Follow Your Own Road
Rumi said, “It’s your road and yours alone, others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.”
When we try to walk down another persons road, it leads to disillusionment and disappointment. It isn’t “our” road. In the book “The Pilgrimage”, Paulo Coelho said that “it is our decision to walk, that creates the road ahead of us”.
It is both being courageous and having curiosity, that keeps us forging ahead on the path. It is the journey itself, that grows us as a person. It has been said that it’s never about obtaining the “goal”. It is rather about who you need to become, to achieve the goal. Marianne Williamson said, “you must learn a new way to think before you can master a new way to be.”
I have always loved the saying, “It’s not the destination,… it’s the journey”. This is because the path isn’t the destination. The path is where we live our life. It is all of life’s experiences. The good, bad, and the ugly. The messy pieces as well as the glorious adventures. The destination is simply a road sign. A sign that we made it to “X”. Then we begin planning a new destination or goal. It’s all about the road we choose, the path we forge.
So cast off the bowlines. Sail out of the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds and see where they take you.
If you want to soar in life, you must first love yourself
If you want to soar in life, you must first love yourself.
“You have to love yourself because no amount of love from others is sufficient to fill the yearning that your soul requires from you” – Dodinsky
So many of you have put the cart before the horse when it comes to love. You spend all of your time “earning” the love of others by being who they want you to be. By doing everything in your power to make their life perfect. You put others ahead of yourself and at the end of the day, nothing turns out the way you wanted it to. You are left feeling like a failure, just “not good enough”.
There is a show on PBS called “Home Fires”. It takes place in England during WWII. It’s about a women’s group that contributes to the village and the war effort. In the first season there is one woman whose husband abuses her. Like all abusers he makes every time he loses his temper to be her fault. The real issue at hand for the story line is that he is a newspaper writer who can’t get enough work, so of course he takes it out on someone he is supposed to love.
A few of her best friends figure out what is happening, but at the point in history there really isn’t anything they can do about it. She is too ashamed to admit what is happening. The times that she struggles to fight back, he leaves her self-worth in even more tatters. At the end of the first season, one of her friends was successful in getting him a war correspondent job without him being aware of her having a hand in it.
He leaves the village to go to the front, and now his wife has the opportunity to start loving herself and building up her self-esteem. The hope being that she doesn’t fall back into the same situation when he returns. One of the underlying contributors of why women stay in abusive situations is that they don’t love themselves enough to gather up what remains of their self-worth and self-trust, to leave and not look back.
“Love yourself enough to take the actions required for your happiness. Love yourself enough to cut yourself loose from the ties of the drama filled past. Love yourself enough to move on” – Dr. Steve Maraboli
You may not be in such an extreme situation with your self-love, but you only have to listen to the comments you make to yourself, to know that it is something you can still do more work on.
When you live your life in such a way that reflects, you’re coming in last, you buy into a lie. A lie that loving yourself first will take away from loving others. A lie that says the only way to be worthy of self-love, is to prove that others love you first. How could you attract the love of others, if you don’t even love yourself?
Trying to in essence purchase the love of others by the self sacrifice of yourself, is like trying to fit the square peg in the round hole. You can push it, twist it, and pound the peg until it shatters, but it will never fit. It won’t fill that yearning from your soul, that begs you to put “love us” first.
5 Things to Quit – right now.
- Trying to please everyone
- Fearing Change
- Living in the past
- Putting yourself down
- Overthinking
You have the power to choose where you are going. You have the power to stop trying to get attention from those who hurt you most. You have the power to stop hating your body, your personality, and the pieces of you that don’t fit in the square hole.
You can start with loving yourself, saying “I love my thighs just as they are”, “I love my imperfect smile”, “I love that I snort when I laugh”, “I love me”. You can get the truth of the situation into your bones – nobody will ever love you more than you love yourself.
It is critically important to your health and happiness – both physical and mental – that you treat yourself right.
What if for the rest of this year you devoted yourself to loving you more? Your choices will change your life.
