True Self
I think that we have all worried that if we let ourselves be who we want to be that everyone would judge us in some way. We have all dimmed our lights thinking that this would keep them safe.
The reality is that if you keep lowering the flame of your brilliance you run the risk of losing your light altogether.
So cut loose all of the bindings and let your passion flame high – we all know how brilliant you are, and we are tired of waiting for you to acknowedge it!
Fork In The Road
Yogi Berra once said, “If you come to a fork in the road…pick it up.”
This is really an interesting quote. It is a think outside of the box comment. We think of the fork in the road to mean that we have two choices – go left or right, but you don’t have to choose only one.
What if you decide instead to blaze your own path down the middle between the two? Why not pick up the fork instead?
A Buddhist saying “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to Truth: not going all the way, and not starting.
So when you come to those inflection points in your life, take a moment to “pick up the fork” and go down the road to truth that is you – even if you are making your own road as you go along.
5 Tips To Embrace Change
Growth is change. If you aren’t growing, you’re decaying, which is also change. Since change is inescapable either way, why wouldn’t you want your changes to be as positive as possible?
The first buds of spring make my heart sing and want to dance
The summer signals a change from working hard, to being able to slow down and relax and play
The first color of autumn tells us me that the nights are getting longer and winter is on its way
The first snowfall reminds me of being a kid and throwing a snowball and making snow angels and having so much fun wearing socks as gloves!
Change is good thing – welcome it into your life with love and wonder and you will live an amazing life
Regrets
This is a list of the most common regrets that we as humans have when we leave this mortal body –
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
Most people don’t honor even a half of their dreams and it is really sad because our dreams are why we are here. We came to be the best at something and, because of others expectations or our own fears of failure, we make excuses for how we will do that dream at a more convenient time, and that time never arrives.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
What are you missing out on in your life by working long hours at a job? Family, Friends, a “real” life?
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
When you don’t express your own feelings, you condemn yourself to a “so-so” life, because your life becomes full of compromises and this feeds in to #1 – never becoming who you came here to be.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
We become so caught up in the daily routines of our lives that they we let golden friendships slip by over the years. I am always telling my friends that at least FB lets us keep up with each other, even if it is just the occasional im when we see them online. This is much better than the lets call each other tomorrow and tomorrow turns into the next day and so on, until we lose touch completely.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Happiness is a choice that we make every day of our life to have, or to sabotage by staying stuck in a rut of bad habits or victim mentality or just plain fear of change.
Why don’t we choose “today” (don’t go to bed until you have done it) to make sure that at least one of the top five don’t pass us by today?
Find The Good
“Find the good in what they said or asked. It’s always there, even if they didn’t mean for it to be there. Sherlock-ly yours, The Universe”
When someone says something that hurts, or is advice that I don’t think is good for me, basically anything that my mind and heart immediately rejects I have this process that I go through.
Sometimes it just takes a few minutes, and for the deeper things it may take a few hours, but I always look for what was true in what was said. I believe that everything someone says to me has some truth in it that I need to hear.
I have found this to be true even when someone lashes out at me because of something that they are going through. There has always been information that I needed.
I believe that I can learn from the mistakes that others make of what not to do, or how not to handle a similar crisis in my life – I don’t have to touch the fire to know it will burn – I can learn from not only my mistakes but those of others too.
So dig through the hurt and find the pearls of wisdom and reject the rest and know that if they could have said it in a better way they would have. They just didn’t know how to say it any better through their own hurt and pain.
One Step
Every day I am making progress on something. It may not look like much, but when I look back over the year, it is amazing how much I have grown both myself and my vision of what I am here to do.
The closer I get, the more I see how every step in the past was necessary to prepare me for this future that I am bringing into existence.
It may seem to some that life is hard, but when you look back you can see how it all unfolded perfectly. It is important to remember when you are experiencing the “tough” times that in the not too distant future you will be glad it happened, because the joy you have now wouldn’t be possible without each and every step you have taken.
Nails
Pounding In and Pulling Out Nails
The parable of Will, a nine-year-old whose father abandoned his mom two years earlier. Will was angry, and he often would lash out at others with hurtful words. He once told his mom, “I see why Dad left you!”
Unable to cope with his outbursts of cruelty, she sent Will to spend the summer with his grandparents. His grandfather’s strategy to help Will learn self-control was to make him go into the garage and pound a two-inch-long nail into a four-by-four board every time he said a mean and nasty thing. For a small boy, this was a major task, but he couldn’t return until the nail was all the way in. After about ten trips to the garage, Will began to be more cautious about his words. Eventually, he even apologized for all the bad things he’d said.
That’s when his grandmother came in. She made him bring in the board filled with nails and told him to pull them all out. This was even harder than pounding them in, but after a huge struggle, he did it.
His grandmother hugged him and said, “I appreciate your apology and, of course, I forgive you because I love you, but I want you to know an apology is like pulling out one of those nails. Look at the board. The holes are still there. The board will never be the same. I know your dad put a hole in you, but please don’t put holes in other people; you are better than that.”
Break Free
It really is all about changing yourself from the inside. When you change an amazing thing happens, the whole world changes too!
Break free from the past and start a new life today.
