Forget all the Reasons it won’t Work and Focus on the One Reason it Will

I love this quote with this photo. When you are climbing, you have to have singular focus on what you are doing. Where is the next hand grip? The next place to wedge in your foot? Constantly looking up the wall of rock to find the easiest way up.

It is very easy to find reasons why we can’t do something. Can’t however is usually masking “I don’t want to”, “It’s too hard”, “too much effort”, “it won’t work”. These are all rungs up a ladder that goes nowhere.

At work I hear things, like I am stuck at this job because no one is hiring people over 50 yrs old. Or no one is hiring anyone without a college degree, or you need more experience than I have. No one in the past five years has been promoted or received a raise, so you have to go outside the company to get ahead. Whatever the complaint, the “reason” will be something that they can’t control or change.

All of these reasons why something won’t work will stand in our way as long as we have a belief in them. I love the work of Byron Katie because her four questions show us the fallacy of believing these “reasons”.

1. Is it true? (Yes or no. If no, move to 3.)
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true? (Yes or no.)
3. How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought? 
4. Who would you be without the thought?

Then she does what she calls the turnaround question – the turn around question puts the thought to the opposite end of the statement. The purpose of this is to welcome all your thoughts and experiences with open arms, so that you lose the resistance to what is actually true.

The 2nd question is my favorite, because in reality we can never know that our “reason” is absolutely true. This is because no matter what the rule is, there is always an exception to the rule. Most of the things that we believe about ourselves and others are just stories our minds have made up. None of them can pass question #2.

The follow up with question #4 – who would you be without that thought? You would be the person who uses focus to accomplish the dreams and/or goals that are set before them. In this photo, you would be the woman who climbs up the wall to the top successfully.

In our other examples, you would be the person who finds their dream job, because they focused on what they wanted instead of what they didn’t want. You would be happy for having accomplished what you set out to do, and didn’t allow negative thoughts to cloud your judgment or stop you in your tracks.

What Does The Term, “The sky’s the limit” Mean To You?

What does the term, “the sky’s the limit” mean to you?  For me, it is where the comfort zone meets “what else is possible?”

What is stopping you is the unwillingness to live beyond this reality.

  – Unknown

It is an extension of “what is possible”, that is beyond what “normal” is for me. It is where all of the magic is, approaching life from that attitude.  All our of limitations are self installed.  We choose them either by accepting them from someone else, or our own inner critic forming them after a failure. The sky is not the limitation, we are. We see these limitations in our professional life, our personal life and our spiritual life. Some of these limitations come from our culture, through the “roles” we play with our friends and family.

Being on a spiritual path does not prevent you from facing times of darkness.  But it teaches you how to use the darkness as a tool to grow.

  – Unknown

When we go on a hero’s journey, the walls that we have built around us, to limit us, get torn down. When you take any really great story, you find within it what Joseph Campbell called the Hero’s Journey. My two favorite stories are “Star Wars” (the first three with Luke) and “Lord of The Rings”. 

The main character (Luke or Frodo) is going through a “normal” or boring life. Nothing much is happening. Then there is a call to adventure (Luke has R2D2 show up and Frodo has Gandalf), something new is introduced into the characters life.  This alters the hero’s destiny. At first the hero refuses the call to adventure – this isn’t for me. I can’t get involved. This can sometimes be because the hero knows that the role that you play within your family, or tribe will be forever changed once you cross the threshold.

Our worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace.  And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God’s grace.

  –  Jerry Bridges

Then the hero encounters the mentor – someone who gives advice and gets him ready. It could be someone supernatural, mystical or angelic. The hero crosses the threshold – leaves home and enters into the adventure. There are tests, allies and enemies are encountered in the journey which teach the hero a lot about him or herself. Plan A and possibly Plans B and C fail, as the hero experiences setbacks and has to rethink how to proceed.

Because you are alive, everything is possible.

  – Nhat Hanh

The hero has faith which leads them to access higher levels of knowledge and abilities to meet the tests with. The hero sees their limitations and ultimately has to defy and defeat them in order to pull through. The setbacks all lead to the ultimate crisis of life or death, where the hero struggles to complete their destiny (Luke battling the evil emperor and Frodo himself and the ring). Now the hero gets the reward – they have won out over the enemies. Many times the loses are mourned even as the victory is celebrated. The hero begins the journey back home, forever changed by the journey. The old limitations of what the hero thought they were capable of have changed. They have been forever transformed.

