Is your life ruled by love or by fear? Love and fear are opposite emotional attitudes that shape our life in very different ways. The psychoanalyst John McMurray describes the difference like this:

“The fear-determined have no sun in themselves and go about putting out the sun in other people. The love-determined have life in them, abundant life. They are the people who are really alive, of whom it can be said that they possess eternal life as a well within them perpetually.”

Life is a lot more beautiful and vivid if it is determined by love and not by fear. I’m sure you can imagine that someone determined completely by love would be a kind of saint. In contrast, most of us ordinary human beings are determined by both forces, love and fear. However, in my experience, even a tiny shift towards love—and away from fear—can bring a lot more happiness.

Here are 7 tips that you can move towards love and away from fear.

1. Cultivate gratitude

Gratitude makes us feel happier. If you remember to be grateful for the blessings of your life, you start to feel more connected to yourself and others. When you let go of niggles and embrace gratitude instead, love springs up.

2. Reality-test your fear

Sometimes fear can be like a cloud that keeps out the sunlight. Then everything feels huge and oppressive. A simple way to deal with fear is to test its reality. Write down three things that you are afraid of. Then look at each point and ask yourself, “Is this fear really grounded in reality?” I know that when I do this, I often find that my fears are unfounded. It’s like living in a shadow-land, peering into the future and expecting bad things to happen.
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“You cannot buy peace; you must know how to manufacture it within, in the stillness of your daily practises in meditation.”

Sometimes it is necessary to step back and realize how stressed we are. If we are not careful, stress can creep up on us and we will become unhappy without realizing it. However, once we are aware of how stressful our lives are, then we can take steps to reduce it. Nothing is as valuable as inner peace; but, it is not something we can buy - it is something we have to cultivate ourselves.

1. Relaxation Exercises

The state of your body will have an effect on your mind and vice versa. If you body is tense, it is reflection of your stressful mind. Learning to relax the body can be a helpful way to reduce stress. A very simple relaxation exercise is to tense and relax your muscles. Concentrate on a particular area and tense the muscles. Then let go of all tension and try to feel as relaxed as possible; feel all the stress and tension leaving the body. Try lifting up an arm, if it drops with a thud this is a sign that you are relaxed; if there is resistance this is a sign of tension.

2. Physical Exercise

We were not built to spend 15 hours a day sitting in front of the TV, driving a car and sitting at a desk. If we do no exercise and are lethargic, life becomes unbalanced. Taking physical exercise gives great relief both mentally and physically. Exercise releases different chemicals which contribute to a feeling of well being. It is also an opportunity to clear the mind and concentrate on something completely different. Often when we are stressed, the idea of exercise doesn’t sound appealing; it is easy to think of excuses like “I don’t have time”. But, here we are making a mistake; we need to make time and once we try we will definitely appreciate the benefits of exercise.

3. Deal with One Thing at A Time

When we have several demands on our time we feel stressed. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by demands placed on our time. The secret is to deal with one problem at a time and do what we can to improve the situation. When we have taken the necessary steps we can forget about it and move on to the next thing. Either take appropriate action or leave it. But, don’t just worry helplessly.
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Many of us are carrying a few extra pounds. Perhaps they’ve crept on gradually over the years, perhaps they’re the “Freshman 15”, or perhaps they’ve been present since early childhood.

It is easy to get complacent. Okay, we know we could do with losing that extra weight, but the thought of dieting and exercise just seems like too much hard work – it’s not going to make much difference, is it?

Since my late teens, I’ve lost nearly a third of my body weight (50 lbs). The knock-on effect on the rest of my life has been dramatic, and if you’re carrying an extra 10, 20 or 50 lbs, you too could gain all of this by losing them:

Instant Confidence Boost

For those who are naturally shy or awkward in social situations, being overweight makes things far worse. Do you covertly glance around a group of friends or colleagues to see if you’re the largest person in the room? Do you struggle to find outfits that flatter your figure – and resort to shapeless clothes which hide as much of you as possible?

Whether you just want to blend in with the crowd, and not stand out as bigger than all your friends, or whether you’d like to be the center of attention for once, feeling good about your body is a direct shortcut to build your confidence.
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“There is a total incompatibility between the joy of reading, a vagabond experience, and the experience of reading in order to answer questions, and explain what you understood.” - Rubem Alves, Brazilian educator.

What is most likely to influence your success at school or at a job? The ability to read well. And that goes for your kids too. The declining literacy of our society has been a major concern of educators for a while now, and yet things are not getting better. One reason might be a failure to recognize that reading and literacy are personal skills, best acquired when associated with pleasure.

In most cases, how well we learn to read will depend largely on our exposure to language as children. If we hear people around us talking about a wide variety of subjects as children, we naturally pick up the words and phrases they use. If we pick up a lot of words, we will have an advantage when we start reading, and we will learn to read better. This, in turn, helps us to acquire more words, leaving the poor readers, who know few words, further and further behind. The literacy divide usually begins early in life, and can only be overcome by lots of reading later in life.

Much of the traditional advice to struggling readers, these days, seems to involve developing “cognitive strategies”. In this approach, readers are asked to focus more, to think, to be curious and ask questions, to analyze, to predict, to infer, and to monitor their understanding, or worse still to answer questions on their comprehension of what they have read. In other words they are asked to become self-conscious readers.I do not agree with this approach.

Here are my seven strategies for reading improvement.
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