Updated 4/14/22
“Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no whenever you don’t want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you’re doing here. Believe in kissing” – Eve Ensler
It was really interesting in locating a photo for this quote. I looked up woman in solitude, and 90% of the photos showed women who were depressed, some even suicidal with a hangman’s noose besides one woman and suicide by pills in several others. I couldn’t believe that solitude was paired up with depression and suicide.
Solitude is critical to being able to love oneself. This is not being an isolationist, which could become unbalanced when taken to extremes. But rather as a sign of being balanced, because you are happy with your own company. Being alone doesn’t make you lonely. It took much longer than I thought to find a photo that actually displayed that kind of joyous feeling within it.
As a woman you give so much of yourself away. You constantly see to the needs of others. Solitude is how you can balance this out, so that you are not giving too much of yourself away. Solitude is strength.
At various times of the year, it is vital to have some solitude to review the past few months and do some deep thinking for how you want the rest of the year to be for you.
“Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul” – Marcus Aurelius
In reading anything that talks about the “crowd mentality”, it talks about how if you feel you must always be with people, it can be a sign of weakness. This is because you may become prone to follow whatever everyone else is doing, just to belong.
I think most everyone would say they are afraid to stand out, not be “normal”, or speak out against a crowd. The real dividing line is do you let that fear stop you?
There is nothing more freeing and empowering to like your own company and be your own person no matter where you are. It is more fun to be considered weird. Be the orange fish in a sea of blue fish. Go your own direction. Be weird.
I love the first quote because it shows great courage to do things like take trains to somewhere you have never been by yourself. To go so far away that you lose the fear of finding your way home. That you will do something that you know in the depths of your soul is yours alone to do, even when everyone you know disagrees.
“Solitude is the soul’s holiday, an opportunity to stop doing for others and to surprise and delight ourselves” – Katrina Kenison
I believe that you have that kind of courage, but sometimes you are still letting life hold you back. I believe this is true of all of us.
There are moments of indecision. Of not being sure of your way. In the end, the only way out, really is, to go through. To step past the place of safety on the sand. You need to actually cross over the line into adventure, stepping into the sea.
“True happiness is impossible without solitude…, I need solitude in my life as I need food and drink and the laughter of little children. Extravagant though it may sound, solitude is the filter of my soul. It nourishes me, and rejuvenates me. Left alone, I discovered that I keep myself good company” – Sophia Loren
Only by being alone with yourself can you come to true honesty with who you are, and how you are being reflected in the world. It is in this place of honesty, you are able to authentically release the parts of you that are not you, and own in the real world the parts of you that are crying to be released into life.
Only to the extent that you expose yourself to the changing tides of the sea, can you transform into who you are becoming. I think that we all want to find out what we are doing here, and we can’t do that staying safely on the dry land. You have to step over the line to experience adventure. Here is to smooth sailing!
For an idea of something that you can do with relative ease, try Forest bathing. It is the practice of immersing yourself in nature in a mindful way. It has a whole range of benefits for your physical, mental, emotional, and social health. It comes to us from Japan and is known as Shinrin-yoku. ‘Shinrin’ means forest and ‘Yoku’ stands for bathing.
Forest bathing in nature allows the stressed portions of your brain to relax. Positive hormones are released in the body. You feel less sad, angry and anxious. It helps to avoid stress and burnout, and aids in fighting depression and anxiety. Immersing yourself in the solitude of you and the forest is very healing to the body, mind, and soul.
A forest bath is known to boost immunity and leads to lesser days of illness as well as faster recovery from injury or surgery. Nature has a positive effect on our mind as well as body. It improves heart and lung health, and is known to increases focus, concentration and memory. Certain trees like conifers also emit oils and compounds to safeguard themselves from microbes and pathogens. These molecules known as Phytoncides are good for our immunity too. Breathing in the forest air boosts the level of natural killer (NK) cells in our blood. NK cells are used in our body to fight infections, cancers and tumors. So spending time with these tree is a special form of tree bathing.
Revised 4/14/22
“It is not who you are that holds you back, it’s who you think you’re not” – Denis Waitley
I was recently talking to my coach about my book that is being published this summer. It is a collection of 90 of my posts and it will be called, ‘Timeless Treasures for Today’s Living’. We were talking about how to promote the book and she was telling me of something that she had read about another author. They had created a program, where if you bought 50 books, you became an ambassador of the book and author. In return she included a bunch of bonus items wrapped around some personal coaching calls, her monthly subscription program etc…
The first thought in my mind was I am not worth someone spending that much money on me. No one would think that what I have is that valuable.
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent” – Eleanor Roosevelt
This quote includes not letting your own negative mind talk make you feel inferior. Immediately check those thoughts of being unworthy. What was so interesting is that I had been looking for new graphics for a post, and I saw this picture with her hand on the mirror and looking away. I felt immediately called to write about self-love. My intuition was telling me that another layer of not accepting who I am was about to be revealed.
You wouldn’t let anyone tell you that you’re not worthy or capable of doing whatever is in your heart to do. So why would you allow your inner negative critic to do so?
It used to take me awhile to recognize that “Cami” was running my mind and was in control of my thoughts. I named my negative mind talker Cami, because she is so good at camouflaging herself. She sneaks into random thoughts, inserts herself into conversations and just all around makes a pest of herself. Cami and I journal together sometimes. I will write down a question for her, and then just detach from the answer and wait for her to tell me what to write down. She comes from a place of fear. She puts the worst interpretations on everything.
Have you ever been at work, just minding your own business and you get a call to go into your boss’s office? What is the first thought that comes into your head? Is it, “Oh no! What is wrong? What did I mess up? Am I going to get fired?” And then you go into your boss’s office, and they just have some random question for you? That is your own internal Cami at work.
“The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts” – Marcus Aurelius
Your Cami is just trying to protect you. She is afraid of everything. She criticizes you to keep you within her designed comfort zone. Within that zone she controls the world and keeps you safe.
The problem is that you’re busy expanding that zone. You’re busy learning new things. You have dreams that you want to grow. So, when you are looking for ways to expand your own comfort zones, you will need to confront, reason, and work with your own version of Cami.
“Embrace the glorious mess that you are” – Elizabeth Gilbert
The quickest way to bring your own Cami around to your way of thinking is to take what you want to do in steps. Kind of like when you take a small child to learn to swim. First you hold them and get their feet wet. Then they would stand, and you would walk out deeper and deeper into the water. Each step is a new victory.
The only way to be confident of your own talents, gifts and abilities is to do what you are afraid to do. So, make your Cami a deal. You will walk so far and then you will talk and negotiate a new distance to explore. Eventually you will have her swimming in the deep end of the pool with a new comfort zone.
If you try to bulldoze her, she will trick you. Like being lost in the forest, you will walk in circles. You will think that you are making progress, but little things will keep drawing you further and further away from your chosen destination.
