The Gift Of Self Transformation

Updated 2/10/2018

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 right for you? This would be a positive thing to know – what doesn’t belong to me or my life. It is hard to leave something or someone behind you, to let them or it go.  It is hard until you decide to do it.  Then it becomes easy.  It isn’t the leaving that is hard, it is the decision.

Envy is another word that has a bad rap. What if envy simply shows you things which you may wish to empower in your own life? That would be a great thing to know – things I want in my life and can empower myself to obtain.  In our lives we have the habit of settling.  We settle with that 10 lbs of weight that we can’t seem to lose.  We settle with our job, thinking what we have is better than nothing.  We settle, settle, settle, because the reality is that we don’t know what we really, really want.

I am always stuck.  I am always stuck between giving people everything because I am dying to create meaningful relationships, and giving them nothing at all because then if they leave, at least I’ll be left whole.

  – (via yoymenoyhoy)

Like Treasure, Brilliance is Uncovered…

Updated 03/17/2020

Have you ever felt like you have a recurring theme in your life?  Something that keeps showing up for you over and over again?

“All of us have gold hidden within, but we have to dig to get it out” – Joyce Meyer

When I was 4 years old I went through a trauma that said it wasn’t safe to be seen or heard.  Childhood traumas can create both a protection reaction and a self-sabotage reaction to similar feelings or emotions as adults.  It is a primary teaching in my coaching practice – to mine what memories you  have as a child to patterns in your life now.

I spent most of my adult life trying to figure out why I always seemed to have one foot on the gas, and one foot on the brake. My experience had become an unconscious program running in the background of my decision-making process. 

All unconscious programs both help you and hurt you.  This is why like buried treasure; they must be dug up and be understood.

I went for professional help because I had buried the memory, and could remember nothing of my childhood until my first day of school. Once I uncovered the memory, I could see how this one experience had impacted my entire life.  I had become stuck in my own life, and it was like the car stuck in the mud.  The wheels were spinning, but all that was happening was that I was throwing dirt all over the place.  Now that I could see how the car was stuck in the mud, I could use tools to get back onto the dry road, and get moving on my own journey of personal transformation.

“The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your  mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself.  That’s the moment you  may be starting to get it right”  – Neil Gaiman

You have these buried treasures that you were gifted with to share with the world. At some point in your life, someone or something happened that convinced you they were worthless pieces of trash.  So, feeling guilty, embarrassed, ashamed, and afraid, you buried them deep inside of yourself. 

Piece by piece, they must be dug up, polished up, and shared. It is these treasures which will shift the world to a better place for all of us. I write to share my treasures with everyone. I am working very hard to help others to be able to share their treasures with the world.  Elizabeth Gilbert in her book “Big Magic” called this “strange jewels” which are buried within you, waiting to be uncovered. 

You may have spent your life looking outside of yourself for fulfillment. You may believe that if you are the perfect child, the perfect student, the perfect spouse or parent, or the perfect employee, then you will be fulfilled.

Nothing outside of yourself can really provide long lasting validation, security or love. You can get temporary fixes, but sooner or later they will all fail.  Then you convince yourself that the next partner, or the next job or the next whatever will be the thing that makes you happy and fills that void. Or you may just condemn yourself as a complete failure.  Instead of looking for something, you stop seeking any kind of love, security or fulfillment.

Sometimes it feels like you have spent your whole life running away from yourself because the pain that lives within you is too much to bear.  You bury it down deeper and convince yourself that it’s the only way to survive. 

But in that pain is great treasure.  There is beauty in the depths of your soul, where you have hidden your gifts.  The great religious leaders recognize the truth of this.

“We are all jars of clay, fragile and poor, yet we carry within us an immense treasure”  – Pope Francis

Every moment of your life is wrapped up in change.  Every truth of today, will not necessarily be the truth tomorrow.  New discoveries in science, uncover and shifts the foundations of what you know.  Technology is constantly changing all aspects of your life.  Just think of the number of new authors made possible by Kindle books. 

I never thought I would be able to change from reading paper books to online.  I never thought I would use Uber or Lyft instead of imposing on a friend to pick me up or drop me off.  My news comes from my iPhone more than TV.  Little things that add up to a lot of changes.

In the same way, as you dig and uncover what lies deep within yourself, you will reach new truths about yourself.  You will become more conscious, more awake.  You will find yourself making small changes in how you live your life. 

You may shrug off old habits which no longer fit or feel right.  You may organize or arrange your life differently to make room for new ways of living your life.  You may find yourself no longer procrastinating until decisions make themselves, but rather consciously make your decisions in a way that moves you forward to living your life purpose.

The Founder of Agape International Spiritual Center, Michael Beckwith took it a step further in reflecting that these divine gifts and priceless treasures were given to you to help shift not just your own consciousness, but the consciousness of the world.

You have these treasure maps inside of you, which lead you to the divine treasure of love. Love of Self, Love of God and Family, Love of the World. You may be a diamond in the rough, but as you take this journey through divine love, the beauty of the diamond will be revealed within you.

Every Great Dream Begins With A Dreamer

“In order to save myself, I must destroy first the me I was told to be”  – The Dreamer

 You were born a dreamer.  All you have to do is watch any small child.  You can see their dreams, their imaginations running wild.  They create whole worlds with blankets and pillows, some Legos and Hot Wheels, Dinosaurs and some plastic green Army Men.  Whatever they can get their hands on.  If you give them a few tools they will cut and saw out some boards and hammer together a space ship, then put on their capes to go out to save the world from alien invaders.  The horrible thing that happens to you as you grow up, is that you let go of your dreams.  You became a realist and make your possibilities into a small safe comfort zones.

