Clouds are just nature's stepping stones to the heavens.

The real heroes are those who rebuild their lives using adversity as a stepping stone to greatness in the midst of the chaos life has thrown at them.

My family stood right in front of me, talking and smiling. I felt like I was viewing one of those cheesy ad shots for camera companies. The ones I looked at and thought, fake, because no one's family ever looked that happy. Yet, the perfect family moment bloomed right before my eyes, and I wasn't a part of it.

....I should have wanted you. I wanted so much to want you.

I stumbled away. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth and just looked athim. 'What was that?'His chest rose and fell heavily. 'A kiss.'Why?'Why?' He laughed. His blue eyes suddenly looked so sad. 'Because I've wanted to do that for twenty years.

You integrate something by first of all accepting it. To resist any aspect of your past is to keep yourself fragmented, and to keep yourself fragmented is exactly what the built-in mechanisms of the negative beliefs in your unconscious mind are designed to do. To become whole within yourself, you must treat each and every experience that you have and ever will have as simply a stepping stone because there’s always a bigger picture. Something challenging may be happening to you right now, and you may have no conscious recognition or idea of why it’s happening, but let me assure you that you will know why one day. How many times have you said to yourself, “Wow, so that’s why it happened?” The issue isn’t really what’s going on in the present moment or what has happened back in the past, the issue is the way you’re defining or looking it….

The more you are grateful for what you have the more you can live fully in the present. When you live in the present moment the greater you can build stepping stones for a brighter future.

When you believe in yourself as a great asset God created for a reason, you will rename your major successes as mere stepping stones because there are greater things that eyes have not yet seen through you, and all are embedded in the value you have in your room; remember that value is you!

You have always been home for me, and nothing has been the same without you...

In Zen, there is an old saying: The obstacle is the path. Know that a whole and happy life is not free of obstacles. Quite the contrary, a whole and happy life is riddled with obstacles-they simply become the very stepping-stones that help lift us to a new perspective. It is not what happens to us in this life that shapes us, it is how we choose to respond to what happens to us.