What Barriers To Love Are Inside Of Me?

Rumi said, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” As I learned to love myself, my relationship with everyone changed. 

Loving myself lead to a clarity of my mind and heart. It gave me the courage to say “no more” hiding behind the masks. To say “no more” living in fear of what others will think of me. To say “yes” to me! The heavy armor I had built around me to protect me was in fact made of fear and stress. As I dropped it all behind me, I was left floating free in joy and freedom.  I learned that I must be the ultimate believer in myself first.

I knew in my bones why I was here on earth. I may not always be clear on what to do next, but I am clear as crystal as to where I am going. Clarity of mind is how you find purpose in life. It in turn is linked to clarity of passion, which is the fire of your soul to fulfill your purpose.

I believe that when we tear down the barriers we have built against loving ourselves, that we dispel the veils of illusion that obscure the direction of our life path. Love is an energy that engages us in life in a whole new way. Maya Angelou said, “Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”

Life is about breaking our own limitations. It is about outgrowing who we were. It is about living our lives, by outgrowing ourselves over and over. It is about being curious and opening doors and finding new paths to explore.

Sending Love Wherever It Is Needed

We all have those days.  The days when nothing is seeming to go the way you planned.  That day when every mistake you made in the past year, shows up on your desk within 5 minutes of your sitting down.  Those days when you feel that the very idea of being able to control anything in your life, is life’s great joke on you.

“Life has many ways of testing a person’s will, either by having nothing happen at all, or by having everything happen at once”  – Paulo Coelho

If you could see what was being hidden in each of our lives, I think that you would be more loving to one another.  There is a video that was done, where little thought bubbles come up as the camera goes down the halls and elevators in a hospital.    Someone is saying goodbye to their dying father.  One man was just told the tumor was benign, while another was told he has cancer.  An elderly woman with oxygen has been waiting for a heart transplant for 69 days.  An exhausted nurse is at the end of a 12 hour shift.  “

Those are the days when you need someone to hug you and say, “You are Good Enough.  You are Capable of Handling this.  You are Important.  You are more than Worthy.  You are LOVED.  You are NOT ALONE.”  These are the days that you need all of the light and love that the world can send you.  What you have to remember, is that at this very moment, someone in the world is either sending you that love, or is in need of you to send that love.

“Could a greater miracle take place, than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” – Henry David Thoreau

It is when you are living your life from the place of passion and purpose, that you shine the brightest.  Knowing that your deepest dreams can be reached.  It is when you take that deep breath, and just let the emotions flow out of you, that you can reset yourself.  It is hard to be loving and empathetic when you are in survival mode.  You need to give yourself the oxygen mask, reset your emotions and then help others.  Find that spark inside of you, and let it shine first for you.  Then shine it for others to help them find theirs.

Recently driving into work, I was playing a CD with healing sounds.  A friend of mine knew that I have been having some health issues, and thought it might help.  So I purchased it and have been playing it all week.

I realized that every area in almost everyone’s life right now is undergoing some issues.  Work layoffs; health issues; injustices in life, and just watching the news can make you a  little stressed out about how everything is in a negative place right now.

Writing these posts and finding the “good news” articles and videos is what keeps my feet walking down my path of transformation.  It is keeping me sane.  It is why I write, and why I want to share what I find with all of the other LemonadeMakers out there.

“Remember . . .  the entrance to the sanctuary is within you”  – Rumi

Then you add in everything negative happening with the war in Ukraine, fighting in politics between the parties, terrorists’ attacks; the workplace and school shootings, countries at war within their own borders, or threatening to make war on other countries – it can all feel overwhelming.

None of these problems have easy solutions.  I think that we are all being called by the Divine to wake up.  To be the love and light that the world needs to heal.  We all need to heal in some way.

“Spread love everywhere you go.  Let no one ever come to you with leaving happier”  –  Mother Teresa

When you lift someone else up, it automatically lifts you up.  As the saying goes, “you rise by lifting others”.  It is not dependent on the other person appreciating your showing them love.  It is not dependent on it being reciprocated back to you.  It could even be ignored.  It will still lift both of you up.

This is because your showing love to others means that you are actively involved in the growth and support of another person.  Right now, you may not be in a place of being able to offer a refugee a place to stay.  You may not be in a place to donate money to help support someone in need.  But you are always in a place of showing love to someone.  Even if it is just a smile and a small prayer that love light their way forward.  You are always able to shine out the love and light to others.

