Walk Away – Not From Pride Or Arrogance, But Because That Door No Longer Leads Somewhere You Can Live

We all stand at the threshold of a great adventure every day. It can be a scary place, because we all have our individual self doubts. We have to unlearn the programming that says it is selfish to put ourselves first. It is not selfish to love ourselves, to take care of ourselves, and make our own happiness a priority. As they say on every airplane takeoff, in case of emergency, put your own oxygen mask on first, then you can help others. 

Every soul is beautiful and precious; is worthy of dignity and respect, and deserving of peace, joy, and love. 

 –  Bryant McGill

You cannot change what is going on around you, until you start changing what is going on inside of you. We need to put on that oxygen mask, so we can take stock of what inside of us is not working. We need to let go of what is not ours to fix, put up with, or allow to continue happening.

We are all born with a purpose and a passion.  It is up to you to seek out that purpose and find your passion.

 – Billy Cox

We are fragile human beings who can be destroyed by another’s words or actions. If we are not being treated with love and respect, we need to see what value we have assigned to ourselves. The people that we surround ourselves with are a reflection of how we view ourselves.  We need to get off the “reduced last chance sale rack”, and get inside the fancy glass case where the precious jewels are displayed.

You are determining the future you every day.  Will the decisions you make today lead you closer to the person you want to be tomorrow? 

– Brenna Smith

How many times for example has someone said, “Where to you want to go to dinner?” and your answer was that you didn’t know or didn’t care.  You do know what you feel like eating, but somehow, you always say, “it doesn’t matter, what you do want?”  The scriptures say something like, he who is faithful in little things, is faithful in bigger things.  What it is talking about is the principle of patterns.  What you do in the big things has been formed by the habits of what you do in the little things.  The habit of always putting others before you, started in the smaller things, like what do you want for dinner.

Be authentic!  Don’t lower your dreams to fit it with others.  If people can’t celebrate your dreams, they are probably not your friends.

 – Phineas Kinuthia

We may be afraid that no one will listen to us, so why speak.  We may be terrified that they will laugh at our dreams and say they are unattainable. We fear being judged as unworthy, not enough.  We don’t want to be all alone and so we abdicate our life away, so that we will be accepted and fit in. This is the story that we tell ourselves so that we don’t have to change.

Instead we can start making choices that feed us, energize us. We can choose to be unstoppable. To be bigger than any worries that are buzzing around us. Those buzzing worries are just scenario’s that no longer serve to build us up. Release what is no longer serving you. Open the window shooing the fly to go buzz its way outside.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do, is also the right thing to do.

The universe is always speaking to us . . . sending us little messages, causing coincidences and serendipities, reminding us to stop, to look around, to believe in something else, something more.

– Nancy Thayer

You are more than you have shown yourself to be so far. You are more than you have been willing to see. You are stronger than you know. Trust your intuition and live a courageous life. 

Respect your efforts, respect yourself.  Self respect leads to self discipline.  When you have both firmly under your belt, that’s real power.

– Clint Eastwood 

Today is the day to get up and walk down your sacred path. Choose to dwell in divine possibility. Awaken to the divine guidance that has been sending you messages. Believe in the divine plan, that you are more capable than you ever dreamed. Remember that you will never had to sacrifice your dignity for your destiny.  If it feels like that is the choice, then your intuition is telling you to pass that choice by. 

Be not the slave of your own past – plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience, that shall explain and overlook the old.  

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Illuminate The Path For Others So They Can See A Way Out Of Their Own Darkness

The world needs more poets like Maya Angelou.  Her writings are so inspirational.

“Nothing can dim the light which shines from within” – Maya Angelou

When you shine your light, it means that you are expressing your soul’s purpose in being here.  You are living congruently with your soul’s purpose and your light shines out.  Don’t you just love being around people, when they are being their authentic selves?  That is true charisma and magnetism.  Maya Angelou was such a soul.  Desmond Tutu is another such soul.

When you listen to the news each morning or evening, it is hard to see the light through all of the darkness.  So much of the news is about the darkness in your community, with only the occasional story that reflects the everyday heroes among us.

“If you light a lamp for someone else, it will also brighten your path” – Buddhist Proverb

Then you all have those times when the darkness of the world has settled into your own living rooms.

You lose a loved one in death; you lose your job; your family falls apart and that special person that promised to love you forever, leaves you.  It could be that due to addictions, your spouse or child has turned into someone that you don’t recognize.  Despite everything you try, you can’t reach them.

So much darkness can spill across your threshold, like the floods during a storm, safety seems to be an unreachable, forgotten place.  You may feel that no matter how many candles you light, the darkness has taken over and you can’t see your way out of it.  The pain has spread from your hearts and buried your soul.

This is the time when you might believe that everything is finished.  That life is over for you. That it is no longer worth living.  And that is when a new beginning happens.  I love the analogy of photos and darkrooms.  The negative is developed in the dark.  Then when the chemicals have worked their magic, the photo can be seen.  Out of the darkness comes a beautiful picture.

Something new has been created.

“If you can’t be the light, be the match.  You may not be the candle to illuminate the room, but your spark can be the source of its light” – Unknown

For most of you, if you look backwards in your lives, you find that the most personal growth was created by the darkness that entered your life.  If you can remember that, when you are going through the “dark night of the soul”, then you know that even if life is giving you bushels of lemons at the moment, something beautiful is about to be born.  It is at this time that you need to remember these words:

In the words of another wise soul, Martin Luther King Jr start where you are.

“If you can’t fly, then run.  If you can’t run, then walk.  If you can’t walk, then crawl.  But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward” – Martin Luther King Jr.