Have you ever had a day, where you planned out this list of things that you were going to get done – yet you find yourself 12 hours later, exhausted and you only were able to cross off 1 thing?
That is your Cami at work again. Bright shiny objects grab your attention. A sudden desire to clean out a closet. You went to the grocery store just to buy milk and you came home with a months’ worth of groceries 3 hours later. Cami struck again.
“I am strong because I know my weaknesses. I am beautiful because I am aware of my flaws. I am fearless, because I learnt to recognize illusion from real. I am wise because I learn from my mistakes, I am a lover because I have felt hate. And I can laugh because I have known sadness” – Unknown
By trial and error, you too can find a way to deal with your Cami. Maybe like me you will learn to journal and negotiate with her. Maybe you will be successful with willpower and bulldoze your Cami into submission.
There are over 80 different kinds of hammers. Most of us are familiar with one kind.
Now you can use that hammer for a multitude of projects, and sometimes it will sort of work out. You might have a few dents, scratches, dings, but you will have a finished product. Or you could use the right kind of hammer, and end up with a beautiful work of art.
Take the time to learn who your Cami is. What she is afraid of. How she wants to communicate with you. Learn how to reassure her. Appreciate that she is doing what she thinks is the right thing, based on your own past experiences.
If you want some assistance to name your Cami, to discover who he/she is – contact us. We are here for you. Keep trying to find the right hammer for your progress.
Revised 4/13/22
Mother Nature freely expresses herself every day, and she doesn’t apologize for it. Most of us learn at an early age what we are taught as “good manners”. Good girls are seen, but not heard. Don’t express a different opinion. Never contradict an authority figure, even if they are wrong. And so on, and so on.
“Sometimes our lives have to be completely shaken up, changed, and rearranged to relocate us to the place we are meant to be” – Unknown
Have you ever been in a building like a lighthouse when a really strong storm comes into shore? The whole cliff shudders and shakes. The waves are so strong it feels like it can actually tear apart the bedrock foundation of the lighthouse. Sometimes you have so bought into being the story of pretending to be someone else, that you have totally forgotten who you really are. It takes a severe storm to shake up the foundations and uproot your life. It is time to bring you back to who you are, and what your purpose in life is.
I love the writing of Don Miguel Ruiz and his book The Four Agreements. The Four Agreements have more to them than this, but this gives you a taste of them.
Be impeccable with your word– I love how it includes not speaking against yourself. How many times have you called yourself dumb or stupid or something equally demeaning?
Don’t take anything personally– What people say and do is a projection of their own reality, not yours.
Don’t make assumptions– This is for me the most important thing, as you assume you know what someone else is thinking and they think they know what you are thinking and the truth is that most of the time we are having two totally different conversations.
Always do your best– The only way to avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret is to do your best. I love that saying, when you know better, you do better.
Don’t be afraid to be who you are. Don’t let fear convince you that you are less than you really are. What people think about you is really none of your business.
What you think about yourself should be your primary concern. Be the best you can be, and when you make a mistake (like we all do) then own it. Clean up anything that needs to be cleaned up and move on. Don’t pack it in your suitcase and carry the weight of it around for the rest of your life. That kind of baggage creates limitations and keeps you in a cage, afraid to be who you are.
When you have reached the place, where you no longer require validation from others as to who you are, what your gifts are – that is when you become the most feared person on the planet.
“If you find yourself asking yourself (and not your friends) Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist? Chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self confident. The real one is scared to death” – Steven Pressfield
Reveal your authentic essence, the part of you that isn’t watered down. This is what makes you a “one of a kind” authentic original human being. The world, especially the social networking world. will judge you for who you are. So why not just be what makes you happy? Be proud of who you’ve become. Hug yourself with both arms and be passionate about how you live your life.
“Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place” – Unknown
Remember that LemonadeMakers is here to walk alongside you. We love the deep conversations 🙂
Notions is a word that reminds me of creative arts. Sewing, paper arts, crocheting/knitting and so on. Tools that you use to make something beautiful and wonderful.
The dictionary says notion is also: “a conception of or belief about something,” and/or “an impulse or desire, especially one of a whimsical kind.”
In the case of this quote a notion is a belief about what grief is all about. It isn’t something that is just outside of you – or inside of you. It’s both about how you are inside of yourself and how you impact the world outside of yourself.
It’s about vision, both internal and external. And like looking through a kaleidoscope, what you see outside of you changes each time you turn the mechanism inside. For you, each of those moving pieces inside the kaleidoscope are made up of your personal stories.
In a recent article in the Washington Post, they were discussing political views around Russia in a recent poll.
“It goes to show you that in terms of public opinion, people remain in their silos” Vera Zaken, an expert on the intersection between information and foreign policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “They’re going to believe whatever truth or disinformation fits their views.”
I thought this was so interesting in how we all live our lives. We live them filtering out anything that doesn’t support our beliefs. It’s as though we don’t hear or see anything that contradicts our worldview. Like we have this force field bubble around ourselves that bounces out any contrary beliefs, thoughts and only lets in what will confirm our beliefs.
This is what change, loss, and grief is about. It’s an opportunity to examine your beliefs. To peek out of the filters that keep you confined in your comfort zone. To see the possibilities of something else. To see the potential that is waiting right across that line of the comfort zone. To admit in new truths and let go of whatever no longer serves you.
Like shedding an old skin, the process of grieving requires you to transform your life. To alter in some way, from who you used to be into a new person, a new self-definition.
These beliefs you protect are really all about who you have been told all of your life that you are.
Watch any good detective mystery show. The main character is always a flawed hero in some way. Yes, they catch the bad guy, but their motivation to do so comes from a brokenness. Going back to the main quote, whatever happened to you, became an altered part of you.
One of my favorite stories, is about how you throw a rock out into the water. It creates ripples that expand out to every part of the shore, until slowly the ripples fade back into the still calm water of the lake. It looks like nothing happened. The lake has the same water line, as the rock wasn’t large enough to create an impact to the water levels. Yet the lake has forever been changed, as at the bottom lies a rock that wasn’t there before.
The stories you tell yourself about your life are like that rock. Each story is created by the impact of that rock as it breached the surface of you, the lake. As time passes, the ripples of grief you experienced die down and everyone around you thinks you are fine. You even think that you are fine. But you are changed forever by the rock that impacted you.
You experience a form a grief for every rock. Some rocks are very small – someone hurt your feelings. Others are larger, like losing a job, or not getting the promotion you worked so hard to get. Then you have a huge boulders of grief from the death of a loved one or a divorce.
Some rocks are just part of life, like the kids going off to college or moving out to get married. Retirement. Things that are part of “normal” life experiences, that aren’t viewed as life altering but really are. Because what they do, is alter or change how you view yourself.
