David W. Earle

“Reality may not be what you want it to be, but it is the reality you now must face. You can deny this reality and try to wish it away, or you can accept it and not waste any energy on wanting it to be different.”

“There are two ways of thinking. One is living life based on fear. The other is trusting. Letting go and allowing trust to control our lives takes mental gymnastics.”

“My prayer is an attitude of pure gratitude for having the opportunity to experience life on this earth with all its pain, heartache, worry, and turmoil; coupled with this gratitude is the thankfulness for just having the opportunity to have lived. That is fairly easy on good days but difficult when life puts rocks and boulders in the road.”

“Honoring your word is the fiber from which trust is built.”

“Many people look at their past and bemoan their mistakes. Those errors in judgment, behavior, hurting others, and the wrong decisions may be what consumes them now. It does not have to be that way, for recovering from a traumatic situation is all a matter of how we think about what happened. It is not so much about what happened to us as what we make of the circumstance.”

“What this world needs now… more balloons and clowns”

“Change is hard, difficult, painful, and often messy”

“Shame is a powerful feeling. There is a tremendous difference between making a mistake and believing you are a mistake...If I don’t see myself as being a mistake then it is I who must take responsibility and I am not ready to accept that.”

“This is what we desire in intimate relationships but this deep connection is often so frightful that most do not take advantage of the opportunities presented for honesty.”

“We violated each other’s boundaries with verbal missiles of anger disguised in the pretense of “just kidding.”

“Teenagers can spot hypocrisy a mile away and here I was telling them how to cope when they witnessed the shambles of my own life and how I was living.”

“...the state of perfection is an elusive goal; demanding something so obscure as almost unattainable and can become a compulsive, crazy making squirrel-on-a-wheel way of living.”

“When you wear a mask, you are not real.”

“Under this aura of perfection he knows how flawed he really is but his intact denial system keeps this awareness suppressed in the far recesses of his mind.”

“Sitting on the hot seat of change requires much courage, patience, and persistence.”

“The more severe the dysfunction you experienced growing up, the more difficult boundaries are for you.”

“Many of the habits of dysfunctional families use are not from the lack of love but are the result of fear. Knowing the love-limiting habits and behaviors of dysfunctional families is a wonderful beginning to lower the fear, allowing us to be real, allowing us all to learn how to love better.”

“Putting labels on others creates a black hole of disregard where judgment thrives and schisms deepen.”

“People build defenses around a weakness, not around strength. Where self-esteem is strong, a defense is unnecessary.”

“Embracing doubt is sometimes threatening, as we fear losing our faith if we explore our doubts. Following that thought, if one loses one’s faith, then as some religions dictate, that individual cannot enter heaven. Since heaven is the reward of an earthly existence, doubt becomes the enemy of this reward.”