Enter Into The Flow of An Ever Changing Life

 “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”  – Lao Tzu

Every year in January the majority of us will set goals for the new year. You may call them New Years Resolutions or goals. They can be personal goals such as your weight or physical fitness goals, or business/financial goals. What ever they are they generally designed to enhance your life in some way. 

“Try not to resist the changes that come your way.  Instead let life live through you.  And do not worry that your life is turning upside down.  How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?” –  Rumi

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. 

“When we resist change, it’s called suffering.  But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called awakening…, Another word for that is freedom – freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human” –  Pema Chadron

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. 

“People don’t resist change.  They resist being changed”  – Peter M Senge

When you step out of the river of change, you are trying to keep your comfort zone in place.  Change threatens your comfort zone.  In the process of trying to keep a stable, balanced comfort zone you step out of the river.  You damn up the divine flow of your life.

• What if . . , instead of using the word “change” which might be threatening, you substituted the word “becoming”.  You are not changing, you are becoming?
• What if . . , instead of thinking that your life is falling apart from the transitions that are happening, you instead saw your life falling together, falling into place?
• What if . . , instead of feeling like you are a puzzle with pieces falling to the ground, you saw yourself as letting go of what no longer belongs in your life?

“It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it”  – Lena Horne

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. The struggle and the pushing come from trying to force things to happen a certain way.  You can force your foot into a shoe one size too small, but you will only cause blisters and pain for yourself.  Drop the expectations,, stop pushing for change, and let it unfold with divine timing. 

“Change is never painful, only the resistance to change is painful” –  Gautama Buddha

Go within, where the wisdom and clarity reside. Instead of having to defend yourself, or prove something, you discover the compassion to simply let life flow forward and outward in simplicity.

“If you are quiet enough, you will hear the flow of the universe.  You will feel its rhythm. Go with this flow.  Happiness lies ahead.  Meditation is the key.”  Buddha

The way you meet an ending impacts the new beginning.  Or to put another way, the way you meet change impacts who you are becoming.  When a door opens for you, it’s not just something new entering into your life.  It’s your life becoming something new.

Change happens whether you want it to or not.  So stop fighting change.  Stop striving for perfection.  Trying to manage change only slows it down, and your experience of change will be impacted by negative emotions.  Instead embrace change.  Lean into it.  Discover what lessons it has to teach you.  Take a moment to become curious.  Trust that it is leading you into a better tomorrow.

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”  – Bruce Lee

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” – Bruce Lee

We Can Go Further Than We Think

Years ago, when I was young, I had opinions on what would I do, if “such and such” happened in my life. I think that when most of us hear of an experience that someone has, we think “well if that happened to me, this is what I would do”.

You might not agree with the decision that another has made, when your imagined scenario happens to them.  But you have no idea why they made the choice they made.  You don’t know all of the circumstances and limitations they were facing.

The lemons that life gives you are not supposed to paralyze you.  They are not supposed to make you bitter.  They are not supposed to make you give up on life.  They happen to help you dig down deep and discover what you are capable of.

“Who I am and what I am capable of doing has always managed to surprise me” – Jodi Picoult

When life does hand you lemons (your imagined scenario), and you are the one trying to make lemonade out of it, many times you come to a totally different decision.

There are many reasons for this. Each of life’s lemons come to you wrapped up in a different series of circumstances. You could look at multiple experiences of someone losing a loved one to violence, and you would find that each instance was handled in a different way.

While the label may be the same “man killed by random shooting”, the circumstances in each case tell their own unique story.

In 1995 Tariq a pizza delivery man was shot and killed by a 14-year-old gang member. Initially Azim, Tariq’s father could barely function. But he came to understand that the 14 yr. old boy named Tony who killed his son, was also a victim.

He felt called to forgive Tony and became friends with Tony’s grandfather and guardian. He started a foundation to help kids stop killing other kids. He began talking with kids in schools about the realities of that lifestyle and the importance of making right choices.

