Bill’s Book of Values

Two Wolves

One evening when dealing with the misbehavior of his grandson, a wise Navajo grandfather told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.

“One is upset; seeing the world through eyes clouded with anger, jealousy, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, and false pride our lower nature, a spiritless, base instinct.

“The other is at ease; seeing the world through eyes open to peace, hope, humility, generosity, compassion, faith, and joy; coming from spiritual insight—our inner wisdom.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?”
The wise grandfather replied, “The one you feed.”

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Introduction

Values are principles, virtues or qualities you choose to guide you in your daily life. Compassion, honesty, forgiveness, service, fairness and love are values. There are many, many more.

This book is about values discovery of values, extension of values, understanding of values, living your values, loyalty to values, attention to values, personally adopted values, understanding and respect for others’ values, and respect for others who strive to live by their values. Values define your personal standards for what is good or bad. Loyally adhered to, they become permanent aspects of your character.

Artie’s Legacy

Ken was collecting his older brother Artie’s belongings from his army barracks. Artie had been killed in action. Ken was surprised by how little Artie had left behind; as though the worth of the life he lived could be measured by the amount of stuff Artie owned when he died. But Ken immediately saw that the important thing about a life is not a thing at all. It is other people’s memories of your relationship with them. The strongest memories are of love given and received.

Each person is of intrinsic worth and can discover and demonstrate that worth by searching for higher values and striving to live them. Each person has the ability to find wisdom within themselves which will affirm this worth. We each build this inner wisdom by living our values. Inner wisdom draws on insight and experience in order to reveal truth and how to live that truth.

It is important to learn to differentiate between thinking with your mind and feeling with your heart. The mind is where we make and rationalize our decisions. The heart, on the other hand, is where we feel the rightness or wrongness of these decisions. It is good to consult the heart before acting on decisions made in the mind.

It is also good to distinguish between your inner and outer life and to evaluate and balance the two. Our minds and our hearts are primary components of our inner life. In our outer lives we interact with other people and all of the things we take in with our senses sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste. In our inner life we can choose to change ourselves. In our outer life we have the ability to express our values through language and actions, thereby impacting the lives of those around us. This book supports journeying into inner awareness and living an outer life consistent with one’s own inner life.

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Tools to help you discover what is true

Journaling

Journaling is an activity you can use for private introspection. For example, writing what you think about some of the ideas this book presents. It preserves a record of your feelings that come up that are new, insightful or surprising for you. Journaling can be a valuable process of dialoging with your inner self in writing. Keeping a diary of what is going on in your life is one type of journaling.

A couple of variations on journaling are especially worth describing. Hot Pen is a technique of hurriedly writing whatever comes to your mind without stopping to edit, rephrase, contemplate or critique. The idea is to capture in writing whatever passes through your mind on the chosen subject. You can edit, condense, expand or meditate on what you have written later if you want to. The Hot Pen technique captures fleeting ideas by means of rapid continuous writing and helps keep ideas or impressions flowing. Letter to and from the Spirit Within writes a letter to the spirit within asking for discoveries, insights and understanding regarding the subject you are writing about. You take about ten minutes to write your letter to the spirit. Then you take about ten minutes to write the response to you from the spirit within. Both techniques often result in surprising and beneficial consequences.

Experts tell us that getting your thoughts down on paper helps you rescript your thought processes. You can change negative patterns to positive patterns simply by journaling. The process is key so we encourage you to write your way to a new way of thinking when you change your thoughts, you change your world.

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Pursue wisdom

Wisdom comes from the combination of insight of how things should be with experience of how well your ideals work. The practicality of ideals is revealed by reflecting on the experience of living your values. You can and should develop better values when the ones you have do not work for you.

Fame Limits Freedom

Two bears were lounging by their early evening campfire, remembering how pleasant their day had been fishing and swimming, raiding garbage dumpsters and honey trees and chasing campers and hikers. Eventually their conversation turned to their old friend Bruno. The first bear said he had heard that Bruno was now a celebrity performer in a traveling circus. He performed all sorts of bear tricks and the audiences loved him and cheered for him . When he wasn’t performing, he traveled in a golden cage. The second bear thought about it for a moment and began to weep.

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Live by the Golden Rule

“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”

This ancient rule of morality has been adopted by most religions, but even people who do not identify with religion have accepted the practical effectiveness of this concept of treating others the way you would like to be treated. Using the Golden Rule as a test or measuring stick is a valuable and reliable way to distinguish true values from false values. Hatred, selfishness and envy will never pass the Golden Rule Test when fairly administered. Generosity, love and fairness will always satisfy it. How would you want to be treated if the situation were reversed? That is how you should treat those who offend you as well as those you love.

