Prayers

Our prayers go out to this poor family and the tragic murder of this beautiful boy. I totally agree with Brittni Lasuramore who said, “You don’t think something like this will ever happen to your family, ever,” Brittni Lauramore said. “I don’t know one person that could ever imagine something this horrible happening.” This is the thought that I think that everyone probably has, when you lose a loved one to violence, no matter the age.
My nephew was murdered almost six years ago, so I have some experience with how long the road is ahead of them. This month is his birthday and we still constantly think of him and miss him. I wish them peace in their hearts, and hope that they can grab onto the joyful memories. I hope that since his killer is going to plead guilty, that the justice system will be swift in providing them with some sort of closure.
They are having a vigil Thursday at 6 P.M., in the church near where they found his remains. Lighting candles to guide him on his new journey.
We wanted to acknowledge the generosity of the V. Todd Ferreira Funeral Services, who have offered to pay for Lonzie’s funeral. The families have known each other for years and this is something that good friends would do for each other.
But V. Todd Ferreira Funeral Services makes this offer for every child. “As long as I’ve been in business, I’ve never charged for a child. Ever,” Todd Ferreira said. “This is no different.” What a wonderful gift they have been giving to grieving families.
“What is important to us is Lonzie and his family, and that’s what we are committed to,” said Todd Ferreria. “And to giving him a special goodbye. One that he deserves.”
Ferreira is working with Lonzie’s family to plan the funeral and burial and said relatives from both sides are of Lonzie’s family are involved in the process.
Ferreira said he believes that the funeral will be open to the community, so that all the people who poured their hearts and souls into searching for the toddler will get to pay their respects and honor him

Macclenny funeral home to bury Lonzie

What Does The Term, “The sky’s the limit” Mean To You?

What does the term, “the sky’s the limit” mean to you?  For me, it is where the comfort zone meets “what else is possible?”

What is stopping you is the unwillingness to live beyond this reality.

  – Unknown

It is an extension of “what is possible”, that is beyond what “normal” is for me. It is where all of the magic is, approaching life from that attitude.  All our of limitations are self installed.  We choose them either by accepting them from someone else, or our own inner critic forming them after a failure. The sky is not the limitation, we are. We see these limitations in our professional life, our personal life and our spiritual life. Some of these limitations come from our culture, through the “roles” we play with our friends and family.

Being on a spiritual path does not prevent you from facing times of darkness.  But it teaches you how to use the darkness as a tool to grow.

  – Unknown

When we go on a hero’s journey, the walls that we have built around us, to limit us, get torn down. When you take any really great story, you find within it what Joseph Campbell called the Hero’s Journey. My two favorite stories are “Star Wars” (the first three with Luke) and “Lord of The Rings”. 

The main character (Luke or Frodo) is going through a “normal” or boring life. Nothing much is happening. Then there is a call to adventure (Luke has R2D2 show up and Frodo has Gandalf), something new is introduced into the characters life.  This alters the hero’s destiny. At first the hero refuses the call to adventure – this isn’t for me. I can’t get involved. This can sometimes be because the hero knows that the role that you play within your family, or tribe will be forever changed once you cross the threshold.

Our worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace.  And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God’s grace.

  –  Jerry Bridges

Then the hero encounters the mentor – someone who gives advice and gets him ready. It could be someone supernatural, mystical or angelic. The hero crosses the threshold – leaves home and enters into the adventure. There are tests, allies and enemies are encountered in the journey which teach the hero a lot about him or herself. Plan A and possibly Plans B and C fail, as the hero experiences setbacks and has to rethink how to proceed.

Because you are alive, everything is possible.

  – Nhat Hanh

The hero has faith which leads them to access higher levels of knowledge and abilities to meet the tests with. The hero sees their limitations and ultimately has to defy and defeat them in order to pull through. The setbacks all lead to the ultimate crisis of life or death, where the hero struggles to complete their destiny (Luke battling the evil emperor and Frodo himself and the ring). Now the hero gets the reward – they have won out over the enemies. Many times the loses are mourned even as the victory is celebrated. The hero begins the journey back home, forever changed by the journey. The old limitations of what the hero thought they were capable of have changed. They have been forever transformed.