You have to keep moving forward into the light.  You have to find some way to keep the light of your heart alive.  Martin Luther King Jr. told us that only light can drive out the darkness, and only love can drive out the hate.  Your heart has both the light and the love you need contained within it, if you don’t barricade yourself from it.

So, when darkness seems to be the only thing you can see, look more closely.  LemonadeMakers are all around you.  We all have our heart lights shining out into the darkness, helping others to see their way out.

“Strong people don’t put others down, . . .  they lift them up” – Michael P Watson

You all have your own stories of the darkness that visited with you.  LemonadeMakers know your story, because we have been in your shoes.  We will help you back into the light, and you in turn will help someone else. That is what the light of love is all about.

The Butterfly Effect Is, Everything Happens For A Reason, Change One Thing, Change Everything.

Learn how to see.  Realize that everything connects to everything else.

  – Leonardo da Vinci

Change is a funny thing in our lives.  It happens everyday.  A seed breaks its shell and begins growing a plant.  The Apple Tree blossoms, forms the bud of an apple that grows and ripens.  The seeds are sown, they grow and produce according to their kind, and they are harvested, eaten and the process begins again.

In 1963 Edward Lorenz presented “The Chaos Theory” to the New York Academy of Science and was laughed out of the room.  Thirty years later, this theory was accorded the status of a “law” when physics professors proved it to be true. The original theory stated that, a butterfly flapping his wings set molecules of air in motion, which moved other air molecules and so forth until a hurricane was set in motion on the other side of the planet.  This change effect, states that in our own lives, even a small change can bring about a revolutionary impact in our lives.

We can look at this through the analogy of the ripple in a lake.  A raindrop hits the still water and starts a ripple.  Then another raindrop, and another, and so on.  Each one creates its own ripple.  These ripples expand out, and end up striking each other as the raindrops fall.  Each of these tiny ripples impact each other to create chaos in the still water.  In the same way, our thoughts, words, and the little details and actions that we complete or leave undone each minute, hour and day impacts not only our life, but the lives of others, both near and far.

Every single thing you do matters.  You have been created as one of a kind.  You have within you the power to change the world.

  – Andy Andrews

Your destiny is bound to the destiny of others.  They say, “the devil is in the details”.  The reason this is true is because it is the details that really change you, and the world around you.  You might think that big events change the world, but if you study history and trace backwards, it comes down to something that was thought to be insignificant, that really sets it all in motion.

Think back to something that happened in your life that you can see totally impacted your life.  Trace backwards to where the event really started.  Not the moment that all of the dominoes crashed down, but to the event that started the dominoes to tilt.   A close friend had some major changes happen in her life in the past 10 months.  She didn’t see the connections until just this past week.  When she saw them, she was astounded at what started the whole pattern to breakdown.

My friend and her husband decided the end of last year to move into a new condo unit.  It was a much nicer unit with more space and a great view.  The new condo was renting for $600 more a month than they had been paying.  It also had additional utilities payments that had been included in their rent for the previous condo.  So like most of us, she looked at her monthly budget to determine how they would be able afford the higher rent.

Her old place was next to a Starbucks, and they had been in the habit of going there for breakfast every single day.  So the amount of money they were spending a month, was just about equal to their higher rent payment.  So she thought they would just stop going to Starbucks, and the higher rent would be easily absorbed into their lifestyle.

They moved into their new home and adjusted their spending habits as planned.  This was the detail that escaped my friend when she made this decision, that she saw when she looked backwards.  My friend was contracting her wealth energy by making this decision.  Starbucks was part of her wealth profile.  She felt wealthy by going there everyday, and spending that much money on coffee.  It gave her the expansive energy of abundance.  She could afford to do this, therefore she was wealthy.

A few months later, she noticed that her business was slowly contracting and they were month over month earning less money.  This in turn caused her to further retract her spending habits.  Then my friends husband told her he was leaving her.  He had reconnected with his first wife and decided to divorce my friend, and begin a new life with his ex-wife. 

My friend was devastated, as she hadn’t seen it coming.  It was like she was getting hit after hit.  At one of their meetings to discuss their divorce, she finally got enough courage to talk to him about what had happened.  She asked him, when his feelings for her changed?  He told her that it was after they moved.  He felt like they were losing their lifestyle, and that it started with Starbucks and then continued on to other things. He didn’t want to live that way.

That was when the “lightbulb” went off in her head.  Starbucks had been the energy of her feeling wealthy. When she made that decision, that started the rain drops hitting her lake.  The more raindrops that fell, the more the ripples contracted her wealth energy, which caused her business to lose more revenue.  Those ripples hitting upon each other changed every bit of positive flowing energy in her life.  It was contraction after contraction in every aspect of her life. 

Perhaps the butterfly is proof that you can go through a great deal of darkness yet become something beautiful.  While she has been through hell the past few months, as soon as she saw the connections forming she immediately started shifting her energy back into the space of abundance.  Her business has fully recovered, and is currently more successful than it was this time last year.  She learned a powerful lesson that has been known for centuries. 

Everything is alive; everything is connected.

  –  Cicero

She feels that if instead, she had thought expansive thoughts, such as what can I do to increase my revenues to afford a higher rent, that her business would have grown and expanded.  They would not have had to reduce their lifestyle, and things would have continue along the same path with her husband.  Now while we can’t say for sure that her marriage would have not ended, but it certainly seems possible that she is correct.

Think back into your own life when you had a situation like my friend.  A time when life started going downhill fast.  A time when one domino after another seemed to be falling.  A time when you hit rock bottom.  Now trace it back to right before it all started falling apart.  There in that space, you made a decision, that was probably a decision of contraction.  There was something there that was a tiny detail, that you didn’t realize was connecting your life and holding it all together. 