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Feel gratitude

You will benefit by making a habit of looking for opportunities, experiences, insights, understandings and relationships to be thankful for from the smallest to the largest. Gratitude elevates your mood and helps you recognize what is important to you, how you can contribute to others, and what you can do to foster your own satisfaction with your life.

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Recognize the potential of your inner life

Your inner life is the mental and spiritual process by which you choose and develop how you want to act and think and who you want to be. You develop your inner life by choosing the values, ideals, virtues or characteristics by which you want to live. Your loyalty to these values determines who you become.

Your inner life is functioning whether you are aware of it or not. You can ignore it, or you can pay attention to building it. Your outer life interacts with people, things, and institutions that probably are not under your control. No matter what you encounter in your outer life, your inner life can be strong and satisfying and can enhance the health of your emotions.
Your inner life teaches you that when you stumble and fall you can recommit to the path that you’ve chosen. There is no irreversible failure, no deadline, no time limit, no minimum required rate of progress, no penalty or punishment, just willing effort at your own pace.

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Realize the limits of your outer life

Your outer life is where you put your values into action and on display. It is where you interact with other people, animals, nature and things. Your values determine how you treat the things and persons you have relationships with. Everything you say and do is a reflection of the values you choose.

Your mind serves both your inner and outer life. Your mind is a tool that you use to apply to your outer life the values you have chosen from your inner life. If you don’t consciously bring your values outward, all you are doing is reacting, not thinking, not choosing and not applying your values to your challenges. You have choices. You can allow outer influences to define who you are, consequently ignoring the wisdom of the inner life. Unhappiness, dissatisfaction and sometimes mental illness result from living with your inner life and your outer life at odds with each other. Happiness, joy and contentment result from consistency and balance between your inner and outer lives, between your higher values and your material level reality.

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Respect the counsel of both your mind and your heart

Your heart is part of your inner life where you have responsive feelings to your words and actions. Do they cause you to feel good or bad? Do you think it was right or wrong to do what you did? These feelings prompt you to reassess you behavior and change or grow if necessary.

Your heart makes its comments in the form of feelings. Feelings like self respect, worthiness, love or rightness confirm the correctness of your conclusions. Feelings like guilt, fear, disappointment with self , failure, ordinary, small and weak are the heart’s questioning your conclusions. Your heart’s feelings about your thoughts and conclusions are valid and important conveyances of inner wisdom. They can vary tremendously from what your mind tells you.
With practice and experience you can learn how to interpret your feelings accurately.

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Consult your inner wisdom

Focusing on what is ideal and right Your inner life is where you are free to define what is ideal and right for you. What you believe is ideal and right is what you should be inspired to support and advocate in your outer life. Loyalty to your ideals will reliably lead to your contentment and satisfaction with how you live your life.

In your inner life there is an inner spirit that gives you a slight nudge to serve, forgive, and love. This inner spirit not only urges you but also teaches you how to serve, forgive and love by guiding your reflective thinking on your words, acts and feelings. Everyone has this inner voice and it will help you develop values and make good decisions.

You can learn to follow this inner voice by going to your heart and listening. Your inner spirit reveals truths and shows you how to live the truths you discover. Through meditation and reflection you can listen and interpret this spirit.

In order to meditate, relax. Quiet your mind by paying attention to the regularity of your breathing. Ask yourself about meanings, values, how to help others, solutions to problems, self control, or any other concern. Listen to and talk with the inner spirit and interpret the feelings and impressions which arise.

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Ground yourself in core values

There are three core values in which we should grow during this mortal lifetime:

Serving Service is love in action. It is giving, encouraging and supporting. It is a great source of joy. It is appropriate to approach every opportunity for action or comment with a desire to be of service to others.

Forgiving Forgiveness gives expression to peacemaking, brings peace within you, and gives you the freedom to love again. Forgiving is letting go of the desire to retaliate or to hold another as in your debt because they have offended or harmed you. When you forgive, by far the greater part of the substantial benefits flow to you.

Loving Love is the desire for self and others to succeed and to experience frequent joy and fulfillment. It is the desire to receive and do good. It is friendliness toward other persons and things. To love and be loved is the greatest need of each person and leads to true contentment.

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Focus daily on the values you choose and search for the meanings they serve

Values are principles or qualities you choose to guide you in your daily life. They are your criteria for what has meaning in your life. They can also be called virtues or principles to live by or ideals. Values are relationship oriented. We need interaction with others in order to grow our values.

Meanings are your understanding of why some quality you value is important. Meanings answer the question “why do this?” . How does the act, thought or restraint serve your values? The meaning we are looking for is not the definitional meaning of a word or concept. The meaning we are looking for is an understanding of the usefulness of living our values. This kind of understanding is a feeling of rightness that comes from the spirit within.

Often, questioning why, why, why reveals a whole family of values. An example is the love related family of values.

