Life’s Storms

 

Revised 5/13/2019

I wrote this poem on a Sunday (see it at the bottom). It had been banging around in my head for a while wanting to be released. So, I took some quiet time while everyone was asleep and let it out. The entire poem is printed at the end of the post.

There is no growth without change. You’ve got to let go of some old stuff. And that can hurt. Often when I’m in the most pain, I realize it’s coming from my trying to control everything. Or resisting the changes that come with the progress. But you see that light . . ., that beautiful next level . . ., and that’s what you have to focus on – Ali Brown

I found the quote by Ali after I wrote the poem and was struck by how much of what I am trying to express in the poem is in her quote.

You have to release what no longer serves you. That could be the story that you have been telling yourself that holds you in chains of fear about success and failure. It could be the story that you tell yourself that you are not capable of being more. The stories you could be telling yourself go on and on.  They are varied and unending, depending on what your life has been about so far.

This control is when you stand up on the ship of your own destiny and release the anchor holding you to your stories. You drop the weight that holds you in place. You open to the winds of change.  You drop all of the baggage of blaming the world for where you are at this moment in time.  You decide to take your control back – control of how you think, how you react.

You can’t calm the storm, so stop trying.  What you can do is calm yourself.  The storm will pass – Thimber Hawkeye

It takes a lot of courage to stand up to the storm of fears and doubts. To realize that as you set sail on your ship, that there will be those who you leave behind, because they are still chained to their own stories. 

When I thought deeply about this I thought of Pompeii.  The volcano was going to erupt.  It had been giving signs of the coming destruction for months.  The people who were awake and listening, left the island behind.  But so many of the people didn’t believe what they were seeing on a day-to-day basis.  And they left fleeing to safety too late. 

I am sure that they fully believed the lies they were telling themselves, the false stories about how safety lay in staying – not in fleeing with nothing to their names, to untold dangers.  No, for them staying was the only smart thing to do.

You, however, face your fears of not knowing how you will steer the ship, or even where the next safe harbor will be.   You have the courage to face the fears of the unknown, to face the lies that you told yourself and make the right decision – to face and live through the changes that are coming.

There comes a time when you just have to listen to the music of your soul and set sail to the unknown. And so the journey begins. 

Life’s Storms

Storms without a name whip the seas into a fury, winds screaming through torrents of rain.
Waves crashing against the shore, bring in lost and forgotten debris.
Stand tall on the deck of your ship, as the birds scatter beneath the howling winds,
Let it blow away what no longer serves you. 

You feel the backlash of empty words with no truth, the shadows are winning.
No sunlight, every battle lost, and shadow is winning. No rescue. 
The lack of love, the hunger for life is insatiable, an open mouth that wails to be fed.
You can’t undo what has been done, it doesn’t serve you. 

Thunder rolls and lightning flashes exposing what still needs to be released.
Let it go out the door, don’t run after it as if falls off the deck and into the sea.
Feel the weight of the past, as the sounds of the anchor being lifted vibrate through your body,
The anchor being lifted from the bottom of the sea, the sound of your journey echoing onward.

Change, the anchor of our soul, it both drops into the sea, and is pulled back up into the ship,
Change moves us ever forward on the journey, unearthing the destination clue by clue, star by star.
Change reveals the next adventure, the next treasure that we are seeking,
Change reveals the next harbor in which to rest our soul

Bright morning stars, as day breaks open the dawn releasing the light, as it climbs the clear sky,
Light breezes blow as it fills the sails, with the dust blown clear, we see what has been done.
Every color sparkles as it plays upon the sea, as we awaken, transformed once more,
We hear the music of our soul, whispering as the journey begins again, echoing ever onward.

Getting onto the Right Path

One of my favorite stories comes from Love, Medicine and Miracles by Dr. Bernie Seigal. A young man wanted to become a violinist. His parents said no, become a lawyer. He went to law school and started practicing law. He then developed what was diagnosed as terminal cancer. Thinking he was going to die, he got a job playing violin for an orchestra. Years later, he was still alive because he realized he was on the wrong path. He had to live his life, not the life of his parents.

Knowing when to walk away is wisdom, being able to do so is courage.

Isn’t it amazing that cancer is what gave him courage enough to walk away?  He demonstrated how true the maxim is that every cloud has a silver lining.  Can you think of examples when you went through a dark time only to find at the end that it gave you what you had always dreamed and wanted?

Your body knows when you are not living your authentic life, and you will receive a wake-up call.

• It is important, that you listen.  That you look within and examine your life.
• It is vital, that you create the courage to make the change.
• It is critical, that you realize that just because you are walking down the right path, doesn’t mean there won’t be obstacles.
• Your need of courage includes being courageous enough to face the fact that you will still make mistakes, experience disappointments and despair.

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact.  Everything we see is perspective, not the truth” – Marcus Aurelius

This is where the ability to both look around you, and within yourself becomes important. It doesn’t mean that you are on the wrong path just because something goes wrong. It just means that you need to grow more, to be able to continue the journey.