“From the onset, I saw victims on both ends of the gun. I will mourn Tariq’s death for the rest of my life. Now, however, my grief has been transformed into a powerful commitment to change. Change is urgently needed in a society where children kill children” – Azim, Tariq’s Father

He made lemonade out of his lemons. This foundation (http://tkf.org/) has grown into an organization of 13 full time staff members and 30 volunteers that mentor over 20,000 students each year. In the article I read, in 13 years they had touched eight million kids (this same foundation is now over 24 years old).

But I would bet that if you had asked him if this were the road he would take if someone killed his son, this is not the answer he would have given. His unknown road that he journeyed on revealed what kind of man he truly was. This is forgiveness in action. 

You are on a road, a journey to discover who you really are. What you are capable of becoming.

“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path” – Buddha

Azim saved himself by walking the path of true forgiveness. He wanted to not only prevent other innocents from being killed, but he also wanted to save those other victims – “kids” becoming killers themselves. His difficult road has led to a beautiful destination – saving others.

What I have learned in life, is to hope that I can emulate the grace I see in others’ lives, as they grapple with life’s lemons. That until I find myself in that same hard place, I don’t really know what my decision will be. I do know that there is no turning back. So, each decision needs to be made in prayer and meditation, with that understanding.

The challenge is not just discovering who I am

but loving what I find.

What can you learn from the lemons in your own life? 

• To never allow someone to make you swallow your soul and make you feel small.
• To never dam up the words in your heart that are crying to be released. 
• Don’t apologize for your imperfections, you are perfectly imperfect.
• Don’t allow the darkness of others to cover up your light, share it with everyone instead.
• Trust your intuition, it is always right.
• Live a more courageous life. 

Who are you? 

A person of deep strength who keeps walking the path, knowing that new wonders are going to be revealed right around the next bend.

(“And She Lived Happily Ever After”) Wrong. “And Then She Created A New Beginning” YES!

 

Jack Canfield tells a wonderful story of an elderly woman who is meeting with her minister to plan out her future funeral. She tells him all the things that she wants around her and she says that she wants a fork. Puzzled the minister asks her why a fork? So she says, “when they have the potlucks at the church you know you are going to have a special desert, when they say to save your fork. The fork is to remind everyone that the best is yet to come.”

When a friendship, relationship ends, or a loved one dies, it can seem like our broken heart is all that we have left. There can be no happy ending. That is when we need to remember the story of the fork. We need to remember that the best is yet to come. We may not even see a glimmer of what it could be. We may look at the broken pieces of our heart and think that there is no way it can be mended.  “new beginnings are often disguised as painful endings”  Lao Tzu

But what we are doing is not really mending the heart. It is giving the heart a new beginning. Think of a clear calm lake. No waves, just a perfect surface reflecting all that is around it. Now pick up a stone and throw it as far as you can into the lake. As it hits the surface, it creates a ripple on the surface of the lake. It starts small and expands out to the entire lake. Eventually the ripples expand to the point that the surface of the lake is completely calm again.  “Start where you are.  Use what you have.  Do what you can.”  Arthur Ashe.

However the lake has been forever changed. It now contains that stone on the bottom of the lake. This is our heart. Our heart will never be the same, as it contains both the love and heartbreak that occurred. It can come back into it’s new shape, and look the same, but it has been forever changed. It is always a new beginning.  “I feel a new beginning coming towards me and I’m running to it with open arms.:  Unknown.

So when someone or something breaks your heart, know that eventually the ripples of sorrow, loss and pain will expand out and fade away. Our heart has been forever changed by the loss, but remember the fork – the best is yet to come. A new beginning.  “Every day is a new beginning.  Treat it that way.  Stay away from what might have been, and look at what can be.”  Marsha Petrie Sue.  Trust in the magic of new beginnings.  Look forward to what is coming next.

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

What Would Your Life Look Like, If I Gave You The Key To Unlock Your Full Potential?

Have you ever said, “I would be happier if .., fill in the blank ____________ (my spouse was …,, my job was…, my weight was ? lbs. less?  etc…)”  I am going to use my weight as the example, but you can substitute anything in your life, that is currently not bringing you into a state of joy.  As you read through this, you can just adapt the process around your job, your spouse, your family, your finances, etc…

Never put the key to your happiness in someone else’s pocket  – Unknown

This includes the pocket of your self saboteur.  Have you ever counted calories?  Have you counted steps?  Weighed yourself every day to see if you released a single pound?   I know I have.  I have a Fitbit and I watch the numbers go up until I reach that 10,000 step mark.  I worry over what I am eating and snacking on.  What I recently discovered about this, is I am in fact disempowering myself.

