Life’s Storms
Revised 5/13/2019
I wrote this poem on a Sunday (see it at the bottom). It had been banging around in my head for a while wanting to be released. So, I took some quiet time while everyone was asleep and let it out. The entire poem is printed at the end of the post.
There is no growth without change. You’ve got to let go of some old stuff. And that can hurt. Often when I’m in the most pain, I realize it’s coming from my trying to control everything. Or resisting the changes that come with the progress. But you see that light . . ., that beautiful next level . . ., and that’s what you have to focus on – Ali Brown
I found the quote by Ali after I wrote the poem and was struck by how much of what I am trying to express in the poem is in her quote.
You have to release what no longer serves you. That could be the story that you have been telling yourself that holds you in chains of fear about success and failure. It could be the story that you tell yourself that you are not capable of being more. The stories you could be telling yourself go on and on. They are varied and unending, depending on what your life has been about so far.
This control is when you stand up on the ship of your own destiny and release the anchor holding you to your stories. You drop the weight that holds you in place. You open to the winds of change. You drop all of the baggage of blaming the world for where you are at this moment in time. You decide to take your control back – control of how you think, how you react.
You can’t calm the storm, so stop trying. What you can do is calm yourself. The storm will pass – Thimber Hawkeye
It takes a lot of courage to stand up to the storm of fears and doubts. To realize that as you set sail on your ship, that there will be those who you leave behind, because they are still chained to their own stories.
When I thought deeply about this I thought of Pompeii. The volcano was going to erupt. It had been giving signs of the coming destruction for months. The people who were awake and listening, left the island behind. But so many of the people didn’t believe what they were seeing on a day-to-day basis. And they left fleeing to safety too late.
I am sure that they fully believed the lies they were telling themselves, the false stories about how safety lay in staying – not in fleeing with nothing to their names, to untold dangers. No, for them staying was the only smart thing to do.
You, however, face your fears of not knowing how you will steer the ship, or even where the next safe harbor will be. You have the courage to face the fears of the unknown, to face the lies that you told yourself and make the right decision – to face and live through the changes that are coming.
There comes a time when you just have to listen to the music of your soul and set sail to the unknown. And so the journey begins.
Life’s Storms
Storms without a name whip the seas into a fury, winds screaming through torrents of rain.
Waves crashing against the shore, bring in lost and forgotten debris.
Stand tall on the deck of your ship, as the birds scatter beneath the howling winds,
Let it blow away what no longer serves you.
You feel the backlash of empty words with no truth, the shadows are winning.
No sunlight, every battle lost, and shadow is winning. No rescue.
The lack of love, the hunger for life is insatiable, an open mouth that wails to be fed.
You can’t undo what has been done, it doesn’t serve you.
Thunder rolls and lightning flashes exposing what still needs to be released.
Let it go out the door, don’t run after it as if falls off the deck and into the sea.
Feel the weight of the past, as the sounds of the anchor being lifted vibrate through your body,
The anchor being lifted from the bottom of the sea, the sound of your journey echoing onward.
Change, the anchor of our soul, it both drops into the sea, and is pulled back up into the ship,
Change moves us ever forward on the journey, unearthing the destination clue by clue, star by star.
Change reveals the next adventure, the next treasure that we are seeking,
Change reveals the next harbor in which to rest our soul
Bright morning stars, as day breaks open the dawn releasing the light, as it climbs the clear sky,
Light breezes blow as it fills the sails, with the dust blown clear, we see what has been done.
Every color sparkles as it plays upon the sea, as we awaken, transformed once more,
We hear the music of our soul, whispering as the journey begins again, echoing ever onward.
If you want to soar in life, you must first love yourself
If you want to soar in life, you must first love yourself.
“You have to love yourself because no amount of love from others is sufficient to fill the yearning that your soul requires from you” – Dodinsky
So many of you have put the cart before the horse when it comes to love. You spend all of your time “earning” the love of others by being who they want you to be. By doing everything in your power to make their life perfect. You put others ahead of yourself and at the end of the day, nothing turns out the way you wanted it to. You are left feeling like a failure, just “not good enough”.
There is a show on PBS called “Home Fires”. It takes place in England during WWII. It’s about a women’s group that contributes to the village and the war effort. In the first season there is one woman whose husband abuses her. Like all abusers he makes every time he loses his temper to be her fault. The real issue at hand for the story line is that he is a newspaper writer who can’t get enough work, so of course he takes it out on someone he is supposed to love.
A few of her best friends figure out what is happening, but at the point in history there really isn’t anything they can do about it. She is too ashamed to admit what is happening. The times that she struggles to fight back, he leaves her self-worth in even more tatters. At the end of the first season, one of her friends was successful in getting him a war correspondent job without him being aware of her having a hand in it.
He leaves the village to go to the front, and now his wife has the opportunity to start loving herself and building up her self-esteem. The hope being that she doesn’t fall back into the same situation when he returns. One of the underlying contributors of why women stay in abusive situations is that they don’t love themselves enough to gather up what remains of their self-worth and self-trust, to leave and not look back.
