Walking In Your Purpose Makes You Magnetic

Life is too short to not follow your passion and purpose in your life.  Passion and purpose are like the infinity loop, in that each one both feeds on and fuels the other.  When they are working in tandem, there isn’t anything that you can’t accomplish.  This is the space of the “high” where you feel invincible.  Where everything just falls magically and magnetically into place.  There is purpose in your searching, which is fueled by your passion.  You search for the answers in response to the hunger that both drives and fuels your soul. It begins when you get the smallest glimpse of your true potential.

The meaning of life is to find your gift.  The purpose of life is to give it away.   – William Shakespeare

That time when you were a little child, and you saw someone doing something that just grabbed you, and you thought I want to be that or do that when I grow up.  At that moment you saw your true potential.  At some point fear of failure, or being told that you weren’t talented enough to be that or do that – something happens that puts a cork in your desire.  You bottle it up.  You bury it deep inside yourself, because you are embarrassed that you ever had that thought.  Who did you think you were?

There comes a time when the need of releasing that cork from that bottle, cascades out of you like a river rushing to the sea.  This need is a palpable thing.  Your heart knows it needs to be released.  Your instincts keep calling to you to release it.  It keeps showing up no matter how we try to ignore it.  It just continues to transform itself over and over again.  It might show up at work one time, at your home life another.  With a loss of a loved one.  With the reconnection to an old friend.  It might show up in your spiritual life.  It keeps winding itself through your life, until you finally pay attention.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.   – Eleanor Roosevelt

Within every life, the things that require transformation, are the pieces of misinformation that you have adopted in your life as being true.  You probably don’t even know that they exist in your subconscious.  For example; If your parents were divorced when you were a child, you may subconsciously feel that if you had been a better child, they would still be married.  This might show up in your life with an intense desire to make everyone happy, to put yourself as last, to literally have the welcome mat on your face as people use you, and then leave you.  You surrender and abandon your dreams.

You have convinced yourself that the problem is that you just aren’t giving enough of yourself away.  If you just try harder you tell yourself, then you can make everyone else happy, and only then you will finally be happy.   You keep that dream bottled up.  You tell yourself that your vision of your true potential is unattainable.  That you must settle. That whole story is a lie, a falsehood. That story needs to be transformed.

There will be places where your self sabotage shows up.  Places where the shadow swings into action to stop you.  Going around the bend of the river, you may get damned up by debris.  Some busy beaver has blocked the flow and dammed up the river.  This debris is all of the obligations that you have loaded upon yourself.  The excuses, “I am too busy or don’t have the time” and “I have no money”,  falls into this bucket.

The question comes up, what is behind the “but” excuse for you to follow your dream?  You need to get curious.  You need to start removing the debris, and figure out where it is coming from.  Each of those sticks is tied to some false belief or assumption that you have to identify and then transform.

Recently there were newspaper headlines “Thames River now home to sharks, seals and sea horses, no longer biologically dead”.  After years of cleaning up centuries of pollution, the river has come back to life.  Just like cleaning up the Thames brought the river back to life, you need to “clean up your river” so that you can get back into flow with your passion and purpose, back into flow with your God given destiny.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.   – Socrates

At places it may seem as though you are motionless, frozen in place.  You have allowed the temporary artic blast from the nature of your fears, to freeze your river.  It may seem like a solid block of ice, but deep beneath the surface, it is still flowing to the sea.  It may have become a small dribble, but with the fires of your passion, you can melt the ice returning the river back into its full force.

Passion requires focused direction, and that direction must come from three other areas:  your purpose, your talents, and your needs.  – #sayquotable

Friends and family may try to sidetrack you, by diverting your river to their own benefit, but your need will find a way to get back on course.

At times we appear to be in flood stage, where the passion is so strong that you surrender to it.  It is at these times that you learn to trust in divine providence to take you where you need to go.  With the force of the floods, overflowing the course of the river, it will speed you past boulders that were blocking your path. Remember that all limitations, road blocks, and diversions are self imposed out of fear.  Choose to leap forward over every obstacle as a challenge, that you have in fact already conquered.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is not think, not wonder, not imagine, not obsess.  Just breathe, and have faith that everything will work out for the best.  It is in that space between the breathing in and out, that brief space of holding, that you hear the voice of the divine.  In this space you have the power to choose your response.  Are you going to run from the challenge of having a mighty goal in your life?  Are you going to deny your highest dreams and say that this is not your calling?  Are you going to create a disaster by not having lofty ideals to strive for?  Or are you going to reach for the stars, and really truly own that this starlight belongs to you and only you?

