Life Lessons: How Our Mortality Can Teach Us About Life And Living

by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

But the progress is not always obvious or smooth.

As we struggle to deal with these people, we have the opportunity to become more loving.

Since like attracts like, we attract what’s inside of us.

You create your own destiny.

You can rewrite the rule book by learning to honor yourself

others, and by recording over the old tapes. You can find a new definition of love for yourself, one that truly means treating the other person as valuable, as worthy of great love and care.

Living each day as if we were on the edge of life reminds us that we have “pictures of

how it should be.” How many times has someone been happy in a relationship today, but wound up fighting over “Will you still be here in twenty years?” Maybe they will, perhaps they won’t; the future is not for us to know.

You will heal, you will return to wholeness.

we will all heal in our own time and in our own way.

Let it go.

Your uniqueness. In one million years there will never be another you.

Real power comes from knowing who we are and our place in the world.

Guilt can sometimes be a guide, telling us that something is off.

It can indicate that we are not following our belief systems, that we are outside the boundaries of our integrity. To move past guilt, we must align our beliefs and our actions.

we are not our mistakes.

See the best in yourself. Remind yourself of your goodness.

Only when you release your guilt do you truly release your past to create a new future.

The key to healing is forgiveness. Forgiveness means acknowledging the past and letting it go.

Change is saying good-bye to an old, familiar situation and facing a new, unfamiliar situation. Sometimes it’s not the old or the new that unnerves us, it’s the time in between.

we need to find a way to embrace change, or at least to accept it.

let go of the past,

Take one moment at a time.

So much more is possible when fear no longer holds us captive.

Kindness always

overcomes fear.

That’s how you beat it; it is no match for love. Fear’s power is built on an empty foundation, it can be defeated just by stepping forward. We’re afraid of many things in life, such as public speaking, dating, and even admitting we’re lonely sometimes. In many cas...

feelings underneath. Indeed, fears are tricky because they are so well layered, one on top of the other. Each can be peeled away until you get down to the bottom fear, the foundation on which all t...

All positive emotions come from love,

all negative emotions from fear.

If we’re in fear, we’re not in a place of love. When we’re in a place of love, we cannot be in a place of fear.

If you don’t actively choose love, you will find yourself in a place of either fear or one of its component feelings.

choose love in order to nourish our souls and drive away fear, just as we eat to nourish our bodies and drive away hunger.

Now is the only real moment we have, and love is the only real emotion because it’s the only one that occurs in the present moment.

To live in the present, then, is to live in love, not fear.

Infusing ourselves with love begins the washing away of our fears.

have compassion—you know what it’s like to have a cold.

If you are stopped because you’re afraid that you or what you’ve done isn’t good enough, have compassion for yourself.

Anger tells us that we haven’t dealt with our hurt.

As we gather these hurts and do not address them, our anger grows.

Her mixture of grace, style, and warmth puts you instantly at ease.

No one enjoys being around an angry person. An angry person is often

realized my God was big enough to handle my anger.

Many scientific studies have shown that laughter and play reduce stress and trigger the release of substances in the body called endorphins, which are chemically similar to morphine. These natural painkillers and mood elevators may be why we feel better after laughing and playing—they give a natural high to our lives.

Laughter is a self-refilling “medicine,” for the more you laugh, the more you laugh. Even when dealing with a subject as serious as death, humor has its place.

but the very definition of a hobby is that you do it

for fun without caring about the outcome.

decided to rebuild my life, to do things with friends, to find fun again.

The key to patience is knowing that everything is going to be fine,

developing the faith that there is a plan.