Courage Quotes

“I wanted to know for myself. I started from the foundation principle – you’re God’s image and likeness and you were never engineered to be self-sufficient and independent of God’s blessing. That’s how I see my identity and who I am. Your blessing is already poured out. Learn how to change your state of being, meaning raise your vibration to step in your blessing, healing and prosperity. I have accessed a connection to my higher-self/God within and so can you. I may be in the infant stage but learning the processes to raise my vibrations and clear blockages through forgiveness is a start to a whole new bright future. Taking back our power. I can’t wait to continue this journey with a greater sense of wisdom, understanding and wonder as the awakening to a world opens up and what we see is just a beautiful world in transition and humanity with upgrades. Don’t let the darkness get you down, let it be a challenge to help you rise to your full potential”
― Samantha Houghton, Courage: Stories of Darkness to Light

“The unfortunate ignorance of a populace has led to individuals believing that if a person is considered disabled then they must also lack certain mental functions. This stereotypical perception pervades our culture and society and only in recent times has seen improvement with the push forward for mental health education. This is something I have seen time and again and it frustrates me that it can cause some people to give up without even trying.”
― Samantha Houghton, Courage: Stories of Darkness to Light

“I had a hardwiring to understand people, what makes us different and what makes us the same. But after that happened, I’ve been searching for answers to make sense of it all. As I aged, I saw how I would morph into identities to fit in with my surroundings and what people around me expected of me. Every time I learned something new or something I deeply resonated with, it became my belief and that belief formed patterns of beliefs. How we view who we are, the way we think about ourselves and the way the world views us makes up parts of our identity. Think about your life – how are you different than you were 10 years ago, or 10 days ago? Here’s an example. Our taught history was based on Darwin’s Theory from 1859, where we live in a world full of competition, conflicts, struggle and scarcity. His theory has been programmed deep in our subconscious, and that we are divided from birth and separate from the world around us.”
― Samantha Houghton, Courage: Stories of Darkness to Light

“Let me introduce you to Courage: Stories of Darkness to Light – eleven individual true stories of eleven brave people sharing their unique struggles with their own mental health battles and of what helped each of them to come through their tunnel of darkness to shine as brightly as they do today.”
― Samantha Houghton, Courage: Stories of Darkness to Light

“Raj’s Story Part One: Chilling with the Family “Has he had his medication?” I turned to face the guest who was currently staying with us, dumbstruck by his egregious statement. On the other side of the room my younger brother and father were arguing as he didn’t want my dad to comb his hair. His words took a moment to sink in and then I felt a cold rage as I realised that he thought my younger brother took his medications to control his behaviour. He didn’t realise that they were there to support his metabolic genetic condition Cystinosis and thus made a stereotypical and callous deduction. He didn’t realise that the medications were the only thing keeping my brother’s health from deteriorating and allowing him the energy to actually have an argument in the first place. He didn’t realise how close I was to snapping,”
― Samantha Houghton, Courage: Stories of Darkness to Light

“However, my Dave was choosing his way. More of the pessimistic perspective. I respected his decisions, but I was starting to feel unheard. Which now I understand was triggering me, and wounds that I had not healed were surfacing. I was crying a lot. What was happening was that my viewpoint wasn’t being listened to, which had ramifications within me and threw me off balance. It’s like you’re living a cognitive dissonance, meaning you value one thing but you’re doing another. I was learning to self-abandon parts of myself to become more convenient for others. For example, I valued connection, sharing dreams, truths of the world, energy healing, holistic and natural remedies... yet I wasn’t able to share this with my partner. It wasn’t his thing. When this happens, there is going to be a disconnect. Later coming to the conclusion and life lesson, we are just a mirror to the people around us steering us to ourselves and reflecting back to us what’s going on inside of us. What was this telling me? Pretty obvious. I needed to find the connection with myself. Self-love was in order.”
― Samantha Houghton, Courage: Stories of Darkness to Light

“How you react to any situation, is up to you. It’s your choice. It comes down to Yes, or No. Yes, I choose to show up for my family, remain positive, show strength, enjoy every moment and day like tomorrow was promised and there was no pink elephant. All while I was still struggling with my own feelings. I decided to embrace the adversity as something to grow from, it must be for a higher good we were experiencing this illness in our life.”
― Samantha Houghton, Courage: Stories of Darkness to Light

“I grew up in the 80s, a small-town girl with big dreams from a town called Pitt Meadows, just outside of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I come from a humble home, where it was common to hear, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Which is code for, “don’t say anything unless it’s something agreeable.” AKA, “don’t stir the pot!” Just a mild form of dysfunction for a highly sensitive girl like me. I learned to keep my thoughts inside, as it might not be the popular opinion. My parents were married in 1967, still in love today, which says a lot these days. I was raised, middle class, at a time when technology was in the infant stage. We received our news from television and the newspapers. We had our adventures outside in nature, riding bikes and daily trips to the store where you could buy 1 cent candy still, wearing seat belts wasn’t mandatory and smoking anywhere was considered normal. We had telephones with cords attached to the wall. If we wanted to talk to our friends, we dialled and they answered, without checking to see who was calling first.”
― Samantha Houghton, Courage: Stories of Darkness to Light