“Love yourself enough to take the actions required for your happiness. Love yourself enough to cut yourself loose from the ties of the drama filled past. Love yourself enough to move on” – Dr. Steve Maraboli
You may not be in such an extreme situation with your self-love, but you only have to listen to the comments you make to yourself, to know that it is something you can still do more work on.
When you live your life in such a way that reflects, you’re coming in last, you buy into a lie. A lie that loving yourself first will take away from loving others. A lie that says the only way to be worthy of self-love, is to prove that others love you first. How could you attract the love of others, if you don’t even love yourself?
Trying to in essence purchase the love of others by the self sacrifice of yourself, is like trying to fit the square peg in the round hole. You can push it, twist it, and pound the peg until it shatters, but it will never fit. It won’t fill that yearning from your soul, that begs you to put “love us” first.
5 Things to Quit – right now.
- Trying to please everyone
- Fearing Change
- Living in the past
- Putting yourself down
- Overthinking
You have the power to choose where you are going. You have the power to stop trying to get attention from those who hurt you most. You have the power to stop hating your body, your personality, and the pieces of you that don’t fit in the square hole.
You can start with loving yourself, saying “I love my thighs just as they are”, “I love my imperfect smile”, “I love that I snort when I laugh”, “I love me”. You can get the truth of the situation into your bones – nobody will ever love you more than you love yourself.
It is critically important to your health and happiness – both physical and mental – that you treat yourself right.
What if for the rest of this year you devoted yourself to loving you more? Your choices will change your life.
Make peace with your mirror and watch your reflection change. The loss of judgment in your eyes. The removing of the wrinkles of anxiety across the forehead, that you aren’t good enough. The curve of the smile of self-confidence, that says you are amazing, and you are rocking that outfit. The glow of inner peace and love that fills your space with light. And – LOL – Best hair day EVER!
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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Sex trafficking is the new American Slavery
#Sex_trafficking is the new American Slavery.
“People who are having sex with children are not johns and tricks. They are child rapists and pedophiles, so we should call them what they are” #Jada_Pinkett_Smith. We agree. If all men caught with an underage girls were prosecuted, jailed and labeled as sex offenders, it might make a dent in this horrible exploitation.
Finally some good news with the #FBI rescuing nearly 150 underage sex trafficking victims on Wednesday. The sting included children in Atlanta (which is known as a hub for human trafficking), Cleveland, Denver and Detroit. According to a 2014 study by Urban Institute, some traffickers in Atlanta make more than $32,000 a week.
This was a joint effort with the National Center for #Missing_and_Exploited_Children and local law enforcement. They were able to arrest almost 150 of those involved.
So many of these #children are lured away because they are looking for attention, unhappy in their lives at home and/or school. They are manipulated and exploited and it is heartbreaking for the girls and their families.
I hope that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is successful in getting these girls the help they so badly need to recover from having their childhoods stripped from them.
See more: http://www.cnn.com/…/14/us/sex-trafficking-sting/index.html…
Two hands working together
Redeeming the world sounds like a pretty humongous goal. We all look for ways to give back to our community, to #pay_it_forward. Social enterprise is something that we can participate in whether you want to enhance your own business into a social enterprise or spend your consumer dollars supporting the businesses who are a social enterprise.
If you were to make a list of businesses who are looking to redeem our world, who would be on that list? They are known as #social_enterprises and some may be well known and others you might not recognize. We encourage you to take a look and consider doing business with these social enterprises, who are working hard to redeem our world. There is a link at the end of the article for the Social Venture Network’s list. I am sure that googling can find even more companies.
More and more businesses and organizations are stepping up to #giveback to society. There are two ways they are paying it forward, through contributions to charities and through having a business that doubles as a social enterprise.
#Charities fill one kind of gap being filled of, “the give the man a fish”. They come to a problem with advocacy and policy changes. There is no money to be made in work of most charitable foundations. When there is a natural disaster, they can mobilize and get working much faster than social enterprise can.
With social enterprises, we have the gap being filled of “teach a man to fish”. They believe that what they create needs to create a deep and lasting impact. They want the beneficiary of their work to benefit long term. It is geared towards delivering long-term sustainable changes. They do this by commercializing the skills that the individual who needs assistance learns. They look at the problem and see how they can fix it at the best possible price, and maybe even get paid for the solution.
What we are advocating is the combination of the two hands working together. The right hand – without passion, without compassion, without drive we can’t create social change. The left – without advocacy, without policy, we can’t create social change. I don’t think the right hand or the left hand is better than the other. Combining them together just makes sense, many hands make short work as the saying goes. Sharing resources, values and working together we will serve the short term assistance that is needed and put things in place to see lasting long term change.
