This Blog's For You!

Last week I battled low energy, I admit. In the endless quagmire of too much to do, too little time, I re-shifted a lot of priorities in my life to make room for several new ventures. I view them all as wonderful opportunities gifted to me by a higher source. That being acknowledged, it did make me want to sit down and have a conversation with said higher source about what exactly I spiritually agreed to. I have not questioned a thing from my higher source. Not when it spoke to me and told me to become a life coach, change my career and quit my job, marry my beloved, or move across the country. I honored each request, sometimes puzzled by the implications it would have on my life (What do you mean I will have to go without a steady paycheck, higher source?). Each time, though, my fears were alleviated and my higher source provided me with more than I could have imagined. Now with this lingering sense of apprehension, I had to ask myself a difficult question: am I...(long pause)...imbalanced? One thing I am profoundly grateful for is my inner balancing beam. I am in tune with my mind and body and I can no longer get away with the painful task of waiting out a bad experience. If it does not feel right I want to know why and I want to self-correct. I left behind needless self suffering with my last wave of self-realization. To paraphrase what Victor Frankel so elegantly wrote in Man's Search For Meaning, we can always get through the how if we know the why. So in feeling this off-kilter bobbling within mind and body this week, I brought out the big guns of re-connecting to the source: Chi Kung, silent prayer, soothing music, journaling, self-coaching, meditation, and a small helping of Wayne Dyer. Usually I can get away with one or two as a means of re-shifting my energy, but this time I needed it all. Searching for some peace of mind in these places was like coming home again. Each silent action brought me closer to peace, revitalized my inspiration and renewed my will to go further than I had before. It also served as a reminder that my life is better served when I pay attention to that which brought me to this place- my connection to and communication with a power greater than myself. This blog's for you, higher source.

When you are feeling low on energy, what is your source of inspiration?

Balancing Act

It has been such a long time since my last post, it almost felt like I was never going to come back. Almost. Life has this way of sweeping you up, like a tornado, and dropping you off somewhere else, somewhere unrecognizable. Like a dream, reality can be familiar and strange, co-existing somewhere in between. Recently I've spent a lot of energy self coaching. I opened myself up in ways I never imagined I would- starting a new practice, changing careers, planning a wedding, joining a volunteer organization and pursuing further education. The result is too many to-do lists, moments of questioning my abilities, and a lot of emails. Ultimately, it has opened my boundaries to new possibilities. I am open and I am learning something new about the world every day. So much of my journey has been looking deep inside myself that the refreshing quest to find how best I can serve has been an exciting personal movement filled with anticipation. I wonder how much I can truly take on and how much I can let go. And I find myself re-evaluating my priorities and I know now, like I never did before, when I am not in balance. It is a new feeling, to be so sensitized to this knowledge of my inner self. To be constantly aware, to be able to correctly identify an emotion, to know my limits-it is a phenomenal discovery. The next step, the opportunity to self-correct, is what I look forward to exploring. It will not be easy, not now that I invited this into my life, to say no. It will not be easy, now that expectations are set, to gently lay them back down. Still, it is more difficult to be untrue to myself, and suffering through painful experiences for the sake of propriety is no longer an option. So, yes, I have been a long time gone. But I think about this journey often. And I feel a sweet relief knowing that I am finding my equilibrium simply through expressing my awareness of imbalance. And that is how it is done.

Puzzle

I have come to look at life as an "enlightened" logic game. Now, coming from me this is amusing, as I am known for my intuition and my heart, but logic? I do like puzzles though- all kinds of puzzles and life is certainly puzzling. More so than that, it is a series of moves, exchanges of energy, putting things in place in order to make room for something else. For instance, if you are working on a jigsaw puzzle, all the pieces are right in front of you but the picture can't be completed all at once without putting the other pieces together first. The picture is there and it is always beautiful and attainable, but it takes a piece at a time, just like your life. You can't force it and in time all the pieces match, but patience is the key. How beautiful could life be if we knew that our picture was already painted and our part was to have fun learning where everything goes, moving things here and there, experimenting, triumphant at times, failing at others, but always sure of a victorious outcome? This is how successful people think! We tend to think of the tortured soul who is uncomfortable with his own genius, but truly successful people already know that their picture is complete, so it doesn't matter where the pieces fall because it is going in it's rightful place. Take comfort in knowing your moves are a part of a bigger plan and believe that the journey of learning and discovery is what life is really all about. The ending will come, of that we can be sure. Everything else unfolds as it will, and we can either worry about what the picture will look like or just learn to love the picture as it unfolds effortlessly before our very eyes.

What If

I am sure I am not alone when I say that I anticipate the future. I continue to peak around every corner of my life, wondering "What is next?" Even if I am not deliberately doing it, the minute I close my eyes my mind wanders in spaces it can't do when I am engaging in the living, waking world. If I close my eyes and fall into a deep sleep, my dreams will make it clear where my subconscious wants to take me. I literally can not escape it. And yet, as part of my soul searching, I tend to take a different view these days of pesky thoughts. Instead of thinkging in circles or ignoring them altogether, I peel them away by layers. What do I feel? Why do I feel it? Confronting these thoughts and then exposing them for the angst- ridden pests that they are truly lets me know again and again that I can not be a crystal ball. I have no idea what tomorrow is going to bring or if tomorrow will even happen. Looking around for the next big thing is a sure sign that I am not in my right place. If I turned back the clock, I could easily say that today is and always has been the next big thing. Dealing with this simple revelation of relativity always brings me back to the moment and slows everything down. The anticipation of tomorrow always reminds me of what I do not have, what I am lacking and how I need to get there. Contrary to what most people believe, getting there is really only important if you know where you want to go. We can always have goals to reach, but what is really important is the feelings that we have when we reach them. If constantly getting somewhere only makes you want to be somewhere else, the journey may ultimately feel rather pointless. Anxiety over the future also brings a lot of negative emotions which translate directly into negative energy, and like attracts like, and so on and so forth. The more anticipation and anxiety build up, the harder it is for the things we want to find us in the fog of negative thinking. There is definitely a fight or flight instinct that kicks in to make this very difficult, as human beings, to not anticipte the dangers of the future. However, it is mindfulness of your thoughts that makes you uniquely human and it is in our power and control to shift your thoughts from surviving to thriving. Using your humanity to attract powerful thoughts by simply not giving in to primal instinct and knowing the difference between fear and anxiety- real threat versus perceived threat- will change your life. When you are in danger, you will be distinctly aware. But if you are basing your life on "what if" thoughts, you are only a danger to yourself.

