How a person seems to show up for us is intimately connected to how we choose to show up for them.

Let's forgive the past and who we were then. Let's embrace the present and who we're capable of becoming. Let's surrender the future and watch miracles unfold.

But peace isn't determined by circumstances outside us. Peace stems from forgiveness. Pain doesn't stem from the love we're denied by others, but rather from the love that we deny them.

When we're willing to see the innocence in another person even when he or she has behaved without love toward us, we activate the Law of Divine Compensation.

Forgiveness is "selective remembering"—a conscious decision to focus on love and let the rest go. But the ego is relentless—it is "capable of suspiciousness at best and viciousness at worst.

The heart's transformation is not attained through the mind—it's attained through surrender, authenticity, forgiveness, faith, honesty, acceptance, vulnerability, humility, willingness, nonjudgment, and other characterological values that have to be learned and relearned continuously.

Withholding love is a form of self-sabotage, as what we withhold from others, we are withholding from ourselves.

Forgiveness is not always easy. At times, it feels more painful than the wound we suffered, to forgive the one that inflicted it. And yet, there is no peace without forgiveness.

Love interrupts the past and opens the future to new probabilities.

Course in Miracles says that everyone we meet will either be our crucifier or our savior, depending on what we choose to be to them. Focusing on their guilt drives the nails of self-loathing more deeply into our own skin. Focusing on their innocence sets us free. Since 'no thoughts are neutral,' every relationship takes us deeper into Heaven or deeper into Hell.

He reminds us that, in every situation, the love you've given is real, and the love you have received is real. Nothing else exists.

Making another person feel guilty will never build unity or goodwill; only blessing, not blaming, can do that. All judgment does is to shut people down emotionally and psychologically.