Suzanne Somers' 365 Ways to Change Your Life

by SOMERS, SUZANNE

• ISBN13: 9780609601617
• ISBN10: 060960161X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-12-01
• Publisher: Crown Pub

Summary

In this remarkable, uplifting book, best-selling author and beloved TV personality Suzanne Somers tackles everyday worries, doubts, and conflicts with practical answers and spiritual affirmations that lead the reader down the path to resolution, inner strength, and, ultimately, a happy and enriched life. As a sought-after lecturer and favorite commencement speaker, Suzanne often speaks to standing-room-only audiences about her own hard-won wisdom--wisdom distilled from a lifetime of transforming negatives into positives. With her usual warmth and candor, Suzanne guides her readers through each week with stories from her own journey and plenty of advice about how to: Find joy in your life every day by appreciating the simple things. Turn obstacles into opportunities and learn from even the stupidest mistakes. Resolve conflict with family and strengthen your relationships with loved ones. Realize the dreams you'd put aside, or even given up on. Appreciate yourself so that others will too. In this daily course of affirmations, meditations, and miracles, Suzanne Somers has created the perfect companion for anyone who's looking to change her life . . . but doesn't quite know where to begin.

Author Biography

Suzanne Somers is the author of seven books, including the New York Times best-sellers Keeping Secrets, Suzanne Somers' Eat Great, Lose Weight and Suzanne Somers' Get Skinny on Fabulous Food. Former star of the hit television programs Three's Company and Step by Step, Suzanne now stars on Candid Camera. She is also the spokesperson for the wildly successful line of Thighmaster fitness products and has her own line of jewelry on the Home Shopping Network. Suzanne also tours nationally with her popular Las Vegas singing act and lectures on substance abuse for the Suzanne Somers Institute for the Effects of Addiction on Families. She lives in California with her husband, Alan Hamel.

Excerpts

Day 1

Today is a New Beginning. This is your first opportunity to work at being the best person you can be. We all possess within us the power and talent to have the life each of us desires. Remember your dreams as a child? Remember not having limitations? Remember that time in your child self when you knew you could do anything, before people and adults in your life started filling your head with fear and negatives? It is important to work at remembering who you really are. What were the comments made about you as a child? Ask those who were around at that time in your life what they remember about you. These comments will be the insight into your authentic self. Recall those enchanted moments of adolescence, those times of invincibility, immortality, when it felt as though you were going to rule the world, be the happiest person ever, and the most successful. Sometimes it would last an afternoon, a summer, a sunrise; these were the enchanted moments inherent in youth before the wounding began. This was our soul telling us who we really are. They were the messages from the very depth of our self telling us who we are, what we are here to do, and our destiny.

Today begin this journey to look within, searching for the answers to the two great questions: Who am I, and what do I want? The answers are within us; that is the good news. It is now up to each one of us to find them. Your soul was trying to tell you back then in those enchanted moments of youth. Your job now is to remember that which you already know. What were you trying to tell yourself, what was your soul trying to say to you, before the wounding began and before you allowed others and outside influences to convince you that you couldn't do it? Maybe because of your particular life story, you experienced only one day of joy, which was the day of your birth. Remember that day of freedom and purity and safety. That memory is still inside you, and that is who you really are.

Thought for Today
Today I will work at remembering who I was as a child with all my dreams and fantasies, when the world and life in general was not filled with fear and limitations, before the wounding began and I allowed others and outside influences to convince me that I couldn't do it. I will try to regain that wonderful feeling that I could do anything. That memory will stay with me always and give me the freedom to start my journey toward my authentic self.  

Day 2

I speak about wounding. I now realize that the negatives in life are essential for growth--that is (and this is important), until they are no longer needed as a tool for growth. I have spent the better part of the past years endlessly reviewing and trying to understand the effects of my childhood upon my adult self. I have experienced many stages of realization that have moved me forward as a person. It has taken years to finally get to this place of peacefulness. So many times along the way I wanted to give up and move on. Yet it became apparent to me I could not move on until I dealt with each wound, each anger, each pent-up feeling. The more I would try to stuff my feelings down, the more depression I would feel.

Going back and reliving buried pain is agitating and uncomfortable, yet it is the only way to come to understanding and then forgiveness. Upon true forgiveness, I was able to let each hurt go, one by one, until one day the slate was clean. It was as though bricks had been lifted from my shoulders. The world had become a beautiful place. The worst was over, and I felt free of a burden I had carried for so long, it had become a part of me. As with a chronic toothache, you get used to it and keep it at bay with constant medication, perhaps an aspirin or two every couple of hours. So too with emotional pain. I was so used to it being there that I kept myself anesthetized with my patterns of behavior. These old patterns of mine were destructive. When the pain came I would spend money I didn't have to distract me. Or I would lie to protect the reality of who I really (thought) I was. Some people take away their pain with a cookie, sex, drugs, or alcohol. It's all the same. But pain does not go away. It just keeps getting buried deeper and deeper until we become our pain. Going back and looking holistically at yourself and your life is essential to unraveling the puzzle. Find the lesson in the wounding. Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, look for the opportunity that has come from the experience. Are you more compassionate as a result? That would be the first positive result of your growth. Look for more gifts that came out of your pain. Make a list of what you like about yourself and what you don't like. Study the list on the paper. Start to look at your life as a glass half-full rather than half-empty. This is the beginning. Along the way you will come to realize, as I have, that the wounding or the pain was your gift. From it you will learn what it is you have come here to do. Life will fall into place, and then the peace will begin.

Thought for Today
I will go back and remember my first painful memories, knowing that the object is not to stir up the past, but that to remember is the beginning of healing. I will not be afraid. It is this courageous first step that will change my life. I must remember so that I am no longer ruled by old hurts but have mastery over them. Harm that has been done to me is not my fault.

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Excerpted from Suzanne Somers' 365 Ways to Change Your Life by Suzanne Somers
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