Make peace with your mirror and watch your reflection change. The loss of judgment in your eyes. The removing of the wrinkles of anxiety across the forehead, that you aren’t good enough. The curve of the smile of self-confidence, that says you are amazing, and you are rocking that outfit. The glow of inner peace and love that fills your space with light. And – LOL – Best hair day EVER!
David Bowie
David Bowie’s death was announced today and I learned something important about him. Not only was he a talented musician and actor, he was also a history maker.
This from the German Foreign Office: “Good-bye, David Bowie. You are now among #Heroes. Thank you for helping to bring down the #wall #RIPDavidBowie”
In June 1987, David Bowie returned to the divided city of Berlin for a concert that some Germans, still view as having helped change story.
In 1977, the year Bowie recorded Heroes, the second of his three Berlin albums, East German border guards shot and killed 18-year-old Dietmar Schwietzer as he tried to flee west across the wall; a few months later, 22-year-old Henri Weise drowned trying to cross the Spree River. Heroes was haunted by the Cold War themes of fear and isolation that hung over the city. Its still-famous title track tells a story of two lovers who meet at the wall and try, hopelessly, to find a way to be together.
Bowie returned for the Concert for Berlin, a three-day open-air show in front of the Reichstag, he chose “Heroes” for his performance. The wall couldn’t keep out radio waves., and there were thousands on the other side that had come close to the wall. So it was like a double concert where the wall was the division. You could hear them cheering and singing along from the other side.
“The mood was one of enjoying forbidden fruit,” Olof Pock, then a 15-year-old kid living in East Berlin, later told Deutsche Welle. “We knew that this was somehow being done for our benefit.”
When Bowie performed on the second night, he began by telling the crowd, in German, “We send our wishes to all our friends who are on the other side of the wall.” He sang “Heroes,” the song he’d recorded in Berlin a decade earlier amid the city’s Cold War fear and violence.
Though “Heroes” is today remembered as an anthem of optimism and defiance, its lyrics capture the hopelessness and desperation of a city divided, friends and family in the East kept apart from their loved ones in the West by violence and terror. The song’s narrator pleads, “I wish you could swim / Like the dolphins, like dolphins can swim,” a reference to the East Germans, like Weise, who died trying to cross the Spree.
The lyrics, remembered in this context, are tragic, each verse ending with the line “nothing can keep us together”:
I, I can remember (I remember)
Standing, by the wall (by the wall)
And the guns, shot above our heads (over our heads)
And we kissed, as though nothing could fall (nothing could fall)
And the shame, was on the other side
The song ends with a plea that eventually things will change, if only for a day:
We’re nothing, and nothing will help us
Maybe we’re lying, then you better not stay
But we could be safer, just for one day
On the final day of the three-day show, East German authorities decided that they’d had enough. Police in areas near the wall, where young East Berliners had gathered to listen, cracked down violently, attacking people with water cannons and arresting some 200. “They kept arresting people, dragging them along the surface of the street. It was like a horror movie. We were enraged,” an eyewitness told Deutsche Welle.
“Many of the eyewitnesses claim that the violent police crackdown on the third night of the concerts … were crucial in changing the mood against the state,” the Guardian has written. East German authorities, by overreacting, had turned the gathering of concert listeners — people who just wanted to hear music — into a subversive political act.
A week later, US President Ronald Reagan visited West Berlin and, standing in front of the city’s famous Brandenburg Gate, called on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”
Reagan’s speech, along with the Concert for Berlin a week earlier, had helped change the mood around the wall, which had stood in some form or another for more than a generation.
Thankful Service
1,000 people attend funeral for Billy Aldridge, a US Marine Corp veteran with no family.
Billy died at the age of 80 in an Indianapolis nursing home last month and the company handling his arrangements posted his story on Facebook. They asked the public to help give this man a dignified funeral service.
I think they did a good job!
