18 Signs That Prove You Are Stronger Than You Think

We tend to give ourselves less credit than we deserve. Always expecting more from ourselves and judging our self-worth by the material possessions that we hold. When in fact, true richness is richness of soul. Happiness comes from freedom and freedom is a gift that you give to yourself.

There is subtle strength that lies within us all. A higher consciousness that never gives up and is always seeking for the upheaval from the darkness into the light. A raising of our vibration and the constant forming and reforming of our mind, bringing us back to that in which we ultimately seek.
We are all here together on this wonderful journey and it takes strength and courage to follow this path to freedom.

There will always come times, when we do not remember how strong we truly are and so, here is a simple reminder to shine a little light on the way.

1. You embrace life as a journey
You know that life is an experience and one to be lived to its fullest. Every moment is precious opportunity to learn, grow and evolve. Even through the darkest of times, we know that the light is surely to follow and we hold our strength until the light beams from within us once more.


2.You are aware of your weaknesses
You understand that no one is ‘perfect’, and you don’t dwell on the things that you can’t change about yourself. Instead, you embrace your strengths and nourish your weaknesses as sometimes our greatest weakness, can be our greatest strength.

3.You change what you can change
You know that you can’t change the world, but you can change your world and so you work from the inside out; positively affecting anyone who comes into contact with you.
Radiating your light as far as you can, like a candle in wind flickering for all to see as you beam brightly in this world.

4. You’re not afraid of failure
You understand that failure is an opportunity for growth and failure puts us in the prime position to evolve and become wiser.

5. You do things your own way
You know that life’s greatest treasure is to learn and learning in your own unique way. You don’t follow the crowd and you choose to create your own masterpiece.

6. You are vulnerable
You understand that being vulnerable doesn’t mean being weak and you are humble and balanced enough to see this.

7. You don’t hold a grudge
You understand that holding a grudge only hurts you. Everyone has their own reasons and everyone has their own perception of life; everyone has their own path to follow.

8. You let people judge you
When you let people judge you it gives you insight into their internal state and puts you in a position to advise them. Also, when judged you are able to find something within yourself that you may not have yet resolved. Everyone is your mirror in life, and just by letting someone else judge you, it gives you great depth of perception.

9. You have patience
You understand that patience doesn’t mean waiting and you continually work hard on your dreams. Just because something isn’t happening for you right now in this very moment that you want to, doesn’t mean that it will never happen.

10. You don’t wait for tomorrow
You know that the next moment in your life is not more important than this moment now and so you do today what you dream of later and you live today like it was your last.

11. Challenges excite you
We all have to admit that life without challenge would be pretty dull and so you embrace these times as an opportunity to strengthen your abilities.

12. You give love
We’ve all been through hard times, had our hearts broken, dreams fallen apart and watched as everything we had built crumble to the ground and still, we are capable of love. That, is a miracle in itself.
Among st all of the trials and tribulations of life we are still able to give, accept and love with all of our hearts. This capacity of love that we all have is what will bring us into the new era, the golden age of light.

13. You embrace your fears
You understand that fear is a product of a thought-form and treat it as such. Constantly seeking to reorganize your mind in the knowing that the only thing to fear, is fear itself.

14. You stand up for what you believe in
You are in tune with yourself and trust your heart. When something doesn’t resonate with you, you have the courage to voice it.

15. You speak your mind
You trust yourself and are confident in knowing that your thoughts are just as valid as anyone else.

16. You follow your heart
You know that your heart is your greatest teacher and are wise enough to respect its wishes no matter how far, how wild and how far off the beaten trail it will lead you.

17. You never give up
As the sun rises and falls each day, you too hold the strength and courage to rise, each time you fall.

18. You have the strength to surrender
Sounds like a contradiction to 17 right? But..
There will come a day when you have exhausted your heart, risen and fallen many of times and finally when you surrender to yourself, you will know that it was heart that led you to your surrender. Upon this surrender you will find new strength and peace in knowing that you are eternity ;  you are the creator and the created.