“There are only two kinds of people in this world.  The realists and the dreamers.  The realists know where they are going and the dreamers have already been there”  – Robert Orben

You need to destroy your comfort zone and remember that you are a dreamer and you have unlimited potential.  Your dreams were designed to custom fit your personality.  If you let them, they will continue grow and expand as you do.  They will follow you all of your days, growing greater and grander as you do.  When Walt Disney was laying in the hospital dying, he had his newest dreams taped up on the ceiling so that he could look up at them and continue to plan their realities.  As long as you continue to learn, to grow and expand, so will your dreams.  Dreams are your future realities, waiting in the wings to come out on the stage of life.

“The dreamers of the day are dangerous people.  For they dream their dreams with wide open eyes, and make them come true”  – D.H. Lawrence

I am always amazed when I read an old science fiction book or look at some of the drawings of someone like Leonardo Da Vinci.  He created on paper the bicycle, the helicopter, and an airplane.  What powerful dreamers they were.  At the time, they were writing about a future they could only see in their minds eye.  They made up inventions that had us deep within the oceans, that had us exploring the galaxy, that had us beaming a person from the land mass of a planet, up through space and into the interior of a space ship.

“Great dreams of great dreamers are always transcended”  – A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

Over time, inventors have been catching those concepts or thoughts, and they have been bringing them into reality.  They invented deep sea diving suits, and submarines and special mini subs that could go even deeper.  You have the ability to see the ocean floor from satellites deep in space.  They took us to the moon and back.  Now we go back and forth on a regular basis to a space station.  I saw a news piece about how someone is building personal small helicopters that will fly themselves and be used in the near future to take us to work.  While this isn’t the flying car that turns into a brief case we saw on the George Jetson cartoons, it is getting closer to a reality.

“All successful people, men and women, are big dreamers.  They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision”  – Brian Tracy

When you are a dreamer that puts action steps into your dreams, you discover a number of things.  You discover what hard work really looks and feels like.  You discover the real cost of sacrificing everything to make the dream into reality.  You discover that the price isn’t as large as fear told you it would be.  You discover that every time you fall down, every time it doesn’t work out like you thought it would, that every single failure, is just a way to show you a new viewpoint into what you are bringing into the worlds reality. You discover that failures are just stepping stones to greatness.

“Do not let the 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”  – Ayn Rand

Every night you tossed and turned trying to figure out the right way, and all of the struggles you have or will go through, are in the end are the price tag of the ever expanding new you.  Each and every price tag that you pay for .. . every single failure, is what is leading you to the mastery of the idea, and the fulfillment of the concept.  The steps of the completion of the dream, becomes a part of the never ending journey to which we all sign up for.  You gain a true understanding of the words, “it is not the destination that matters, but who we are becoming along the way”.

“Yes, I am a dreamer.  For a dreamer is one who can find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world”  – Oscar Wilde

Dreamers Steer By The Stars, SO . . .

Follow your Dreams

Make a Wish

Dream Big

Take a Chance

Believe Big

Make a Change

Taste the Sky

Find the Fire Within

Follow Your Passion

Hold the Vision

Trust the Process

Live Your Life In The Light Of Dreams And Possibilities

Sometimes you just need an adventure to cleanse the bitter taste of life from your soul

  – Unknown

One of the processes many of us go through at the end of the year is to go through the year that is passing.  We look at our highlights, both good and bad.  The successes we celebrate and the failures we sift through for the good pieces hidden in the ashes.  I think that one of the things to plan for the new year is an adventure.  It could be as simple as a hike up into the mountains where we can just sit in the silence and commune with our soul.  Or it could be that we take a trip to somewhere we have never been.

It could be within driving distance of where we live or we could travel to a foreign country.  What it needs to be is an experience that is something totally out of our comfort zone.  Doing this gives us a new perspective in our life.  It shifts our viewpoints and sometimes it changes our life in unforeseen ways.

The secret of making dreams come true can be summarized in four C’s.  They are curiosity, confidence, courage, and constancy; and the greatest of these is confidence

– Walt Disney

When we take the time at the end of the year or the beginning of the new year to look at our life, we need to be gentle with ourselves.  Going deep within using Disney’s four C’s will unlock things in our heart, soul and mind that we didn’t know where there.  In talking to my life/business coaches a thought floated to the surface around money.  Years ago, when I would be in a discussion around money with my husband, I would say I wanted to have something physical to show in my hands for the money that I spendt.  I haven’t said this for years, but it brought to the surface a belief about money that was hidden within me that needs to be released.  When you approach these hidden beliefs without judgement, but instead curiosity it becomes so easy to let them go.

To breathe your own truth is your heart’s most burning desire.  To live your purpose is your soul’s lifelong dream.

  – Dodinsky 

Don’t be at war with yourself when you look at the blocks that you have.  We all have some beliefs, which block the path to our soul’s dream.  Instead get curious.  Give your basic life tools the chance to work, by working with them.  Meditation, journaling, routines to take care of your health, living in gratitude for what each day has brought to you.  Instead of challenges, you believe that you have opportunities for growth.

Live your truth.  Express your love.  Share your enthusiasm.  Take action towards your dreams.  Walk your talk.  Dance and sing to your music.  Embrace your blessings.  Make today worth remembering.

  – Dr. Steve Maraboli

Taking down the walls you have been building your whole life to expose yourself as you really are.  True freedom doesn’t have limits to who you can be.  Taking up the practice of something new to grow your soul is completely dependent on your realizing it doesn’t matter that you do it well or badly.  Just that you do in fact do it.  You are the one who decides that an experience or change in your life is personal growth, or that it creates personal fears.  Get curious and give yourself the love that you give so freely to others.  Be a soothing balm to your soul.