• Love
• Compassion
• Affection
• Kindness
• Mercy
• Forgiveness
• Respect
• Service
• Tenderness
• Empathy
• Understanding

Why is love good? Because it leads you to compassion. Why are love and compassion good? Because they lead you to affection. Why are love, compassion and affection good? Because they lead you to kindness, etc. Discovering meaning is discovering a facet of the truth. Truth is awareness of discovering how the cosmos really works.

Recognition of meaning may arise suddenly, out of insight from the inner spirit. It may be mysterious, a seeming miracle. Or it may arise progressively — first a feeling, then a suspicion, then a theory, then a conviction and finally a trusting belief.

Grow in levels of meaning

There are different levels of meaning which can be applied to values. Meanings can be explored by asking “Why?” Consider the value “generosity. “ Why is it good to be generous?

1. If you are generous, you may get something in return.
2. If you are generous, you will feel better.
3. If you are generous, you will make someone’s life better.
4. If you are generous, others may follow your example, making our world a better place.

These are all valid meanings supporting generosity but they range from selfish to altruistic in their motivation.
When you accept a value, it isn’t so important which level of meaning motivates you. Over time you will elevate the level of meaning by reconciling it with your lessons of experience. Over time, something comes from within which progressively changes your relationship with a value.

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Cycle of values development

• Inner Life
• Choose Values
• Heart Feelings Feedback Good/Bad Right/Wrong
• Mind Choose Words & Actions
• Outer Life Live Words & Actions
• Inner Life You receive insight into goodness in your inner life. You access your inner life by meditation and reflection. You discover, choose and refine values here and you feel meanings here.
• Mind Your mind plans how to achieve the good you have discovered in your inner life. It predicts and implements better behavior and better consequences.
• Outer Life In your outer life you act on your decisions and get feedback from other people. Your values work or don’t work as determined by your experience.
• Heart Feelings You are back in your inner life. You are meditating and reflecting in order to feel your heart’s assessment. Review what you have done, what happened, how it might be done better and whether your actions served your values. Now, repeat the cycle.
• The greater your experience of living your values ( both success and failure), the deeper the meanings become. All higher meanings whisper of love, forgiveness and service.
• There is an infinity of higher values.
• They all relate to love
• The desire to do good.

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Some higher values for truth seekers

Acceptance

Seek to accept people as they are. Release the temptation to judge others or yourself. Give acceptance to others as you would have them accept you. Acceptance permits relationship. It does not endorse thoughts or behavior.

Affection

Having warm regard for someone or something. Enjoying being with them or it. Affection involves tenderness, fondness, attachment.

Authenticity

Genuine, trustworthy, reliable. Aspire to be real with yourself and in all your relationships. You want people to come to know you for the goodness in you. When you live loyal to your goodness, you are happy and not confused by pretense and your friends are attracted to the real you. Portray yourself as you actually are. No pretense about what you are or believe. We grow into what we believe.

Balance

A harmonious arrangement of parts or elements; poise; equilibrium. In all that you do, think and feel, seek a healthy balance to nourish the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual parts of yourself; a balance that creates a partnership between heart and mind.

Commitment

Commitment is a state of being bound emotionally, intellectually or spiritually to a course of action or to a person or to an ideal.

Compassion

Compassion is recognizing the suffering and pain of others and making allowances for the distortions these cause in their experience. Compassion is caring about them in their suffering and wanting to help. Compassion makes allowances, lifts burdens, and comforts.

Confidence

Confidence is a feeling of assurance, especially self assurance. Be confident in your ability to make decisions and carry them through. Have confidence you will make good choices because you are learning to trust the guidance of your inner wisdom and to follow it. You have undiscovered inner abilities to cope with what comes your way. There are qualities within you that make you strong and able. Believe you can achieve and honest effort will be frequently rewarded.

Courage

Courage is when you try to do the right thing even though you expect there may be uncomfortable consequences. It is a quality of mind and spirit that enables you to face danger, fear or challenges with confidence and resolution. To be courageous you have to experience some amount of fear and do what you think is the right thing anyway. Timid people can be courageous and so can cautious ones. Those who act with reckless disregard of danger are not exercising courage.

Dependability

Demonstrating to people by your actions that they can depend on you to do what is right and to keep your promises. Being clear about what you are promising. Being reliable, trustworthy and faithful.

Devotedness

Unwavering loyalty and commitment to a person or a cause. Courageously persevering regardless of the difficulty. Always putting the other person first and ahead of self.

Discernment

Intentionally seeking and incorporating inner wisdom and insight from the inner spirit to distinguish right from wrong and good from bad in order to make proper decisions and build healthy relationships. Intentionally seeking insight from spirit. Exhibiting keen insight and good judgment, grasp, self knowledge and realization.

Encouragement

Enthusiastically supporting others in their efforts to expand their values, express their creativity, and reach their wise goals. Finding joy in encouraging the progress of others. Approving, fostering, morale building, advocating and inspiring.

