Appreciation and gratitude are a must if you choose to become the architect of increased happiness and your own fulfillment.

To manage our emotions is not to drug them or suppress them, but to understand them so that we can intelligently direct our emotional energies and intentions.... It's time for human beings to grow up emotionally, to mature into emotionally managed and responsible citizens. No magic pill will do it.

Many people are now starting to experience a new energy filtering down through the density of mass consciousness. This energy stirs your spirit to find freedom of expression and amplifies the voice within your heart. This new planetary energy facilitates people in thinking more about the heart and its potentials in all human affairs.

Appreciation is a powerful tool to shift perspective. Finding something to appreciate during a difficult situation quickly moves the perspective to the big picture from the little picture.

With just a little education and practice on how to manage your emotions, you can move into a new experience of life so rewarding that you will be motivated to keep on managing your emotional nature in order to sustain it. The payoff is delicious in terms of improved quality of life.

Managing our emotions increases intuition and clarity. It helps us self-regulate our brain chemicals and internal hormones. It gives us natural highs, the real fountain of youth we've been searching for. It enables us to drink from elixirs locked within our cells, just waiting for us to discover them.

When we react to life from the head without joining forces with the heart, it can lead us into childish, inelegant behavior that we don't respect in ourselves. If we get the head in sync with the heart first, we have the power of their teamwork working for us and we can make the changes we know we need to make.

Love fulfilled sees where we could have gone the way of love before, if we'd known how, and how insecurities limited many of our choices. Love fulfilled perceives new meaning and higher reasons behind many of the mysteries of why things happened as they did. Living from the heart is business - the business of caring for self and others.

By using your heart as your compass, you can see more clearly which direction to go to stop self-defeating behavior. If you take just one mental or emotional habit that really bothers or drains you and apply heart intelligence to it, you'll see a noticeable difference in your life.

Physiologically, it simply doesn't matter whether your anger is justified or not. The body doesn't make moral judgements about feelings it just responds.

Learning to just say no to emotional reactions isn't repression. Saying no means not engaging the frustration, anger, judgment, or blame. Without engagement, you won't have anything to repress.

Stress is an unstranformed opportunity for empowerment.

Appreciation is like looking through a wide-angle lens that lets you see the entire forest, not just the one tree limb you walked up on.

Remember, don't waste time comparing your life to others who seem more fortunate. Being fortunate is based on how much peace you have, not how many luxuries or conveniences you have. Practice from the heart to make peace with what is.

Generally, appreciation means some blend of thankfulness, admiration, approval, and gratitude. In the financial world, something that appreciates grows in value. With the power tool of appreciation, you get the benefit of both perspectives: as you learn to be consistently thankful and approving, your life will grow in value.