Don’t be beautiful.  They keep saying that beautiful is something a girl needs to be.  But honestly?  Forget that.  Don’t be beautiful.  Be angry, be intelligent, be witty, be klutzy, be interesting, be funny, be adventurous, be crazy, be talented – there are an eternity of things to be other than beautiful.  And what is beauty anyway but a set of letters strung together to make a word?  Be your own definition of amazing, always. That is so much more important than anything beautiful, ever.

  – Nikita Gill

Audrey Hepburn to me is what this quote is talking about.  She grew up in Belgium and was involved in fighting against the Nazi’s.  She was a professional dancer and began acting just to help support her mom.  At the time she wasn’t considered a beauty.  Her body wasn’t the right shape, her eyebrows too bushy.  But she lived her life as she wanted and because she wasn’t afraid to be who she was, she became an icon..  She won a Tony, an Oscar and Grammy and is one of only 12 people to win all three.  She insisted that Hubert  de Givenchy design all of her clothes for the movies she was in.  She later stepped away from Hollywood and concentrated on he work as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF.  I love her quote, “I’m Possible” for impossible as well as several others.  She was an eternity of things, including beautiful and to me a wonderful example of living her life on her own terms.

Step Into The Wild Unknown, Become Who You Are Meant To Be

There is a saying, if you want to change your life, change your thoughts.  Thoughts are like a series of stepping stones across a river.  Some of the stones are slippery from the moss as the water runs over them.  Some of them are unstable and rock as you step on them.  Some of the stones are tilted with edges that cut like a knife and hard to walk across.  Some of the stones are firmly planted like a foundation stone.  We can’t cross the river without stepping on the stones.  We choose the stones to step on.  Each stone we walk across, becomes part of our life’s path.  Some trip us up and we fall into the water.  Some support us, some don’t.  Life demands change, but it always comes back to us choosing.

We cannot become what we want to be by remaining what we are.

  – Max Depree

I am listening to the Lord of The Rings soundtrack as I write this.  The Lord of the Rings is one of my favorite books and it really exemplifies change, with the journey of the characters.  Some like Frodo and Samwise were challenged to greatness.  They had failures when it seemed like the evil of the ring would destroy them.  They wanted to give up, because what was asked of them was so hard.  They kept walking towards their destination and that journey forged them, like a hammer hitting them again and again as they walked through the fiery tests. Each challenge brought them closer to the great characters they had the potential to be. 

Inspiration and growth only come from adversity and from challenge – from stepping away from what’s comfortable and familiar and stepping out in the unknown

– Ben Saunders

Boromir failed in his duty.  Gollum swung from bad to good to bad again.  Saurman fell from being a protector of the world to its destroyer.  So many were tested and found wanting, not because it was their destiny to fail, or that they were inherently evil.  It was because they stopped trying to be good and wise.  It was easier to let the bad take over.  Sometimes we think that we have lost of the best part of us, like when Gandalf went down into the fires with the Balrog, and we don’t know how we can continue.  It seems like all is lost.  But like Gandalf coming back as a new being, we can always be reborn.  As long as we keep walking, the way will open before us.  When we push the edges of the known universe, we discover new lands to explore.

I always find beauty in things that are odd and imperfect – they are much more interesting.

  – Marc Jacobs

Have you ever monitored the thoughts that cross your mind?  The things you think, but filter and so don’t say?  An interesting exercise is to sit on a bench at a mall, park or beach – somewhere where there are lots of people.  Turn on the recording button on your phone and just record your thoughts as you watch the people walk by.  When you replay it, notice if the majority of your thoughts were positive or negative.  Where you funny?  Quirky? Profound? Think about your favorite TV shows or movies.  The characters in the book, movie, TV shows that you remember and fall in love with, are the ones that are quirky – Spock or Data from Star Trek, or maybe the science nerd from NCIS Abby or Dr. Mallard.  Punky Brewster with the funny socks.  The characters on The Big Bang Show.  The list goes on and on.  Find the beauty in you being you. 

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

  – George Bernard Shaw

Asking yourself questions about your thoughts can provide useful insight into thoughts that you can work on changing.  Whenever anything went wrong for my mom, she had a habit of saying, “I could just kill myself”.  She didn’t even realize she was saying it until one day my son said to her after something happened, “I know grandma you could just kill yourself”.  She was horrified that she had said this so often that her young grandson said it back to her, and she stopped saying it.

Close some doors.  Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because they no longer lead somewhere.

  – Unknown

As you get curious and not judgmental about the thoughts, dig beneath them to see what patterns are in your life that you didn’t realize were there.  We all have them.  How many times have you been driving to or from work and realized that you are missing moments in your drive – that suddenly you are home or at work and you don’t remember part of the drive?  Shifting the patterns is what makes real transformation of your thoughts.  I have hated spiders since I was a kid and got bit when I was sleeping on my hand.  When I was talking a college creative writing course years ago, they had us read a book by Sue Hubbell.  Her husband and her were both professors at a University and he decided one day to walk away from tenure and go live in the Ozarks.  A few months later, he left Sue also and she wrote about that year in her life where everything fell apart and she was left with no money and no job and a house in the middle of nowhere. 

Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.

  – Wayne W. Dyer

Each chapter was written around something in nature.  One chapter was about spiders.  When I finished that chapter, my relationship with spiders changed.  While I still don’t “like” them, I am no longer terrified of them.  This chapter for me highlighted the fact that when we learn more about something, it changes our relationship with it.  It takes the fears away, because we removed the unknown from the equation.  When you go beyond what you think is real, you step into the unknown.  While the unknown is filled with fears, each day our relationship with it changes, because more becomes known.  Like walking down a path through the fog – we may not be able to see far into the distance, but each step reveals what was hidden before.  Just keep stepping on the next stone, taking the next step in your life.  Make this quote your mantra, and you will have an amazing life.

Today I create a WONDERFUL NEW DAY and a WONDERFUL NEW FUTURE.