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, one finds it attached to everything else.

  –  John Muir

This is so important to remember.  Contraction of energy will cause our connections to spin out of control.  It is expansion of energy that grows into abundance.  It is expansion of energy that creates love and compassion to one another.  This is what we need more of, both in our personal lives and the world.  It is the answer to all questions, expansion of love.

Humankind has not woven the web of life.  We are but one thread within it.  Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.  All things are bound together,… all things connect.

  – Chief Seattle

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Remove The Boundaries And Make Your Dreams A Reality

In 2013, in Oregon, teenage sisters Hanna (age 16) & Haylee (age 14) lifted a tractor to save their father pinned underneath.

In 2015, in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Nick Williams lifted a four-wheel-drive vehicle to save a young boy pinned beneath its tire.

In 2015, in Vienna, Virginia, Charlotte Heffelmire was able to momentarily use incredible strength to free her dad from a GMC pick-up truck.

“The only thing limiting us in life is our belief that there are limits” – unknown

What do these three things have in common?

They are what you call miracles, extreme feats of strength. Adrenaline on overload. What they demonstrate is that the rules, boundaries and limitations don’t exist.

Why? Because you can blast through them, when you don’t stop to think about it. These examples show people who did something their logical minds would have told them was impossible. But because someone they loved was in danger, they did the impossible.

There was a commercial at Super Bowl XLIX for Always #LikeAGirl. In the video an adult female shows them what it’s like to run like a girl, then a young female teen, and preteen female and last a little girl. The older girls ran in an unreal way that was weak and ineffective. The younger girls ran as fast as they could. The commercial highlighted the fact that most women when they hit puberty, take in limitations to what they can do and be. 

“Our beliefs are just thoughts with emotions tied to them that we’ve taught ourselves to believe are true” –   JV Crum III

As teenagers, in order to fit in, you started holding back on what you were capable of.  75-80% of your negative thinking patterns come from negative beliefs that you have made up about yourself. 

When I started school, I was four years old, turning five in November.  I entered first grade, because my school didn’t have a kindergarten.  So, I was very small and always 1-2 years younger than everyone else in my grade. 

I was chosen last for any sport activity.  I formed the belief that I wasn’t good at sports.  Because of this belief, I never tried.  To this day, I am not active in any sports.  This is just a belief, and only my reality as long as I let it be. 

Ernestine Shepard, is a body builder.  She believes that age is nothing but a number.  Because of that belief she is doing some amazing things.  When she was 56 years old she decided to become a body builder.  In 2010 she entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest female body builder.  At 83 years old she is still going strong.  “I am out running/walking at 3:30 a.m. in the morning with a group of people, seven days a week,” Ernestine told the Miami Times. “I eat very healthy and eat five meals a day every day. My gym schedule consists of going five days a week and doing a variation of 100 sit-ups per day.”

She has been on Oprah and recognized throughout the world for what she is doing. She teaches an Energy Fitness Class at a gym.  She has a video created by Prevention Magazine.  She is an excellent example of how it is never to late to take a negative belief about yourself, and break through any self imposed limitation with a new positive belief.

“Don’t limit yourself.  Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do.  You can go as far as your mind lets you.  What you believe, remember, you can achieve”  – Mary Kay Ash

All of us continue to allow limitations to rule our lives as adults. Some limiting beliefs are conscious and some unconscious. You need to realize that it is all just an illusion, a false belief of your imagination.

At one time there was a saying that if God meant for man to fly, he would have been given wings. The Wright Brothers refused to allow that limiting belief keep them from their dreams. 

Your beliefs challenge you to get creative.  You can choose to rise up and create what is needed to be successful.  Failures come when instead of rising up, your mind creates road blocks.  Your mind comes up with all of the perfectly good reasons why it can’t possibly work.  Why you are “not enough” of something to make it happen.  This path of limited thinking leads to failure.

People with boundary problems have distorted attitudes about who is responsible for failures in their life.

• Your parents made mistakes in how you were raised.
• Your have relationships right now don’t allow you the freedom you need to be successful.
• You don’t have a college degree.
• You are poor.
• Someone is out to get you at work.

The excuses list could go on and on.   The truth is that you have built boundaries all around your excuses and painted yourself into the proverbial corner.  The corner is limiting, but it feels safe.  You lack the courage to step over the line and actually risk pursuing something you want.  You are just plain afraid of any change in your life.  It happens to everyone all the time.

“Boundaries are for those who are too afraid to take the leap”  – quoted from @Business Beware

If you accept a limiting belief, it will become your truth.  What walls have you built over the door of opportunity that you are ready to blast into bits? What limiting belief are you ready to let go of?

Share with us your limiting belief that you are letting go of.   Your share will help all of us to do the same.

When Life Challenges You, Hold Your Head Up High And Ride That Wave To The Shore

Our feelings and emotions can at times be overwhelming. I remember when my mom passed away, that in the evenings I would get deluged with emotions of missing her, being mad at her for dying, hurting so much that I just crawled into a ball and cried until I couldn’t breathe.  There are times in your life, when your whole body is crying in such deep pain, that it takes everything you have just to take another breath.  It feels as though your soul is on fire.  It is hard to remember that feelings are just visitors, and we can let them visit, and then let them go back out the door they came in.

An entire sea of water can’t sink a ship, unless it gets inside the ship.  Similarly, the negativity of the world can’t put you down, unless you allow it to get inside of you.

 – Goi Nasu

Like a person surfing the waves, we can learn to ride these overwhelming emotions. We may crash and fall off our board, but we can choose to get right back on and ride the next wave. To me riding the wave is allowing the emotion to flow right through us, just as the wave reaches the shore and dissipates into nothing.

