Sherrie Smiles

If you don't trust yourself to be involved in
transforming that which needs to be changed, then
you end up waiting for someone else to come along
and do the work for you. This leads to a constant
state ofdependence on some external authority,
when the means to achieving what you want sits
within yourself.
~ Malidoma Some

Ancient hosts watched travelers carefully before allowing them near the fire.

The best investment you will ever make is that which you make in self-improvement. Constant self-betterment is the key which will open the locked-up forces within you.

Fear and doubt obstruct prosperity.
Abundance rarely reaches a person whose mind is fixed on lack. In the mental realm, unlike states do not easily harmonize. Trying to become prosperous while continually speaking poverty, expecting poverty, fearing poverty, and predicting that you will always remain poor is like trying to recover from illness while constantly imagining disease, identifying with it, and convincing yourself that healing is impossible.

Prosperity is not drawn by fixation on lack, but by an inner condition that can recognize, receive, and act in accord with increase: a prosperous thought, a prosperous conviction, a faith in possibility, an ambition that does not apologize for itself.

The heart is a scribe.
It writes the world
before the world appears.

Other people's views and troubles can be contagious. Don't sabotage yourself by unwittingly adopting negative, unproductive attitudes through your associations with others.
― Epictetus

The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.
― Epictetus

How fair the flowers unaware^
That do not know what beauty is.
With poets and gazelles they share
Another world than this.

Prosperity begins in the mind. Everything must be created mentally first.

Happy Lunar New Year 2026.

Mental equanimity is the ability to stay steady inside, no matter what is happening outside.

Not numb.
Not indifferent.
Not passive.

Steady.

It’s when praise doesn’t inflate you and criticism doesn’t crush you.
When success doesn’t make you reckless and failure doesn’t make you collapse.
When emotions arise—but you are not dragged behind them like a kite in a storm.

~August