  – Louise Hay

Don’t Be Afraid To Dance Your Own Dance Of Life

In order to save myself, I must destroy first the me I was told to be – The Dreamer

When you were this girls age, you had dreams about who you wanted to be when you grew up.  You may already have been singing, or dancing, or wanting to be a doctor or lawyer.  Between this and that statement they let you know that you should choose a less challenging career than a doctor or lawyer, because you really aren’t that smart.

Or it could be more subtle where you are being directed by your parents into the career that they want for you.  That career your mom or dad wanted; or everyone in your family has this career (our family is all in the legal or medical field); or the one you want won’t be able to support you – all valid reasons by their way of thinking.

Along the way you learn to hide who you are.  You learn that others will judge you or belittle you.  So, you put on masks to conform to what friends and family expect – who they want you to dress like, look like, act like.  You hide your dreams so that no one can destroy them any further.

You learn not to trust your heart to be in others hands.  You give up on what is possible and settle for what is conforming to the needs and desires of others.  You forget who you are and what you are here for.  You no longer take part in the dance of life, but instead settle back against the wall and watch those with more courage or talent dance it in front of you.

Ten years from now, make sure you can say that you chose your life, you didn’t settle for it – Unknown

There is only one way to truly know who you are deep down inside.  You have to get in touch with your own soul.  You need to be by yourself, and sit with yourself, and just listen.

Looking back at your life, find the places where you were really happy.  Find the things that are so easy for you to do, that others find hard or impossible.  Trace back all of the threads that have your name engraved upon them.  Start picking out and removing all of the threads that are not you.  Look for the gold and silver pieces and toss out the dross.

Now look for the patterns that are left.  The amazing thing is that it usually takes you back to this age.  The age when you acted out who you really were, before society broke you like a young colt and told you who to be.  The threads of genius that are all you, can now be taken up and made into whatever pattern you want.  It is never too late to be who you were meant to be.

Sometimes when you make this journey deep into our soul, you discover that your life has to be completely shaken up.

• UPLIFT:  You are covered in dust and debris that needs to be removed.  We need to rearrange almost everything. Uplift what you buried.
• EMPOWER:  Change almost everything.   Empower your heart and soul to lead you in the right direction.
• VALIDATE:  We need to go to the place we are supposed to be.  You need to validate that your dreams are right.  You can be and do what they are leading you to.

A close friend of mine relocated from Los Angeles to Italy and she loves it.  The best thing to do is to remove what doesn’t belong and then figure out how to rearrange what does.  It is an individual journey that defines who you are in a totally new way.  You discover your truth by looking for it down deep within and then integrating it into your life.  You are on a life adventure.  This journey is for you alone.  Embrace it and life it fully.

The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated.  It isn’t true that everyone should follow one path.  Listen to your own truth – Ram Dass

There are some that will say that living your life purpose, is being selfish.  That you are ignoring the wishes of others.  But actually, the reverse is true.

Each one of us was given as part of our life journey a divine destiny.  You were born into the place and the family that would give you the tools to accomplish this purpose.  Some of those life lessons come through adversity, some come as part of the journey of rediscovering who you are really meant to be.

If you don’t take the risks, make the changes and transform your life, then your destiny will not be fulfilled.  And you will not be living the life that God sent you here to live.

So, it is actually selfish to not live up to your full potential.  To not find out who you are supposed to be.  To not utilize your power to its full capability. To not live out loud and up front your God given destiny.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

“Happiness is not something readymade.  It comes from your own actions” – Dalai Lama

As an adult you might look at all the clean laundry on this bed and sigh, thinking that it all needed to be folded or hung up and put away.

But my two grandsons didn’t see a pile of work to do, they saw fun.  The smiles on their faces make my heart burst with joy.  Can you remember being this age and thinking that everything in and around your house was just waiting for you to figure out a way to have fun with it?

As an adult you need to get back that lens of seeing things as something ready made to make you happy.

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do, are in harmony” – Mahatma Gandhi

One of the things that I love about watching small children, is their ability to just be themselves.  They aren’t hiding who they are behind a mask, no fake smiles, no hidden agendas.  If something does happen that makes them sad or mad, their emotions flow straight through them.  The don’t pout in the corner waiting for someone to coax them back into a good mood.  They have their moments when a tantrum hits them, then they immediately get distracted and two minutes later they are on the bed rolling in clean clothes and laughing about nothing.

They don’t have baggage that they carry around with them, that slows down their emotions.  They don’t find themselves trapped in an endless loop of replaying a bad experience over and over again.  They don’t let their emotions send them into an endless spiral of judgment and negativity.  They don’t spend their days getting triggered by something unimportant. They don’t let a single thing cause them to spend the rest of the day in a bad mood.

“The best thing that you can do to this world is to be joyous.  Being joyful, is the greatest offering you can make to the world”  – Jaggi Vasadev

Have you ever been in a terrific mood, driving down the freeway as you go to work?  Then someone cuts you off.  You might mutter under your breath.  Or maybe you yell at the driver shaking you head or hands.  Or maybe you drive right up on their bumper to let them know how angry you are.

A few weeks ago, two drivers were going down the freeway, and I don’t know what started the argument, but they were taking turns cutting each other off, then they pulled their cars over and one man got out with a baseball bat.  Fortunately, there was a highway patrol behind them, and he was able to stop it from escalating even further.

Why do people let someone else’s actions destroy their own good mood?  Why do they feel the need to somehow get back at them for their either unthinking or aggressive driving habits?

“Respect yourself enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves you, grows you, or makes you happy”  – Unknown

It isn’t easy to let things go as fast as they happen to you.  But if you remember these two rascals and a load of clothes just out of the dryer, maybe, just maybe, you can be like a child.  Feel the emotion, and let it flow out of you.  Take back your self respect and don’t allow anyone to push you down the rabbit hole of negative emotions.  Just walk away.  Dance down the sidewalk.  Laugh.