The empty nester wonders who am I, if I no longer have kids to mother on a daily moment by moment basis? The retired person wonders who am I if I am not “this job title”? They both wonder what do I do with the rest of my life? What is my purpose if I am no longer …, (what I have identified myself as)?
These rocks are not problems to be solved. There is no mystery to them. They are just the reality of your life. These rocks are experiences that shape who you are. It is what you do with the rocks that matter.
So, enter into the world of unfiltered “what if’s” – take out a piece of paper and write down 4 things that have happened to you recently. And start writing out possibilities of what you can paint on your rock.
The easiest way to do this is through imagination and curiosity. Take any experience that happened to you from conception through the age of 18 that you believe has impacted your life in some way.
If you are really honest with yourself, you will be able to find some silver lining to any experience. I read years ago something that has profoundly changed how I view all such experiences and it was around forgiveness. It took me a long while to incorporate this into my belief systems, because for many years it was just too big of a leap.
It is around the concept of how you come to earth to experience things. And you travel in this soul group, there are members that volunteer to be the catalyst for some of your life experiences. How that person loved you so much, they volunteered to provide either the negative or positive experience required as part of living your purpose here on earth. The author stated that if you can find yourself in this space, then you can honestly say “thank you” for what happened. It incorporates the saying, “life happens for you, not to you.”
What this belief allowed me to see was a different way of looking at what I have experienced in my life. From there I could see how each thing in my life has built upon what was already there. If some of those “steps” had been missing, then I wouldn’t have made it through some of the harder things. It was like I was being trained for an Iron Man – each thing strengthened some part of me. I didn’t see the patterns of strength training being connected, but when I look backwards, I can see how everything is connected.
When you see how everything is connected, what you realize is that removing any piece would cause the whole construct to fall apart. Each piece however painful at the time, was necessary.
When you first start training for an Iron Man, you probably experience sore muscles. You probably received blisters. You experienced the moment when you thought you couldn’t take one more step, and then broke through a barrier and found you could go another mile.
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trail and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired and success achieved – Helen Keller
What if…, every time I experienced a breakdown, I smiled and started celebrating the breakthrough?
Transformation isn’t a one and done kind of thing. The butterfly is used as a pretty common analogy for transformation. The caterpillar building the chrysalis and emerging is the common use.
But did you know that the transformation for the caterpillar begins much sooner? Monarch Butterfly caterpillars’ lives are divided into 5 instars – this is the time it takes to outgrown one skin and burst into a new one.
This is where choice comes in – do you simply shed a skin, and move seamlessly into your new stage of growth, or do you fight the moment of growth. Do you try to stay in your comfort zone so long that you burst through your current comfort zone? Bursting sounds a little messy and very painful.
One way or the other you will change.
For example, you may have outgrown your current position at work. Or you may hate your job, but you have those golden handcuffs on, in that you make too much money to leave. It doesn’t matter if you love or hate your job, the time has come to move on and expand into your full potential.
Shedding your skin means that you are proactive and look for the next position, either within your current company or outside of it. Bursting your skin means that you leave in the worst possible way, either getting fired or quitting in a temper.
When you shed your skin by bursting it, it leaves you to clean up a mess. I had one job in which it took weeks before I had worked through the bad emotions and was capable of updating my resume and getting into looking for a job. It took much longer to work through the lessons learned from bursting my skin.
Each time you expand your comfort zone you develop new skills and grow your own internal gifts. I took a job once that I thought was going to finally help me break through being a senior loan processor and become an underwriter. That was how the job was sold to me.
I started work and in addition to processing loans they had me review, edit and complete a manual that they used for mortgage brokers that sent their loans to this company to be sold to them.
I worked hard on the manual and upon completion the company that I worked for decided they needed to downsize and laid me off. I was devasted and angry that I had worked so hard on that manual. I felt like I have been used up and thrown away.
I wasn’t able to find another position in the San Diego area because interest rates had increased, and everyone was laying off people. I ended up having to relocate to find work.
What I realize when I looked back at this time is that I was being pushed into a new comfort zone. When I relocated, I was hired as an underwriter.
The savings and loan I worked for needed a servicing manual, so I wrote one for them. They needed training done for their loan officers in their many branches, so I wrote out a program of training and trained them. I ended up teaching classes at South Seattle Community College for the bank for loan processors and loan officers.
All of these skills I had acquired at that job in San Diego. Without that job, I wouldn’t have had the skills or the confidence to step up to those opportunities. When you shed a skin or burst a skin you have the opportunity to grow of stagnate. To take on a new color, or stripe, or to shrivel up and remain where you are.
When you shed a skin or burst one, it can take time to grow into who you are becoming at this stage. You may need recovery time. It could be that where you are living now is not where the next opportunity is for you to grow into who you are becoming. You need to allow the space and time for things to unfold.
When the butterfly at last crawls out of the chrysalis it needs to take the time to pump its wet crumpled wings. It can take up to 12 hours or more before it is ready to take its first flight.
When you consider that the adult butterfly’s life is between 15-50 days, that 12 hours takes on a whole new meaning. It is not a short period of time for the butterfly. It is like months of time.
Learning and adaptation are how you embrace and absorb new skills. And as you learn and adapt you need to let go of the old way of doing things.
A baby first learns to roll over. Then to crawl. Then to stand up. And at last, to take that first step.
Trial and error are involved. Failure is a given. But with hard work, resilience, and determination progress is made to go from that initial learning to roll over to running.
To shed a skin requires a mind shift and an identity shift.
We all have the habit of identifying ourselves with our job, our position. We give ourselves a label that describes who we are.
This means that in each of these periods of growth, you are required to let go of “who you think you are” and reinvent yourself. You need a new label.
What happens is that as you try to stretch and challenge yourself, you’ll have a really hard time finding anyone to talk about it. Someone who can understand your new level. Every time you get into a creative space, something transformative will happen. As Alice said, “I knew who I was this morning, but I have changed a few times since then”.
“Explore the things that shake you up as well as the things that bring you joy,” says writer Alexandra Elle, the author of the guided journal In Courage. “When you stay curious, you can become your own greatest teacher.”
Richard Powers shared that at its root the word “bewilderment” actually means “to head out into the wild”.
So, this week I’m inviting you to be bewildered. To let go of your certainty and your self-protectiveness and to come alive to the world’s magic. I wish you grace. I wish you peace, and a great week everybody—bewildered.
Revised 1/12/22
The biggest gap in your life is between what you know and what you do – Bob Proctor
It is up to you to be a prisoner of your past, by remaining in it; or to be a champion of your future by building it. If your life path was to travel from one of these formations in the above photo, to the next one and so on to the end, how would you do it?
You could anchor yourself and rappel down the mountain, then walk to the next peak and scale up that peak. Then cross the peak, rappel down the mountain and repeat over and over again.