In every journey something in your life will become complete.  It will have played out its purpose.  That road map will no longer lead you in the right direction.  You need to wake up to follow a new direction and not just blindly continue down a road that no longer leads you in the right direction.

Every year roads change.  New maps are made.  If your car has a GPS unit it will need to become updated.  The road that used to go through that small town, now bypasses it.  Internally your GPS has updated itself and you need to follow a new path.

U-Turns don’t take you all the way back.  They just take you back far enough that you can take the turn you missed.  Life’s road twists and turns.  There are no two directions that are ever the same.  So, when you complete a U-turn, it is just like taking a right-hand turn.

You can’t truly go backwards, although it seems like it some days.  Trying to, is very disappointing, as you can’t recreate what we left behind.  You changed and so did everyone else.

Don’t allow yourself to become the boulder blocking the path. This is what happens when you try to go backwards.

• You block our own path.
• You recreate similar patterns of self-destruction.

If you do, that is when you know that it is time to listen to the heart.  Your heart and soul are like the magnetic needle on the compass. Always go to “true north” and you will be on the right path.

I have always maintained that U-turns are part of every journey to some place that I don’t know. I expect them, I laugh when they happen. U-Turns can be really interesting.

What I have learned in my life is that every single experience has something important in it that I needed to learn. I may only understand later, why that piece of knowledge was required.

I have been in the mortgage industry for over 40 years. So I have lived through good and bad cycles in the financial industry. Years ago I had a good job, but the owner of another company kept calling me to come and work for him. Finally after months of getting his phone calls, I gave notice and went to work for him. This job would end up being a U-turn for me.

He had hired a free lance writer to create a manual for the mortgage brokers he worked with, and she seemed unable to finish the project, so as part of my job I took that project to completion.

Then two weeks later I was laid off, when the interest rates hiked up and his business slowed down. I really yelled at myself, because I felt I had made a wrong decision in taking that job.  I felt I should have stayed where I was, safe in  my comfort zone.

We ended up having to move out of state in order for me to find work. But what happened next, was really interesting.

The Savings and Loan I went to work for needed manuals written for their servicing department, and because I had that experience I got the job of being both an underwriter and a trainer. I created several training programs for them, as well as the servicing manual.

Then I got a second part time job teaching at South Seattle Community College for an adult education class for loan processors and loan officers. I ended up creating new manuals for this position too, because their manuals were so bad. Both of these jobs would not have been available to me, if I hadn’t taken that earlier job and got the experience of creating a manual.

“Move on.  It’s just a chapter in your life.  Don’t close the book, just turn the page for a new chapter”  – Unknown

So you will fall down. You may even get lost. U-Turns are a given. But as long as you take out that compass, listen to your heart, and keep creating the courage in your soul, you will be on the right path. As long as you tune into true north, you can take that step into the unknown, knowing that this is the right path.

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!

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.

[lp-logic ids=”3473″ limit=1][lp-logic ids=”3473″ limit=1 use_content=1] Content to use [/lp-logic]

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.

[lp-logic ids=”3473″ limit=1][lp-logic ids=”3473″ limit=1 use_content=1] Content to use [/lp-logic]

Helping others

Robert Norton discovered the truth of how helping others helps you get over your own troubles. He recently lost his mother right before his wedding, which created an emotional roller coaster for his bride and himself.

When he returned from his honeymoon, he discovered that the man who mowed his lawn was walking 2.5 miles with his lawn mower because his car broke down and he couldn’t afford to get it fixed. What stunned him is that the man who mows his lawn is 83 yrs old.

So he and his wife started a GoFundMe account and raised enough money to buy his lawn care man a new truck.

They raised $13,000 and a local car dealer sold him a 2004 Nissan truck at cost and the balance of the funds were used to pay for his auto insurance, license plates and a Home Depot gift card to purchase a new lawn mower.

“He’s going to cut our yard as long as he wants to cut our yard and we’re going to pay him as long as he wants to cut our yard,” said Robert. “I think anybody who is 83 years old who works as hard as he does, as loyal and faithful as he is, his work ethic and character, should have a vehicle to drive and do his work in.”

See more:  http://www.liftbump.com/…/90189-man-who-mows-lawns-shows-…/…

 

Action

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”
– Dale Carnegie

Action is the fear killer. I always liked the line in Dune about fear being the mind killer. Fear freezes you in place so that you can’t move, thus creating inaction.

Action

“As you move toward a dream, the dream moves toward you.” – Julia Cameron

When we take “action” to bring a dream into reality we show the universe that we really want this to be our reality. The universe then kicks into gear with synchronicity to move people, places, and things into our lives with just what we need to make it happen.

Inspired Action

Self confidence is the result of a successfully survived risk. Your purpose is never complete and there are two kinds of action – obvious action and inspired action – I love inspired action because it floats you up to the next level.

Action

“Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire, and begin at once, whether you’re ready or not, to put it into action.” Napoleon Hill

Don’t put it off waiting for more money, a better education, thinking that if you just wait until circumstances are perfect then everything will come together. Put your dreams into action now, as there were never be the perfect time or circumstances. Just Do It!