Stop, Look Around, Believe In You

Insight is a new awareness about something.  I think it is easiest to see it play out in your life, when you look backwards in your life.  About 15 years ago, I started long range planning for what I would do in my retirement years.  I knew I wanted to have my own business, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.  I started attending seminars about holistic healthcare businesses, because I had been trained in Herbs, Aromatherapy and Reiki.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a practitioner with it, but I thought that if I leaned how to run a practice, it would be easily transferable to any other type of business.  At one of these seminars, I had a huge transitional life experience.

“Your perception of me is a reflection of you; my reaction to you is an awareness of me”  – Unknown

The facilitator called on me, as I had raised my hand to share something with the rest of the group.  It was a large group of around 100 or so people.  He looked at me, like he wasn’t sure if he knew me, but thought he did.  He asked if I had attended any of their other events and I said yes, three of them.  That was when it happened.  He made a motion like he was removing a literal cloak off my shoulders and said, “You are one of those invisible people.  I am removing your cloak of invisibility.”  It felt like in every single cell, in each strand of DNA a shift  occurred in that moment.  I felt like a spot light was centered on me.  I was blinded by the spotlight.

I knew in that moment, that I could never be invisible again.  It was the beginning of a multitude of shifts and changes in my life, some of which are still continuing today.  Change can happen within a single moment, but if you are not open to awareness, it will pass you by.  If I had just thought, “that’s a stupid thing to say”, it would have passed me by.  Why?  Because I wasn’t open to it happening.  How many things happen around you daily, where you miss the opportunity to shift and change your life because you are closed off?

This is why, even though you say and do whatever you can to help another person, you can’t change them.  They could be drowning in a bathtub and all they have to do is stand up to save themselves.  But if they are not open and aware, anything you say or do hits an invisible shield and has no impact on them.  It breaks your heart to watch them self destruct, to hurt themselves over and over and not be able to reach them.  They have to walk their own path.

“Fight for the fairy tale, it does exist”  – Joy F

Just remember, that for them too, change can happen in a single moment.  For Snow White it was a kiss that dislodged the poison apple.  For Sleeping Beauty the kiss woke her up.  It may be that your loved one just hasn’t hit their bottom yet.  That when they hit their bottom, you hope that like the fairy tale they will wake up.  That they will see that they just have to stand up to save themselves.  What is sad but true, is that most of the time hitting rock bottom doesn’t affect people the way you think it will.  It can be as simple as life catching you by surprise.  Because your mind is not prepared, it’s not on guard.  In that brief moment something as small as a comment can slide into your consciousness unimpeded.  At that moment, your perception of reality changes.

“When you change your thoughts and perception, you change the way you live”  – Rita Zahara

When I look back I can see that it was literally as if my reality changed to a new place.  It felt like all of that was in preparation for LemonadeMakers, as it was just a few months later that my nephew was murdered, which was the catalyst for creating LemonadeMakers.  It was if the timer went off, and Sheryl’s destiny gears began moving everything into place.

“Sometimes in the wind of change, we find our true direction”  – Unknown

Insight is like a faceted crystal, or a kaleidoscope.  Every time you look through it you turn to a new facet, or with one click on the wand, the kaleidoscope changes what you see.  You see a new perspective.  A different angle.  There are so many levels of awareness about what you are trying to see or understand.  It is up to you to be curious.  To ask questions.  To look at the subject through different lenses to see another level of awareness.  So our picture at the top of the post for example, shows a light bulb with an idea that pops into her brain.  Then you see the gears, these are the levels of awareness that she is running her idea through.  The question mark, is her insights, that again start running through more levels of awareness.

“Perception is a wave.  You change as your perception of something changes because you define yourself as a reflection of whatever you happen to perceive”  – Frederick Lenz

There is a game that a friend made up.  You had these slips of paper, and during dinner you would choose one slip and read the question written on it to another person at the dinner table.  I remember once I had the question, tell me a story about your life that you don’t think I know.  I asked my dad and he told me this wonderful story about something that happened when he was a kid.  It totally changed how I thought he was raised.  A little curiosity opened a new awareness, an insight about a man I thought I knew.

“A man of awareness knows that life is constantly changing.  Life is change.  There is only one thing permanent, and that is change.  Except change, everything else changes”  – Osho

You have had something happen in your past that changed your life.  Do you remember when you were a kid in grade school and they had those pictures that were partly formed and you have to connect the dots to complete the picture?  Awareness many times happens, when we look backwards after a change has happened.  All of a sudden we see connecting dots to different small life changes that prepared us for the bigger life change.  We had no idea, insight, or awareness that these seemingly small changes, were in fact a part of the larger picture of where we were going in life.

“I can be changed by what happens to me.  But I REFUSE to be REDUCED by it”  – Maya Angelou

How is it possible to have life change you, yet not be reduced by those changes?

“The spirit of her invincible heart guided her through the shadows”  – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

My cousin had a fitness test at work that triggered a heart attack.   How do you go through “bad things”, and yet not be reduced by it?  Perception.  At first everyone was really upset that this happened.  They were talking about suing his employer.  But when it was discovered at the hospital that he had Graves disease everyone’s perception of what happened shifted.  Without treatment, Graves’ disease can cause some serious and potentially fatal health problems, including: An irregular heartbeat that can lead to blood clots, stroke, heart failure, and other heart-related problems.  So what happened at work could have saved his life.

Perception is the meaning that you give to the thing that happened.  Have you seen those pictures that have a hidden picture in it?  Where some people see a beautiful woman, and others see a hag with a pointed hat – depending on their perception.  When someone points it out to you, now you can see both women.  Your perception is changed.

So many possibilities of something positive coming from any experience – it will all depend on the meaning that you put to it.

“Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything”  – George Bernard Shaw

So open up new doors.  Shut the doors behind you that no longer lead to anything positive.  Trust in the magic of new beginnings.  Don’t make it complicated.  Just begin.  Join us in our next monthly call of April 4th and learn about what you can do to have a more positive and fulfilling life.

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be”  –  Lao Tzu