Write Away...

I am sitting at my dining room table, enjoying a cup of coffee, and tapping away at my laptop. I have always envisioned this as my perfect moment- the life of a writer. Although I am not getting paid, so I cannot exactly say I am living the dream. Yet somehow, it all comes down to this moment. I think I expected my success to come in a pretty picture, usually involving glowing skin, happy smiles, and piles of money. And maybe that will happen one day, and I can certainly get carried away by the picture. But right now, as the words come to me, I quietly close my eyes, finding my way around the keyboard and let the thoughts flow through me. Success in its physical form is simply a transference of energy from the spiritual realm. Our psyche, happy and healthy, is the greatest success we can master. Feeling energy flow through my body, and coming up with something to say, something meaningful, creating words that have been strung together a million, trillion times, but not quite in this order, and somehow finding a new meaning, is success. Writing for the pure excitement of seeing what I am really thinking, instead of hiding away in my subconscious, is a great success. Feeling the keys as they jump up and down excitedly beneath my finger pads is truly a marvel. Being here, eyes closed, and imagining what the spelling mistakes will amount to, is also pretty amusing. I may not have sat down with any message, nothing bright and clear that will make a difference, but to me, being able to express myself in a coherent, linear form, rather than a mass of words and images in my head, is a huge success. I think today you should write something down too. Get in touch with your inner source of energy. See what you have to say to yourself. And just enjoy the moment, small as it is. And then someday, you can go back and read what you wrote and that moment will be encapsulated for all time.

Being Right Never Felt So Good

As a Virgo, I am going to stereotype myself and say that I fit into that class of people that really likes perfection. I am a stickler for getting the job done before deadline and under budget. And yet, I find myself wondering about the imperfections as of late: those times when the conversation does not go smoothly, the plans that fall through, or when my emotions get the better of me. I like to stay in control, and I always like to give myself a good mental beating when I lose my cool. And then I come back to the idea of imperfection and I wonder if it is really not about getting it "right" at all but to embrace me, my experiences, for exactly as they unfold before my eyes. Simple, yes. Easy? Nah. But that is exactly what started to happen- the proverbial light bulb in my head told me that my lesson was to find grace in losing, laughter when I am getting it all wrong, smiling when the balls I so nimbly juggle begin falling at my feet. And then when that thought sunk in, I felt liberated in a way that theoretical lessons will never do it for me- I started to want to fail. I looked for the opportunity to pat myself on the back when the cards were not in my favor, to feel deep gratitude when what once seemed like an obstacle I had to push down was a gate I simply unlocked and strolled through. And then as synchronicity always plays a part, I read something that just jumped off the page. We are not here, in this life, so that we never experience emotional pain or hurt or even anguish. We are here to overcome it, to even embrace it, and to become more spiritually aware because of it. When we come across someone who is giving us a good fight, we can feel gratitude toward this person as our teacher. And if we do not recognize the teacher, we will be sent an even stronger teacher with a more powerful version of the same lesson. For me, my recurring lesson is to continually re-create my vision of perfection. The conversation or the experience or the relationship will not always go smoothly, but if I can accept that which occurs without the doubt and residual feelings of failure, if I can see it each time as a small win on this journey we call life, than it will always, undoubtedly, without hesitation, be...perfect.

Accept the Unexpected

I am working on acceptance...not just accepting myself and the people in my life for exactly who they are (although that has been a journey unto itself) but accepting of the moment, whatever happens in that space of time. I am learning a lot about this, and frankly I've been a little surprised at what I am discovering for I had this idea that life is supposed to look like I imagined it. I kind of figured that with my new search for peace and purpose, life would be one big crispy potato chip (my apologies to those who enjoy chocolate covered sundae metaphors). The search for acceptance boils down to the here and now...whether things are going the way you would like is pretty much irrelevant to the source of your happiness. At least, that is what is being asked of our acceptance. Life will go this way and that, things are truly out of our control, and the times you can accept it, the times you can be like water and flow through the currents of life, are the times when true peace will be yours. Is this easy to do? Only when you have figured out that it's not so complicated after all, but that could take us a lifetime or one hundred lifetimes. The more we believe we can control the flow of life, the longer we hold on to the illusion that we do not have to "accept" anything, the harder the struggle to live in the here and now. While we live in an ever burgeoning world of complex technology that purports to simplify our existence, remember there is nothing more beautiful than silence, nothing more brilliant than the human body, nothing more satisfying than a moment that offers a glimpse of eternity. It may appear that things are not "going your way" though remember this is a tricky illusion. Once you accept that everything that happens can be and is your way, you will be ever closer to finding true acceptance, to claiming true happiness.

Today, I am going to accept all things that come my way, without judging the experiences as good or bad. How can you practice acceptance in your life?