You are here not to shrink down less, but to blossom into more of who you really are.   — Oprah

Gratitude is so important to happiness. Be thankful for what you are now, and keep fighting for what you want to be tomorrow – always shifting and transforming towards the magnificence that is buried deep inside.  Everything changes, seasons come and go.  You turn around and suddenly you find half the year is over.. Everything on this earth is in a continuous state of evolving, refining, improving, adapting, enhancing…, changing.  You were not put on this earth to remain stagnant. You came here to reach certain goals.  To fulfill certain dreams.  To capture the highest ideal of who you are capable of being.  You came here to not only reach the stars, but to reach beyond them.

Leave Fear Behind You, Face Everything And Rejoice

Women who run with wolves have discovered something about themselves, that allows them to leave behind the fear that is expressed because of going outside the comfort zone.  See beauty in being able to walk alone or with the pack.  Because you are unafraid, you may be called names by those who will fear you.  Labels like defiant, incorrigible, impossible, wild and untamed by society.  Wear these labels with pride.

When you live with fear, you will always be “Finding-Excuses-And-Reasons” (F.E.A.R.)why you are not living the life you are yearning for. Why do you experience this type of fear? It comes from a lack of self love, self trust, and self care.

You don’t think that you have the courage; that you don’t deserve it; that you can’t have your cake and eat it too.  You have bought into being small.  Bought into not taking up a lot of space.  Bought into being unworthy.  It is not your true nature.  It is not who you are deep in your heart.  It is not who you are yearning to be.  Do not become an endangered species.  Do not muffle your soul for the sake of others.

For women who run with wolves, you have discovered S.E.L.F. which stands for Sacred-Empowered-Liberated-Self Care

She sees herself as a Sacred being

She sees herself as an Empowered being

She sees herself as a Liberated being

She sees herself as a Fearless being.

•  She runs with a vast community of souls, who hold and support her.
• She knows as a sacred being she is never, ever, truly alone. 
• She is honored as a wisdom keeper, an empowered being that has grounded herself into the earth. Her roots run deep into the earth and support the work she does in the world.
• She knows that she is a liberated woman who came to this earth to free those who have become shackled to the stories of not being good enough, pretty enough, or worthwhile.
• She is fearless because for her the word fear is a word of high integrity, because for her it means Face-Everything-And-Rejoice (a transformed definition of fear).

Her purpose is to remind others of their own sacred agreements they came here to fulfill. Of the love they have for each other. To free them from their self made chains and fulfill their own purpose in being here.

She knows that she can be grateful for each fear that is faced down and transformed into something wonderful. She is rejoicing because she is working with others out in the world to build a bridge to shift our world from the challenges we see happening today, into a place of unity, love and trust.

If you can change your definition of the word fear, you can change your world.

To fearless women, I am honored to be your sister.

Below is a copy of my poem which expresses these thoughts.

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.

The great spirit has honored the wolf with a voice that sings out in the darkness.
He honors the great spirit by singing to us,
“Do not be afraid, for you are not alone”
“I am here, and I remember you even if you have forgotten”.

Like the wolf I sing out to you, through my words on a page I say,
“I remember you, for we have traveled together before.”
I honor you that you have come again to do the great work before us.

Call out together with me as we gather our relatives that have forgotten their purpose.
Call to their minds our sacred agreement to meet at this time and place.
Whisper to them of the great love we have for each other and their hearts will remember.

Gather around as we build the bridge of knowledge and understanding.
This bridge will unite all peoples together in love
This bridge is shifting our world into a new age of unity, love and trust.

We are one,
One love, I love us
One trust, I trust us,
I honor our sacred agreements, I am here.

Face the fears that are keeping you locked out of your destiny. Unlock your cages and use those divine gifts with purpose to not only shift and change your world, but the entire world. Come and renew yourself. Find your voice and howl at the moon!

Choices, Chances, Changes

Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.

  – Ralph Waldo Emerson

At some point in our childhood we start looking at trying and failing, as being a loser,  because we did not do it perfectly the first time we tried.   A baby learns how to roll over; then crawl; then walk.  A baby learns how to say words.  Think of any 1 – 2 year old and they do not pronounce each word perfectly.  I remember my boys saying truck, but the “T” blended with the “R” sounded like an “F” and peoples heads would turn when they said the word, like they were swearing.  My boys didn’t decide that because they couldn’t say the word perfectly the first time, that they would never attempt to say the word again.  A baby who stands up for the first time and then plops back down on their bum doesn’t decide that crawling is safer, so that is all they are going to do forever.