Old ways won’t open new doors.  – unknown

A new way of saying Einstein’s definition of insanity.  I am “trying” over and over again to have better control, so that I can become healthier.  Old ways that didn’t work the first time.  It is sort of like banging my head against the door, hoping this time it will open for me.  I keep “trying” to get myself out of the obesity designation.  What I am in fact doing, is disempowering myself from being successful.  I am empowering my view of my weight, to have complete control of my eating and exercise habits, setting myself up for self sabotage.  I have put the keys to my happiness in the pocket of my self saboteur.

Find a heart that will love you at your worst and arms that will hold you at your weakest.  – Unknown

That heart and those arms need to be yours, not someone else’s.  When something isn’t working, then study, research, read and listen.  It never has failed me that someone will say something that triggers my mind to go down a rabbit hole and come up with something that my heart and soul have been trying to communicate with me.

Dear Destiny,  I am ready to listen now.  – unknown

When I walk every day, I listen to podcasts.  I have Tony Robbins, TED Talks, a NPR show called Scratch, EWomen’s Network, Success Magazine, and several others that I listen to.  I listen to whatever is next on the list.  This past week, I pieced something together from several different podcasts that became an “aha” moment. I needed to listen to my inner genius.  Those who listen to their inner genius often end up changing their world.  So I asked myself, “What is it still possible for me to do?”  Notice that I said do, not try.

I have been trying to discover through hits and misses what is contributing to the weight I have, and what I might do to be more successful in releasing the weight.  It isn’t as simple as diet and exercise.  What I received this week was a couple of keys.

Key #1 – Don’t try.  Trying doesn’t last long.  Trying is one of those words that sounds positive, but doesn’t have a high energy vibration to it.  Falling back to the famous Yoda quote – “Don’t try, Do or don’t do.”  Instead the key that fits into the transformation door, is to commit myself to “mastery” of releasing weight and becoming healthy.  Mastery is hard work.  You have to learn something completely.  To take it apart and put it back together again.  To understand the purpose and reason for every single part, and the actions it plays.  It takes time.  But when you become a master at something, it doesn’t just change you, it transforms you.

Mastery reflects understanding diet and nutrition, not generally, but as it applies to my individual DNA and my physical body.  It reflects understanding how the feelings I am feeling each day (my moods, and memories) enter into the equation.  It is about paying attention to my instincts or gut reactions to the pain and pleasure that is happening to me moment by moment.  And lastly it included my thinking or my intellect.

There are powers inside of you which, if you could discover and use, would make of you everything you ever dreamed or imagined you could become.    – Orison Swett Marsden

Key #2 – Realize that my mind plays this game of chaos.  I can tell that my weight is affecting my general health.  I am exhausted.  I have digestive issues among other things happening.

But my mind likes the chaos it understands, better than the chaos it doesn’t know.  It started from fear.  It said it was trying to protect me from unwanted attention.  It told me that I didn’t want to be like my mom, and hurt people that I loved.

So add in a few pounds, plus a few more.  Still getting attention, don’t worry, just add a few more pounds.  My own subconscious good intentions will kill me.  I needed to forgive myself, and let go of the need for protection.

Forgiveness is not something we do for other people.  It’s something we do for ourselves to move on.   – unknown

Key #3 – I am changing the interior landscape a little each day.  I really never practiced self care.  It was always care for everyone else first, and I got whatever was left over. 

So it is like going from the hard dry desert to a beautiful flower garden with a stream flowing through the middle.  I had to dig up the soil.  I had to put in some fertilizer to bring it up to optimal healthy soil that would support the growth of the flower garden. 

I then planted seeds.  I watered them.  I weeded out what doesn’t belong or bring me joy.  I brought in some nice chairs to sit in.  A small table to put a nice glass of lavender lemonade on.  I transformed the desert of “not taking care of myself”, into a place that empowers me to do self care.

Your success and happiness lies in you.  Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.    – Helen Keller

 Key #4 – Gratitude.  Every day I am finding things about my body, my health, the way I am taking better care of me – ways I can be grateful that I have this opportunity to bring back vibrant health to me.  Gratitude pays homage and honors the steps I am taking.