The reason people awaken, is because they have finally stopped agreeing to things that insult their soul.

  –  Unknown

I believe that we all take numerous hero’s journeys. We take them in our personal lives, our professional lives and our spiritual lives. We take small journeys and we take “dark night of the soul” journeys. Each time we need to transform our lives, we take a hero’s journey. We reinvent ourselves, we improvise, adapt and overcome our self made limitations. We get creative, we become flexible and adjust as we experience paradigm shifts.

There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

  – Bruce Lee

So don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the moon. Use your imagination and creativity, to discover that the possibilities of your world are limitless.

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If You’re searching for that one person that can change your life… Look in the Mirror.

Ernest Holmes said, “Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.” This time of the year is a great time to reflect back on what transpired for the past twelve months of our life. What happened to the goals or resolutions that you set for the year? Did you achieve them? Did you give up on them? Did you rise up or fall down?

Looking back helps us to see what we want to bring into our life. I trust that I deserve unconditional love. That I can have happiness and success every day in my life. That I can trust my wings and fly. I trust that I am right were I need to be, and that 2016 is going to be an amazing year.

If you look at your reflection in the water, you see of surface of you. But if you put your hand through the reflection, you can see what lies beneath. The question I always ask myself is “why am I doing this to myself? How can I do better?” Through the years of yo-yo dieting I have asked myself this question many times.

It is not the things that happened in my life that define me, but how I coped and adjusted through them, that made me who I am today. Somewhere along the way, weight became a protection. I release that. Somewhere along the way, my will power that had always controlled my life was crushed. I release that. I release the self destructive way of thinking.

Last year about half way through I hired a health coach because I haven’t been successful in losing it and keeping the weight off. So I ask myself “why am I regaining the weight?” The past few months new things have been brought up from the depths beneath the surface and released.

I am working on being a better person, and that includes my body, mind and soul. For whatever reason, the body fights back. So the reflection that I see right now, is showing me who I was. I am reflecting back to it, who I want to be.

I have been listening to all of the talk about Carrie Fischer and what she looks like today, versus almost 40 years ago when they filmed the first Star Wars movie. It is really sad that some of us feel the need to say negative things about how someone looks. Speaking as someone who is overweight I can testify that it doesn’t help me to lose weight. It doesn’t make me feel motivated to do anything positive. It just makes me feel depressed, because it is something that I am working on. I think Carrie Fischer is an amazing woman, who has had her struggles, just like all of us. She is courageous because she does it in the public eye, and says what she thinks. She is my hero.

So what do I do when I see someone extremely gorgeous? I stare, I smile, and when I get tired of holding up the mirror, I put it down

The Soul Never Thinks Without a Picture

I love the Emily Dickinson poem in which she says, “hope is the thing with feathers – that perches in the soul – and sings the tune without the words – and never stops – at all”.

Hope is perching in our souls and singing to us everyday. It tells us these wonderful stories of what we can accomplish in our lives. Visualization is critical to this hope, as it helps to bring in everything we want in our lives.

I think that is why I love to read from real books, and not on a computer screen. I order the fictional books on my kindle now, but for those books that I know that I want to underline and really think about – those books have to be paper.

In the movie “The Secret” and the book that followed it, they talked about visualization. Many people will tell you that they have a hard time with it, but if you tell your mind not to picture “your kitchen”, 99% of us immediately see our kitchen in our minds eye. It is a little harder to build a visualization of something that you have never seen, but block by block, with practice it can be done.

When I learned how to do it, I started with visualizing an orange. First I would see a circle, then I added color (orange), then texture (the dimples, feeling the smooth bumps), then I would see it squirting juice down the side of the orange, feeling the spray on my face. When I reached that point of seeing the juice, I could actually taste orange juice in my mouth as I watched the juice run down the side of the orange. I just practiced every day for several weeks, until one day I didn’t need to do it step by step, it just instantly popped into my head. Then I moved on to other things. They seem real, because I put all of my senses into the visualization.

This really helped me to connect deeper to my imagination. When I read books, I now see the story in my mind. The sun shining on the ocean as it flashes bright lights along the cresting waves, hear the waves crashing on the shoreline, feel the wind blowing and digging my toes down into the cool part of the sand, smelling the salt air, – I can totally enter the world being created by the author. When I am in this space, I see connections and possibilities that I have never thought of before.

This is how I learn from everything that I read, because I enter into worlds I have no experience of. I love it when a really good movie brings you totally into the world they have created. You forget you are even watching a movie.