If you believe the doubts in your mind you won’t achieve the dreams in your heart.

  – Marinela Reka

A girlfriend and I were discussing this, and I thought that it must have something to do with peer pressure.  When we enter daycare or some other classroom experience and discover that some kids can do things better than we can.  At some point the comparison starts shutting us down.  We don’t want to risk the possibility of being wrong, so we don’t raise our hands when the teacher asks the class a question.  We put a label on not being perfect, as being a total failure.  In our minds we see kids with mean faces, laughing at us.  Or maybe we see our parents or teachers telling us that we are just stupid or dumb.  That we can’t learn anything.  That we will never be anything.

Failure is not the opposite of success; it’s a stepping stone to success.

  – Elli Stassinopoulos

What if we were to consciously try to change that meaning in our own head.  What if failure is part of success and something to be enjoyed?  Just as much as we celebrate crossing the finish line in a race as the winner, we were to celebrate crossing the finish line even 1 second faster than we had before, even if it was 100th place in the race? 

Winston Churchill had that kind of thinking.  I think that if he had been of a different mentality, WWII for England might have turned out differently.  One of my favorite quotes of his –

Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.

  –  Winston Churchill 

The reality of the situation is that each time we try something new, it is going to be full of things that we can do differently to be more successful the next time.  They say that it takes 10,000 hours to become a master of something.  So each time we do it, we are a little more successful.  We can look at what happened and determine what we can shift, take out, put it, tweak the next time to make it even better.

What makes someone talented successful?  Michael Jordon summed it up with,

I’ve never been afraid to fail.

    – Michael Jordon

We have to be willing to take the leap of faith off the cliff.  We may not land perfectly, but when we replay it in our mind, we can determine what we did, and what we can change.  Then we can go back up to the top and try it again. 

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.

  – Ken Robinson

Everything can be improved.  10,000 tries allows for an awful lot of improvements, step by step.  Step by step, we place each thing that didn’t work as the stones that we step on as we try it one more time.  Failures are part of the process of living a life that is worth living.  It is how we grow, by changing something and trying something new.  True success can only come from doing something new, failing at it and doing it again, just differently.

Never let success get to your head, and never let failure get to your heart.

  – unknown

Like the irritation to the oyster, which gets coated over and over again, each new thing we learn becomes a pearl of priceless beauty.  Can you look back at your life and say thank you, for the mistakes you made that taught you to laugh at yourself?  Those stories that felt painful at the time.  Now they are the funniest stories that you and your friends tell each other.  It always starts with, “Remember when I . . . ” and then ends with laughter.   

Don’t worry about failures, worry about the chances you miss when you don’t even try.

  –  Jack Canfield

How many opportunities in our life have we walked past, because we were afraid to try? There is nothing worse than a life that you didn’t even try to live.  That is where the true regrets in your life come from.  The things you did not do.

Love this quote (which didn’t have who wrote it, so unknown)

I AM STRONG

because I know my Weaknesses

I AM BEAUTIFUL

because I am aware of my Flaws

I AM FEARLESS

because  I learnt to recognize, illusion from Real

I AM WISE

because I learn from my Mistakes

I AM A LOVER

because I have felt Hate

and . . . ,

I CAN LAUGH

because I have known Sadness

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Wake Up and Live!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The distance between dreams and reality is called action – Unknown

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

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

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

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

Listen To Your Heart, Hear The Music Of Your Soul

“Listen to the wind, it talks. Listen to the silence, it speaks. Listen to the heart, it knows” – Native American Proverb

The visual here is of listening to nature. The wind, the silence of the deep night, that is the time our heart speaks. The mind quiets in expectation of what might happen. It waits in silence to see what the soul wants to be expressed. Then it becomes busy with plans and ideas and arguments for and against every thought.

“It’s the heart that knows the path, the mind is just there to organize the steps”– Jeff Brown

Your heart knows things that your mind can’t explain. When you drop down into your heart to listen, it is like listening to God, as he answers our prayers. There is a peace to it that is hard to explain. There are what I term “Kairos” moments, where the connection to mind, body and soul are wide open. Into the depths of the open space time stands still. There is an awakening, a sigh, a moment of seeing something out of the corner of the eye. In the space between the inhale and exhale of breath God speaks to us.

Like the stillness of a lake, where not even the breath of wind disturbs the surface. Then there is a single rain drop that hits the center of the lake, and the ripple slowly spreads out to lap at the shoreline. Then another drop, and another drop, a downpour begins. The ripples expand out and over each other. The surface of the water is in chaos. Each ripple ends at a different part of the shore, spreading out the details and nuances of the message. And suddenly our soul knows the answer that we have been seeking. All of this happening between the inhale and the exhale.