Life can be a wonderful journey. We are always learning, evolving and growing with each other– until the end we will stand strong and when we surrender, it will be only to ourselves and in that moment we will find peace.

Via (Spiritscience)

How much would you pay to live for an extra year?

We all strive to forestall death – but at what cost does it become too expensive? BBC Future explores the attempts to value the price of life.

Human life is so precious, it seems crass to put a price on it. How can a pile of coins, paper or gold bars match a year on Earth? Life should be, quite literally, invaluable.

Yet that is the morbid question that health services, everywhere, inevitably have to ask. They have limited money to spend on sick and dying people, and whenever a new drug becomes available, they have to make a choice: will the few stolen months, or years, be worth the money it costs?

Our gut instincts may seem obvious: we should do all that we can to buy more time for the people we love. Yet Dominic Wilkinson, an intensive care doctor and ethicist at the University of Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics recently wrote a thought-provoking article questioning these assumptions and asks us all to consider just how much we should be willing to pay for a longer life.
Intrigued, BBC Future phoned him to explore his argument, and to better understand the ways we currently calculate the price of life.

Hi-tech treatments mean that we can survive many of the diseases that would have killed our ancestors - yet they come at a huge cost (Credit: Getty Images)

At the moment, drugs for terminal illnesses tend to be judged on two things – by how much they extend the lifespan, and the quality of life of the patient, using a scale known as the Quality Adjusted Life Year-saved (QALY). A drug that helps you live for an extra year, at half your general quality of life, would score about 0.5 years on this scale, for instance. “Alternatively, a drug that improved your quality of life for a year from a level of half normal, to full health would also score 0.5,” explains Wilkinson.

The UK recommends paying about £20,000 to £30,000 for each additional year of good health

From these calculations, a health service can then start to set a price on whether a drug is worth the cost. The UK’s recommendations, for example, are about £20,000 to £30,000 ($30,000 to $45,000) for each additional year of good health, once it has been adjusted to take into account the quality of life. So a drug that achieved 0.5 on the QALY measure would only merit £10,000-15,000 ($15,000 to $22,500).

This inevitably means that some drugs have been rejected by the National Health Service (NHS), because they are simply too expensive: the breast cancer drug Kadycla, for instance, only extends the lifespan by about six months for a cost of £95,000. Even if the quality of life during those few months is equal to that of a healthy person, it still hugely overstretches the limit. (Other healthcare providers may have different criteria, of course – but they all have to weigh up the costs and benefits in some way, before offering to fund a treatment.)

Campaigners argue that the pharmaceutical companies should lower the costs of such treatments, and that health services should also invest more and more money in drugs that will buy terminally ill patients some more precious time. Given these strong and emotive arguments, the UK recently considered increasing the threshold for terminal illnesses – to as much as £80,000 ($120,000) for each “quality-adjusted year saved”.

Should we pay more for drugs that will extend a life, if it means cutting off treatment that could improve the lives of those not in danger (Credit: Getty Images)

As doctors looking after patients, we are ethically driven to say that ‘I know it is expensive but my first duty is to help my patient – Dominic Wilkinson

Wilkinson says this attitude is completely understandable – and it’s often the doctors, as well as the patients themselves, who argue the case. “As doctors looking after patients, we are ethically driven to advocate for patients, to say that ‘I know it is expensive but my first duty is to help my patient,’” he says.

But the inevitable sacrifice is that this money will be taken away from other areas of care, such as mental health services or help for people with disabilities – measures that may be crucial for improving the quality of life for people at the start or middle of their lives.
Is it worth forfeiting one person’s comfort to buy another a few more months at the end of their life? When making these decisions, it’s important to gauge public opinion. And although you might assume that most people would pay infinite sums to buy a few extra years, recent research suggests we do not all place such a high value on the sheer length of the lifespan.