Equality

Treating everyone as having the same worthiness and right to respect, dignity and equal treatment. Equality is not sameness. It recognizes that each person is unique and it values individuality.

Fairness

Be sincerely fair to others, even when it costs you something. Be fair in justice, in sharing, in inclusion and in opportunities. What is fair is how you would have others treat you if the situation were reversed.

Faith

Confident belief in the truth, value or trustworthiness of a person, idea or thing; the leading of one’s own spirit within toward optimism and good outcomes. Live with trusting belief that goodness is never wasted. Good will prevail, if not now, then later. Given enough time, all respectful, loving behaviors produce good consequences.

Forbearance

Tolerance and self restraint in the face of provocation. Choosing not to react or retaliate.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is the willingness to set aside offense and extend fresh opportunity for relationship despite anger or hurt from past injuries. It does not require forgetting that the injury ever occurred. Be willing to forgive harm done to you. Seek to forgive injuries of the past and release anger and resentment. The road to peace begins with forgiveness. Abandon your anger and resentment even in the absence of the offender’s remorse. Free yourself…by forgiving.

Generosity

Give others your time, your encouragement, and your material support. Give with goodwill and a sincere desire to help others succeed. Generosity is an attitude of helpful friendliness, not an amount.

Gentleness

Considerate actions, words and gestures. Gentleness can be firm, strong, assured, and controlled. Or it can be soft, caring, and supportive. It is concerned with achieving goals while preventing suffering.

Genuineness

Honestly felt or experienced. Not phony or false. No spin. Appearance and reality are the same. No deception, actual or real. Frank, sincere, honest and authentic.

Goodness

Correct, true, beautiful and loving. Beneficial, causing no harm and uplifting. The ideal.

Graciousness

Kind, gentle, poised and good mannered. Giving, forgiving, and generous. Warmly courteous and tactful. Graciousness conveys love, even when the answer is “no.”

Gratefulness

Gratefulness is an attitude of thankful appreciation. Be grateful for opportunities to change and grow. Make a point to notice the things you can be thankful for. Beauty, goodness, truth, values, insight and understanding; these are things everyone can give thanks for and feel grateful in their inner self.

Honesty

To be honest is to say and be consistent with your real and genuine thoughts and actions . Honesty applies to your habits, relationships, ideas, actions, and plans. Honesty is fair, truthful, and gentle. It does not mislead.

Hope

Optimistic, expectant, anticipating, confident. Hope is expectation of good outcomes. Look for the best in yourself and others and embrace hope for the future. There is unrecognized goodness in everyone.

Integrity

Honesty, honor, trustworthiness, goodness. Reliable loyalty to higher values. A person has integrity when all of life is based on their highest principles.

Kindness

Friendly, merciful, tolerant, forgiving. Considerate of others feelings and needs.

Listening

Listening is more than hearing. It is receiving and interpreting data. It involves ears, eyes, touch and more. When done well, it shows respect for the person and message of the communicator and informs the listener. It is important to listen carefully and to communicate carefully. Listening is giving full attention to the other’s message.

Love

The desire to help others succeed in life. The desire to do good to others. An intense feeling of deep affection.

Loyalty

Loyalty is like reliability and consistency. It is choosing not to desert your friends or your principles or your obligations. Loyalty keeps you from being easily diverted by peer pressure and fear of disapproval. Unwavering in devotion. Faithful, firm.

Mercy

Generosity in administering the consequences of justice. It applies love for the offender to relieve the harshness of mechanical rule enforcement. Mercy extends compassion and forgiveness to someone who has done harm or offended in some way.

Openness

Openness listens. Openness is willingness to understand and to entertain new ideas, new people, new experiences and the leadings of the inner spirit. Willingness to change and grow. Unprejudiced, objective, tolerant, receptive, enlightened.

Originality

Receptive to inspiration and new and unique answers coming from your inner life. Genuine, unconventional, innovative, groundbreaking.

Patience

Patience has to do with self restraint and the passage of time. It is waiting politely for good and satisfying results. Patience gives the inner wisdom of everyone concerned time to operate to help produce good results. Tolerant, understanding, persevering, constant, calmly awaiting an outcome.

Peace

Nonviolence in attitude and behavior in thought, word, and action. Inner calm leads to outer peace. Respect leads to peace. Desire to be of service leads to peace. Forgiveness leads to peace.

Reasonableness

Willingness to alter your stance. Allowing opponents to have some success. Looking for and incorporating the valid elements in opposing positions.

Resilience

Resilience is the ability to survive and sometimes even thrive in difficult or hostile circumstances. It is the strength to endure in the absence of advantage. Resilience is a charming virtue. It is the underdog succeeding despite the improbability. The resilient person can face challenges and recover from difficulties. Rising from defeat repeatedly despite the odds.