We are human. We are not perfect. We are alive. We try things. We make mistakes. We stumble. We fall. We get hurt. We rise again. We try again. We keep learning. We keep growing. And we are thankful for this priceless opportunity called life – Unknown
Or, you could become a bridge builder. You could build a temporary bridge out of ropes or wood, or a bridge designed with stone or steel that would last for many years.
Neither way is wrong or right. Just different choices. You could for sake of argument take opposing viewpoints on the better, faster way to walk this path. You could discuss how those that follow you would make better speed with some type of bridge that you are building. Or how scaling up each peak would define you and make you stronger. For me, rock climbing would be facing the fear of falling to my death. It would test my faith in ropes, cords, carabineers, slings, anchors, and harnesses.
At the end of the day, the analogy is that each of us has our own path of divine destiny to walk. There really isn’t a right or wrong way to walk the path. The lessons will come to you regardless of what you choose.
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things – Rainer Maria Rilke
Some time ago I self-identified a pattern that I have. I call it one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas. It began with a childhood experience when I was four years old. I was very motivated to the best in school and when I was an adult to climb the corporate ladder. I was also very introverted and didn’t like to be seen and noticed. This pattern of drawing attention to myself by being a master at my job, and then shrinking back when I got the attention used to drive me crazy.
I finally through years of self-improvement identified this pattern and started working to shift and transform it. Every time I feel like I am walking in slow motion, or pushing a boulder up hill, I know that this pattern has reentered my life. It is an energetic signal that I am being blocked in some way.
Have you ever had a project you wanted to complete and every time you sat down to work on it, you would remember something else you had to do? It might be an email that simply must be written and sent now. It might be laundry or dishes that have to be done. You notice a spider web on the ceiling that must be removed. You have to run to the store. Your mind is looking for something to distract you away from the project. Suddenly the whole day is gone, and you didn’t work on it at all.
Put gaps in your life: moments to reflect, prepare, meditate and breathe – Jody Adams
For whatever reason your life pattern is trying to shift you away from the project. There is something about this project that it wants to avoid. In some manner, this project is pushing up against the boundaries you have set in your subconscious. It sees a danger, and so it works hard to gently distract you away from it. The completion of the project will in some way change and shift your life – it could be that you are aware of it, or it could be some unforeseen possibility that your subconscious wants to avoid.
In my case, I started shifting the pattern first by writing these blogs. It felt safe because I am unseen and unknown to you. Then I started speaking on stages about my transformational work. This was also not too hard, because with the lights on a stage, it is hard to see the audience.
They aren’t up close and personal. The hardest thing to shift was being able to walk into a room and not be terrified of meeting and having conversations with strangers. Of not being judged as “not enough”. Of feeling like I was an imposter. Negative thoughts of self-judgment. Places I was afraid of. “Who was I” to think I had something to say you would want or need to hear?
Negative thoughts are like rotten or missing boards on a bridge. It is scary to think of stepping out on this bridge. What if I fall?
This pattern of “having a foot on the gas and brake at the same time”, is really great at camouflaging itself. It has chameleon qualities. When I started with this Facebook page, I knew that I needed a website for the blog posts. Instead of 30 – 45 days it took me nine months and the hold ups were all from me.
t took me months to actually sit down and start writing my first book. Every time I start something new, “Cami” my own personal chameleon puts the brakes on. The good news is that it is taking less time for me to recognize what she is doing and shift her efforts at slowing me down.
I may not have gone where I intended to go. But I think I have ended up where I needed to be – Douglas Adams
Many teach that we came into this life to have a certain experience. Mine seems to be dealing with this pattern of foot on the brakes, when I am pushing hard on the gas to accomplish a goal. Now that I recognize it has chameleon like qualities, whenever I am not progressing towards my goals, I know to go looking for that sneaky lizard.
The best thing in life is to go ahead with all your plans and your dreams, to embrace life and to live everyday with passion, to lose and still keep the faith and to win while being grateful. All of this because the world belongs to those who dare to go after what they want. And because life is really too short to be insignificant – Charlie Chaplin
This life pattern is my GAP – Gods Area of Preparation. This is where you learn about new ways that your life pattern has shifted, and you learn new ways to build bridges to close that gap.
The winds of life will try and pull you off course. The space between your values and behavior is called the Integrity gap. It is the places where what you say you are doing and what actions are actually taking place, have a gap. It isn’t that you are purposefully not living in integrity. It is that sneaky chameleon who has disguised itself to put up roadblocks to the actions that you intend to do.
Go back to places where you feel like you might have had the brake and gas on at the same time. Once you recognize the patterns, it becomes easier and easier to release the brakes and have your actions spring back into gear.
Can you see GAPs in your life pattern? Do you see where you need to learn to build bridges to close off the gap to get to your destination?
Don’t be afraid to explore and discover what the broken pieces of you are trying to say. Mosaics at made from broken pieces, and they are a beautiful work of art. All of life experiences come together to create who you are. To expose the divine gifts you have, you rearrange the pieces to uncover the hidden treasures you have buried deep within yourself. To show you just how every shattered dream, served to provide just what was needed to move forward in strength.
Albert Einstein traced the root of his accomplishments to curiosity. What triggered Sir Isaac Newton to discover gravity from a falling apple, as apples had been falling from trees hundreds of years. Had no one ever got curious as to why the apples fell in a downward motion? How much of the world around you, do you observe with wonder?
Awe is a part of wonder and curiosity. Psychology Today has described awe as “an overwhelming, self-transcendent sense of wonder and reverence in which you feel a part of something that is vast, larger than you and that transcends your understanding of the world.”
Taking a walk in nature can result in being awestruck. I love that word. If I am going to be struck with something, please let it be awe. To suddenly see something with new eyes will send you off with a sense of adventure. To me it is like the photo of these two boys. They will question everything they see. They haven’t yet entered into the age where they think they already know everything. They will ask a lot of “why” questions seeking to understand. They will see things in a different way, because they don’t yet know the “rules” of how something is supposed to work. And that is where the sense of discovery, wonder, and curiosity begins. It is the beginning of an adventure.
“Noticing the world as constantly changing can help us dance with the flow of life.” – Sarah Jane Shangraw
In reading an issue of Mindfulness Magazine, they stated the following steps in taking a walk in nature what will bring “awe” into your life.
Curiosity and exploration floods your brains with dopamine, which makes you feel happier. It gives you higher levels of positive emotions, lower levels of anxiety, and greater satisfaction with your life. It’s a skill that can be developed. It is a habit of applying wonder, and feeding your desire to learn more.
Curious people want to try new things – so next time you go to a restaurant, try a food you have never eaten before. Curiosity begins with asking questions. In searching for different answers. In making a new or different connection. In taking what you discover and using it to make sense of your newly expanded world.