The reason people awaken, is because they have finally stopped agreeing to things that insult their soul.

  –  Unknown

I believe that we all take numerous hero’s journeys. We take them in our personal lives, our professional lives and our spiritual lives. We take small journeys and we take “dark night of the soul” journeys. Each time we need to transform our lives, we take a hero’s journey. We reinvent ourselves, we improvise, adapt and overcome our self made limitations. We get creative, we become flexible and adjust as we experience paradigm shifts.

There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

  – Bruce Lee

So don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the moon. Use your imagination and creativity, to discover that the possibilities of your world are limitless.

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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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Future

Sometimes we need to let go of how we thought our life should be. Instead we need to embrace the life that our soul is calling out for. The life we were meant to live.
It is scary. It can feel like we are all alone.
But maybe the journey is all about unbecoming who we are, so that we can become who we are meant to be.

Dream

If you don’t build your own dream, someone else will hire you to help build theirs.” (Tony Gaskins Jr. and Farrah Gray are both credited with this quote.)

This is so true and what most of us are stuck in, building everyone’s dreams but our own.

Many years ago when my kids were in the range of grade school and Jr High School, I was working for a mortgage company in the Seattle area. One day the boss had all of us in an emergency meeting. Walking around the room, he spoke about how he felt that the year we were in was going to be a very good year for mortgages, but that the following year would see a downturn in our industry.

Getting more excited as he walked around us, he stated that he was mandating mandatory overtime on weekends. It was critically important he said, that he make as much money as he could that year. The important thing was that he wanted a new Porsche. He felt that next year he wouldn’t be able to afford to buy one, so it had to happen this year.

Needless to say, this didn’t go over very well with his staff, as we were all looking at him like “what did he just say?”. I was floored that he would be so bold as to tell us that the sole reason why we should be working overtime (when we were paid a salary and not hourly) was for his personal gain. He wasn’t too happy when I told him, that he could fire me if he wanted, but I was not going to be working every weekend – mandatory or not.

Most of us started working in order to fulfill our dreams. The reality is though, that this isn’t what happens. We get caught up in the day to day grind of getting a paycheck that always seems to fall short of what we think we need to fulfill those dreams. So the dreams get put into the “someday” pile that becomes buried and becomes the forgotten pile.

For me, I had the dream of writing bestselling books. I would read the mystery, the science fiction/fantasy book or the self help book and think, “I could write this”. But I was always so busy working, taking care of the house and children, that I thought, “well, as soon as the kids are gone, then I will write.” The kids are all gone, and other than the LemonadeMakers blog and Facebook, my writing the Great American Novel or even the smaller mystery book still isn’t happening.

My dream got put on hold, and I can’t seem to take it off – I think that the Staples “easy” button isn’t working right – who do you call to get if fixed?.

Farah Gray has another quote “You are confined only by the walls you build yourself.” This quote got me thinking about how it was never that I didn’t have the time. Because if that was all that it was, I would have written those books that we all know that I have in me. It was and always has been about the self confidence to put myself naked on the page. It has always been about fear of not being good enough, of failing and being a flop. About what if people picked my stories apart and ridiculed me?

I had built the walls myself that separated me from achieving my dreams, that separated me from even trying to do so. I still have a box of stories started but never completed. Well I am getting ready to tear down those walls of separation.

Through a series of events, I have been getting the message loud and clear, that I need to get out the pen and paper and start writing. I am going to follow the advice of Steve Jobs, “don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice.” It is past the time to pour my soul out onto the paper. The worst that can happen is that you throw the paper in the trash.

It would be great if some of you were brave enough to join me as a demolition crew and tear down the walls that we have been hiding behind. What dreams do you have hidden behind a wall? Is it time to start tearing down your walls too?

Wolf

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.

Worries

Mark Twain once said, “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

So how do we learn to worry less? It is really about surrendering to the experience of worry in order to transform the worry into a higher vibration of positive energy.

When we worry, we have these internal arguments that seem to be about “something bad” is going to happen. Someone who has an illness is going to die; I am going to lose my job; my spouse doesn’t love me anymore; the list is endless.

Some are major worries and some are minor.They do however all have something in common. No amount of worry will change the situation. Worry stresses the body and accompishes nothing positive.

