“Two things define you. Your patience when you have nothing, and your attitude when you have everything.” – Magnus Christian What is more powerful than hope joined with inner certainty, with patient urgency? What is more enabling than the resolve to act rather than surrender to despair? What is more ennobling than the mindset reframed to abundance while in the midst of scarcity? Courage, action, gratitude – the hallmarks of excellence. They define life at a higher level, regardless of circumstance. – We’ve been working on a new website! Whenever we read these posts, we’re inspired to write our own private thoughts. Now you can …
Maintaining Your Personal Identity in Changing Times
The only constant in life is change. Sounds like an oxymoron but it really is true. Here’s how it works: A trend starts, picks up momentum and blows right past the point of balance. What happens next? It turns around and does the same thing in the opposite direction. Like a pendulum swinging from side to side, life is always in a state of motion and changes direction frequently. So, how do we maintain our personal identity and avoid an identity crisis if everything is always changing? Can we achieve stability in motion? True stability is not the absence …
The Blame Game: Help Yourself Out Of It
“Dad would start blaming, as if it were important to establish once and for all who was responsible for every peccadillo.” ~ Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse (ACOA/codependency expert) The latest group of comments in the Check in Thread talks a lot about … Continue reading →
The new fearless you
“On the other side of fear is freedom.” Look at this another way: On the other side of your fear is your freedom. Are you ready to be be free? Are you ready to stop holding back? Simply face your fear and do it anyway. Just walk to the other side. Start …
Signs of a Maturing Soul
The signs of someone maturing on the spiritual path aren't that hard to spot. Especially for those of you who have awakened, embracing your spiritual awakening lends itself to often dramatic inner shifts. However, that still doesn't mean that other people will notice. In a world where people are caught looking at the surfaces, many people won't be able to see past the packaging to notice all the inner crap that has been removed from inside.Which as always is why we don't…
Mail. We Get Mail When We Are Replaced in a Very Public (FB) Way
I wrote this post in 2008 but have re-run it several times since. Why? Because it keeps coming up as an issue. If you recognize yourself in this, ask yourself: “Does it hurt when I do this?” and answer “MAYBE … Continue reading →
10 Ways to Boost Your Emotional Health Every Day
When did you last consider your emotional health? We make daily choices to improve our physical wellbeing. But our mental wellbeing also benefits from attention. Doesn’t it deserve as much commitment? Some things undoubtedly benefit both our mind and our body, like eating well, exercising, and having good sleep habits. But
More than mere belief
“Having the audacity to truly believe that what you desire is available to you right now is one of the most powerful things you can do.” – Jen Sincero Yes. Right now. It’s more than mere belief, it’s the conviction that what you want awaits you. The conviction that what you want you can get. No doubt whatsoever. You must believe this so strongly that you will do whatever needs to be done to make what you want real in your life – no obstacle too great to overcome. Most don’t, or won’t. They doubt their power to possess; they lack the drive…
Fear and Denial or Awareness and Survival?
During my life in the rainforests of Queensland, Australia, I learned that a smart person has to live in Survival Mode. But don’t think this means that I lived in a constant state of fear and denial, always awaiting the next deadly danger. That is how I initially lived, terrified of poisonous snakes, ticks, sea snakes, jellyfish, and dangerous crocodiles, sharks, stinging trees and more. I lived in a perpetual state of fear and denial until I educated myself about the creatures I lived with. I learned their territories, habits and needs. Once my awareness increased and I better understood them, I was able…
After Healing Abuse: The Collapse of the Victim Mentality
Healing abuse is powerful medicine. It's necessary medicine for a world with so much pain and suffering. Consider the below statistic:"On average, 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States—more than 12 million women and men over the course of a year."– The National Domestic Violence Hotlinehttp://www.thehotline.org/resources/statistics/Obviously, we know …
Would You Still Love?
If you had a crystal ball and knew it would end badly, would you still love? Psychology Today Blog: Would You Still Love?
Sympathy and Empathy – Do You Really Know the Difference?