“Becoming happier is one of the most vital and momentous things that you can do for yourself and those around you.” – Sonja Lyumbomirsky
Some adults think that asking questions somehow implies they lack knowledge. But what I have found through the years, especially with the meanings and emotions triggered by words, is that there are a lot of words that I think are communicating one thing, but were received as another. Words can have more than one meaning. So I try to communicate what I have to say, using a lot of examples and analogy’s. Then I watch how it lands. If it seems to have landed wrong, I then use another analogy. I keep doing this until I know that what I meant, is what is understood. I ask a lot of questions, seeking understanding and connection.
Asking yourself the right questions can make a huge difference in how happy you are. We can train our brain to look for answers by asking it to focus on a certain task. If you ask yourself these three key questions everyday, your brain will step outside of the negative self judging that your mind tracks down. These questions will help rewire your brain to focus on the positive.
Curiosity is a strength within the virtue category of wisdom, one of the six virtues as described in Positive Psychology. The other strengths in the wisdom category are creativity, judgment, love of learning and perspective. According to Wharton University, curiosity has a genetic component, which can be grown or limited according to ones environment.
NASA’s rover on Mars is named Curiosity. She’s been on Mars since 2012 and since her battery is thought to be able to last for only 14 years, she’s nearing the end of her lifespan. NASA is looking for answers by collecting data on Mars.
It will certainly be interesting to see what they discover in that adventure – answers they were looking for – did Mars ever have the proper conditions for life to survive. So far they’ve discovered that Mars had sulfur, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon – all key ingredients for life. What things will be discovered that no one knew to ask?
From Britannica Curiosity Compass, “10 Ways to Improve Your Curiosity”
Curiosity makes your brain more receptive for learning. It is like a muscle and the more you use it the stronger your mind becomes. When you are curious, your mind expects and anticipates new ideas related to what you are curious about.
One of my favorite things about Jim Rohn was when he would get this look on his face, with his hand on his chin and say, “I wonder what happens next?” It was his way of not going into negative emotions when something you might judge as a bad experience happened. He used the analogy, when someone cuts you off driving down the road – instead of getting angry, say “I wonder what happens next?” I started saying, “Thank you for getting in front of me, because you are in a hurry and I don’t want to be the person you rear end when you follow to close.” This is because I have been rear-ended several times and gotten hurt twice. So I am truly grateful when this kind of driver passes me, even if he is cutting me off.
So using curiosity, and “I wonder what happens next?” thinking – what things happen in your life, could you turn around from a negative experience? How instead, could you turn it around, staying calm and centered in wonder?
Life is full of change. Seasons change. You change. Use the fall season to complete and release what no longer serves you. Use the winter season to rest, digest and restore yourself. Use the spring season to get curious about what new things can you seed into your life to grow you as a person. Use the summer season as a time to harvest the new beginnings that you started in the spring.
So go on some new adventures. Ask open ended questions. Listen intently and ask others why this is so important to them? Give others experiences instead of things. Learn a new hobby. Go on long walks, listening, looking, smelling, – using all of the senses to discover what you have missed. Live a full, happy life!
I love words. They are so much more than squiggly lines on a page. They have width and depth to them. They affect our emotions. They have layers and layers of meaning. So I love when I have the chance to explore a words meaning beyond the formal dictionary definition.
Some words change meaning over time. In Biblical times the word shambles (which means a mess to me) meant the meat market. Thomas Crapper was an inventor and he invented a toilet, and in time his last name took on a whole new meaning because of his invention.
This past week I was reading an article that was really talking about decision making. It was focused around two words, Anxiety and Entitlement.
Anxiety (which is fear fully expressed) is triggered in response to the perceived threat of our values. If one of your values is around honesty, truthfulness, integrity – whatever word you choose to mean you don’t tell lies (you hate, hate, hate, being lied to), and you suspect that this value is being threatened, this would create anxiety for you. Say for example, your mom told you to lie and say she wasn’t home. You want to tell the truth, but your mom (authority figure) is telling you to lie. Do you go against your values? Or do you tell your mom no?
Anxiety lives in the space of worry about how to make the decision. You might make a trade-off for example, and “squish” the truth, telling them that she’s not available at the moment. Once you’ve compromised yourself in some way, that is when anxiety morphs into something new. It becomes resentment. “How dare mom make me tell a lie.” You blame the other person for your compromising your values, rather than taking responsibility for the decision you made.
“All of us have the privilege and responsibility of choosing our attitudes, no matter what circumstances or situations we find ourselves in. The key word here is choosing. Attitudes don’t just happen; they are the products of our choices.” – Joyce Meyer
This is where I came across a new shade of a word that we’ve heard a lot about, entitlement. For me entitlement was always about “the right” I have to something. I am entitled to an education, for example. It also has the meaning of special privileges, which is where the words “white entitlement” has come from in reflecting the ways that racism has been expressed in society. When you feel entitled to something it amplifies your anxiety, feeding it so that it grows in guilt and blaming others for your current situation in life.
This article I was reading was discussing how denying the reality of your situation is a form of entitlement — and entitlement breeds resentment. When you deny the reality of your situation, what you produce is anxiety – which is a fear of something. Going back to the example of your mom asking you to lie about her being home. Is there a more creative way to do what your mom is asking and not be lying? Can you protect your value of truth and honesty and still obey your mom?
There are probably many ways of doing this, but what came to mind for me was what if you said, “My mom can’t talk right now, but maybe I can help you?”
My mom once told one of my sisters to answer the door and say that she wasn’t home. So my sister answered the door and said, “My mom said to tell you that she’s not home”, needless to say, that was the last time my mom did that. LOL.
“Your life and how you experience it is entirely your making. Only if this absolutely sinks in, will you make the necessary changes” – Sadhguru
So lets just say that as a child you were asked to lie for your mother on a regular basis. As a result your value of truth and honesty was constantly being bombarded. Now imagine that you are in a working environment where you are being asked to lie. Telemarketing comes to mind as a kind of job that could impact a persons values for honesty.
I remember back when we still had a landline that my husband answered a call that was from a telemarketer about home loans. She said that was she was returning our call, pertaining to the refinance of our home. That we had asked to be contacted regarding reducing the mortgage payment for our home.
She went into her sales pitch and once she paused my husband asked her why she was working for a company that required that she lie with her first sentence. He told her that not only had we never contacted them regarding a refinance, but that his wife worked for a bank and that if we were interested in refinancing that is where we would do it, because of the benefits for employee loans. He suggested that she think about finding a job where every sentence she said wasn’t a lie.
She was neglecting her values, by failing to take responsibility for them. She probably blamed her job for this. She probably felt in conflict with meeting her financial obligations and keeping her job and failing to live up to her own personal values. She was probably ignoring the inner conflict, tapping it down. Her inner emotions would be in a turmoil and her whole life would be impacted. Feelings of guilt can turn into anger and rage. When you live a life in this manner, you think that you’re mad at the unreasonable demands of your job, but in reality it is because you are failing to be responsible to your own internal values.