“Open your heart to hear the sweet, pure, positive and loving messages of your soul” – Sue Krebs 

You will need some time to take in all of the messages received. Time to process, to both reason and accept without reasoning. When the mind, body and soul are all on a wide open connection, it can seem overpowering. But like the music of the orchestra, if you just slow down your life for a moment, you can hear each instrument as it enters and leaves the music being played.

Disconnect from the electronics for a space of time; no T.V. no radio, no IPhone, no internet. Just sit in contemplation, remembering the messages, the conversation. Just sit, listen and accept. Know that what journey your soul is telling you to take, it is the perfection of divine timing to begin it now.

“Be bold enough to use your voice, brave enough to listen to your heart and strong enough to live the life you’ve always imagined” – Unknown

Your mind will bring in the chaos of the world . Churning your mind into a tornado, it can tear huge holes in your inner peace. It can bring up every mistake, every omission, every single thing that can be viewed as failure to tell you not to take this journey. Not to step upon that particular path. It whips you and beats you with dark images until guilt pours over your heart, drowning it in sorrow that you are unworthy, incapable of going on this journey. It creates confusion and makes you feel lost from your purpose. That you didn’t really understand the message correctly.

“Talk to yourself in two languages – what do I fear and what do I love – in order to balance the body and the soul” – Peter Shepherd

That is when it is vital to listen to your heart and soul. Your heart and soul does not lie about who you are, and why you are here. Listening to your heart you will uncover a wild uncharted world. You will learn what is meant for you, not what others want for you.

When you follow the directions of the cars guidance system, you are listening to someone else tell you how to travel on your life’s journey. You will travel to your destination the fastest route, but are those directions the right way to your destination? You won’t pull off the freeway and travel the backroads. You won’t stop at interesting small towns and walk through shops and find treasures. You won’t meet that interesting older couple in a diner that talk about what it was like when they were young. You will miss out on the life you are supposed to be living.

It takes boldness and courage to listen, because if you are truly open hearted and honest, there are shadows within all of us. This is when you have to be bold in using your voice. You have to be brave enough to stand up, even as you acknowledge that you are not infallible. At your hearts core is a strength that will help you stay in the fight of living the life you have always imagined you could have. It is easy to plan out this kind of life, but life has a way of bypassing your plans and going off in its own directions.

When nothing is making sense in your life, that is when you have to fall in love with every detail of what is happening. When you have to remember, that life is happening for you, not to you. It really comes down to attitude and perspective in the end.

“In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of the thing not meant for you” – Unknown

“People will want you to behave in a certain way, to make a certain choice because it reinforces the way they see the world.  But you have to do what’s right for you” – Unknown

As always, if you can’t figure out the questions to ask yourself, if self discovery is a puzzle you’ve yet to solve – contact us.  We are here for you.

Difficult Roads Lead to Beautiful Destinations

 The Spiritual Journey is the unlearning of fear and the acceptance of Love

  – Marianne Williamson

Taking action with the collaboration of your life purpose and your personal genius together, is part of being able to listen to your souls voice.  This unique collaboration forms your souls fingerprint.  When you can see yourself from the souls perspective, you remember what your life’s purpose is.  You remember why you came to the earth.  Your personal genius is the gift(s) that God gave you to accomplish your life’s purpose with.  There is no one else in the world with your unique gifts and skills.  

Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything.  Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you so you can be who were meant to be in the first place.

  – Unknown

Your soul has been speaking to you through your heart since you were conceived.  You may in fact remember it from when you were a child, before someone convinced you not to listen to it.  They put you asleep, so that you wouldn’t hear it.  You woke up the moment that you decided that you were not going to allow your soul to be insulted any longer.  When you decided to stop listening to those lies, and accepted that you are a divine gift to this world.  You decided to stop just existing, you decided to start participating in life. 

The only limits you have are the limits you believe.

  –   Wayne Dyer

It is when this desire to fully live our lives awakens that we start to seek out more knowledge.  Many people will use prayer or meditation as a part of this process.  It helps to quiet the mind, so that the soul can be heard.  Have you ever had a thought or a dream about something that came true?  Have you ever thought about someone and then within minutes they called?  Have you ever had “Deja Vu”, that deep feeling that you have experienced something before, when you know that it has never happened before?  These are all soul communications.  Every experience adds to your personal growth.  We begin to release all of the false beliefs that held us in cages.  We  remove the barriers of judgment of those different from us, that kept people distant.  We become curious. 