Just because someone invites you to argue and fight,

doesn’t mean you have to accept the invitation.

Self-Awareness allows you the space to check in within you and choose happiness.  To choose not to worry.  To choose the “easy button” in all aspects of living your life in joy and happiness.

When you choose to live your life from the place of gratitude it helps you to shift your energy, to bring in more of what you want in your life.  As you walk down your chosen path, the journey of life brings you many things.  Not all of them are meant to stay.  Everything in your life currently is serving some sort of purpose.  Part of the journey is figuring out why it is in your life.

What it is supposed to be teaching you, and once you know and implement that knowledge, then it is time to let it go.  What an interesting thing it is to recognize that in every moment you have choices laid before you.  You can choose anger and frustration, or you can let the negative emotion roll in a wave over you and past you to the shore.  Watch as it draws all of the negativity back out to sea.

“We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong.  The amount of work is the same” – Carol Castenada

Sometimes happiness is a feeling. Sometimes it’s a decision.  Don’t let stupid things break your happiness.  If you really look at life, while you will have tragedy happen in your life, most of your unhappiness from day to day is your being triggered by something stupid.

• What are your dreams, visions, your life purpose?
• Are you on track to bring them into reality and complete them?
• Have you allowed distractions to sidetrack you?
• Are you unclear on what your life purpose is or how to bring it into reality?

Remember, we here at LemonadeMakers are here for you.  Contact us and let us help you choose a million reasons to be happy.

Celebrate The Hero In Each Of Us, That Voice That Is Brave Enough To Say “Enough” And “No More”

“Strength doesn’t come from what you can do.  It comes from overcoming the things you once thought you couldn’t” – Rikki Rogers

Life in a Jar . . .  a play written by school children in Kansas.  Tells the story of Irena Sendlerowa who saved around 2,500 Jewish babies from Nazi death camps.  Saying that what she did was nothing special, she said “I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality.  The term hero irritates me greatly.  The opposite is true.  I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little.”

She was captured by the Gestapo and beaten, breaking and crushing her legs and feet, and then driven away to be executed.  On the way, she was rescued.  She was never able to walk without crutches afterwards.

I think that most of us wonder if we would have had the strength and courage to do what Irena did.  Risk our lives for children that we didn’t know.  To survive that kind of beating.  To have the attitude of thinking that we could have done more than rescue 2,500 children.  She is a special kind of hero.

As brave as Irena was, think for a moment of being the mother who had to decide if she could give up her child.

What guarantee was there that this would in fact save her child?  Where did such inner strength come from?  Most of the parents who gave up their children did not survive the war and lost their lives in the death camps.

Put yourself in that place for just a moment, could you have given your child to Irena?  Their story is told in the PBS program, “Irena Sandler:  In the Name of Their Mothers”.

Harriet Tubman is another amazing woman.  Born a slave, she ran away leaving her husband and children to escape slavery.  Walking almost 90 miles to Philadelphia with no map, directions or help.  She returned to the South at least 19 times and lead her family and hundreds of other slaves to freedom via the Underground Railroad.  She was very intuitive and had dreams that would tell her when to leave the road, or that a particular way was not safe.

A movie about her life was made, called “A Woman Called Moses“.  She is an inspiration again, for standing up for what is right with bravery and courageous action.  After rescuing her family, the fact that she went back again and again, with a large bounty on her head for over 10 years makes her a monument to courage and determination.  She was also involved in helping women get the vote, working with Susan B Anthony.

“Believe in yourself and all that you are.  Know that there is something inside you that is greater than any obstacle” – Christian D. Larson

You could write story after story about amazing people who showed tremendous resilience and courage.  Who dug down deep within themselves to find their inner strength to live through trials and tribulations.  Who fought through the inner and outer darkness of their lives.

In fact, all of us have such stories within our own lives.  You may think that what you have done in your life doesn’t compare to the stories you have heard, the ones that you have labeled as heroes.  I am sure that if you were to talk with Malala Yousufzai, she would insist that what she did standing up in defiance to those who wanted to prevent her being educated, was nothing notable.  We are all Irena’s, and Harriet’s, and Malala’s.

Maya Angelou is another courageous woman, my hero.  Her writing and her wisdom are so inspiring.  One of my favorite quotes of hers, “I can be changed by what happens to me.  But I refuse to be reduced by it”.  We all face in our lives numerous times that test us.  Things can happen that can shatter you, that can pierce your soul.  But nothing that happens can reduce you to something less that you are.

“A strong woman knows she has strength enough for the journey, but a woman of strength knows it is in the journey where she will become strong” – Unknown

Like the water in a lake.  Something can cause large ripples that disturb your peace, that shatters your emotions.  The cause of the disturbance, like a large rock, might sink to the bottom of your lake, your soul.  It might forever change you, but it does not reduce you.

You still have the power to return to your inner and outer peace.  To continue to learn, grow, and transform your life.  To be curious as to what else is possible in your life.  To be an intelligent, courageous, loving woman who teaches others by being her best possible self.

Journal prompts:

• What are your dreams, visions, your life purpose?
• Are you on track to bring them into reality and complete them?
• Have you allowed distractions to sidetrack you?
• Are you unclear on what your life purpose is or how to bring it into reality?

Say YES To New Adventures

It all begins and ends in your mind.  What you give power to, has power over you, if you allow it.

  – Unknown

So how do you work with your mind to change your story?  You acknowledge that you are where you are in your story because of how you did, or did not use your power.  You realize that while you can’t control every challenge that happens in your life, you can control your response to it.  That is where your power to control your story originates – how you respond.