I am sure that you heard the joke of the man who was on his rooftop, the water in flood stage cresting higher and higher towards him. He prays for help and God sends him some people with a canoe and he says “no thanks, God is sending me help”. He prays for help and God sends him some people with a motor boat and he says “no thanks, God is sending me help”. Then a helicopter comes and he says, “no thanks, God is sending me help”. Then the flood waters come higher and he drowns. Upon entering heaven he asks God, “why didn’t you save me?” God says, I sent a canoe, a motor boat and a helicopter, but you wouldn’t get in.

This kind of visualization is how we can attract into our lives, the things we need, to bring to us the goals and dreams we want. We have to remember that part of the journey, is the lessons we learn and how we grow and change, as we go towards our destination. By visualizing into the space the gratitude of already having it, by using all of the senses, we make it so real, that the divine is busy seeing what doors of opportunity it can open for us. What kinds of synchronicity it can bring into our lives. But we have to get into the boat.

The most important thing for us is to be looking for the doors and opportunities as they pass by us and grab them. Go through them, no matter how scared we are. Take the leap of faith that this is your answer, and climb up the ladder being presented and get into the helicopter.

How Does One Become A Butterfly?

A caterpillar must endure a season of isolation before it turns into a butterfly.  Embrace the time you have alone, it will only make you stronger.

  – Steven Aitchison

Life is a journey of learning and discovery.  As young children we take in everything we can learn.  We are authentically ourselves.  Somewhere along the line of growing up, we learn to hide who we really are.  To keep ourselves safe.  To avoid ridicule.  To be the perfect person, so that we will be loved.   We have many reasons why we start hiding.  But there comes a time in our life, when we realize that in order to be truly happy, we have to transform back into who we really are.  We need to become the person we were created to be.

Butterflies can’t see their wings.  They can’t see how truly beautiful they are, but everyone else can.  People are like that as well.

  – Unknown

Transformation gives you the chance to rewrite the story of who you are and who you are capable of being. There are many things in our life that we give negative meanings to. But what if you gave pain the definition that it shows you that which is not for you? This would be a positive thing to know – what doesn’t belong to me or my life. Envy is another word that has a bad rap. What if envy simply shows you things which you may wish to empower in your life? That would be a great thing to know – things I want in my life and can empower myself to obtain.

To be nobody but yourself is a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight – and never stop fighting.

  – E.E. Cummings

The being that is forming in the cocoon is no longer a caterpillar. For the caterpillar the past is truly a place of reference. It can no longer live there, because that body is gone. Within the cocoon the caterpillars body literally melted into goo, and then formed a totally new body. As the butterfly’s body grows into its new shape, it becomes cramped as the wings want to expand out. It isn’t a place of residence for the butterfly, so it has to break loose and spread it’s wings and find a new home.  Even though everyone who knew you as a caterpillar is expecting you to still be a caterpillar, you can’t go back.  You have to fight to go forward, staying true to who you now are.

I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.

  – Mary Oliver

The butterfly had to break out of the old place of residence and begin a brand new journey, where everything is experienced for the first time. It must break open its heart to begin this journey, because it has to trust its intuition for flying, for finding food, for making a new home. Literally everything for the butterfly is a brand new experience.  You have to have the courage to follow your own heart and intuition.

You will know you made the right decision when you pick the hardest and most painful choice but your heart is at peace.

  – Unknown

Transformation is a scary business. Because I am a perfectionist, I hate doing something new for the first time. I am doing the best I can with my posts, knowing that I will have spelling errors or grammar mistakes in my writing. I can proofread this a dozen times and the minute I publish I find something I missed. When I sponsor the post, I can’t make any changes, so anything I missed becomes a permanent part of the post. I am living with being imperfect in order to just get the post out there.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

  – Steve Jobs

When we listen to our intuition, we are right where we are meant to be.  We can impact the people that we share the world with.  It may be a tiny corner of the world.  Or we could be like a comet and affect the entire world as we fly through the night sky.  It isn’t up to us to say how much of an impact we will make.  It is up to us to live life as fully as we can.  To follow the dreams that have been written in our hearts.  To break out of the comfort zone and spread our wings and fly.  It doesn’t even matter if we know where we are or where we are going.  It only matters that we fly.  That we soak up the sun.  The we soar with the breezes.  And if we can do that, then whatever we leave behind will be sufficient.

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