Top 10 Things: Time and Space
“The Top 10 things about time and space that most people seem to forget:
10. You chose to be here and you knew what you were doing.
9. There are no “tests” and you’re not being judged.
8. Everyone’s doing their best, with what they know.
7. You already have whatever you’re looking for.
6. You are of the Divine, pure God, and so is everyone else.
5. Religion needs spirituality; spirituality does not need religion.
4. You’re naturally inclined to succeed – at everything you do.
3. You happen to life, life does not happen to you.
2. Order, healing, and love belie every moment of chaos, pain, and fear.
1. Following your heart is the best way to help others.
The truth shall set you free” The Universe
Adversity to Adventure
“Fear is the trigger for hesitation, yet it is also the energy that makes life exciting. If you embrace your fears, you become master of your own forward movement. Choosing fear changes fear from adversity to adventure.” Dean Hyers
Think of going on a roller coaster for the first time. You are hesitant because you are afraid, but at the urging of others you get on the ride. Then the ride begins the long climb up to the top of the first grade, can you hear the clacking of the wheels on the track? It seems to take forever to get to the top, and yet at the same time you are wishing it never will. You hear others betting that they can’t hold their hands up in the air the whole ride, and you notice that your fingers are tightly gripping the metal bar, which is the only thing that will keep you from ejecting out of your seat and flying through space without a parachute. You get that hollow feeling in the pit of your stomach as the car starts sliding down the long drop, as fear causes your stomach to do flips. The wind from the ride dropping straight down blows your hair in your face blinding you, and you slide from side to side in the car as it is whipped around the corners. screaming through time and space – no wait that is you screaming, as you hurtle through the loops up and down until at last it slows to a stop and you get out.
Watch the kids as they leave the ride and you see that they mastered their fear as they rush to get back in line, laughing and telling each other about the rush they had – the fear changed from adversity to adventure.
What if every time you are afraid and your stomach is lurching, you remember the exhilaration of riding the roller coaster for the first time and the rush you felt as it ended and you ran to do it again?
What if you faced every fear in your life as a great adventure, knowing that you will safely come to a stop at the end and be ready for the next thrill?
Instead of resisting or even permitting fear to be part of your life, what if you value it and enjoy it?
If you can learn to really embrace your fear like a loved one that you haven’t seen in a long time, then you can become the master of forward movement.
Fragile
“We’re all fragile inside, even the strongest among us, and our worry about that confines us. Nobody does it to us. We lock ourselves away inside cages of comfort. The bars of our cages are velvet lined, padded and soft, yet strong as iron to makes us feel safe from the risks that accompany authentic expression. Meanwhile life passes you by, while part of your authentic self remains hidden underneath, unfulfilled and unexpressed.” – Dean Lincoln Hyers
This is taken from the prologue of a book that I just bought. Everyone has put themselves into a cage that protects them, because everyone has experienced being misunderstood, laughed at, rejection & failure. We may project our strengths to the world, but we have hidden back what we feel sensitive and fragile about in our cage of protection.
There comes into our lives these moments, when our passion cries out for expression, when we have the opportunity to stand up for what we want, how we want our world to be, to be the hero of the moment. We look through the bars of protection that we ourselves have created and we wonder “what if?”
The truth is that everyone is afraid; that everyone has a cage where they have hidden their fragile secrets. When you are brave enough to own your moment, acknowledge the fear and do it anyway, you are giving everyone else a gift that says, “see the real me”. Your authenticity is a mixture of strength and vulnerability, it is the whole you, not just the strength part of you that you normally project, but all of you.
What if instead of protecting our reputation, we created a new one? What if instead of holding back we took a step forward and shared the passion hidden inside?
Define
“Nothing in the universe can make you relive some painful moment from your past as long as you choose to live from the higher understanding that no old dark thought has the power to define you, let alone drag you down.” – Guy Finley
Old dark thoughts do not have the power to define you, let alone drag you down – this is what “the truth sets us free” from. The truth doesn’t make the mistake go away, but instead we come to understand that one action (either good or bad) does not define who we are.
As a society we tend to take a single action and let that one mistake define a person. They become a hero or a zero in that one moment. Take an example like a successful business person who has donated both time and money to charity, who has a strong loving family, and who one night makes an error in judgment to drive after having 3 drinks with dinner, and who then has a car accident – does this one error in judgment forever define him as a drunk driver? It shouldn’t, but it sometimes does.
We tend to judge others like we judge ourselves in our heads, negatively. We really need to look at not only our own internal judgments, but also those judgments that we make about others. Instead of defining a person by one action, we need to define them by all of their actions, as a whole person. If you want to know how judgmental you are, look at the judgments that you form about others that you may barely know based on something that you heard or read. The same way that we are judging them, so will we internally condemn ourselves.
So listen to how you talk about others; how you judge them based on some single action and then take a moment to mentally write down every positive thing they have ever done. Who is this person as a total person? Now do the same thing for yourself. Who are you as a woman; a daughter; a sister; a friend; a spouse; a mother; a grandmother; as a worker (business owner/employee/employer); as a total human being? Note the wonderful things that you have done for society, for your family; for your friends – everything you have accomplished since you were born – look at all the good that has been done and realize that these are only the things that you know about or will permit yourself to acknowledge. Your friends and family could expand that list (probably by pages and pages), as well as the kindness you have displayed to strangers that changed their life and you didn’t even know about it.
Give yourself the acknowledgement that one deed does not define a person, but rather it is a lifetime of accomplishments, good and bad that say who you are. You will recognize that the truth sets you free from both internal and external judgments when your conversations, both internal and external, look at the total truth to define both ourselves and others.