“How people are is their choice. How I am is my choice. No matter what they do, no one can make me angry, happy, or unhappy. These are privileges I have kept to myself.” – Sadhguru
When you hate Mondays, because you hate something about your employment – it is time to take a look at your inner values. If you find yourself in a relationship either with a person or a job that is creating a lot of stress, anxiety, and emotional turmoil – it is time to take a look at your inner values.
Don’t neglect them. Take responsibility for your own inner conflict, your own needs and priorities. Don’t blame others for the misery. Instead start making changes to bring your life back into connection to your inner values.
You need to create psychological safety for yourself. You need to experience the “truth” of what is happening in your life, the reality – not the story you are telling yourself and others.
The choice is always yours. You can fix yourself – make the changes in a job or a relationship by staying true to your inner values – or you can try to “fix the truth”.
Fixing the truth, or bending your values and choosing to stay in relationships with a person or a job that is not in your best interests just keeps you in conflict and misery.
“Privilege can either blind or be an eye-opener. The choice is ours.” – Renita Siqueira
Take a stand. Stop letting others push you into denying your values. Instead, put life on a pause. Take the time to regroup. Make the time to nurture your soul and start taking small steps to live your life from the place of your values. Always have faith that God will lead you where you need to go.
In part One of this blog we talked about how:
Charting your course means that you need to be open to adjustments, revisions, false starts, rewriting your goals, refocusing your passions. You need to be able to both dig in your heels and let go at the same time. You must, must, must have a willingness to change.
What I love about “Alice In Wonderland” is that nothing that she experiences was normal, predictible behavior. Her journey gets started because she is curious. She follows the white rabbit, who was talking to himself about being late and holding a timepiece as he runs by. Curious, she follows him down a rabbit hole and falls into an unbelievable world. She is faced with choice after another choice, with no reliable way of knowing what one is the right one.
Along the journey she meets The Caterpillar with his famous line, “Who are you?”. He helps Alice to adapt to Wonderland by eating the magic mushroom.
She meets The Cheshire Cat several times in her journey. He floats, evaporates and disappears and shapeshifts throughout her journey as he offers cryptic pieces of advice. He is the only character who actually listens to Alice as he attempts to help her navigate Wonderland.
In Alice’s adventures through Wonderland she is faced with truly “wicked problems” as she trys to get back home with her head still attached. It is her curiosity that gets her through as she meets new characters and tries to understand the stories strange rules of how life operates in Wonderland.
As you live your life you will come across many rules that others blindly follow, without asking themselves ‘why’. When you ask why, they will say, “that’s the way it has always been done”, because they don’t even know why. They have no curiosity about the rules. “It’s just the way they do things here”, they will say.
“Life is like a game of chess. To win you have to make a move. Knowing which move to make comes with insight and knowledge, and by learning the lessons that are accumulated along the way. We become each and every piece within the game called life.” – Allan Rufus
Each chess Game consists of 32 initial pieces. The game of chess has specific rules on how each of the pieces can be moved. In theory it is possible for a game of chess to never end, with an infinite number of moves. Consider the whole board when making a move, because each move impacts the entire board.
When my kids were teenagers I used to try to get them to understand the importance of the decisions they were making in their lives using the chessboard analogy. I taught them that while the move or decision that they were making might be according to the rules and thus legal, it didn’t make it the right decision. Sometimes the right decision is to take another path.
The chessboard shows up in Alice’s journey in Wonderland. “Chessboard Behavior” in this quote refers to how in playing the game of chess you make strategic moves. You think ahead to the piece you are contemplating on moving. You try to guess the other players response and then your response in turn. You envision out multiple moves and then then go back and think through another move and contemplate it out several moves. You keep doing this until you can choose the best strategy.
While you are guessing on the other players moves, as you get to know how they play the game, your guesses become more and more accurate. You gain knowledge, skills, and with natural talent you can make winning choices.
“The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.”
– Thomas Huxley
There is an article published called “Brain-Heart” which contains way too much information and is in such detail that it isn’t easy to put into a simple sentence or two. In this article, he links spiritual traditions and science together in an interesting way. He is demonstrating Dragonfly Eye thinking, by combining the boxes of both science and religion to see what else could explain how in quantum physics atoms could be linked across far distances. That energy is informed by what David Bohm called the implicate order and what physicists now regard as the quantum vacuum or zero-point field.
The experience of the universal domain of consciousness, is the same in all religions, and in all religions it inspires a sense of oneness and belonging. Michael Beckwith affirms that “when you strip away the culture, history, and dogma of every religion, the teachers of those religions were teaching very similar principles and practices that led to a sense of oneness.”
Ervin Laszlo says, the quantum vacuum is like “the Akashic Field of ancient Hindu spiritual tradition. The Hindu say the Akashic record is a field from which all the universe is formed and which holds all that ever was, is or will be. The Hindu also say that the Big Bang that started the universe, and the big crunch that will happen when the universe goes into reverse and collapses back into itself, is only a part of many cycles of universes, just like ours, appearing and disappearing, just like the subatomic particles in our world.”
Putting this into a simple example that I read about many years ago, is what happened around the world when 9/11 happened. Scienctist have for many, many years recorded the magnetic waves rising from the earth into space. Many months had passed since 9/11 and they were looking back over time tracking the waves on the report when they noticed a huge spike simultaneously around the world. When they tracked backwards they discovered it happened just as the planes were hitting the twin towers. It was if the information had been communicated around the world at the exact same moment. It was the field.
I remember the day as though it was yesterday. Literally 20 minutes before the crash I was writing in my journal before work. In my journal I recorded how I couldn’t comprehend how someone could become so wrapped up in hate and dogma that they felt that God wanted them to kill people they didn’t even know, who had done nothing to them. They hadn’t committed an act of atrocity that required revenge. The actions themselves are designed to create fear, chaos and hatred – to cause separation. The planes hit the towers as I was driving to work. It still gives me goose bumps as I feel that in that moment of writing I had tapped into the field. I didn’t know what was about to happen, but somehow I knew something was about to happen.
When you tap into this field, I think you tap into divine guidance. In mediation, in journal writing, in walking through the forest – there are times when your mind is freed from the controlling structures you keep it in. When intuition comes forth. It’s how you get the idea to call a friend or family member. It’s how when you have that thought, the phone rings and it is them. It’s a connection to the field.
Storytelling engages the emotions required for actions. Show and tell is how you connect others to your story. When you want to sell something showing through storytelling is like sitting them in a theater to watch an engaging drama. You can make them cry (pictures of abused animals or a small child in torn dirty clothing looking like they are going to cry). Commencement speakers tell how they graduated from this college, share the story of their careers. “I did this and so can you” is the motivational theme of the speech.