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart.

  –   Helen Keller

Now that you are conscious, your souls strong voice can lead you in your journey of transformation.  We are all born to be leaders, but sometimes we let life’s obstacles beat us down.  We need to learn to be resilient, and then help others to be resilient. What we learn is to stop trying to make things happen in a certain way that our mind has made up, and instead to let things unfold as they are supposed to.  We realize that we are on a divine timetable, not a human one.  We start to feel the connections to everyone and everything. There are lessons for us if we are willing to be still and watch them unfold in others peoples lives.  We see their troubles, their life patterns, their special gifts of the spirit.  When we can truly sift away all of the static of judgment away, we see them as God meant them to be.  It is so uplifting to see that, to be in that space.  It encourages us to try to be what God meant for us to be.

I think a spiritual journey is not so much a journey of discovery.  It’s a journey of recovery.  It’s a journey of uncovering your own inner nature. It’s already there.

  – Billy Corgan

Instead of being afraid and running our life from fears, we start shifting into that space of love more often.  We let the negative emotions pass through us with less hindrance.  We find that anger at the crazy or distracted driver ahead us sort of passes by like a cloud on a breezy summer day.  We are not seeking out conflict with others.  Those feelings of unrest and frustration that used to gather like a summer storm with thunder and lightning just break apart and disappear over the horizon.  We suddenly realize that those tiny frustrations with the kids, our spouse, that person who has the noisy habits at work – we suddenly realize that those negative emotions are less and less.   It is like the pressure that they were building up inside of us is just no longer there.  The itchy spot no longer is red, swollen, or angry looking.  It has faded away.

Spirituality can not be defined, but can be described as a journey to the center of the soul.

  – Perter Kemmsies

This doesn’t mean that we don’t have those days when we want to explode.  It is just that our attention is no longer constantly being grabbed by it.  We find ourselves dwelling more and more in the positive emotional vibrations.  We are all born to love everyone we meet.  Then fear is introduced to us, and we start being afraid of being hurt, being judged, being less than someone else.  So we protectively do that to others, to protect ourselves.  A spiritual awakening, or consciousness is stripping away those multitude of fears and putting the acceptance of love back into its place.  This is truly living in reality, because our journey has been to lead us back home to our purpose in being here now.

As with any journey, who you travel with can be more important than your destination.

  –  Unknown

The world has been waiting for you.  You are a catalyst to help others wake up, and become conscious of their life’s purpose.  To help them take action themselves.

We are spiritual beings on a physical journey . . .   There are no limitations, other than those that we impose upon ourselves.  Mastery is within our power – if we wish it to be.

  – Susan Barbara Apollon

This day, let us begin to live our purpose with passion, and give our sacred gifts to the world.

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working.  To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

  – William James

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Are You Ready To Be A Hero For Your Own Life?

Having Courage Is One Of The Six Impossible Things

“Alice: How long is forever?
White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second”

 – Lewis Carroll

Life seems like that sometimes. I remember years ago that we were driving north on I-5 in Oregon and we had just crested the top of a hill around Roseberg. You could see quite a way in front of you as the road sloped down into a valley. Ahead of us was a semi-tractor trailer and he ran over something that looked like shiny metal in the road. Immediately his tires blew and he started swerving and then the whole rig tipped onto its side.

For a moment it was like slow motion.  I could see so many small details as the whole scene played out like a movie. Then whoosh, time sped back up and my husband was pulling off the road and running back to make sure the driver was ok. The driver was just shocked by what had happened. But for me, it was the weirdest experience of time I have ever had. It was like the rabbit said, forever came in just one second.

“I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then”  – Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“May I have the courage today to live the life that I would love.  To postpone my dream no longer.  But do at last what I came here for and waste my heart on fear no more” – John O’Donohue

Courage is being in love with the anticipation of what comes next, even when we have no idea what that might be.

We Are Stronger Than We Know

Awaken To Your Soul’s Destiny

It took me years to find the magic of self transformation.  Each transformation I go through, awakens me a little more. It is a personal and sacred journey each time.  Each time I get curious about something, I know that my soul is sending me a new message to wake up.  It’s time to make another transformation, another change, another shift in my life.

I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me.

  – Joshua Graham

I now know that I no longer have to walk through the dark night of the soul, to transform my life.  I think about the experiences in my past, and what I learned going through each experience of death and rebirth.  It is the death of something that needs to be released, something that no longer serves me but rather belongs to the old sleepwalking me.  It is the rebirth of the real me.  The parts of me that I hid deep within.  It could be something about myself that I disowned as a child.  It could be the dream that I was told wasn’t possible coming back to life.  It is the realization that I am whatever I choose to become.