Respect

Gracious. Honoring the uniqueness and humanity of each person. Treating as significant, having elevated status, worthy of consultation and consideration. Someone or something that matters. Everyone wants to be respected. Respect is a peacemaking tool.

Sincerity

Earnestness, wholeheartedness, truthfulness, openness, straightforwardness. If you want to be known and admired for yourself, you need to be true to what you are. Sincerity is reaching into your inner self for the feeling of what is right and then enacting what is right. You should also respect others who sincerely portray themselves, even when this is not so attractive. Allow sincerity to enter your actions and relationships with others. Seek to act only in ways which are consistent with your convictions. Say and do what you really mean about what really matters to you. Sarcasm and mean teasing are incompatible with sincerity.

Service

Service is doing something for or giving to others. It can be money, things, personal time, effort, good advice, love or acceptance. There is always an inner benefit to the server from unselfish service. Commit yourself to serving and then seek guidance from your inner wisdom in serving others and the community.

Sympathy

Showing compassion; kind; concerned. Soothing the victim with understanding. Sympathy is not just an attitude or feeling. It involves action and expressions alleviating some of the other person’s suffering.

Tenderness

Affectionate, understanding gentleness. Sensitive to moral or spiritual feelings. Having warm feelings; merciful; compassionate.

Tolerance

Forbearance of criticism. Allowing another to be as she is. Open mindedness, sympathy, patience, accepting people or situations. Recognizing and respecting the beliefs or practices of others.

Trust

Relying confidence. Inclination to believe or confide readily. Relying on something in the future; depending.

Truth

The way things work together for good. The supreme reality loving relationships. The way all things and beings are coordinated in their assent Godward.

Understanding

To understand another person (or yourself) you need to know how they have become what they are; their successes and failures, their pain, their dreams, their love and their fears. Psychological, intellectual, emotional, spiritual it all matters and always adds up to a uniquely valuable person. Ability to appreciate or share the feelings and thoughts of others. Sympathetic or wise toward people.

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Living your values

Especially through service, forgiveness and love

An overview of living your values

• Your values are principles or qualities you choose to guide yourself in living your daily life. They define how you believe you should act and react.
• The safe and secure foundation of your values is within you. Go within. Consider the possibilities. Ask which way is right. Listen. Test your conclusion against the golden rule.
• Your system of values benefits from regular reflection, periodic self assessment, and healthy feedback from others.
• Your values become your own when you realize them in your experience, actively choose to adopt and follow them and let them determine how you live.
• Your value system is dynamic. Values can and should grow in meaning throughout your life.
• At some point in your life you may choose to change the priority of certain values in your value system.
• We pursue the quest for truth through the development of values and the search for meanings in our individual lives.
• Don’t run from failure. Resist it and struggle to succeed but experience every part of it so when the next opportunity comes, you have learned what does or does not work. You will become resilient and will not only survive but will thrive. Failure provides a unique and intense learning experience which should not be wasted.
• Often you won’t live up to your values. What is important is that when you stumble and fall, you get back up and recommit to your values. Loyalty to your values is something that matters. It grows through the intelligent decisions you make in your mind and your heart every day.
• Your deepest values are ones that have been tested and proved true to you through your life experience.
• Your most useful values are ones that bring you the greatest satisfaction, develop a sense of life purpose, foster a spiritual connection in yourself and with others and help you to live a life of integrity and originality. You are creating yourself through your choices and loyalties.

Labels

My dogs had been rolling in some foul smelling substance. I reprimanded them for being so foolish as to cover themselves with such awful smells. They replied that there are no bad smells but they admitted that some were more aggressive than others. They argued that I had wrongly prejudged their new smell and labeled it as “foul”, while they found it to be awesome. I sup-pose they have a point. The label I place on something has a lot to do with the worth I place on it and the way I treat it.

Cultivating values daily

Here is an exercise for you to use to intentionally cause your higher values to emerge and grow.
Choose a value to cultivate. Focus on the value. Explore the definition of the value and the consequences of living it. Relax and imagine how it would feel to live that value and how things would be different.

• Remind yourself daily of the values you have chosen by posting them on a mirror, your mobile device, or desktop.
• Work on the values you have chosen by incorporating them into your thinking.
• Consult your values before making important decisions.
• When you notice a struggle in yourself, look for a conflict between your actions or desires and one or more of your values. In order to feel better, adjust your actions to align with your values.
• Pay attention to your values daily in order to form good habits. Use your feelings of rightness, appropriateness and goodness as indicators of what is right to do.
• As your values become a part of you, choose additional ones to add into your life.
• You are not alone. Your spirit is a guide to all values. Friendships with other truth seekers is important. We all need each other to grow…and to change our world for the better.