Life is like riding a wave.  To keep your balance, you must keep moving.

 – Eric Carlson

Sometimes your heart needs more time to accept what your mind already knows.  I think the reason that grief or anger can get us stuck in these emotions, is because we don’t allow the emotions to flow through. They can get caught in a rip tide inside of us.  We fight releasing them until we are exhausted. Sometime we struggle and we battle ourselves, denying how we are really feeling.  Other time we  wallow in these emotions, holding them to our hearts and refusing to let them flow.  Either way they will keep pushing us to the shore and then dragging us back out to sea, until we are so exhausted, that the rough surf literally beats us into the sand.

Allowing the emotions to pass through helps us to heal from the hurt. We recover much faster, and we can begin choosing good memories to dwell on. We can progress into appreciation for the time that we had with what we have lost. The truth is that we haven’t really lost anything. People and things come into our lives, serve their purpose or reason for being there, and then move on to the next thing. The important thing is that we had them in our lives for the time they were with us.

When we have a bad memory come up, we can just ride the wave to the shore, and then consciously allow it to fade into foam and dissipate.  It doesn’t have to drag us back out again.  We can release the hold we have on it, and let the feeling fade away.  As the last bubble of the foam pops, then it is time to let it go. Then we can consciously decide that we want to raise our vibrations up into higher levels.  We can raise the vibration out from the sadness, grief, or anger. We can start attracting good feelings into our space. We always have a choice, even when we think that we don’t. 

When stress and bad days hit, we are designed to reach out for the help we need.  But our natural tendency is to withdraw instead.  We shut down, hole up, limit ourselves to our own little worlds.

 – Holley Gerth.

It is important when the bad days hit, to reach out to someone we love and let them help us. 

Allow yourself to really feel, your feelings.  It’s okay to bare your soul, breakdown or cry because through that breakdown comes your breakthrough.

–  Rashida Rowe. 

Letting those who love us help us, is practicing self care.  It is reflecting back to those who love us, how much we love and trust them to be with us in our hour of need.  And sometimes when those that we love say they are okay, we need to hold them tight and look them in the eyes and tell them that we know that they are not okay.  And that in itself is okay, because we are going to keep holding them tight until they can breathe on their own again.

Taking a few deep belly breaths, placing our hands on our heart, and consciously reaching for something that will help us raise our awareness into something positive. I always think of the laughing baby when the dad tears the paper video or cute kittens and puppies, or a favorite song like Pharrell Williams “Happy” song.  Music has the wonderful ability to speak to us, to express what is in our hearts, that we can’t express in words.  As the “Happy” songs says, “happiness is the truth”.

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To Catch Your Dreams, You Have To Be Brave Enough To Chase Them

Have you ever heard of the question  – If you could have dinner with anyone dead or alive, who would you want to have to a dinner party?  Eleanor Roosevelt is on my list.  She seems to have been a remarkable woman.  Her advice?

“Do one thing everyday that scares you”  – Eleanor Roosevelt

I don’t live up to this quote, but I do try to do things that scare me.  First I procrastinate on them a little, though.  Most of the things that scare me, are things that I have never tried to do before.  So every year part of my goals, are to do things that I don’t currently know how to do.

Do you remember when you were a kid and you got your first bike?  I remember being so excited to be able to ride a bike like all of the bigger kids did.  It was a symbol of growing older.  A lot like getting your drivers license or turning 21, a true milestone.  First though you had to have training wheels. It took a time or two to figure out that they were keeping you from falling, because you had to learn to trust them.  Then came the day that you had probably been whining about, the day they took the training wheels off.  You were ready to balance the bike and ride it all alone.  After a fall or two, you figured out how to balance the bike and from then on you were no longer a baby.

What I remember most, is that even though I was scared of falling and getting hurt, I wanted those training wheels off.  Being accepted into the big kids group was more important than letting the fear stop me.  Always remember that when you are scared, you are thinking about doing something that requires you to be brave.  Riding a bicycle without training wheels for a 5 year old is being very brave.

“If it’s both terrifying and amazing then you should definitely pursue it”  – Erada

What is something that you have done this past year that required you to be very brave?  What were the training wheels that you removed, the thing that you were depending on, that you needed to let go, so that you could grow?

When I took my drivers training class, it was part of high school.  The class started right after school, and the first time behind the wheel you had to drive off a side street bordering the high school.  All of your friends would gather around the stop sign, waiting for you to drive the car out of the lot and up to the stop sign on the side road.  Of course, there were several sudden jerking stops as you drove toward the stop sign and all of your friends would laugh.  It was like a hazing in a way, because it eventually happened to everyone you knew.  At some point we would all be the object of ridicule.  But at the same time, it was like – cool, I’m driving a car!

These are the two examples that I keep in my head when I am trying to break through and do something that scares me.  Both of those things scared me, but at the same time, it was cool, look at what I am doing!  It reminds me of the hit song from “Panic At The Disco”, “Hey look ma, I made it”.  It also helps to have mentors like Eleanor Roosevelt.  People that you admire, who you can look to for guidance.   Albert Einstein is another of my dinner party guests.  He said:

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new”  –  Albert Einstein

I think that sometimes you are scared to want something so badly that it hurts.  You are scared of not only failing, but of succeeding and then being disappointed.  Of succeeding only to lose it later.  So you tell yourself that you are afraid of failure, but in reality, you are afraid of success not being enough.  Of success not lasting.