We saw this in our post a few weeks back. A college girl saw a short term need with the homeless in Detroit – it was cold and they needed jackets and sleeping blankets to keep warm. She took her skills and created a sample sleeping blanket that converts into a jacket. She then applied for a grant, which she won. She then taught and employed several homeless women to sew the jacket/sleeping blankets. They then had sponsors with local businesses to purchase the jacket/blankets to provide to those who needed them. The charity got the grant and sponsorship’s and provided the needed jackets/sleeping blankets. The social enterprise was created by her employing the homeless to manufacture the jacket/blankets.
We need to think outside the box of how things have always done. Everyone uses the once a year fundraising format. They have the
charity runs, the silent auctions with dinner, or the annual golf tournament. This just makes raising funds way to hard and too much work.
Instead lets think outside the box and look to innovate to create something new, different, and then apply a business model to it so that the service provided becomes self sustaining.
See more: http://svn.org/meet-our-members/featured-member-profiles
Cocks Not Glocks
The new mantra at the University of Texas? #CocksNotGlocks
I can honestly say that if my child was entering college this year, they would not be going to the University of Texas at Austin, Texas.
With all of the college shootings we have had, the tragic loss of life and emotional scars that those that were shot or were those who were standing next to them as the shots were fired – this ruling makes no sense to me.
“‘You’re carrying a gun to class? Yeah well I’m carrying a HUGE DILDO,'” Jin says in the group’s description. “Just about as effective at protecting us from sociopathic shooters, but much safer for recreational play.”
If the one student in Arizona that shot four people and killing one young man had not been carrying a gun, the altercation that broke out might have had a few cuts, bruises, and maybe a broken bone. It is extremely unlikely that he would have killed someone, creating the trauma for the families of the young men he wounded and killed, ruining his own life, his family forever impacted by what he has done.
It doesn’t make hundreds of students attending the school feel any safer. And they are protesting it in a unique way, with signs or sit-ins, but by “strapping gigantic swinging dildos to our backpacks.”
The professors are not happy about either, some in protest are leaving the school, saying they don’t feel safe to continue teaching there.
There have been incidents in every war where a soldier is killed by friendly fire. Our own government accidentally bombed a Doctors Without Borders site just a few days ago, and 12 medical workers and seven patients are dead. Police have accidentally killed innocent bystanders and their own. What do we think will happen putting guns into the hands of students with no training and then have a killing rampage start from some mentally ill person? How many more lives will be lost, how many young people will be living with the knowledge that they accidentally killed someone trying to protest themselves?
What do you think?
http://www.chron.com/…/campus-carry-ut-austin-dildo-dildos-…
Potential
I love this photo with this quote because when you are on the edge, it is a fine line between success and failure. Walking a tightrope means that you are putting it all on the line, because one misstep and you fall.
When you step out over the open air the only thing that you can do is to have absolute focus and intention on your goal. There is no turning back, and even though your heart is pounding and your stomach lurching, all you can do is keep going. – The glory is what happens when you reach the other side. OMG you can’t imagine the jumping for joy, and the screaming until your voice is gone happiness that is on that other side. Because you know that you totally went for it, and killed it, and I can’t believe that I really did it feeling that you get when you do something like that. You can’t feel any more alive than when you have achieved something that you knew you could do, but at the same time were scared to death to even try.
Potential is such a loaded word, because although it seems to have a high vibration, there is a bit of hope included in the word, which is not a high a vibration. Potential has the meaning of possibility, which leaves room for doubt. Being capable doesn’t mean that you will be, only that you can be. We normally don’t see our own potential, and try to discount it as not being that special. I think that is why the edge is required, because we need to be daring to realize our potential.
But at some point in your life, your purpose will hook you and you can’t not go in that direction. There are some people who turn their backs on this moment and they are the ones that live the lonely life full of regrets. But we are not those kind of people. We are the kind of people that scream a full throated yes! We are the kind of people who drag our friends and family along with us, and they come even though they think we are crazy, because we catch them on fire, so that they can’t help but burn with us. That is what being alive is about – it is about our purpose catching the world on fire and changing it just because we dared to live in full glory of our potential.
Potential
“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” – Leo Buscaglia
Has anyone ever asked you what’s wrong, you look sad, unhapppy or mad – but you didn’t feel that way? You were just lost in lost or concentrating on something and somehow the expression on your face wasn’t happy. I think that we can all at times be walking around in a mental fog, just not paying attention to not only how we might look, but just not seeing what is happening around us.
I have been researching charities today for a project I am working on and it is amazing the number of them looking not only for donations, but your volunteer hours to help them reach those in need.
We all have the potential to impact the lives of those around us, whether it is a simple smile, a listening ear, or reaching out via a local charity with an act of caring from our hearts. It doesn’t have to be money, although they all need that – it can be as simple as giving someone a ride to the store or medical appointment and back home. We all have the ability to give of ourselves in some way. Today reach out at least with a smile and make someones day a little better.
Potential
I believe that each of us has potential that we haven’t come close to realizing; that we are more intelligent than we think & that we are more creative than we can imagine. I believe our greatest achievements lie ahead of us & the happiest moments of my life are still to come. I believe through learning & applying what I am learning, I will be able to solve any problem, overcome any obstacle & achieve my goals!