It says that while I am not where I want to be, I am making progress.

It says that I don’t have to beat myself up on the days I fall short of 10,000 steps, or have the strawberry shortcake for dessert.  It says that I will continue to be committed to bringing my body into a completely healthy state.  The “friend” needs to be “you”.  Self Love.

I’m a success today because I had a friend who believed in me, and I didn’t have the heart to let him down.   – Abraham Lincoln

If you find yourself spending a lot of time and money, and not making any progress, you are in fact, stuck in neutral.  It feels like you are in drive, because you are counting calories, you are weighing in, you are restricting your food intake, but you are in fact stuck in neutral. This is evident when day after day, no weight is released. Your subconscious mind has you stuck in the chaos you know.  You are blindfolded as to what is really happening.

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all.  Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach.  The world you desire can be won.  It exists  . . . it is real . . .  it is possible . . . it’s yours.    – Any Rand

When you are not reaching your goals, you need to stop.  Take a deep breath and look at what you are doing. First look to gratitude to where you are on the map.  Then look to the patterns of the familiar chaos – what is eating up your time, energy, money, contributing to your frustrations?  What story are you buying into that creates the “I am too tired” to walk tonight?”  What food cravings around caffeine, sugar, processed foods, fast foods are you having because you are bored or stressed out?  These stories are your self sabotaging patterns.  If you can start to recognize them, then you have the potential to transform them.

The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential…, these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.    – Confucius

When you have mapped out where you are, then you are ready to put the car back into drive and put your foot on the gas.  You do this by getting deeper into personal mastery.  The neutral gear is calling your attention to some part of the chaos, that is not working for you any longer.  Something that needs to be down shifted, released and/or transformed.  Once you have gotten this new piece of knowledge into your head, drawn it down into your heart to become wisdom, then you can release your passion to fuel your motivation.  You can realize your expanded potential and unlock a new door in your life of transformation.

You have always possessed the keys of transformation.  The divine puts the doors of opportunity in front of you, over and over again.  It is up to you to put the key in the lock, and go through the door. When you do that you discover untold potential and mastery within yourself.  You have more natural potential than you could use in 100 lifetimes.  Don’t let this life go by, not even using a small fraction of it.

Questions provide the key to unlocking your unlimited potential.   – Tony Robbin

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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Wake Up and Live!

Action without vision is only passing time.  Vision without action is merely daydreaming.  But vision with action can change the world –  Nelson Mandela

You can drive down the freeway, not paying attention to where you are going.  You will go places, but in reality, you are just passing time.  Vision without action is daydreaming.  You can write down how you want to go to Scotland.  But if you don’t save any money, it is just a daydream.  But when you put the vision and action together, miracles can happen.

You can put a budget in place and save money. You can check out websites and find a really good deal on airplane tickets, or a travel package.  You can put in your request for vacation time at work.  You can research and plan and pay for the perfect trip to Scotland, and it happens because you put the dream into action.

Don’t tell people your dreams.  Show them – Unknown

I love science fiction books.  The writers dream up things that don’t yet exist or that people of their day didn’t yet know about.  In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathon Swift wrote that Mars had two moons – it would be nearly a century later that they discovered he was right.  Jules Verne had rockets launching into space from Florida.  Kipling had mail being flown all over the world, before there were even airplanes.  Such things as television, solar power, video phones, movies with sound, space flight – all things talked about in science fiction before they were invented.

All of this came from someone’s dream, or vision being brought into reality.  I know that someday in the future, we will beam people from place to place.  Science will catch up to those dreams too.

But what about your everyday life?  Can your dreams create the future for you personally?  I have always loved this Steve Jobs quote:

It is really up to you to get still enough that you can hear the voice of your soul, your intuition.  Not listening to who the rest of the world wants you to be.  But getting still enough that you can hear the whispers that you have ignored for years.

The distance between dreams and reality is called action – Unknown

To listen to that still, soft voice.  You can’t be the anchor for everyone else in your life.  If you succeed in drowning out the voice of your soul, you drown your happiness.  Life is a gift.  Your soul knows the key to happiness.  It wants you to be crazy and live out those dreams that you buried deep within.  It wants you to wake up and be awesome.  The ruts in the road only show up, when you are not living your dreams.  The negative emotions drain your energy, and your life.  Wake up and dig up those dreams.  Don’t let them die in the dirt.  Put your vision into reality.