Both empathy and sympathy are forms of having concern for another person. There seem to be varying definitions of what exactly the differences are. Dictionaries say one thing, but modern usage encompasses other angles. In psychology, empathy is focussed on as more useful than sympathy. The term empathy was in fact created by pioneers of scientific psychology in the …
Start small, end big
“If you will change, everything will change for you.” – Earl Shoaf Change is hard, so start small. The smaller the better. Build new habits; one at a time. Maybe a half-habit at a time. Find a new point of reference, a better direction. Take it one day at a time. You have enough time…
Are Your Actions Being Hindered by Your Excuses?
If we see things in our life that we want to change, then what is it that is holding us back from doing it? Why don’t we just take the actions that will produce the desired changes? Questions like that can sure give birth to a huge list of excuses, can’t they? If someone says to us, why haven’t you lost the weight, or read those books, or made more money, or learned to control your temper? We …
Webinar Recording: Highly Sensitive People and Living a Spiritual Life
Once a year, I like to turn my attention to the topic of highly sensitive people. As a highly sensitive person, I understand a lot of the unsettling emotions and energies that are going on around me pretty much all the time, but because of the spiritual path, I’ve learned how to be at peace with a lot of it. I’ve also learned how to use those different energetic feelings to help me go…
Life Isn’t Fair. Deal With It.
Grief is an important part of moving on. It’s important to feel as bad as you really feel. It’s important to give credence to your grief and your hurt. But it’s also important to take time out (especially as the … Continue reading →
Write for you
“Validate your life.” Write. In a journal, a diary; on note cards or post-its – whatever works for you. Writing is the act of validating your life. It’s the process of coming to terms with who you are, where you once were, and where you’re going. Writing, however informal, however literary, captures…
Webinar: Tips for Creating Conscious Relationships
Next week's webinar tackles the task of how we can all learn to create conscious relationships. This is a topic I've covered before in numerous other spiritual blog posts, and as always, I emphasize that it all starts with your relationship with yourself. Dealing with your own baggage is the first step to developing conscious relationships with your romantic partner, children, friends, family, business associates, colleagues, and more. Until you cross that bridge, you are very likely trying to control others in your relationships in futile attempts to make yourself feel a certain way. This is the nature of unconscious relationships.In this webinar, I'll offer tips about what …
Learning What We Need To Know
“I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.” – Winston Churchill When I first started my journey toward wholeness, I spent a lot of time wishing that someone would feel sorry for me, take … Continue reading →
Self-Compassion – a Better Way to Raise Your Self-Esteem?
Too often we try to grow our self-esteem by only focussing on the positive, acknowledging our talents and strengths but carefully avoiding any perceived flaws. While this can give us peaks of confidence, it can also backfire and lead to comparing ourselves to others and criticising ourselves. So is there a better way to raise …
Junk the crap
“Get over your crap and into creating the life you love.” – Jen Sincero Where do you stand in your reality? If you’re stuck, do something, anything – and get started. If you’re digging yourself into a hole, stop digging; climb out the hole. If you’re going through hell, keep going. Life is dreary, dull, drudgery when you allow yourself to stand still, up to your eyeballs in crap. Don’t tolerate the crap. Junk it. You can do it. …
True Self – Focus on the Cause Not the Symptoms
Have you noticed the general tendency to focus on the symptoms of a problem rather than address the underlying cause? One good example of this approach is western medicine. The accepted modality is; if it hurts we have a drug for that. My mind works a little differently. If it hurts, I want to know why so I can eliminate the cause. Masking the pain without addressing the cause is what I call the ostrich approach. It’s like sticking your head in a hole so you can’t see the lion running…
The Animal Within: Retraining the Primal Instinctual Body
A lot of times, I hear people in the spiritual world say that fear is just a word. Well, the word fear is a word, but the experience of fear is obviously much more than a word. It's a whole body experience, which–by and large–we don't enjoy. Some people learn to interpret fear in some different ways such as excitement, and while I don't know if there's a difference in the biochemistry of general fear versus excitement fear from something like bungee jumping, I don't think that most people want to feel that much agitation and intense energy on a regular basis.Thinking of fear in terms of agitation can also be a helpful road …
Step Out of the Dance NOW
When my ex and I first separated, he would take the kids for “visitation” and go to his grandmother’s and call me. Although he was supposed to be visiting with the children, he would call me almost the minute he … Continue reading →