Using the show-and-tell mindset you are bringing whomever you are talking to into the picture you are creating. You need to be clear in your own mind what actions you want to flow from your story, what idea or thought process you are trying to change.
In the graphic above, you can imagine that the children pictured are trying to talk mom or dad into paying for them to join a sports team or a dance class. In the child’s imagination they are going to be a star. What is it that would make mom and dad open their wallets?
If you can get the person you are talking with to enter into your vision, you need to create a moment of “awe”. This past month two different billionaries left the atmopshere for a very short time and saw something amazing. The astronauts say that when you see it you can’t help but be transformed. The saw the earth from space. It is called the Overview Effect. It creates a cognitive shift, something changes when that happens. An emotional cracking open of yourself, a blast of realization and resonance.
I have felt this moment of “awe” a few times. The first time was holding my newborn son. I don’t think that it is possible to explain the shift that happens in that moment. The transformation that happens when you realize this small tiny baby depends on you for life, and that you would give your life for that child in a heartbeat. Awe is something that happens in a heartbeat. A shift that says your world has changed, and it can never be what it was before.
If you can tell your story with “awe”, there is nothing that you can’t do. Nothing you can’t accomplish. “Awe” draws those who are listening to your story to see all of its potent possibilities. All of the paths of the chessboard that you can move in. It takes you in to Dragonfly Eye thinking. You are floating through the field and soaking up the knowledge of the universe. You see the hand of the divine in the story as it unfolds. You embrace uncertainty as your closest friend. And curiosity takes you on a new adventure.
Every story has a story. How the story is shaped defines how you grow. The way forward is never down a straight and narrow path. Growth is like what happens in the “Alice In Wonderland” story, where you do “Six impossible things before breakfast”.
We think that growth is a linear measurement. But all growth doesn’t happen with forward momentum.
Charting your course means that you need to be open to adjustments, revisions, false starts, rewriting your goals, refocusing your passions. You need to be able to both dig in your heels and let go at the same time. You must, must, must have a willingness to change.
In starting any journey of self discovery, it is important to engage your curiosity muscle. When you are around a little child you see that muscle in action moment by moment. From the minute they are born, they are wide eyed looking at everything. Everything is new and wildly uncertain. They are on a mission to discover and understand this new world they were born into. They grab onto everything. They put everything into their mouths. When they start talking, everything becomes a “why”? For every answer you give, you get three more “why’s”?
For some reason you lose this voracious appetite as you grow older. You start thinking that you know the answers, or you are afraid that everyone else does but you. So you stop asking why.
A great exercise to start bringing more attention to your curiosity muscle, is to start putting a question mark behind your first thought when trying to solve a problem that has come up in your life. Start asking why is this, the way it has to be done?
Most things in life can be successfully completed in a variety of ways. There are usually multiple solutions, and multiple paths.
Focus on using curiosity as a focal point for engaging with creativity. Sometimes you have a better journey when taking the long way home.
Uncertaintly is hard to live with. You want to know everything there is to know about something, so that you can feel that you’re making the perfect decision. That your work will be perfect. That your life will be perfect. But that isn’t how anyone’s life is. If you were to talk to anyone who you think has the perfect life, they will tell you that fame, fortune, status – whatever criteria you want to measure by – doesn’t make their life perfect. They still have problems. They still make mistakes . They still make bad decisions.
When you throw away the word perfect, you are left with imperfect. Which is how we all are. We are all perfectly imperfect. We are all left feeling like we are blind as to how to make the best decisions in our lives.
So what are we left with then? Uncertainty. We are left with blindly following rules that have a multitude of exceptions, based on faulty or fuzzy logic, and sometimes just plain guesswork.
Watch any good mystery or crime drama and at some point someone is going to say, “I have a bad feeling about this”, or “My gut is telling me not to walk away”, or something similar. In the real world you use your gut instincts or intuition a lot. Subconsciously you may be making decisions without your mind even knowing why you just turned right instead of left. It just felt like the right way to go.
One thing that I have learned in the corporate world, you can make facts and figures, statistics say pretty much whatever story you want to tell. I love logic, but I also know from experience that if I walk out my front door feeling like there is something I am forgetting – I am 99% of the time forgetting something. I have sat in my car ready to leave going down a mental checklist as I tell myself that I can find nothing that I have forgotten. But the minute I get to my office and sit down in my chair, a random thought surfaces with the thing I forgot. My intuition was right.
Knowlege is always provisional and incomplete. There are always new facts that surface as time goes by. New evidence comes to light. If this wasn’t true then there would never be a drug company being sued for side effects discovered as time went by. No airplanes would fly in the sky. The world would still be flat.
So when you think you know everything there is to know, just be aware that you don’t. So what do you do?
Dragonflies have large, compound eyes, with thousands of lenses and photoreceptors sensitive to different wavelengths of light. Although we don’t know exactly how their insect brains process all this visual information, by analogy they see multiple perspectives not available to you. Dragonfly-eye perception is common to great problem solvers, as they take in 360 degrees of perception to encompass multiple viewpoints and ideas at once.
Kalidescope eyes that view life through multiple lenses. This way of thinking is a way to see beyond the familiar patterns that your brain pushes into place. By widening out the periphery of your vision, you can look out beyond all of the filters your mind sees the world through. You look at a problem from multiple perspectives. This is where compassion comes in.
When a two year old has a meltdown at a store, many times you will see a mother about to have one herself. A compassionate viewpoint sees two over-tired individuals, not a bad child or a bad mother.
Your brain like to think in patterns. Good or bad. Black or white. This or that. Putting things in containers that belong together free’s up your brain to think faster.
By using dragonfly eye’s, you can view the world around you in an entirely new way. Whatever problems you are facing; whatever decisions need to be made; you can start to see the many possibilities and probabilities in front of you. Instead of just:
You see “and” not “or”. You can go up, down, backwards, forwards, straight, crooked, ladders, slides, caves, etc…, you see all of the possibilities at once. The secret to developing a dragonfly-eye view is to “anchor inside yourself” rather than outside as a starting point. To work on that curiosity muscle. To develop more trust in your intuition muscles. To exercise your compassionate view of yourself when you try to be perfect. To embrace uncertaintly. To have dragonfly eyes.
In this blog we covered steps 1-3 of the below diagram. Read the next blog for part 2 as we review steps 4-6
You might think that when I chose to create this quote and graphic that I was thinking of judging and forgiving others. It is very true that when you seek to understand others, that judgment goes by the wayside and patience comes in for the struggles that they are having. However, when I was thinking about what to write about this morning, it was in connection to self judgment.