So what can we do about “worries”? For example, if a loved one is going to the store and will be about 20 minutes, at 21 minutes I might have them dying in a car accident. I might think that I am worrying about their safety

What I really need to do is to go beneath that unconscious trigger and determine what my worry is really about. How would I go about doing that? The first thing to do is to notice that you are worried. Let go of the worry and enter into a state of wonder in your mind.

Wonder is asking questions that you are curious about. I would ask myself, “I wonder what new positive thing is trying to come into being?” Instead of arguing with the worry, transform the vibration from negative to neutral. A neutral, natural curiosity vibration of “I wonder why” I am worried about he/she taking longer at the store than they thought.

Feeling deeply into my body, I would,focus on the feeling of worry and where the worry is coming from. From the lower root chakra of safety and survival? From the heart chakra of how much I love this person? See if the body can express what it feels into words. Don’t try to force it or make something up. Simply notice and stay with the feeling, as it continues to run like a computer search program in the background. Either now or later it will express itself into words. I find that at night when I am dreaming, I will get the answer in my dreams. I believe this is because my conscious mind isn’t blocking or aruging with the answer.

Once this feeling has a context to it beyond just worry, take that feeling back in time to when you felt just like this feeling. Keep tracing the feeling back to a time where it wasn’t labled and identified as a particular emotion, just a feeling that you didn’t really understand. That is where that feeling was born, before you really understood the concept and labled it. Maybe it was a feeling of abandonment.

Once you identify this feeling, work with DYBO and recognize, release and restore yourself to let go of the low vibrational feeling from your body. DYBO is a BraveHeart Women program that helps us to move stuck emotions. In this case the stuck emotion that is triggering your worry. You learn to dance your buts off – not the butt you sit on, but the buts you live with. Worry is one of those buts that we live with. I am amazed at the amount of transformation it has made in my life. Let me know if you want more information about it!

Struggle

Struggle in life is what happens when we resist the life lesson. When we fear or hate the changes occurring in our life, we become so powerless that all we can do is struggle. We think that we can force life to go in the direction that we want to go, we believe in the illusion that we are in fact in control. We have this tendency to get anxious when life “isn’t going our way”, and we start creating all of these fearful possibilities of what will happen, if we don’t get control of the situation. But all that anxiety does is serve fear – it doesn’t really solve or fix anything, it has no real answers to give us.

Hero

Hero is such a funny word. When we tell someone they have been a hero, they will always something that sounds like, I’m not a hero – I just saw something that needed doing and did it. We always think that the actions of others are heroic, but never our own actions.
We think that heroes are people who do something dangerous to save a life; but we forget about all of the 100’s of “ordinary” things that we do each day that are also true actions of a hero. Being there everyday for our friends and family to support them. The money that we donated to a nonprofit that helps people; the clothes that we donated to Goodwill; the food we donated to the foodbank, and so on.
These small acts are also the actions of a hero to the person that receives them. Celebrate the heroes in your life. Let them know how much they are appreciated. Be a hero youself today, even if it is just a smile – that smile might just save a life!

One Step

Every day I am making progress on something. It may not look like much, but when I look back over the year, it is amazing how much I have grown both myself and my vision of what I am here to do.
The closer I get, the more I see how every step in the past was necessary to prepare me for this future that I am bringing into existence.
It may seem to some that life is hard, but when you look back you can see how it all unfolded perfectly. It is important to remember when you are experiencing the “tough” times that in the not too distant future you will be glad it happened, because the joy you have now wouldn’t be possible without each and every step you have taken.

Top 10 Things: Time and Space

“The Top 10 things about time and space that most people seem to forget:

10. You chose to be here and you knew what you were doing.
9. There are no “tests” and you’re not being judged.
8. Everyone’s doing their best, with what they know.
7. You already have whatever you’re looking for.
6. You are of the Divine, pure God, and so is everyone else.
5. Religion needs spirituality; spirituality does not need religion.
4. You’re naturally inclined to succeed – at everything you do.
3. You happen to life, life does not happen to you.
2. Order, healing, and love belie every moment of chaos, pain, and fear.
1. Following your heart is the best way to help others. 

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.