Love Must Prevail

It’s inspiring to see that in response to one person’s darkest, most violent actions, humanity can still come together in an effort to win with the power of love.  The link below takes you to the Broadway site where you can buy the song “What the World Needs Now is Love” that they recorded for $1.99 and support the victims of this horrible tragedy.  Watch the video, it brings a smile to your face and peace to your heart.

http://www.broadwayrecords.com/shop/broadway-for-orlando-what-the-world-needs-now-is-love-mp3

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.

Impossible really means I’m Possible

When you look across the ocean with the sunrise or the sunset, you see the colors mirrored on the surface. This is like our appearance, beautiful when calm and serene. But if you dive down deep, into the depths, that is where the true beauty of a person lies, in their soul. This is the beauty that we miss, when we make surface judgments about someone. Rumi says, “Your heart is the size of an ocean. Go find yourself in its hidden depths.” Self knowledge is the place to start. We need to dig down deep within us, and question all of the stories we have told ourselves about our life. What do we know to be 100% totally true? If we seriously ask and listen to the answer to this question, most of us would have to acknowledge that most of our stories about life are made up. We make them up to make sense of the things we have seen, done, and experienced. John Lennon said, “The more I see, the less I know for sure.” This is because the more that we learn about life, the more we see that most of our knowledge is surface knowledge. The deeper we dive, the more we see how much more complicated and interconnected our understanding of life is. “Knowledge is knowing the depths of the ocean. Wisdom is knowing where to swim” Saleem Sharma. Sometimes life can be hard to navigate. When the storms come in, the waves churn up from the bottom of the sea bed. Things come to the surface that have been long buried. We are like this when the storms of life blow in. All those things that we stuff down inside of us, because we either can’t, or don’t know how to deal with them, come churning up to the surface. Instead of being afraid of what we have buried, we need to rise up and calm the waters. Be still. Breathe. Be at peace. Realize that God never brings anything into our lives that we can’t handle. Wake up to your dreams. Live them out in your reality. Lean on the divine, and on those who love us. Change what can be changed, release the rest. See the hope of a new day, the beauty that lies within each of us, and the love that never dies. Remember that you can do anything you “think” you can do, and impossible really means “I m possible”.

Martin Luther King Jr.

There are so many good quotes for Martin Luther King Jr. His most famous speech, “I have a dream” is full of lessons for us all. I thought about Martin Luther King Jr. a lot the past few days. What would he give a speech to us about today, if he were still alive?

The world is so full of injustice that it is like chains weighing us down. It is like that scene in Sleeping Beauty, where you are chopping down the vines that cover the castle and they regrow faster than you can chop them down. Wage inequality just gets worse every year. Men and women still are not paid the same wage for the same job. We see how terrorism is changing the face of racism, making us afraid of others based on not only their skin color, but their culture and religion. The war against drugs is never ending as drugs continue claim the lives of our young people every day. Lack of access to healthcare continues to be a major problem. I could go on to spit out depressing facts and figures as well as continue the list of things wrong in our world. But I won’t.

One of my favorite MLK quotes is “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, “What are you doing for others?” I think that this quote would be a big part of his speech for us today. “What are you doing for others?” Because at the end of the day, it isn’t some governments policy, law, or program that is going to change our world. It is each of us individually standing up and stating, “I am going to change me”. And as each of us, “changes me”, we will inspire others to do the same for themselves. And individual by individual, the world will change.

What will make this transformation possible is love, forgiveness and lifting each other up. It is the realization that now is the time to do what is right. To teach our children critical thinking, because that is what is needed to lead us forward. To understand all holy scriptures fundamental teaching is that only light can drive out the darkness. All of these thoughts come from other MLK quotes.

If we all started out today, and every day going forward with these kinds of thoughts creating actions of change, the world would change overnight. This reminded me of the Berlin Wall falling down. It seemed to happen overnight, but it was actually the work of many over time. It was small actions that lead to the wall falling down.

The goal should be not to just think about these things one day a year, but rather to think about them daily. Because action goes where our attention is focused. And action is the only way to implement real lasting change upon ourselves.

A last quote “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” We can be disappointed that even though some progress has been made, it hasn’t happened yet,. Just don’t lose hope that if we all keep walking together hand in hand, that it will happen.

How Does One Become A Butterfly?

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

  – Steven Aitchison

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

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

  – Unknown

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

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

  – E.E. Cummings

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

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

  – Mary Oliver

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

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

  – Unknown

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

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

  – Steve Jobs

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

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Hope is perching in our souls and singing to us everyday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wonderful

This reminds me of one of my favorite philosopher/speakers Jim Rohn. I find myself always asking in my mind, “Isn’t this interesting? I wonder what happens next?”

It allows me to not get into drama and trauma, and stay outside of the emotional vortex that is created in any disagreement.

I think that I am amending this comment to: “Isn’t that interesting? I wonder what wonderful thing is about to happen?” I love to keep it positive. It makes for a fun filled life with lots of laughter. And I have been reading a lot lately about people who live a long life have a lot of laughter in their life.

Hope

We’ve all heard the saying, “Fake until you make it”, but it doesn’t really work that way. You can fake being happy, or optimistic, but you can’t fake hope. And without hope, you will lack the energy to engage with life and accomplish your goals. Hope is directly related to our sense of wonder and possibility. The greater our perception of possibilities, the greater our hope. Hope is truly a necessity for an optimistic life.

I read something interesting today about hope. If you have an extremely negative childhood, a childhood where you lost hope, you will be more prone to drug addiction. This is because hopelessness affects the brains ability to produce dopamine, and taking drugs will increase the dopamine levels for those whose brains do not have the ability to produce it naturally. You literally self medicate without knowing the reason why.