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.
Thank you to all of my wonderful friends who support me year in and year out. I have been reviewing all of the posts on LemonadeMakers since the beginning of January.
It seems to be a buzz word to talk about how much we have grown, and I have said the same thing about my journey the past three years.
As I have been going through each of the posts and printing out the stats for them, I see plainly how much I have grown in what I was posting and writing. It took a few months to find the right voice for LemonadeMakers.
I am not saying that I fully understand what LemonadeMakers fully resonate with, but the past three months we have been growing almost1,000 followers a month. I am still experimenting with the right approach and we will be changing the look and feel of LemonadeMakers in the next 30 days or so.
What I do see is how much we love to see the good in humanity. That there are growing numbers of people who give without thought of recognition or reward, but because they see a need and a means to fill it. Lives are being changed everyday. Part of it is because we are encouraged by sites like LemonadeMakers to go out and do something positive in our daily lives.
If you haven’t checked out our site and liked it, please come over and join us. We are a pretty cool place to connect with other wonderful people. It will put a smile on your face and restore your faith in the human race.
We have the habit of thinking that change is hard, because we think of change as being a huge undertaking. We think of losing 100 lbs instead of just replacing the candy bar with a delicious piece of fruit; we think of adding exercise as running a marathon instead of just replacing 10 minutes of watching TV with a walk around the block.
Subtle changes create an avalanche because they are small shifts here and there until the weigth of the change becomes a tipping points. They are easy to do and you will be surprised by how much change can happen, seemingly overnight – the proverbial overnight success came from a practice building in momentum until the avalanche roars down the mountain.
I encourage you to think of what subtle changes you can make that will shift you and thereby the world to a happier, healthier place to live.
Today’s Lesson in Ease: Momentum
Subtle changes made consistently along the way contribute to Momentum. Small subtle shift in the inner hidden base of a snow-covered mountain create the necessary Momentum for an avalanche. I now choose to consistently create subtle shifts along the way.
~Ellie Drake~ BraveHeart Womnen
“Since what other people do to you is not in your power to change, you need only concern yourself with what you do to yourself, for that is in your power.” – Guy Finley
As women when we get an emotional hit, the vibration of the emotion is fast moving through our body. As it moves, it slows down to a speed that allows us for form a thought of what this emotion is trying to tell us. So a thought for women is actually a slowed down emotion. Once an emotion has been slowed down it becomes a distorted emotion (because it is no longer vibrating at the correct speed), and this slowed down distorted emotion, creates a negative thought.
Most of us tend to get overtaken by our feelings and reactions to the negative thoughts. We believe that someone or something else is causing us to be unhappy, Instead of giving away our power to be happy to another person or possession or belief, we have the power within ourselves to change the negative thoughts.
Instead of resisting the negative thought, what we need to do is welcome the thought with a vibration of nonattachment. Just open the door and say hello to the thought, completely neutral. When we do this we are retraining our hypothalamus that just because I have a negative thought doesn’t mean I have to go down into negative energy. I can remain in ease and nonattachment, and just allow the thought to go on its way. No harm, no foul.
I think that this is what Guy Finley is talking about, from a woman’s point of view. I can’t change what others do or say. The only thing in my power is my reaction. I can just welcome the thought in and let it go on its way, with no drama, no story, that is what is in my power and in your power. Because my reaction in any other way just puts negativity into my life. I am essentially punishing myself for something that I had no control over – what someone else did or thought or didn’t do or think. How useless is that?
It is in my power live a life of ease and grace, and if you really think about it, if someone is trying to hurt me, isn’t that the best revenge? No reaction, just me being happy
“A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our worlds; it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of serendipitious opportunities that were somehow absent before the change” – Earl Nightingale
I was thinking yesterday about law of attraction; about commitment; about how you could get to a goal in such a way that it forever changes your life – so that you could never go back to where you were before.
I think that it is when you “know” not just want or desire. Take my current goal of getting back to what I consider as my “normal” weight (pre 4th pregnancy). It is not because I would be healthy; or I would look better; or to be more attractive to my husband; or any of the other reasons that you would assume or tell me why I should lose weight. I have tried all of those and the weight came back.
There is a place that is stronger than motivation; and it recognizes that it is necessary to achieve my life purpose to make this change, and because of that I know in my bones that this will be permanent. This is due in part because I have uncovered the self sabotager from my childhood and she knows that she doesn’t need to protect me any longer, that it is now safe for me to be seen. When you are obese, people tend to slide their glances past you and it makes it easy to be invisible. Now that little girl from my past wants to be up on stage with me, to live out loud.
I think that when we reach beyond all the easy answers down to the core, you truly do connect magically and the world turns you on to opportunities that always existed, but you never saw before, because you were in the dark. When you reach out to the stars the rocket boosters needed to gain altitude burn away the fears,and excuses and you become lighter; free to do things you never even considered possible before.
“There are two primary choices in life; to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.” – Denis Waitley
Sometimes we don’t know what is wrong, just that for some reason we aren’t happy and satisfied. What we need to do is look at our life to see where the dissatifaction is, and then investigate the alternatives that we have for change. Then we can either change the circumstances or how we view the circumstances. We may love what we do for a living, but not living in the big city where the office is located. So the answer may be telecommuting to work from the country; finding similar work in the country; or creating a more “country” atmosphere around us. Or it may be that we find reasons to fall in love with the big city. Just make a small change and go from there to being a happier, healthier person!
Change is not about “fixing” yourself. You are not broken. It is about asking yourself – what do I now want to become? What do I want this life to be about? How can I discover a new truth about life itself? You are creator and creation all in one fantastic package!
“The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” ~ Albert Einstein. If you don’t like your day or your life, change it. We need to stop letting fear direct our lives and step out and make the changes we know we need to make