When surveyed, many people said they would prefer to pay for treatments that improve palliative care, rather than new drugs that would buy extra years (Credit: Getty images)

Wilkinson points to a detailed UK study of 4,000 people that clearly explained the different ways the health service’s limited resources could be spent, and asked the participants for their preferences.  “They clearly indicated that they weren’t comfortable with giving more money to people who were terminally ill, compared with people who might benefit at other stages of their lives.”

Perhaps most surprising were the results from a study in Singapore, which questioned elderly, but otherwise healthy, citizens as well as those suffering from terminal cancer. “The striking thing from that is that they were prepared to pay an awful lot more money for palliative care so they could be treated in their own home, than drugs that would extend life,” says Wilkinson.

Many participants would pay just £5,000 to extend life by a year

On average, the participants would pay £5,000 ($7,500) for a treatment to extend life by a year. But they were willing to pay about twice that amount – £10,000 ($15,000) – on better palliative care, such as better nursing that would allow them to die in the relative comfort of their homes, rather than a hospital. “It seemed to provide a fresh way of thinking about difficult decisions.”

Doctors are increasingly arguing that we should maximise the quality of our time on Earth, rather than extending the length of the lifespan (Credit: Getty Images)

Clearly, these studies are not the final answer; it is hard to know if these opinions are shared among different people in different cultures and facing different illnesses; there are also questions about just how effectively a calculation like the QALY scale can really, objectively assess a treatment’s potential. But Wilkinson thinks that we should at least consider these different opinions before devoting more and more money to extending lifespans.

“Although it’s very understandable to want to buy more expensive drugs for the terminally ill, I don’t think it reflects the view of the general public or those of the patients,” he says. “Nor is it clearly the right ethical approach.”

As the population ages, and healthcare grows ever more advanced, and expensive, these issues will only become more pressing. The eminent American surgeon Atul Guwande has long questioned whether it is better to stretch out the lifespan, instead of increasing the comfort of our available years. Ezekiel Emanuel, the former director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the US National Institutes of Health, has even claimed that he would refuse all life-extending healthcare at the age of 75, rather than entering a cycle of ever more intense treatments to draw out his last few years.
Few of us may decide to take such a drastic decision, but anyone, at any age, may do well to consider the value of their time on Earth and what we are doing to make the most of it.

Via(BBC)

Are You the Cause or Effect of your Life?

Think back to some key points in your life. You have probably had some pretty big things happen to you that shaped who you are today, wouldn’t you say?

Maybe you’ve even done something big and important. Oh, you and I both know that’s true, even though you might like to downplay it, as if you’re not ridiculously special inside.

At what point do you become the cause of something, and cease to be to be the effect? Is there also a point when you cease to cause something, and are affected instead? 

Truth be told, the answer lies in the synergy of the two. You can’t have one without the other… and you can’t have the other without the One.

Obviously this is sort of a universal answer that I think that most people, philosophers, scientists, and even religious people could rationally come to as a fundamental law of the cosmos. It cannot be disproven.

To write it tangibly, in short, would sound, I think, something like this.

Every Cause has its Effect; and every Effect has its Cause; Everything happens happens according to Law; Chance is but a name for Law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the Law.

That came from a quote written in the Kybalion, a book on Hermetic Philosophy spanning back to Ancient Egypt and Greece, in the days of the Library of Alexandria.

What I’d like to propose here is that by personally embodying this principle, you gain the God-Given Right to be the creator of your life. You are the observer of causes, and the observer of effects. You are the creator of what you decide to Cause, and the creator of what you Effect.

You are affected by the world around you, you become literally moved into cause by your affections.

When you observe the transition of energy from “Someone did something” to “I feel this way” to “Now I do this”, you basically start to active the central portion of your brain, (your higher awareness), to be more aware of your actions in every physical moment. Thus, you become more present, more clear, more focused.

Not only do you become more present, you become a better creator… and who decides what you create? That would entirely depend upon you. You are free to be the cause of the effect of your mind changing.

Good luck,
Jordan & Ray

Oh, and just for fun!

 

 Via(Spiritscience)