Allowing people inside your life is a beautiful thing.  Letting go of people who drain your spirit is another beautiful thing you can do for your life.  The key to being happy is knowing you have the power to choose what to accept and what to let go.

  – Dodinsky

First step is to silence the mind.  The subconscious mind is so busy trying to distract us from our real story.  It wants us to get lost in the stories of who our parents said we were.  Of who our friends and relatives expect us to be.  But our true story is waiting in our hearts to be re-discovered.  To be released from the cage that we put it in when we were small children. 

Meditation is a great way to learn to silence the mind.  Visualization is another great way to give the mind something structured to do, so that it will let our heart and soul communicate with us.  For me, my heart and soul communicates best in my dreams.  Many of my poems and best blog posts come from ideas in my dreams.

The soul usually knows what to do to heal itself.  The challenge is to silence the mind.

  – Unknown

Second step is to let go of trying to control things that you have no control over.  To let go of what you can’t change.  Which usually means that we are trying to control the behavior of someone else.  Or control things over which we have no power in the first place. 

In our life story we sometimes have to climb a high mountain pass.  We are supposed to travel up over the pass and back down the other side.  As we follow our road over the mountain, we may find the road has been washed out.  We might find the road has had a rock or mud slide.  Maybe a bridge is out, or there is a raging forest fire.  We might have to detour around whatever the roadblock is.  That doesn’t mean that we drag all of those rocks, mud, broken bridges or burning bushes with us, as we go down the other side of the mountain.  We leave that roadblock on the road.  It is not our business to fix the road.  It is not our burden to control the journey and demand that the road be repaired before we continue across the mountain.  Our business is to simply travel to our destination by any means possible.  It is in the traveling that we learn, change, adapt and transform.

One of the happiest moments in life is when you find the courage to let go of what you can’t change.

  – Unknown

Third step is to really, truly, believe from the bottom of your soul, that you are unique, no one in the entire universe is like you, and that is how it is supposed to be.  Stop trying to fit in a mold.  Stop trying to be Martha Stewart in the home, and Oprah at work, and Marilyn Monroe in the bedroom, all rolled up into one amazing super woman.  Don’t try to make yourself live out someone else’s story.  Live your own.  

You weren’t made to replicate, obey or stand in the shadow of another person.  You were made to stand in your own power and find the truth in your soul..

  – Lonerwolf

Fourth Step is to realize that while we all need a helping hand once in a while, nothing will destroy our power to live our own story faster than having the habit of depending on others.  Just like a tree that grows in the forest, we must grow deep roots to support our upward growth.  If we start leaning on the trees that we are planted by, when the storm comes into our life our roots will not support us and we will crash to the ground.  The unfortunate thing about our crash is how we damage those next to us as we fall.  We must learn to stand up alone and be an original.

Nothing else so destroys the power to stand alone as the habit of leaning upon others.  If you lean, you will never be strong or original.  Stand alone or bury your ambition to be somebody in the world.

  – Orison Swett Marden

Fifth Step has to do with your relationship with yourself.  Really understanding what real self love and self trust is all about.  Not having these vital areas in balance in your life is what leads to most of our broken, damaged relationships – with friends, with family, with our spouse, with our co-workers at our job,  It enters into how people treat us, how we communicate our needs, wants and desires, and how we are perceived in the world.

The relationship with yourself sets the tone for every other relationship you have.

  – Jane Travis

Sixth Step is your relationship to others and the world.  You can’t make everyone happy and it isn’t your job to do so.  There are always going to be people who say that you are “not enough” – not good enough, not pretty enough, not rich enough . . .  and so on.  Those judgments are on them.  They want to feel better by having their own problems being pushed off on to you.  It is not your job to judge them back.  To think that you have to show others what kind of “bad” people they are.  Their true colors will come out without your help or assistance.  Don’t blame others for your life, and don’t accept the blame for how they are living their own life.

Give.  But don’t allow yourself to be used. 

Love.  But don’t allow your heart to be abused. 

Trust.  but don’t be naïve. 

Listen.  But don’t lose your own voice.

  – thisislovelifequotes. net

There are more steps, breadcrumbs that you find along your journey.  It all begins with a simple decision.  Is this DAY ONE, or is this ONE DAY?  You decide.  What’s your story?

Discover Your True Story

You tell me to quiet down cause my opinions make me less beautiful.  But I was not made with a fire in my belly so I could be put out.  I was not made with a lightness in my tongue so I could be easy to swallow.  I was made heavy – half blade and half silk.  Difficult to forget but not easy for the mind to follow – Rupi Kaur

Life gives us a lot of experiences.  They run the whole emotional scale.  You fall from ecstatic joy to pain that leaves you whimpering in the corner, wishing that death would come and take you away from it.  Life gives you the experience of Heaven, Hell and every realm between.  Like clay you are formed and molded by your life experiences.  Like clay you go through the fire.

But you have a choice about what that fire does to you.  You can choose to become rigid, brittle and defined by those fires, so that everyone you meet hears about your horrific life.  Or you can choose to become refined by the fire, tempered by it and made stronger.

Why would you fear the fire?  Because when you are refined by the fire, it exposes you.  You become vulnerable. You have to own the good, the bad, and the ugly and beautiful parts of who you are.  To be ok to be perfectly, imperfect.

People will see the ugly parts of you, and you have to acknowledge that that is part of who you are.  You can’t deny it, you can’t make it be less than it is, you can’t say it doesn’t exist, and that somehow that ugly bit of you is actually someone else’s fault.  You can’t say I lost my temper, and it was that person’s fault.  That they deserved your going nuclear on them.

The fire shines the light on you.  If you stand up in that light and acknowledge who you are, then you have the opportunity to transform it.  You can release the negativity, shift it, and change it into something better.