I realized that strong souls are forged living through the fires of hell.  That the fire itself is healing, The fires may feel like they are consuming us, but they are refining us.  They burn off the false truths that we cling to.  Like false messiahs they promised they would keep us afloat, but it was all illusion.  They were shown to be false prophets of our subconscious, seeking to keep our souls bound, unmoving in chains.  The fires consume the false beliefs, freeing our souls rise up from the ashes like the phoenix.  We rise up  with wings of faith and soar into a brightly shining divine destiny.  

What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.

  – Charles Bukowski

While I prefer to live the rest of my life, proactively seeking transformation, I can still honor the forges of hell for the deep truths that they provided.  I am climbing up to the top of the next mountain summit, to view the next horizon of transformation.  Within each new transformation, there is a pattern that reappears in every persons life.  This pattern weaves itself through the tapestry of our life.  In one corner we have the scene of our home and family life.  In another section of the tapestry we find our employment or career.  In another scene we see the health of our physical body, while another reflects the health of our spiritual body. 

In all these scenes there is a common thread that winds through.  For myself, for years it was the fear of being seen.  What is so interesting is that I discovered this thread came from my mother and was actually her own pattern.  When I realized that it didn’t belong to me, it was as though the thread dissolved, and could no longer be located in my life tapestry.  We all have threads in our tapestry that don’t belong to us.  They belong to friends and family.  We need to pull and release these threads back to their true owners.

Other common threads or patterns in the tapestry are my own.  My fears, which hold me back.  They are like the loose hairs that thread and wind themselves into your laundry.  The fears wind around and through the patterns of the cloth.  Have you ever taken a item of clothing out of the dryer only to find stray hairs wound into the fabric of your clothes?  It isn’t part of the material, but it somehow has wound itself into the material.  When you pull on it, it will break, but it is really hard to get all of the hair out of the material.  That is what these patterns of fear are like.  We pull at them, and break them up.  But there always seems to be a part of them still there. 

I have a need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.

  – William Lloyd Garrison

There are also “not enough” threads which are the spaces were the material creates these little pills – the thread gathers into these little knobs, which affect the look of the item.  They are formed from abrasions in day to day life.  Places where we felt judged, not appreciated, ill-used.  These “not enough” threads get created from stories we have told ourselves all of our lives.  These stories, although we would swear are true, are in fact illusions.  When we get curious and start examining why we are rubbing our life the wrong way, we are able to shift these stories.  When patterns are broken, we transform the chaos into new beliefs.  Beliefs of being strong minded; strong souled; strong bodied; and strong hearted.  An awakened soul.

The most beautiful people I’ve known are those who have known trials, have known struggles, have known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.

  – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

The reason people awaken when they do, is because they have finally stopped agreeing to things that insult their soul.   They wake up to the fact that they are no longer owned by the desires outside the body, but have awakened to their true nature.  Their heart is on fire, and they burn off the chains that have been holding them in place. 

Be true to life by being true to your purpose.  As you become present and thereby total in what you do, your actions become charged with spiritual power.

 – Eckhart Tolle

We are in fact spiritual beings, that are awakening to our purpose in becoming human.  We turn inward to remember why we are here and what we came to do. 

Go, knock at the door of your own heart.

 –  Rumi

That is where you start looking for your answers.  Enlightenment is a destructive process because we have to let go of things, stories really, that we have told our sleeping selves were true.  With each awakening we leave behind something or someone.  It takes courage to tear down the stone walls that we built to keep ourselves asleep.  Those stones were hidden deep within us, like unseen anchors they held us in place.  With enlightenment, we begin cutting through the iron chains with a sacred energy that comes through our divine connection.  Heating up the links until they snap apart, setting us free.

It takes courage to endure the sharp pains of self discovery, rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.

  – Marianne Williamson

By realizing who we are at our deepest level, we find our personal genius.  That unique gift that the divine gave us, is like the fingerprint of our soul.  No one else has the same personal genius that we have.  Each personal genius is required to fulfill their life purpose and ignite their passions into action.  We are all like individual puzzle pieces sent to the earth to fulfill a divine purpose.  That we why some of us feel the force of Rumi’s words, “do not go back to sleep.”  Because the world is waiting on each of us to fulfill our divine purpose.

This Universe is not outside of you.  Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you already are.