Living your values with family & friends

• Encourage your family and friends to be aware of their values. One way is to ask them ( with no hint of criticism ) why they are doing or saying what they are.
• Be a living example of loyalty to your values. In your loyalty, be careful not to feel or display an attitude of superiority.
• Support your family and friends in living the values they choose. You may encourage them to modify their values to fit reality but you should not tempt them to violate their values because they are inconvenient. They are searching for truth too and they must find it in a way that is meaningful to them.
• Share with those you meet. Talk about values, meanings and truth. Many people are interested.
• Assist others in their search for values and meanings. Be sincere and direct. No sarcasm. No playing the devil’s advocate. No suggestion of disloyalty to values.
• Dedicate yourself to making a contribution toward a better world. Do something noble with your life.
• Be a living example of the values that you have chosen. Be a living example of loyalty to your values.

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Living your values through service

Service is an activity that is performed for the benefit of others. Service gives us the experience of becoming selfless. Through selflessness we enter the spiritual dimension of forgiveness and love. Service is love in action. It is a great source of joy. It is giving, encouraging and supporting.

Unselfish Service?

My spirit within talks often about my need to be of unselfish service to others. And I try; but I guess I don’t really understand. Every time I do something for another with no goal of honor or reward for myself, I enjoy it so much that I can’t be sure it was unselfish. Or maybe it is inevitable. Perhaps the universe rewards unselfish service with pleasure and joy.
Service leads us to a greater understanding of the world in which we live. We act and pay close attention because we care. Service is the process by which we move from a selfish to a selfless existence. It is a gift we give to others. Here are some suggestions of ways to serve.
Serve yourself (Take care of yourself)
Good health is important to the desirable balance between spirit, mind and body.

• Study and practice optimal nutrition.
• Exercise regularly.
• Refrain from polluting your body or your mind. Your mind connects you to others and to the uni-verse and your inner self to your outer self.
• Reflect positively — Engage in gratitude and re-view your day (to remind yourself what works and what does not.)
• Educate yourself. All education is immediately beneficial and eventually useful.
• Engage in healthy conversation to expand under-standing.
• Exercise your mind by in-depth study.
• Feed your spirit. Your spirit is the advocate, sponsor and sustainer of the things and attitudes you value.
• Spend time with inspiring people.
• Spend time with people who encourage you.
• Learn and practice meditation to relax and to re-lease your inner wisdom.
• Learn to be comfortable with yourself. Forgiving, patient and tolerant of yourself.
• Seek and explore other people’s values and meanings.
• Accept inspiration wherever you find it.
• Spend time in nature. Enjoy its diversity and beauty.
• Forgive freely and lavishly.
• Contemplate beauty of form, action, balance, sound and behavior.
• Count your blessings and feel gratitude.
• Read through this book once a month. Understand and / ponder each statement. Determine whether you agree or not.
• Serve your family and friends.
• Spend time interacting lovingly with your family. Talk, listen, play, do things for them that you know they want done.
• Help with projects around the house.
• Be understanding about your family members’ points of view.
• Listen fully, attentively and respectfully.
• Encourage.
• Be kind.
• Be helpful.
• Connect with your extended family.
• Be lighthearted, cheerful and playful.
• Be charming.
• Explore differences with respect.
• Serve your community
• Cultivate and express your care about others.
• Stay informed. Volunteer in community projects.
• Participate and encourage friends and family to engage in community activities.
• Practice being a positive, friendly influence.
• Recycle and in other ways lighten society’s and nature’s ecological load.
• Become involved in a local social justice issue.
• Serve the world
• Realize that we are one global family and practice the golden rule.
• Get involved with global concerns.
• Get involved in environmental projects.
• Become involved in a global social justice issue.

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Living your values through forgiveness and peacemaking

Every Day Tolerance

I put my dogs out. They found a skunk. The skunk was offended by their barking. I was offended by its spraying. It was ended by my shooting. Anger is like that. It rationalizes and escalates. Now I have a stinky dead skunk, two stinky very live dogs and a case of guilt at having taken the skunk’s life to satisfy my irritation. Too bad someone wasn’t forgiving and or tolerant.

Bearing a grudge and carrying fear or hurt from your lower nature are damaging to you emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and even physically. Forgiveness is healing and it makes a space for love. When you forgive, a transformation happens inside of you that causes profound growth. When you don’t forgive, you allow the source of your anger to accumulate and become part of your nature, your character.

Forgiveness is realizing you cannot change what happened but you can change yourself and the future by forgiving. Let go of the burden of fear and hurt and apply your inner wisdom towards forgiveness even when you don’t receive an apology or expression of regret.

You have a choice. You can choose to live in your higher self even when those around you do not choose to live in theirs.
Here are some techniques to help you to forgive.

Letting go

By forgiving you are not condoning the behavior, nor are you required to continue a relationship with the person. (That is a separate decision).

Forgiving is letting go of the anger, hurt and desire for revenge.