She wasn’t looking for a knight, she was looking for a sword – Atticus

You might have this mix of fairy tale dreams where you want someone to take care of you, and yet at the same time you fiercely do not want someone to fix you.  You are not looking to be fixed.  You are not broken, or damaged, or needing to be rescued.

That is judging your experience without knowing the whole story.  That is making assumptions of what your dreams are made up of.  That is not understanding what your destiny is preparing you for.

You don’t need a hero, you are one.  What you need is a sword to cut out of us all of the parts that do not serve you, and do not belong as part of you.

Promise yourself that you can and will do better.  Hold yourself to not looking back.  Learn from the past but don’t live there.  Leave the baggage at the airport and travel lightly through life.  Anything that shattered you wasn’t meant for you.

You have this habit sometimes of holding on to something that doesn’t serve you.  You stay in the job, where you’re experiencing bullying, where you’re put down because you believe in some way it is true.  You stay in the job where you are experiencing harassment because you tell yourself you need “this” job.  You stay in a relationship that burns your soul, sacrificing yourself because they say they love you even when their actions tell you it is a lie.

Don’t continue to dance on the broken glass, thinking that you can somehow fix it.  It will just slice your soul and shred your spirit.

You can’t let other people tell you who you are.  You have to decide that for yourself – Unknown

At some point you have to change the situation.  Instead of being battered by the storm, you have to become the storm.  In order to thrive you have to become fearless in the pursuit of what sets your soul on fire.  You have to put on your life jacket and abandon the sinking ship, with the knowledge that you will be okay.

It might not be today or tomorrow, but the storm will always play itself out.  The sun will shine again.  You are valuable, you are a Goddess, and you must firmly believe that with all of your heart and soul.

She was powerful, not because she wasn’t scared but because she went on so strongly, despite the fear – Atticus

This kind of power comes from the place of not needing anyone to validate who you are.  To get to that space, you have to have gone through the refining fires.  You have to have exposed your vulnerable places, your ugly thoughts and actions.  You have brought the light to all of the dark corners of your heart.  When you have faced who you really are without the masks, without the excuses and justifications, fear gets burnt out of you.

Fear is a choice, and you can choose not to live at its address any longer.

When we accept who you are, you lose false pride.  When you own “this is who I am” fear loses its grip on you.  You are ready.  You are willing.  It is time to go out and fight for your dreams.  You no longer feel that you are obligated to prove your worth to anyone, and if they are demanding that you do so, you walk away.

Once upon a time you were a little girl with big dreams that you promised you’d make real one day.  Don’t disappoint yourself – Unknown

Your Saving Grace Is To Be Your Own Hero

Can you imagine this conversation between two people looking out over the water and seeing a hand reach up out of the water?

Can’t you see she is drowning?

She’s just doing that for attention.

Someone should help her.

If we acknowledge her, then she’ll never stop.

I think she is in danger.

She’s just feeling sorry for herself.

It’s too late now.  She is gone.

Why didn’t she ask for help?

This conversation plays out in all of our lives at some time.  For me it was my daughter was close to two years old,.  She wasn’t talking.  Literally no words.  She had sounds, so she wasn’t mute.  She just didn’t say mama or dada or anything.  I had taken her to doctors and they determined that physically there was nothing wrong.  She could hear fine.  She understood what you were saying, she just couldn’t communicate back.  So they said I should force her to talk. That she wasn’t talking because I gave her want she was trying to ask for.  They said, “When she was indicating that she wanted something, don’t give it to her unless she says the word”.  So we had a painful few months of following the doctors directions.  Then I took her back and demanded to see some specialist.  This issue was not that she didn’t want to say the words, the issue was that something wasn’t connecting correctly.

So we saw the specialist, and they couldn’t figure out anything that was wrong.  So they told us to put her in daycare.  They felt she wasn’t around enough children.  Even though she had an older brother, cousins and friends her age from church – that wasn’t sufficient.  So we put her in daycare,  Another bad decision as it made her stand out.  When they were sharing in circle time and she couldn’t verbalize her sounds into real words, she became even more withdrawn.  So again, back to the doctors.  Finally they authorized speech therapy.,  The area we lived in had a school she attended for four hours a day.  They had a two to one ratio of speech therapist teachers who worked with her and the other children, who all had some sort of speech disability.  Within 6 months she had a 100 word vocabulary and she was finally able to express herself.  It took me one whole year to get her the help she needed.

I felt like I was having that conversation with those doctors, that I typed above  I knew she had a problem and they were not listening or helping.  They were just making things worse.  Fortunately I kept after them until she got the help she needed.  She had delayed speech, and it was an inherited condition.  I discovered later that one of my grandfathers daughters from his first marriage had the same thing happen with one of her grandchildren.  And my daughter had the same thing happen with a couple of her own children.  It was not that she was doing it for attention.  It was not that trying to help her get what she wanted but couldn’t tell us, was just encouraging bad behavior.  She was asking for help.

Ships don’t sink because of the water around them; ships sink because of the water that gets in them.  Don’t let what’s happening around you get inside you and weigh you down.

  – Unknown

Have you ever been the person asking for help?  Did it feel like people were watching and talking, but no one could hear you through the water?  This happened to me when I was 28 years old.  I had been diagnosed with Glaucoma.  They didn’t want to do surgery because I was so young.  A lot of times when you are young and healthy, when they do laser surgery on your eyes, your eyes think that the surgery is a problem and “repair” the surgery back to what it thinks is the normal way for the eye to be.  So we were trying out three different drugs.  The first on didn’t work at all.  The second one had a side effect of making me suicidal.  I could tell it was making me depressed and giving me dark thoughts.  I was struggling with it, but it was making me afraid to talk about it.  I finally was able to tell the doctor what was happening and he put me on the third drug.  Due to different side effects I ended up doing the surgery.

