deep inner state which doesn't depend on any person, situation or a romantic partner. That's how I define Love for No Reason: it's an inner state of love.
Marci Shimoff
41.
I believe love is why we're here on the planet and that ultimately it's our purpose for life. They say people who've had near-death experiences often report back that at the end of our lives we have a life review and we're asked one question, and that question is, how much did you love?
Marci Shimoff
42.
What would our lives be like if we could all be happy no matter what?
Marci Shimoff
43.
I truly believe that forgiveness is the fast track to greater love and it's the path that can really heal all. We all have areas of our own lives where we have a hard time forgiving, whether it's with ourselves, or others, but when we can practice forgiveness, many of our self-destructive habits will begin to fade away.
Marci Shimoff
44.
So, in life we have a one question final exam - and it's not the kind of exam you can cram for at the very end. One of the main reasons we're alive is to expand our capacity to love.
Marci Shimoff
45.
The second doorway has to do with vitality. It's about feeling alive, vital, and feeling the life-force flow through us. This doorway is also known as the creativity center and it houses a great sense of aliveness in it.
Marci Shimoff
46.
The challenges we've had personally and globally have been the catalysts needed to let go of old ways of being that aren't the vibration of love.
Marci Shimoff
47.
One of the things that happens when we're feeling more love and care is that we go into what's called "heart rhythm coherence," which you can actually measure and monitor on a computer screen. It's also possible to train yourself to go into heart rhythm coherence at will.
Marci Shimoff
48.
The study of love is an emerging field. Perhaps the leaders in the field are a group called The Institute of HeartMath who have found that we have many physiological, psychological, and social benefits when we're living with greater love, care, and compassion.
Marci Shimoff
49.
The concept (of happiness) is universal. In Buddhism, it is called causeless joy, in Christianity, the kingdom of heaven within, and in Judaism it is called ashrei, an inner sense of holiness and health. Is Islam it is called falah, happiness and well-being, and in Hinduism it is called ananda, or pure bliss.
Marci Shimoff
50.
But i couldn't. Was nowhere near ready for a committed relationship, and it wouldn't be fair. I needed time - to become the right man for a woman like you.
Marci Shimoff