Forgiving benefits the forgiver most. It is not releasing all memory of the offense. It is giving up any desire to retaliate, get even, or hurt the offender. It avoids dwelling in the hurt of the offense. Forgiving frees you from the burden of spiteful thinking and prolonged hurt. Since you are the person who gets most of the benefits of your forgiving, it is to your advantage to let go of thoughts of retaliation quickly. Forgive even when the offender is unrepentant and seems unworthy of forgiveness. Forgiveness is important to your emotional, mental, and spiritual health.

When you realize that you are carrying desires to punish the other person, you can first try the shortcut method of letting go of those emotions: Simply relax and ask yourself “Can I just let this offense go?”

If your answer is “yes’ this should be sufficient to free you of the anger, hurt, and desire for revenge.

If you are not ready to let go, acknowledge that you need help. Ask your inner wisdom to help you. Then take time to cool down.

Cool Down

• Remove yourself physically from the situation.
• Breath slowly and deeply.
• Go for a walk.
• Firmly tell yourself to stop and detach from your anger, hurt, betrayal and fear emotions.
• Ask for help from your inner wisdom to create a new perspective. By cooling down away from the offender and his/her friends, you will become capable of thinking clearly and making good decisions. Be sure that you understand the situation, then consider your feelings calmly.
• Consider Your Feelings
  Feelings come from your unconscious. Understanding feelings helps you understand yourself and others. By respecting those feelings and questioning why you are feeling a particular way, you can more easily put things into a healthy perspective.
  Feelings come from a part of your mind that doesn’t verbalize well. Nevertheless, it performs valuable and important data analysis for you. It is very alert and sensitive to circumstances, body language, eye movement, etc. Its conclusions register as feelings and intuitions in your conscious mind. These are part of your inner life. They contribute to your inner wisdom. If you decide that your feelings have wisdom to impart, explore what these feelings are saying to you. Then check in with your values.
  Check In With Your Values
  Use your inner wisdom to check in with your values. If you ask, your inner wisdom will help you find ways to treat the other person as you would like to be treated.
• Which of your values apply to the situation?
• What do these values tell you?
• Take time to imagine how each value feels as you allow it into your mind and heart.
• Acknowledge that your anger and resentment mostly hurt you. Let go of the desire to punish and any tendency toward feeling victimized or hurt.
• Ask yourself if you are ready to live your values.
• Choose to act on the values you have explored.
• Forgiveness
  Let go of anger, resentment, suffering, and self victimization…enjoy the benefits.
  When you embrace the value of forgiveness and let go of the anger that binds you, you discover your power to achieve good consequences has greatly increased and this is a source of joy.
  Reconciliation
  Once you are free of the painful feelings, consider carefully if you want to continue the relationship. Your choice in this should always lean toward reconciliation and relationship, not isolation. It will be helpful to consult your inner wisdom by going within.
  Going within
• When going within to evaluate a situation , apply respect, sympathy, and honesty towards yourself and others.
• Determine what you need to do to gain a healthy under-standing of this person, situation, or yourself.
• Seek to understand with compassion, empathy, and generosity.
• Make a higher choice even if those around you don’t.
• As you live your day-to-day life, go within to consult your inner wisdom frequently to evaluate situations be-fore you take action.

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Seeing from a different perspective

Every human being has two natures, like in the two wolves story. These two natures are vying for your attention. You can choose to reach for the best your inner wisdom can produce or you can live in your lower and lesser nature. The nature you feed is the one that will win.

Seeing a situation from an opposing perspective is a useful process in difficult circumstances. It is especially effective in helping you to forgive others. This process applies your imagination to show you that many of the perceived wrongs done by others are less infuriating when you imagine a rational motive for their action. All sorts of damaging things happen as we live and they need to be accepted with grace and quickly transcended.

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In your mind’s eye picture a cave man an angry man with club upraised, breathing hate and animosity as he looks fiercely just ahead.

Now enlarge the picture.

In front of him crouches a saber toothed tiger. Behind him, a woman and two children. Immediately you recognize this man is risking his life to protect those he loves and cherishes. The man is the same in both pictures. But in the second sketch your perception is expanded to see his motives. In one he is a violent and dangerous animal. In the other he is a hero to be admired. He hasn’t changed. Your understanding has. If you could only fathom the real needs, feelings and motives of others, you would understand them better and you would recognize their similarities to you.

