“Love, compassion, and tolerance are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.”

The essence of all religions is love, compassion, and tolerance. Kindness is my true religion. No matter whether you are learned or not, whether you believe in the next life or not, whether you believe in God or Buddha or some other religion or not, in day-to-day life you must be a kind person. When you are motivated by kindness, it doesn’t matter whether you are a practitioner, a lawyer, a politician, an administrator, a worker, or an engineer: whatever your profession or field, deep down you are a kind person.

Having a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing sounds easy until you think about how much conditioning has taken place in your life, and how many of your current thoughts were influenced by geography, the religious beliefs of your ancestors, the color of your skin, the shape of your eyes, the political orientation of your parents, your size, your gender, the schools that were selected for you, and the vocation of your great-grandparents, to list only some possibilities.

Law of attraction practitioners know the way to attract new romance is to love themselves the way they want to be loved by another. Loving yourself creates a vibrational match for receiving love from the outside. It’s a simple matter of giving yourself that which you desire from another.

But what if you’ve already got a partner in life who isn’t “being all that he can be”? Or maybe your dream-come-true bride devolved into a shrew over time? Can law of attraction help you change someone or improve an existing relationship?

Talking about commitment usually evokes various responses. The compassionate samurai believes that it means doing what he says he’s going to do. The average person believes in this concept . . . some of the time. He believes that he should do what he says he’s going to when conditions are optimal or conducive for keeping his word. But honestly, commitment doesn’t have conditions. A compassionate samurai follows through whether it feels good or not; average people do what they feel like doing.

Everyone wants to be able to improve their lives in some way: to heal something, to start something new, to find their soul purpose. As long as we are alive, this process continues. Everyone has a next step waiting to be taken, and everyone absolutely everyone has trouble accomplishing it. In fact, we spend an inordinate amount of time making up reasons and excuses for not moving forward.

Being stuck can be extremely painful. The desire you have to change a habit or improve your life comes from your soul. When you do not move forward with it, you block the very expression of your soul. The frustration that accumulates over time because of dysfunctional patterns of self-sabotage merely represents the surface issue.

You often see articles on ways to unwind and relax after a stressful day, which I always find useful, but for me the most important advice would be to get to the source of the problem, and cut stress out before it even happens. By careful editing of your life, and changing certain habits, you can eliminate most (not all) sources of stress in your life.

What if you are creating your life story with the very thought you are thinking right now? Many people have changed their lives-turning financial ruin into abundant prosperity, transforming troubling relationships into loving bonds, and even healing what experts called untreatable diseases.

These people aren’t scholars, scientists, prophets, or millionaires. They’re just like you and me-everyday people who face heavy challenges throughout their lives-whether it’s our jobs, our families, or our inner selves. How did they do it? They discovered the wisdom of self-help pioneer Louise Hay and learned how to use the power of a single thought.

Every year women ranging from professionals to housewives get together as volunteers in Thimphu, Bhutan, to raise funds for a nunnery in a valley far from the city. They collect donations, organize monsoon balls, sell lottery tickets, and write about the life and hardships faced by the nuns who reside there. Thanks to their diligent efforts, conditions in the nunnery have improved in recent years: A new housing facility has been built, and the nuns are provided with warm clothes and proper food.

Milarepa depicts the humble beginnings of the man who was to become Tibet’s greatest saint. A true story based on centuries-old oral traditions, a youthful Milarepa is propelled into a world of sorrow and betrayal after his father’s sudden death. Destitute and hopeless, he sets out to learn black magic - and exact revenge on his enemies - encountering magicians, demons, an enigmatic teacher and unexpected mystical power along the way. But it is in confrontation with the consequences of his anger that he learns the most.