I was talking to my husband about the second drug and asking him if he couldn’t see what was happening.  He said, that he could see it, but was so afraid of putting me over the edge I was balanced on that he did nothing.  We talked about it for some time.  I explained, that what that did was to make me feel like he didn’t care.  That even if what he said or did was not the perfect thing, at least I would have known that he was trying, that he cared.  Instead I felt abandoned and that he didn’t care about me.  Like the woman in the story, I felt like I was reaching for help and he was just watching me drown.

We all have bad days.  We all witness others having bad days.  Sometimes those bad days turns into weeks and months and years.  We are crying out for help.  We feel abandoned.  We all watch it happening to someone we know or love, and we don’t know what to do.  So we do nothing, or we get bad advice from experts and do the wrong thing.  What we need to do is go to divine source.  The divine source speaks to us in our hearts.  When we reach out to others from that space, even if what we do is not the perfect thing to do, they see that we are trying from a space of love and compassion. Not from a space of judgment, or making someone be wrong. 

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water.  When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do, you will sink and drown.  Instead you relax, and float.

  – Alan Watts

We need to realize when we are drowning and ask for help.  We need seek deep within to find what it is that is currently trying to be exposed and released from our life.  A wrong belief that is holding us hostage.  A drug or alcohol addiction.  A relationship that is killing us, but we won’t let go of.  That we are trying to save someone, who is just taking us down with them.  When we try to save broken people, we need to take care that we don’t cut ourselves on their broken pieces.  So many patterns, addictions, issues of self sabotage.  They need to be released so that we can again relax and float.  Life sometimes takes us to the edge, but it is always within our control, it is our choice to be a victim, or we can decide that this life can and will be better and we are a thriver. 

Life sometimes takes you into troubled waters not to drown you but to cleanse you.

  – Unknown

 So when we find ourselves in deep water.  Relax and float.  Reach out for help, but always remember it really comes down to being our own hero.  No one else can fix us, and we can fix anyone else.  It is always an inside job. 

Chaos Is A Key To Change And Transformation

In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.

  – Deepak Chopra

Chaos is actually a good sign.  It tells you that you are about to have a breakthrough.  I love this photo – we literally have the elephant in the room.  It is being ignored and creating chaos.  Chairs and tables are being destroyed, dishes crashing to the floor, and she is sitting there like “what?”  Chaos is one of the keys that tells us things are about to change.  We have the ability to choose in this situation.  We can continue to ignore the “elephant in the room” or we can acknowledge it and start to deal proactively with the changes happening in our life.

All great changes are preceded by chaos.

  –  Unknown

All of the great inventions have come from a place of chaos.  When you think outside of the box, it is in a place of chaos.  All of the possibilities are buzzing around your head, all trying desperately to get your attention. It is being willing to be told you are stupid and foolish to think that you can be an agent of change.  A chaos agent.  Someone who stirs things up.  Look at the disruptors currently bringing change in our world.  3D printing is on the brink of being able to create organs that can be used to transplant and save lives.  They are creating car parts, hearing aids, and implants.

Madness is somewhere between chaos and having a dream.

  – R.M. Drake

Soon every piece of personal information, drivers license, credit cards, bank accounts, your id card for work will all be digital and take just your thumb print or a scan of a chip located within your body.  Virtual reality will soon impact with endless possibilities beyond gaming.  Our houses will soon be totally controlled with the “internet of everything”.  More and more of everyday life will become fully automated, such as self driving cars.  Think of every science fiction movie or book you have read and we are quickly approaching the implementation of that fantasy becoming our reality.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join in the dance.

  – Alan W Watts

When life is crazy and the chaos is driving us mad – faith in the divine plan gives us an anchor.  It keeps us steady in the raging storm, so that when the storm has passed, we can pick up the pieces of our life and carry on.  It gives us a vision to hold on to that can keep us calm  in the midst of the insanity.  And if we are courageous, we can let go of the expectations of how our life should be and see instead how our life could be.  When you let go of the expectations, you make space for something better.

Never mind your ideas of how things should look, your expectations of how things must be.  Life will scramble all of that into an unrecognizable chaos.  The difficulty, the joy, the privilege is in being undone and then creatively reshaping yourself into a form you never imagined could be so beautiful.

  – Amy Larsen

When the chaos creates frustration, it is because we have become confused.  A lack of clairity creates the frustration.  It is a poisonous emotion, stopping us from achieving our dreams.  We need to step out of this negative emotion, out of the darkness.  Release the frustration and get back into curiosity about what is happening.  Curiosity about what old belief we have outgrown that is expressing itself thorugh the frustration.  And get curious about what new something is being born into our life.

Life has dark moments and it is out of our darkness that we often find our greatest beauties and strengths.

  – Bryant McGill

 Chaos is only a problem when we get stuck in it.  If in every place we go, the elephant is in the room wrecking all of the furniture, then we need to seriously examine our life.  That kind of chaos is not a predictor of change, but rather an avoidance of making changes.  Chaos is a bridge to take us from where we currently are in our life, to where we are seeking to go.  A bridge makes the connection from one side ( where we are ) to the other side  ( where we want to be ).  You use it to travel across the river or lake, or across the ravine.  You don’t park on the bridge and live the rest of your life there, afraid to go forwards or backwards.  It is our self-identifying with the chaos, as though that is who we are, that will keep us in the darkness.  While life and chaos will give us those dark moments, it is not who we are.

Change is growth.  It is living life.  It is about recognizing and being conscious of what the journey is teaching us about ourselves.  Becoming conscious, becoming self aware.  It is recognizing the elephant is in the room.  Is it being self destructive and needing to be addressed?  Or is it just sitting there waiting to be called into action?