Change is Good
Lao Tzu said, “Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”
Every year in January the majority of us will set goals for the new year. We may call them New Years Resolutions or goals. They can be personal goals such as our weight or physical fitness goals, or business/financial goals. What ever they are they generally designed to enhance our life in some way.
One thing that I have discovered about myself is realizing when I am pushing a goal to happen in a certain way or time frame, life gets frustrating and hard. But if I step back and look at my goal from the aspect of divine timing, I can usually see that the reason why the goal isn’t progressing. There is something that I am missing, something vital to make it happen. When the progress towards the goal starts to become pushing a boulder uphill, I know now to walk it backward down the hill until the pressure is released.
I step back and re-look at what I am doing. Re-look at the time table. Re-examine the reasons behind the goal to see if I need to adjust what the goal is trying to accomplish. I love the analogy of flowing downstream in a river. There are these little bays or inlets, eddies in the river where you can float in stillness. In these places, you acquire knowledge, skills, make partnerships, etc.., things that will be needed later down river. You have a chance to examine and revise your goals based on new knowledge. Then when the timing is right, you re-enter into the river and flow further downstream.
Lena Horne said, “It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.” Stop struggling against the load, Instead, relax and float. You can float for hours. It is the struggle that makes you exhausted, wastes all of your energy and breaks you down, so that you give up.
Go within, where the wisdom and clarity reside. Instead of having to defend ourselves, or prove something, we discover the compassion to simply let life flow forward and outward in simplicity.
Ending with my two favorite Bruce Lee quotes: “Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” And the second one is “there are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there. You must go beyond them.” I wish you success in growing beyond any plateaus that you are currently experiencing in your life. Be water and flow.
Live Your Dreams
If you can see it, you can be it and do it!
Lt Col Brandt, had an idea when she learned that more women pilots were coming to her base. She did the math and realized that they had enough women to do an all female crew to break some records for the longest flight without refueling the aircraft for military aircraft. And that is just what these ladies did. Way to go Ladies – what a great example for the girls growing up to realize that they can be and do anything that they want to with their lives.
This month marks the first anniversary of Lady Hawk Day in the city of Grand Forks, ND. Mayor Mike Brown established the day in recognition of the “Flight of the Lady Hawk,” the longest flight without air refueling on record for a military aircraft, led by an all-women team.
According to Lt. Col. Brandt, what differentiates this particular record from others like it, is that all of the women pilots included in the mission came from the same squadron. Historically, groups have had to reach out to other squadrons or units to get enough women together to achieve a record. And in addition to the six women pilots managing the remote flight, the more than 50 support staff and ground crew were also women.
Capt. Natalie Winkels, one of the pilots who participated in the historic mission, reached out to us to share the group’s incredible accomplishment and to “show aspiring young men and women out there that women are setting world records.”
See more: http://www.womenyoushouldknow.net/flight-of-the-lady-hawk-…/
The heart knows a thousand ways to speak
When I look at this quote and picture there is such a bond between the dog and child. You can just feel the energetic connection. Our pets sense our needs so well that it seems as though our hearts are speaking to each other.
I remember as a child I would hold my dog Snoopy and sometimes just cry out my frustrations. I felt like he was the only one who I could talk to about my problems. I knew that my dog was never disappointed in me. He was always happy to see me. I think that he is the reason I remained sane in an sometimes insane childhood.
Our hearts don’t just pump blood throughout our body. They also have their own nervous system that can process information just like our brain. It also is a hormonal gland, producing among others the hormone Oxytocin, also known as the love or bonding hormone.
The heart actually plays a major part in determining the quality of our emotional experience from moment to moment. The heart appears to play a key role in intuition. Although there is much yet to be understood, it appears that the age-old associations of the heart with thought, feeling, and insight may indeed have a basis in science.
So the poet Rumi’s words of the heart knowing a thousand ways to speak is actually true as our heart functions speak to every sense that we have in our body, speaking to our body even more than our brain does. As a source of wisdom, spiritual insight, thought, and emotion it proves that Rumi’s words may well be more than simply metaphorical.