“Move out of your comfort zone.  You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new” – Brian Tracy

I have really thought about this fear of failure/success.  I love the breakdown of the process in the above picture – that moving out of your comfort zone is actually a process of moving from fear, to learning and then to growth. (note:  the photo is from Adobe and I can’t fix the typo)

Once I move past fear the feeling I have shifts into anticipation.  Like fear, it also begins and ends in the stomach.  Like riding the roller coaster as it climbs up and up to the sky, and then hurtles you down to the earth, whipping you back and forth through the turns.  The wind blowing against you, your stomach lurching up your chest as you hold on tight.  Then all of sudden the ride is over and you are running back to the end of the line to do it again.  This kind of fear is telling you that being scared can be a thrill, because you are learning and extending your comfort zone at the same time.  That what you are about to experience by entering the growth zone is worth breaking through the hesitation and going full out.

“Life is inherently risky.  There is only one big risk you should avoid at all costs, and that is the risk of doing nothing”  – Denis Waitley

They say that at the end of a persons life, what they talk about is the things that they didn’t take the risk and try to do.  Being in love, is one of those risks.  Being afraid of being vulnerable, of being rejected, they hold back the words.  At the end of their life they regret not telling people how they really felt, not saying “I love you” enough to those that mattered to them.  When they had the opportunity, they shrunk back telling themselves, “they know how I feel”.  While that may be true, what any person wants and needs is to hear those words.

“If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you” – Unknown

So whether it is learning to ride a bike, drive a car, ride a roller coaster or say “I love you” – don’t let fear hold you back.  Be brave.  Say the words, do the deeds.  Feel the fear and do it because it is scary.  Do the things that both excite you and scare you at the same time.  Live your life as fully expressed, as bravely, and as committed as you can.  Just maybe if you can do that, you’ll get more than you ever could have imagined.

“All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them”  –  Walt Disney

Walking In Your Purpose Makes You Magnetic

Life is too short to not follow your passion and purpose in your life.  Passion and purpose are like the infinity loop, in that each one both feeds on and fuels the other.  When they are working in tandem, there isn’t anything that you can’t accomplish.  This is the space of the “high” where you feel invincible.  Where everything just falls magically and magnetically into place.  There is purpose in your searching, which is fueled by your passion.  You search for the answers in response to the hunger that both drives and fuels your soul. It begins when you get the smallest glimpse of your true potential.

The meaning of life is to find your gift.  The purpose of life is to give it away.   – William Shakespeare

That time when you were a little child, and you saw someone doing something that just grabbed you, and you thought I want to be that or do that when I grow up.  At that moment you saw your true potential.  At some point fear of failure, or being told that you weren’t talented enough to be that or do that – something happens that puts a cork in your desire.  You bottle it up.  You bury it deep inside yourself, because you are embarrassed that you ever had that thought.  Who did you think you were?

There comes a time when the need of releasing that cork from that bottle, cascades out of you like a river rushing to the sea.  This need is a palpable thing.  Your heart knows it needs to be released.  Your instincts keep calling to you to release it.  It keeps showing up no matter how we try to ignore it.  It just continues to transform itself over and over again.  It might show up at work one time, at your home life another.  With a loss of a loved one.  With the reconnection to an old friend.  It might show up in your spiritual life.  It keeps winding itself through your life, until you finally pay attention.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.   – Eleanor Roosevelt

Within every life, the things that require transformation, are the pieces of misinformation that you have adopted in your life as being true.  You probably don’t even know that they exist in your subconscious.  For example; If your parents were divorced when you were a child, you may subconsciously feel that if you had been a better child, they would still be married.  This might show up in your life with an intense desire to make everyone happy, to put yourself as last, to literally have the welcome mat on your face as people use you, and then leave you.  You surrender and abandon your dreams.

You have convinced yourself that the problem is that you just aren’t giving enough of yourself away.  If you just try harder you tell yourself, then you can make everyone else happy, and only then you will finally be happy.   You keep that dream bottled up.  You tell yourself that your vision of your true potential is unattainable.  That you must settle. That whole story is a lie, a falsehood. That story needs to be transformed.

There will be places where your self sabotage shows up.  Places where the shadow swings into action to stop you.  Going around the bend of the river, you may get damned up by debris.  Some busy beaver has blocked the flow and dammed up the river.  This debris is all of the obligations that you have loaded upon yourself.  The excuses, “I am too busy or don’t have the time” and “I have no money”,  falls into this bucket.

The question comes up, what is behind the “but” excuse for you to follow your dream?  You need to get curious.  You need to start removing the debris, and figure out where it is coming from.  Each of those sticks is tied to some false belief or assumption that you have to identify and then transform.

Recently there were newspaper headlines “Thames River now home to sharks, seals and sea horses, no longer biologically dead”.  After years of cleaning up centuries of pollution, the river has come back to life.  Just like cleaning up the Thames brought the river back to life, you need to “clean up your river” so that you can get back into flow with your passion and purpose, back into flow with your God given destiny.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.   – Socrates

At places it may seem as though you are motionless, frozen in place.  You have allowed the temporary artic blast from the nature of your fears, to freeze your river.  It may seem like a solid block of ice, but deep beneath the surface, it is still flowing to the sea.  It may have become a small dribble, but with the fires of your passion, you can melt the ice returning the river back into its full force.

Passion requires focused direction, and that direction must come from three other areas:  your purpose, your talents, and your needs.  – #sayquotable

Friends and family may try to sidetrack you, by diverting your river to their own benefit, but your need will find a way to get back on course.