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Taking action to forgive

After careful consideration you may need to take some sort of action before you are ready to let go. Some possibilities are:

• Speak out about injustice. You may need to protest an injustice done to yourself or someone else.
• Cut off relationships that interfere with your personal growth. You may find that some relationships are doing too much damage and decide to end them.
• Talk it out. You may want to share your needs with the other person and see if you can work out a conclusion that is satisfactory to both of you. Perhaps there is a middle ground that satisfies the real needs of both parties.
• Expressing anger, fear, violence, or agitation can cause others to respond in their own similar manner. Instead, cool down first, then speak calmly to resolve conflict. This approach can help build relationships. Relationships are real, lasting, and worth the effort. It is a good thing to make a new friend. But it is a great thing to make a new friend of an enemy.
  Practice peacemaking and
  Communicate Calmly
  Be gentle and respectful with others and yourself.
• Calm down before you react. Listen to your feelings and be aware of your emotions.
• Talk to yourself about how you feel and ask for what you need.
• Listen with an open heart to what others have to say.
• Look for points you can agree with.
• Be willing to consider the possibility that you are partially responsible for the problem instead of just blaming the other person.
• Make a sincere effort to understand the other person’s viewpoint.
• Look for ways to solve the problem, not just win the argument.
• Find a middle ground as a compromise.
• Banish drama (stirring things up ) from your life and be-come a peacemaker.
• Forgive yourself & promote inner peace
• When you don’t live up to your values, forgive yourself, repair the damage and recommit.
• Practice becoming increasingly loyal to your values. The opportunities to abandon high values are many.
• Forgive yourself. You are in the process of becoming a better person.
• Don’t condemn yourself for your mistakes; learn from them.
• Consult your inner wisdom frequently to help promote peace in yourself.
• Face your fears. With courage and strength from within, any fear can be overcome.
• Work to replace emotions that are not serving you such as fear, anger, resentment and envy by cultivating peaceful values.
• Treating others as you would like to be treated if your roles were reversed is a reliable guide to forgiving and promoting peace.
• Be patient with yourself and others.
• Forgive & promote peace with family & friends
• Educate yourself in conflict resolution techniques.
• Get in the habit of promoting peace instead of drama in your relationships.
• Work to prevent bullying of any kind.
• Encourage solutions rather than blame.
• Practice the values of forgiveness and peacemaking instead of drama and conflict.
• Promote peace in your community & the world
• Realize that the planet is in process—civilization is evolving. In any particular moment things may be getting worse but from century to century they are improv-ing.
• Work to make the world a better place.
• Promote peaceful solutions. Be a visible advocate for peace.
• Find and promote a cause that matters to you.
• Live your values. They really do matter.

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Love is the desire to do good to others, to help them succeed in life and to have what they need, including respect, joy and friendship.

Love is the origin and the culmination of all values. Everything that is well done incorporates and expresses love caring about others.

In order to think about love in greater depth, take a few minutes to reflect on how each of the values listed below expresses love.

• Affection is the warm regard for, attraction to or desire to be with.
• Compassion is sympathy for the suffering of an-other and a desire to help.
• Kindness is dealing with another with courtesy, gentleness and helpfulness.
• Mercy spares an offender from the harshness of justice.
• Empathy is understanding how another is feeling.
• Forgiveness lets go of hurt, anger and desire for retaliation or retribution or the desire to get even.
• Respect is treating others with dignity and honor.
• Service is doing something good for the benefit of others.
• Tenderness is soothing, understanding ministry to another.
• Understanding is feelingly comprehending an-other’s mood, attitude or behavior.
• Ways to love yourself
• Practice service and forgiveness. Both benefit you as well as others.
• Increasingly stay in contact with your higher self. Con-verse, ask, reflect and ask again.
• Consciously become more loyal to the values you have chosen.
• Practice discernment on the ways you spend your time so they can become healthy & productive. How do you spend your time? Is that as it should be?
• Spend some time interacting with nature and appreciating what it does for you.
• Engage regularly in positive relationships.
• Spend frequent occasions in some form of meditation.
• Ways to love family & friends
• Find opportunities to help those in need.
• Learn to show and practice kindness.
• Show love through physical touch ( backrub) and actions (finding car keys).
• Show love through verbal expression: “I love you.” “You’re great. ” “I like how you. . .”
• Listen with your higher self.
• Generously share materially and emotionally.
• Ways you can love your community & the world
• Help community members through acts of kindness.
• Always respond positively and respectfully to person-al requests for help.
• Serve and volunteer in your community.
• Find and play a positive role in loving groups.

For example:

• Boys and Girls Clubs
• Big Brothers/Sisters
• Religious organizations
• Youth and/or teen programs
• Social Justice issues
• Life has purpose

Your life is important to everyone. You are a participant in the repeating cycle of discovery, decision, action and reflection. (p.12) Through this process we are all growing into our real and mature selves and, in this way, together we can slowly make real the best that we can imagine.

Truth and Techniques for Cultivating Higher Values to Achieve Success and Satisfaction in Life
In Search of Values and Meanings
By: Truthseekers board members.
Contact Truthseekers at
www. TRUTHSEEKERSQUEST.com
Assembled in 2014 by William Cooper.
Contact William Cooper at
cooper3630@sbcglobal.ne