“Self awareness is not self judgment. It is looking, and seeing, and discovering who you really are. So check your judgment at the door.” – Trans4mind
You set goals, dreams, ideas of how your day is going to go. You are plan your life out. You will grow up, graduate college, get a job, marry and have a family, climb the corporate ladder, live in a nice home with the white picket fence, and live happy ever after. And then it happens. Self sabotage enters into the picture and you do it wrong. You destroy what you’ve built. You crush someone else. Self judgment burns you like a fire that is raging out of control.
Negative self talk enters your head:
“What upsets people is not things themselves, but their judgments about these things.” – Epictetus
You are not perfect. Nobody is. So you will make mistakes. Some of those mistakes will be disasters. Some of life’s disasters happen from things not in your control. Your mom dies from cancer; your nephew is murdered; your grandson is hit and killed by a delivery truck. Life just happens.
You can’t go back and change what happened. But you can in any moment create a new beginning. Starting over. Let it go. Done is done. Stop carrying the emotional baggage of your past. Take responsibility for your actions. Rectify whatever can be shifted into a better place. Then free it from your mind.
As part of your self awareness journey, you have to discover the courage to ask the difficult questions, both of yourself and others. You need to learn to communicate clearly. It is one of the hardest lessons.
Sometimes you are so scared of what the other one might say, that you don’t ask the question that you know in your soul needs to be asked. Or, you lie to yourself that you can make something happen that you know is not really in anyone’s best interest.
Self awareness takes a lot of courage. It is the only way to avoid the misunderstandings, drama and sadness that happens when we ignore the signs and continue walking down the wrong road.
“We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are, or the way they should be. And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of those assumptions.” – Stephen Covey
It might be time to start examining all of your assumptions. Get curious as to what you things in life you think that you understand. Years ago there was an aquaintance in the church I attended. Someone had seen her having dinner in a restaurant with a strange man. When they left the restaurant they were holding hands and the man kissed her goodbye. That person went around telling everyone that she had a boyfriend. The gossip took off like a wildfire. What really happened was that her brother was traveling and stopped off to see her for dinner on his way to another location for business. The person who saw her made an assumption and they thought what they saw was the right interpretation of facts. It wasn’t.
How many assumptions about yourself, others, and life itself do you have that could have another interpretation?
I love the writing of Joseph Campbell. He talks about the cave you fear to enter. There was a demonstration of this in the original group of Star Wars movies. When Luke is being taught by Yoda and he enters into the cave. He asks Yoda what he will find inside and Yoda tells him, only what you take in with you. Per Joseph Campbell, “The cave you fear to enter has the treasure you seek.” You need to find your own cave. Own the fear(s) you have and enter it. Like Luke you will learn something powerful about yourself.
“Own the fear, find the cave, and write a new ending for yourself, for the people who you’re meant to serve and support, and for your own culture. Choose courage over comfort. Choose whole hearts over armor. And choose the great adventure of being brave and afraid. At the same exact time.” – Brene Brown
So set your intention to keep moving forward.
Create the space and intention to remove the armor that keeps you feeling like you’re stuck. You’re not really stuck. You just need to check the thinking that created the circumstances you find yourself in.
If you were to concentrate in this moment, what is the one thing that you most desire in your life right now?
Someone out there would give anything to:
This list could go on and on. Some things on this list are within your control to obtain. The dream of the new home or car; the promotion or the new job – all things that you can work for and earn or obtain.
It might be that you’ve tried to get pregnant, had medical procedures to assist, and still can’t get pregnant. It might be that obtaining this dream means that you have to adjust to a new reality of foster care or adoption to have children. To match your dream of a child, to the child’s dream of parents to love them.
Some things might take a different path altogether. Being with a loved one who has died, you might take the path of talking to them in a praying meditative state. Or maybe the path of writing that letter telling them everything you never had a chance to say.
When you were a kid, did you ever take a magnifying glass or even just a glass and focus the suns energy on a piece of paper until the heat got hot enough that it started a flame? It takes focus to keep the glass still and just wait until the paper gets hot enough. If you keep moving the paper around, it will never get hot enough to create the flame.
Creativity generates ideas. Inspiration takes those ideas to the next level by thinking about them.
It takes focus to follow the trail that the idea came from. It takes getting outside of the normal day for just a few minutes to say, “I wonder what happens next, and next, and where does it go from there”. It takes focus to not get lost down the rabbit hole of other thoughts and ideas and just stay on this one trail with no distractions. You have to harness your creativity and focus your thinking down a particular path to reach the destination.
Let’s just take the first dream on the list above and “find the perfect mate”. Maybe the first thing you do on this path, is to take a piece of paper and write down all of the details of what your idea of a perfect mate is. Write down as many things as you can think of, even what seem like silly details, such as they put the cap back on the toothpaste. What their character is like; how they look; what their dreams are; what music they like; do they need to sing karoke with you ever Friday night? Do they love to line dance at a country western bar? Do they love chocolate? Go all out and write down everything your heart and imagination can think of.
Once finished put that list in a drawer and forget about it.
Now start a new list. This list is the most critical list of all that you’ve ever made. This list is about who is that person, with all of those qualities that you just wrote the pages about, who is he/she looking for? This is going to be about the list of changes that you are going to make in your own life, to attract that dream partner into your life. This list is the secret of how the only person you can change is yourself. This list is about the secret that when you start making changes in your own life, your life dramatically changes. Your life improves by the amount of focus, power, brilliance and energy that you use to implement changes.
Focus means that you have to say no to anything that is not moving you forward in the direction of attracting your life partner. You are surrounded by people who will take you off the path you are walking down. There are constant distractions trying to sidetrack you. So you say no to going out Friday night with your girlfriends because want they want to do isn’t in line with anything that you wrote down your perfect mate would want to do.
Remember that you wrote down that your perfect partner loves to line dance in country western bars. You’ve always wanted to try it out because it looks like fun. You never have because you don’t know anyone who would go with you. So you’ve never gone. So focusing on making changes to youself means, you check out some country western bars and find one that has free line dancing lessons. You go to the next lesson and start learning how to line dance.
Just keep making these small changes to how you live your life in line with the values that you say you want in your life. Step by step you become the perfect person for the perfect mate you are wanting to attract into your life. You focus on what matters and let go of the rest.
Keeping in line with attracting that perfect mate, you’ve now went through all of your closets and dresser drawers and have space allocated to that perfect mate to use. You are ready – now those dormant forces are going to align to collaborate and transform your dream into reality. There are so many wonderful stories out there about men and woman who have done this and attracted their perfect mate.
You can use this process to achieve every single dream you have. You make the changes in your life that are necessary to create the space for your dream to come true. Feel right now, how you imagine you will feel then. Bring those emotions into your reality today. Life the life today, that you have been projecting into your future.
“Stay focused on your goals, your peace, and your happiness. Don’t waste your time on anything that doesn’t contribute to your growth.” – ihearts143Qutoes