 –  Rumi

Transformation, is a process.  If we fail to involve all of the steps in the process, what we end up with is temporary change.  We change for a few weeks, or maybe a few months, but eventually the rubber band of will power will snap and we will return to the previous habits and lifestyle.  Change is temporary.  Transformation is required to truly shift our life, our DNA, into a totally new being.  With each one of us that awakens, our gifts bring us one step closer to universal peace and harmony.

Behind the mask of ice that people wear, there beats a heart of fire.

  – Paulo Coelho

So be curious, and take that first step down the path to awaken.  Then be curious and take the next step to enlightenment.  Then be curious and take the next step to transformation. Then be curious and take the next step to the next horizon.  Then be curious and awaken just a little more.  Get curious and become even more enlightened and transformed again and again.

The meaning of life is to find your gift, the purpose of life is to give it away.

  – Joy J Golliver

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Can Life Be A Daring Adventure?

I have had on my desk for several years a large rock on which is inscribed, “It is not the destination, It is the journey”.  We think that accomplishing our big dreams or goals in life is the point.  But really that isn’t true.  There will always be a new destination, dream or goal.  It is who you become on the way to the destination. Every daring adventure is really all about the transformation.

Our brains will try to convince us not to go on the daring adventures.  It will insist that we have limitations.  It will try to close us off from transforming our life.  It tries to convince us that transformation will affect our very survival, that we can’t exceed the boundaries that it deems by logic to be safe and secure for us.

Getting our brain and heart to effectively communicate is a difficult process for most of us.  Take the analogy of the  shoreline here in the photo.  The sand is the logic of the brain.  The waves the emotions of the heart.  There is a point when the waves come up against the sand and they blend together.  That is the space that we are looking for, in having this internal conversation between the logical brain and the emotional heart..  That moment of overlap in which the different perspectives can be viewed.  A unity of understanding can be achieved in that moment of overlap, when the two meet energetically – the influence of chaos from the emotions with the logical rigid mind, which is demanding that we stick to the known rules and do not go exploring.

This is one of the things that we will be exploring in our upcoming seminar on “Living A Transformational Life”.  There is a wide difference of meaning between change and transformation.  When we change our lives, the majority of times it just doesn’t last.  We go on a diet, lose the 20 lbs and then less than a year later, the 20 lbs has crept back on.  Change is primarily achieved with willpower.  The problem with will power is that it is short lived.  At some point the rubber band that we have stretched out snaps back or breaks.  Then we are back to square one in the changes we had made. 

Transformation on the other hand, alters us to the point that we no longer have the option to return back to what we were before.  Once the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis it can’t return to the caterpillar’s body, no matter how much it might want to.  The transformation process has altered the DNA and physical form.  There is no way to return to that old body.

Some of the concepts that we will be exploring with the webinar are the acronym of FACES, being:  Flexible, Adaptable, Coherent (resilient), Energized and Stable.  It is about creating opportunities in the sea of potential, and seeing the potentialities on the plains of possibility.  About movement, about flow, and the charge of being truly alive.  It is about collaboration through creating harmonies out of differences.  Like the waves upon the sand, we will come together honoring the differences in our lives.  We will be linking the brain and heart together to create something new and different for each of us.

Is your life a daring adventure?  Come to our webinar and learn how to disolve the boundaries that have imprisioned you off from your heart and souls desires.  Listen to the words of William Ward:

“The adventure of life is to learn. 

The goal of life is to grow. 

The nature of life is to change. 

The challenge of life is to overcome. 

The essence of life is to care. 

The secret of life is to dare. 

The beauty of life is to give. 

The joy of life is to love.” 

 Ask yourself some great questions:  Where are you now?  How do you feel about it?  Where do you want to go?  How would you like to get there?  In what manner are you now traveling there?  What steps can I take?

Events

Injustice Anywhere Is A Threat To Justice Everywhere – MLK Jr.

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed.  If people all over the world would do this, it would change the earth”  – William Faulkner

Kym Worthy is a true Lemonademaker.  She inspires me because she truly makes a difference.  She changed not just her local county that she worked in, she really changed cities around the entire United States.  She was like water.  She went around obstacles, she broke up boulders in her way, she flooded the media, she stormed through anyone and anything standing in her way and got justice for rape victims who had been waiting for it for as long as 30 years.  She is my hero.

“There be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protect”  – Elie Wiesel

Her story starts back in 2009 when she was an assistant DA with Wayne County in Michigan.  In the summer of 2009, Rob Spada who worked in her office was taking a tour with local police through an evidence warehouse.  Passing by rows upon rows of white cardboard boxes he asked what they were.  He was told they were rape kits.  When he pulled down four random boxes he discovered that they were all unprocessed rape kits – 11,341 kits, some more than 30 years old (statute of limitations is 20 years).