No Legs, No Limits
Wow! Truly inspirational. Her personal mantra is “no legs, no limits”. Reading her story I realized that my excuses for not being physically fit are pretty lame. What limitations are you buying into with your life today?
She isn’t letting what some people call a disability hold her back. She is proving that owning who you are makes you hot. What is holding you back from your dreams today?
There is a personal belief in yourself and your dreams that is definitely in play here. If it is in your heart, and you really feel it, the vision pulls you. There is nothing that will stop you. I read this in someone else’s Facebook posts and really liked it “it is like the sun – you can’t block it, it will shine regardless”. Do you feel that sunshine?
A true LemonadeMaker, she is redefining the rules around beauty, and she is gorgeous. Kanya Sesser’s goal is to prove that “different” is sexy. She’s been modeling sports brands, bathing suits and personal lingerie since she was 15.
In addition to be being a successful model, she surfs, skateboards, races bikes, and is currently training for the 2018 Winter Paralympics as a mono skier.
She was adopted from an orphanage in Thailand when she was 5 years old. I want to give a shout out to the parents who adopted her. They raised her to be a strong, confident woman who is not afraid of who she is.
“I love showing people what beauty can look like,” she says. “These images show my strength.”
Future
Sometimes we need to let go of how we thought our life should be. Instead we need to embrace the life that our soul is calling out for. The life we were meant to live.
It is scary. It can feel like we are all alone.
But maybe the journey is all about unbecoming who we are, so that we can become who we are meant to be.
Strength
We all know those special people in our lives that make the challenges that come into their lives look simple. They seem to thrive when the speed bumps in life make their appearance. I know that I come from a line of strong women. My mom weathered a lot of struggles in her life, and while she may have been wounded a few times, she was never broken. I love being a woman who is willing to not only bring my light out into the world, but bring the matches to light others flames too.
In history we have Margaret of Anjou, Joan of Arc, and Deborah in the bible. Deborah was a prophetess, a judge or ruler and a warrior. Joan of Arc and Margaret of Anjou road at the head of armies with their banners striking terror into the hearts of their enemies. We also have the mythology of Goddesses such as Athena, Diana, Hella, Isis etc…, who were powerful warriors.
There are so many song lyrics that speak about being a strong woman. From Helen Reddings song “I Am Woman”
“Oh yes, I am wise
But it’s wisdom born of pain
Yes, I’ve paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to, I can do anything
I am strong
(Strong)
I am invincible
(Invincible)
I am woman”
to Kelly Clarkson’s, “Stronger”
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
Stand a little taller
Doesn’t mean I’m lonely when I’m alone
What doesn’t kill you makes a fighter
Footsteps even lighter
Doesn’t mean I’m over cause you’re gone”
To Katy Perry’s “Roar”
“I got the eye of the tiger, a fighter, dancing through the fire
‘Cause I am a champion and you’re gonna hear me roar
Louder, louder than a lion
‘Cause I am a champion and you’re gonna hear me roar”
So here’s to not playing small. Here is to every woman in the world being brave, roaring out into the world and being invincible Here is to not just bringing a light into the world. Here is to bringing enough matches to light our world on fire.
To it not being okay that we find drowned babies in the ocean sand because they were fleeing war and oppression in a boat that couldn’t make it to freedom. That it is not okay for another child to go to bed hungry tonight. To it not being okay that we are burying children because they had no access to medical care. Let’s all of us take a stand and shift and change our entire world into a safe place to raise happy healthy children.
Stronger
When you are hanging on by the tips of your fingers, time stands still. There is this moment when even the wind holds its breath in anticipation. It is in that exact second that you reach down deeper than you even believed was possible. And what you pull out of the depths of your soul sends you straight up and over the top.
When you have reached past what you thought was possible and gone over into the impossible, that’s when you are unbeatable. Because even single cell in your body now knows that the only limits you have are what you believe is the limit.
YOU are stronger.