Your soul will open doors, but you have to be looking for them and walk through them.  Your soul will give you signs, but you have to read them and then do what they say, by following through with action.  If you are listening to the radio and not paying attention, then you will pass the signs by.  Just like on the freeway, there will be more than one sign telling you to stop for gas.  You can’t blame the universe when you don’t pay attention to the voice of your soul and run out of gas.

 Every morning you have two choices; continue to sleep with your dreams, or wake up and chase them – Unknown 

Get curious.  Dream Big.  Be Unstoppable.  There are those who try to make the doors to your dreams slam shut, they try to put things in the way so that they can’t be opened.  You have to see what is, and what else is possible.  That is where the magic happens, that is what makes the miracle possible.  That is the place where the newer, bigger dreams live.  That is the place of giants, where the dreams are deeper than the bottom of the ocean and larger than the boundaries of the universe.   So, Wake Up and Live!

Strong Women Value Themselves and Each Other

The devil whispered in my ear, “you’re not strong enough to withstand the storm.”  Today I whispered in the devil’s ear, “I am the storm”.

  – Unknown

We are all stronger than we know or think we are.  I come from a long line of strong pioneer women.  My great, great grandmother came across the Oregon Trail as a young girl.  The wagon train that her adopted family was part of was attacked by Indians.  She was adopted by the tribe and given to an Indian brave that she had two girls with.  One day a French Canadian trapper saw her and offered to take her back to the white people.  My great grandmother was hidden in an oak barrel for two days scared that if she made a sound she would be killed.  When she reached Oregon and the white people my great grandmother suffered the prejudice of being a half breed.  Her mothers tale was one of rescue, her tale was something else.

In my own life, my parents were divorced when I was four because my mother had an affair and became pregnant with another married mans child.  She moved us around a lot and it wasn’t until I was in high school that I went to the same school the entire grade.  She was married five times and had numerous other relationships looking for something outside of herself, to fill the hole within.  At one point when I was thirteen years old we were homeless because we had no where to go when her current relationship failed.  That was when I knew that my life would be different.  She taught me that you couldn’t find anything outside of yourself to fill the need you had inside.  It had to come from within.  Even though she made a lot of bad decisions, she was the strongest woman I have ever known.  I come from a long line of strong women.  This is what they taught me:

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.

  – Nora Ephron

Strong women know that sometimes we just need to sit with the questions until a direction is clearly revealed.

Strong women can sit with another woman in the silence without needing to say anything to break the tension.

Strong women know that when another woman is venting she doesn’t want anything to be fixed, she just needs someone there to witness the removal of the splinter that is causing her pain.

Strong women know that they must make their own light. And if as it sometimes happens that their light goes out, another sister will be there to share hers, until we are strong enough to relight our own.

Strong women know that when the light goes out, we are facing the day, when we question everything. When something so tragic happens that all of our foundations crash into dust.

This is the day when we all circle around our sister as she faces her crisis of faith and reveals the doubts which will birth a new creation. This is the day when we nurture her. When each sister holds the soul of the other ,and whispers the words of transformation.

This is the day of transformation which strips away the old way of being. Rising like a phoenix from the fire, we are reborn, fully transformed. 

No longer trying to be what others want us to be, we accept “us” without reservations or restrictions.

Strong women know that when you stand strong for yourself, you are standing strong for all of us.  When this belief is fully understood and lived, incredible things happen.

We value who we are, no matter what anyone else thinks. 
We forgive ourselves completely. 
We trust ourselves wholeheartedly. 
We are brave enough to love ourselves just as we are, perfectly imperfect. 
We empower ourselves to fully embrace our intuition.
We begin to live our life being the wonderful creation we are.

We fully realize the power of being a goddess, and that nothing can hurt us or stop us, except us.

A strong women doesn’t hold back either the laughter or the tears, because both cleanse the soul.

A strong women doesn’t apologize for knowing how to be both soft and powerful.

A strong women in her essence, her entelechy, is a gift to herself, to her tribe, and to the world.

I choose to be kind because it makes me happy.  But I will defend my boundaries and my loved ones without hesitation.  Make no mistake:  I am fierce.

  – Nanea Hoffman

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