In the past half-dozen years, backlogs of untested rape kits have been discovered in Memphis, 12,000; Cleveland, nearly 4,000; Tulsa, 3,783; Milwaukee, 2,655; Dallas, 4,144; San Diego, 2,873; Miami, 2,900; Honolulu, 1,500. Smaller cities are not immune, either. Kansas City, Missouri, had 1,324 backlogged kits; Tempe, Arizona, more than 500; Flint, Michigan, 246.

“When injustice becomes law, rebellion becomes duty” – Unknown

Rob Spada contacted Kym Worthy in his office and told her what he had found.  She first wrote to then Detroit Police Chief Warren Evans requesting a meeting to discuss how to proceed.  When she didn’t get a response, she wrote Chief Evans again, adding, “It is imperative that your Department move on this as soon as possible.” Again, nothing.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”  – Desmond Tutu

Not one to stop at no answer, the story was leaked to the newpaper resulting in “Rape Evidence Shelved?” as the front page of the Detroit Free Press on September 22, 2009.  Worthy put together a plan for her office to take the lead on testing the kits, but then Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano, who controlled her budget, shot it down. The county simply couldn’t afford it, he said, and it was really a problem for city hall and the police, not the county.

Kym is not a woman who takes no for an answer.  What she did next was to spearhead a national movement for reform.  In May 2010, at the invitation of U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), she testified about the backlog before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.  Later that year, the research arm of the Department of Justice gave Worthy and her partner agencies a grant to test 400 random kits, to provide a statistically significant snapshot of what was at stake, and then in April 2011, the agency followed up with a $1.5 million grant to address the backlog.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”  – Unknown

To test all of them, Worthy estimated she’d need about $17 million (the lab work ran $1,000 to $1,500 per kit). On top of that, she intended to investigate every single case, even those that didn’t end up having meaningful forensic evidence. But she had only three sex-crime investigators on her staff, the police department had as few as six.

“One person can stop a great injustice.  One person can be a voice for truth.  One person’s kindness can save a life” – Nicky Gumbel

The nonprofit Detroit Crime Commission—which, on behalf of Worthy’s office, had negotiated the cost of testing down to $490 per kit—joined with the Michigan Women’s Foundation to launch what organizers believe was the first-ever crowdfunded campaign for a government program, called Enough SAID (Sexual Assault in Detroit).

“An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished equation”  – Mary McCarthy

They received donations from everyone and everywhere.  A local canasta club started donating the pot from its weekly game; the Galentine’s Book Club kicked in $525. In October 2015, a coalition of African American businesswomen held a fundraiser that leveraged the rivalry between the University of Michigan and Michigan State football teams to net more than $30,000. Sheryl Sandberg donated an unsolicited $25,000 to the cause. To date, Enough SAID has raised $1.5 million in private contributions.  by the beginning of 2016, $8 million had been allocated to Enough SAID by public bodies ranging from the state attorney general’s office to the Michigan legislature.

Worthy didn’t just rustle up money; she also transformed the “entire culture of law enforcement,” as her deputy Spada puts it. In his 20-plus years at the prosecutor’s office, he says, “I’ve seen a change in how police approach sexual assault victims. That’s been brought about by Kym, in how she attacked the problem and let it be known publicly that society had certain kinds of assumptions about what a victim would act like or be like.”

“If you look at any other group of people suffering injustice, women are always in the worst situation within that group”  – Salma Hayek

Worthy also has spearheaded the push for concrete legal and procedural reforms. Michigan law, enacted in 2014, requires that rape kits move through each level of law enforcement according to a mandated timeline—three months from start to finish—and both police and healthcare professionals must notify victims about their right to obtain information about their own kits.

“The time is always right to do what is right”  –  Martin Luther King Jr.

I believe that Kurt Cobain stated the problem of rape many years ago.  Kurt Cobain said, “Rape is one of the most terrible crimes on earth and it happens every few minutes.  The problem with groups who deal with rape is that they try to educate women about how to defend themselves.  What really needs to be done is teaching men not to rape.  Go to the source and start there.“

See the full article which includes ones rape victims story of getting justice 15 years later.  This story was first published by Elle and I found it with an article in NationSwell.

Do you see in your own life where injustices were tolerated by yourself and others?  Be inspired for follow in Kym’s footsteps.  She got creative.  She raised awareness.  She didn’t let the matter go away.  Even though her journey took years to complete, she stayed true to her vision and her conscience.