At times we appear to be in flood stage, where the passion is so strong that you surrender to it.  It is at these times that you learn to trust in divine providence to take you where you need to go.  With the force of the floods, overflowing the course of the river, it will speed you past boulders that were blocking your path. Remember that all limitations, road blocks, and diversions are self imposed out of fear.  Choose to leap forward over every obstacle as a challenge, that you have in fact already conquered.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is not think, not wonder, not imagine, not obsess.  Just breathe, and have faith that everything will work out for the best.  It is in that space between the breathing in and out, that brief space of holding, that you hear the voice of the divine.  In this space you have the power to choose your response.  Are you going to run from the challenge of having a mighty goal in your life?  Are you going to deny your highest dreams and say that this is not your calling?  Are you going to create a disaster by not having lofty ideals to strive for?  Or are you going to reach for the stars, and really truly own that this starlight belongs to you and only you?

You are here not to shrink down less, but to blossom into more of who you really are.   — Oprah

Gratitude is so important to happiness. Be thankful for what you are now, and keep fighting for what you want to be tomorrow – always shifting and transforming towards the magnificence that is buried deep inside.  Everything changes, seasons come and go.  You turn around and suddenly you find half the year is over.. Everything on this earth is in a continuous state of evolving, refining, improving, adapting, enhancing…, changing.  You were not put on this earth to remain stagnant. You came here to reach certain goals.  To fulfill certain dreams.  To capture the highest ideal of who you are capable of being.  You came here to not only reach the stars, but to reach beyond them.

What Is The “Normal” That We Spend Most Of Our Life Trying To Be?

Brene Brown gives us a hint of what we are seeking when we say we just want to be “normal”.

“Because True Belonging only happens when we present our Authentic, Imperfect Selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of Self-Acceptance” – Brene Brown

Being “normal” to most of us, means that you fit in.  That you are accepted.  That you experience a sense of belonging to a group or tribe.  So, the first clue to how you achieve that sense of belonging or being normal, is that you accept yourself for who you really are, deep down inside. You don’t rely or depend on what other people are thinking about you.

What they think about you is none of your business.  It actually has nothing to do with you.  It has to do with how your actions or lack thereof are triggering them.  And whatever triggers them is all about their own shadows.

“Normal is for people without courage” – Unknown

So why is it so hard to have that feeling?  Because you are so busy rejecting who you really are.  An easy example is what most of us do when someone has a camera – you either try to stay out of the photo or try to position yourself so that you are hiding whatever part of your body you don’t want to be memorialized by a photo.  Then you find fault with how you look in the photo.

How many photos do you have of yourself that you actually love?  Why not?

“Normal is an illusion.  What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly” – Morticia Adams

You feel that you are the only one who feels the way that you do.  So, you push the true self down into the basement of your soul and lock the door.  Then you start building a persona to match what you think is normal.  Because this persona isn’t who you really are, you can’t really have that sense of true belonging.

Instead, you run around with this sense of “trying” to belong.  What is so funny, is that almost every person in this group that you are trying so hard to fit into, is doing the exact same thing.  In fact, there are probably friends of yours who if you all took down the personas and accepted who you really are, are in fact part of your tribe that you think doesn’t exist.

“I tried being normal once.  Worst two minutes of my life” – Unknown

When I was in grade school and Junior High School, we moved every six months or so.  Until I was in high school, I didn’t attend one school for the entire school year.  It was usually two different schools in two different towns.  This made it really hard to make friends.

What I remember most is trying to be who I thought someone would want me to be, just so that I could have a friend.  In High School I first made friends with a group of girls that were on the wild side, because the wild girls were more accepting of new people.

Now where I ran into problems was that I was an “A” student, and the wild girls were not.  So, after the first experience of being put down for “A” grades, I tried to downplay my grades.  Then I started letting them slide into “B’s” to be accepted.

But the truth was that I liked school, I liked learning, I liked trying to be the best in the class.  So, I changed my friends to some that didn’t care what my grades were.  They allowed me to be who I was.  Their acceptance gave me a tiny sense of belonging, of not sticking out too far above the crowd.

“If you are always trying to be normal you will never know how amazing you can be” – Maya Angelou

Why do you lock your true self into a chest, and bury it on the desert island?

• You are both terrified and amazed by the colors of your soul.
• You have this push-pull going on.
• You have a brilliant idea, then you mentally tear it apart.
• You have a dream you passionately want to go after, then you analyze it to death, with fears of failure and not being worthy.
• You have a door of opportunity open in front of you, and you feel an intense pull to go through it, but you listen to all of the naysayers and walk past it with dragging feet.

Self-Acceptance, means that you believe in yourself.  This is risk at its highest form, because what if you are not enough?  This is where the loving the imperfect self comes in.  No one is perfect, and so by this reality, you will fail sometimes.  And that has to be okay.

“I heard a voice that told me I’m essential.  How all my fears are limiting my potential.  Said it’s time to step into the light and use every bit of power I have inside” – Indea Erie

Alice Through the Looking Glass, in Wonderland and Underground, was always looking for adventures.  She didn’t have time for “normal”.  She was way beyond that!

Alice didn’t like following the rules of “normal” behavior.  It takes a lot of courage to go out on adventures.  Adventures bring out parts of you that you didn’t know were there.  It also shows you parts of you, that you may not like.  Adventures teach you to look at things differently.  Backwards, upside down, and sideways.  Adventures teach you about who you are.

“Who in the world am I?  Ah, that’s the puzzle that is only yours to solve.”

“I knew who I was this morning, but I have changed a few times since then” – Alice in Wonderland

The more that you take these adventures and learn about yourself, the curiousier it gets.  This is because like the looking glass adventure, everything is opposite of what you would think.  In taking the risk and going on the adventure, what you find is more freedom to be your imperfect self.

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change” – Brene Brown

How does that work?  By being curious, and having self-acceptance that you are imperfect, you start to allow yourself the space to experiment.  You start trying new things.  You mix up the parts and create something new, different and wonderful.  The more you open to change, the easier it becomes to let go of certainty.

