Kathy D Gypsy

When you were born, you didn't come with an owner's manual; these guidelines make life work better. 1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it's the only thing you are sure to keep for the rest of your life. 2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called "Life on Planet Earth". Every person or incident is the Universal Teacher. 3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of experimentation. "Failures" are as much a part of the process as "success." 4. A lesson is repeated until learned. It is presented to you in various forms until you learn it -- then you can go on to the next lesson. 5. If you don't learn easy lessons, they get harder. External problems are a precise reflection of your internal state. When you clear inner obstructions, your outside world changes. Pain is how the universe gets your attention. 6. You will know you've learned a le...

Once in awhile, I ponder the question of whether a different choice in life would have drastically changed my outcome. And I often wonder, do we really have choices or are we destined by fate? Perhaps there is such a thing as reincarnation, where the laws of the universe work whether you believe in them or not; where karma is dealt to our particular situations because of what we have done or not done, good or bad. This also includes the idea that 'like attracts like' and any negative or positive energies we release toward others bounces back to us a hundred times greater. I remember my aunt used to tell me, "Be careful what you think and what you say!" She believed, that any negative energy (like hatred or anger) would quickly tie you to that person in a next life, so that both parties must come back to work it out. What a perfect way to receive punishments and rewards for our bad or good deeds. So, getting back to choices vs. fate, I realize that certain situations i...