Self-acceptance means that you no longer become that mean, vindictive, cruel person in your mind to yourself. You are no longer at war with who you really are.  You are made up of strength and struggle; of giving and receiving; of being first to do something with no guarantee that it will be returned to you, or that you will be successful in the doing of it.

It is this strong sense of belonging, of self-acceptance, of self-love, that enables you to have the courage to live an imperfect life as your true self.  Don’t fear failure.  Take ownership of who you are and be proud of it.  Take chances, like they are lucky gold tickets, because they are.  No matter what, do not stop being the weird, crazy person that you are meant to be.

Transformation Is the Dance Of Life

Leave Fear Behind You, Face Everything And Rejoice

Women who run with wolves have discovered something about themselves, that allows them to leave behind the fear that is expressed because of going outside the comfort zone.  See beauty in being able to walk alone or with the pack.  Because you are unafraid, you may be called names by those who will fear you.  Labels like defiant, incorrigible, impossible, wild and untamed by society.  Wear these labels with pride.

When you live with fear, you will always be “Finding-Excuses-And-Reasons” (F.E.A.R.)why you are not living the life you are yearning for. Why do you experience this type of fear? It comes from a lack of self love, self trust, and self care.

You don’t think that you have the courage; that you don’t deserve it; that you can’t have your cake and eat it too.  You have bought into being small.  Bought into not taking up a lot of space.  Bought into being unworthy.  It is not your true nature.  It is not who you are deep in your heart.  It is not who you are yearning to be.  Do not become an endangered species.  Do not muffle your soul for the sake of others.

For women who run with wolves, you have discovered S.E.L.F. which stands for Sacred-Empowered-Liberated-Self Care

She sees herself as a Sacred being

She sees herself as an Empowered being

She sees herself as a Liberated being

She sees herself as a Fearless being.

•  She runs with a vast community of souls, who hold and support her.
• She knows as a sacred being she is never, ever, truly alone. 
• She is honored as a wisdom keeper, an empowered being that has grounded herself into the earth. Her roots run deep into the earth and support the work she does in the world.
• She knows that she is a liberated woman who came to this earth to free those who have become shackled to the stories of not being good enough, pretty enough, or worthwhile.
• She is fearless because for her the word fear is a word of high integrity, because for her it means Face-Everything-And-Rejoice (a transformed definition of fear).

Her purpose is to remind others of their own sacred agreements they came here to fulfill. Of the love they have for each other. To free them from their self made chains and fulfill their own purpose in being here.

She knows that she can be grateful for each fear that is faced down and transformed into something wonderful. She is rejoicing because she is working with others out in the world to build a bridge to shift our world from the challenges we see happening today, into a place of unity, love and trust.

If you can change your definition of the word fear, you can change your world.

To fearless women, I am honored to be your sister.

Below is a copy of my poem which expresses these thoughts.

The wolf howls at the moon, not out of loneliness,
As he knows he is one with the universe.
He howls out of gratitude to be a member of the pack.

He remembers those he has traveled with in past lives, 
He sees those he is traveling with again.
He rejoices in his vast community of souls, knowing that he is truly never alone.

The great spirit has honored the wolf with a voice that sings out in the darkness.
He honors the great spirit by singing to us,
“Do not be afraid, for you are not alone”
“I am here, and I remember you even if you have forgotten”.

Like the wolf I sing out to you, through my words on a page I say,
“I remember you, for we have traveled together before.”
I honor you that you have come again to do the great work before us.

Call out together with me as we gather our relatives that have forgotten their purpose.
Call to their minds our sacred agreement to meet at this time and place.
Whisper to them of the great love we have for each other and their hearts will remember.

Gather around as we build the bridge of knowledge and understanding.
This bridge will unite all peoples together in love
This bridge is shifting our world into a new age of unity, love and trust.

We are one,
One love, I love us
One trust, I trust us,
I honor our sacred agreements, I am here.

Face the fears that are keeping you locked out of your destiny. Unlock your cages and use those divine gifts with purpose to not only shift and change your world, but the entire world. Come and renew yourself. Find your voice and howl at the moon!

We Are Victorious Over Fear

We crash.  We burn, and we get back up stronger, more resilient, and more determined than ever before.  We are not victims, we are victorious.  

– Garrett Paknis

With each step we add something to our life or, we release something out of our life.  That is how change and transformation works.  It is taking that step.  That step towards our dreams.  We don’t look behind us and waste our energy in feeding our fears.  We just keep taking another step.  Each thing that we release out of our life is something that no longer brings us joy.  It no longer serves us.  It might be that it is something that we have outgrown.  Or it may be made up of disappointments.  Something that feels like a failure or setback.  We take out the lesson we needed and we release the rest.  It is all the parts of the illusion that we are burning away.  Those so called losses do not define who you are in reality.   Only in fears illusion do they hold any power. 

There is no illusion greater than fear. 

– Lao Tzu

When we don’t release the illusions we can become frustrated with our life.  Frustration is like damming up the river.  It tries to keep flowing, but it gets stopped by the dam.   At some point the water rises up to the top of the dam.  Then it starts to trickle over.  It isn’t yet free flowing.  We start to realize that the dam is the problem.  It is at this point of recognition, that we can at last redirect the energy of the river, to burn away the illusion of the dam, and begin to flow freely again to the sea. When your passion and your purpose are greater than your fears and excuses, you will find a way.

Life doesn’t get easier or more forgiving; we get stronger and more resilient.

 – Dr Steve Maraboli

When we can at last see through the illusion of fear, we begin to get bold enough to use our voice to speak our truth.  We can be brave enough to listen to the voice of our heart, to our intuition, our souls voice.  And we can be strong enough to finally live our life’s purpose with full out passion.  We are willing to be vulnerable enough, to be split open and let all our insides spill out onto the table.  We are strong enough to be who we really are.  To fully expose the parts of us that we had hidden away from fear of being seen.  The phrase “do not be afraid” is written in the bible 365 times.  A daily reminder to be fearless.  So start everyday with this reminder to be fearless, breathing in the faith of walking with courage and fulfilling your divine purpose..

Fear is always triggered by creativity, because creativity asks you to enter into realms of uncertain outcome, and fear hates uncertain outcome.  This is nothing to be ashamed of, it is, however, something to be dealt with.

 – Elizabeth Gilbert

It is not letting our dreams be deferred to “Someday Isle”.  Someday I will have the time; someday I will have the money; someday when the kids are grown and through college.  Instead we trace our stories to their roots.  We liberate our soul to fulfill our dreams.  It isn’t about “what happened to me” (see my pain and feel sorry for me), it is what we choose to do with life’s experiences.  It is about look at who I have become, what I “chose” to become.  What treasure we found within the experience, the hidden gem.  It is about how it has exposed the better me that was hiding inside of it.

The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun.  It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and the rains and scorching sun.

 – Napoleon Hill

It is pausing as you inhale the breath. To pause listening to the question in the space of the pause.  To hearing the answer with the exhalation of the breath.  There in that space, is the creative spirit.  It is waiting to take you by the hand.  To walk the road of fulfillment of the dream.  There in that space is the taste of possibilities.  It is how that creativity bubbles to the top when we take the time to just breathe and listen.

We get a glimpse in that space of where we are heading.  It invites us to plunge into the river and flow to the sea.  To learn to dance down life’s road.  Be curious, make great discoveries.  Observe how the unknown can become joyful. 

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Choices, Chances, Changes

Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.

  – Ralph Waldo Emerson

At some point in our childhood we start looking at trying and failing, as being a loser,  because we did not do it perfectly the first time we tried.   A baby learns how to roll over; then crawl; then walk.  A baby learns how to say words.  Think of any 1 – 2 year old and they do not pronounce each word perfectly.  I remember my boys saying truck, but the “T” blended with the “R” sounded like an “F” and peoples heads would turn when they said the word, like they were swearing.  My boys didn’t decide that because they couldn’t say the word perfectly the first time, that they would never attempt to say the word again.  A baby who stands up for the first time and then plops back down on their bum doesn’t decide that crawling is safer, so that is all they are going to do forever.

If you believe the doubts in your mind you won’t achieve the dreams in your heart.

  – Marinela Reka

A girlfriend and I were discussing this, and I thought that it must have something to do with peer pressure.  When we enter daycare or some other classroom experience and discover that some kids can do things better than we can.  At some point the comparison starts shutting us down.  We don’t want to risk the possibility of being wrong, so we don’t raise our hands when the teacher asks the class a question.  We put a label on not being perfect, as being a total failure.  In our minds we see kids with mean faces, laughing at us.  Or maybe we see our parents or teachers telling us that we are just stupid or dumb.  That we can’t learn anything.  That we will never be anything.

Failure is not the opposite of success; it’s a stepping stone to success.

  – Elli Stassinopoulos

What if we were to consciously try to change that meaning in our own head.  What if failure is part of success and something to be enjoyed?  Just as much as we celebrate crossing the finish line in a race as the winner, we were to celebrate crossing the finish line even 1 second faster than we had before, even if it was 100th place in the race? 

Winston Churchill had that kind of thinking.  I think that if he had been of a different mentality, WWII for England might have turned out differently.  One of my favorite quotes of his –

Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.

  –  Winston Churchill 

The reality of the situation is that each time we try something new, it is going to be full of things that we can do differently to be more successful the next time.  They say that it takes 10,000 hours to become a master of something.  So each time we do it, we are a little more successful.  We can look at what happened and determine what we can shift, take out, put it, tweak the next time to make it even better.

What makes someone talented successful?  Michael Jordon summed it up with,

I’ve never been afraid to fail.

    – Michael Jordon

We have to be willing to take the leap of faith off the cliff.  We may not land perfectly, but when we replay it in our mind, we can determine what we did, and what we can change.  Then we can go back up to the top and try it again. 

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.

  – Ken Robinson

Everything can be improved.  10,000 tries allows for an awful lot of improvements, step by step.  Step by step, we place each thing that didn’t work as the stones that we step on as we try it one more time.  Failures are part of the process of living a life that is worth living.  It is how we grow, by changing something and trying something new.  True success can only come from doing something new, failing at it and doing it again, just differently.

Never let success get to your head, and never let failure get to your heart.

  – unknown

Like the irritation to the oyster, which gets coated over and over again, each new thing we learn becomes a pearl of priceless beauty.  Can you look back at your life and say thank you, for the mistakes you made that taught you to laugh at yourself?  Those stories that felt painful at the time.  Now they are the funniest stories that you and your friends tell each other.  It always starts with, “Remember when I . . . ” and then ends with laughter.   

Don’t worry about failures, worry about the chances you miss when you don’t even try.

  –  Jack Canfield

How many opportunities in our life have we walked past, because we were afraid to try? There is nothing worse than a life that you didn’t even try to live.  That is where the true regrets in your life come from.  The things you did not do.

Love this quote (which didn’t have who wrote it, so unknown)

I AM STRONG

because I know my Weaknesses

I AM BEAUTIFUL

because I am aware of my Flaws

I AM FEARLESS

because  I learnt to recognize, illusion from Real

I AM WISE

because I learn from my Mistakes

I AM A LOVER

because I have felt Hate

and . . . ,

I CAN LAUGH

because I have known Sadness

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