“One truth you must consider. You are only as expansive, successful, joyous, peaceful and free as you truly love and accept yourself.”
~ Joseph
I want to suggest that you consider the possibility that it’s time you take real charge of your life. It’s time to more fully understand who you are, what you want, and how you are getting in your own way.
Most of who you are is learned and much of it has been helpful in moving you to where you are now. However, big chunks of it have been holding you back, slowing your progress or even road-blocking what you feel deep inside is right for you.
Fear ruins people’s lives. It can poison your dreams, terrorize your imagination, imprison you from doing things you want to experience, strangle your heart from opening, drown your creativity, blind you to the truth, and cripple you moving forward. Does any of this sound familiar?
The most interested thing about fear is that it is not real. It always begins as a thought and then turns into a feeling sensation you have learned to call fear. 99% of what you fear is all in your mind.
Yet it still dominates the world. It is so powerful that fear has been used to control the masses for centuries. Just create an imagined enemy and people fall into doing what they’re told.
Let’s talk about fear and what you can do about it.
Over the last two years of living quietly, I have gained some valuable insights about happiness and I want to share them with you today.
As I started going through the alphabet I realized I had more than one idea for each of the letters. They all seemed valuable. What I want to give you is as many good ideas as I can come with. Hope that’s okay with you? Here’s the list:
Acceptance of Self – If you accept yourself as fully as you can, happiness will come easily. Loving yourself will set you free to love the world.
Awareness – Through awareness of who you are and what matters to you, you can create the life you want. Awareness makes your life a choice.
I continue to notice in myself - and in almost every other human being - that self-doubt is a ongoing challenge that just doesn’t go away one day. Instantly erasing it sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it?
Instantly, maybe not - however there are ways to shrink self-doubt that can be hugely successful rather quickly. I will share these with you shortly but first I want to share 5 ways self-doubt is fueled:
1. Looking to others for self-approval – This never works but it seems so important when you doubt yourself. There could never be enough approval from others to dissolve the lack of approval inside. Move past this strategy. It only creates more self-doubt.
2. Trying to satisfy the ego-mind’s need for reassurance -The ego-mind is never satisfied. This mind can have everything it wants but it will go searching for even more. The ego is fueled by fear. Notice the ego’s voice and don’t let it run your life.
3. Ignoring your intuitive/soul’s sense of what is right for you - This is a frequent mistake made because the rationalizing mind too often pushes the inner voice aside. Ignoring the quiet wisdom inside fills you full of doubt.
I invite you to join me and explore a spiritual practice of blessing.
The following is the blessing I will share throughout this Summer for the benefit of all our brothers and sisters on the planet:
I call upon the brightest light within me and beyond to bless all my human family.
I send blessings from the heart of unconditional love, compassion, kindness and caring to everyone.
I send blessings of awareness, consciousness, insight, inspiration, awakening and the realization of are oneness.
I send blessings of peace, inner peace, and world peace. It is time to find peace together.
I send blessings of joy, happiness, laughter and much enjoyment of life. Feel the joy flowing through these blessings to you.
I send blessings of healing, health and well-being to all. Within we have all we need to heal ourselves and each other.
I send blessings of flow, abundance, prosperity, money, wealth, and financial freedom. We all deserve this wonderful flow.
I send blessings of freedom, free to be, free of oppression, free of the need to be in control and be right, and free of all limits.
I also bless myself with all these blessing and encourage you to do the same.
Together our blessing will send transforming waves across the planet for the good of all.
Let the Blessings flow,
Joseph
First a quick summary: You may have noticed that I often revisit ideas. I do that for several reasons:
1. I have discovered that my own journey towards self-realization benefits from looking at ideas and concepts from variety of perspectives. I suspect that is true for you.
2. Reminders seem very helpful in these times filled with such distractions. I am curious what you need to be reminded about as you move towards your highest expression? Please leave comments below.
3. I find that every time I read something I resonate with, I expand in my awareness; I open to a greater understanding. At this blog I explore timely issues for each of us on a path of awakening. What kinds of ideas resonate with you? Comments welcomed.
I hope you find this summary helpful and a good-lead-in to one of my favorite themes – Being and Doing.
Over the last few months I have been sharing ideas with you that I find words inadequate in expressing. This writing challenge is tied to ongoing seismic shifting of my inner sense of self and the world.
At this point in my life I’ve committed to leaving a lifetime of programming behind. Now I am on a personal journey of deepening awareness, expanding compassion and realizing the highest levels of potential and expression.
Recently I’ve had a number of insights that have been very helpful. My hope is you can join me in exploring these higher levels of knowing.
My first insight is why joy matters.
On the other side of what seems to be reality is a much more profound truth. That truth is that heaven waits for you now. Not the kind of biblical heaven imagined by the inventors of the different religions. This heaven is within.
The great promise of most religion is that you will have a better life in the hereafter. The Truth never lingers in the possibilities of tomorrow. It can only reside in the present moment. Now is the only place where the seeds of human possibilities bloom.
Heaven is not a romp through the tulips but a song that sings itself as your life. You are the creator of each moment whether it’s heaven, hell or dull disconnect from the vibrancy of life.
Characteristics of the true heaven within you include:
A loving heart so vast and unconditional that all is included
Recently a reader of my blog left a wonderful comment about receiving and it stimulated a flow of ideas that I became very excited about. The excitement sprang from that fresh perspective and experiences his comment stirred in me.
As a result, I went to work journaling about how to be open to receiving. I use my journal to tap into my higher mind and the guidance from my soul. This is what came to me in bright flashes of insight:
Receiving Of Flow
Begins as an opening
With an opening, comes a trickle
That expands into a steady flow
Then a vibrant stream begins to stir
This over time becomes a powerful river
Along the way you remain open, receptive and grateful
Then you and the flow become one in an ocean of abundance
December is near and so is the end of the year. All the talk and ideas about this being a great time of change has been interesting because speculation creates expectation and expectations feeds the collective mind to expand.
Can you feel the activation for change in you and around you? A kind of evolutionary call seems to be going across the planet.
Humanity appears to want to rise up and move to a richer more expanded expression.
· Can you feel the joy in your heart as it moves toward expansion?
· Have you sensed that you and many others are collectively tapping into this aptitude for compassion, for consciousness and for awakening?
· What other ways do you sense a call to further express who you are?
There are a number of ways or paths you can explore if you want to feed and grow your expansion.
Remember that song from the 60's? You can hear it here. The song was about a world with too little love in it when there could be so much more.
That song is right and you know it. What of the world’s problems wouldn’t be so much better off with a big dose of love? I am not talking that mushy stuff. I am talking about the kind of love that is without conditions, that is endless, and that resides in our hearts waiting each day for a fuller expression.
Can you feel that call of love?
I looked at myself in the mirror and had to smile. I have never felt more alive and filled with such joy. These past 14 months of retreat here at the Oregon coast have been such a wonderful gift.
We moved here because my intuition told me where to go. This inner voice even picked out a place for us to live. The house is imperfect like us but the beauty and grace of the natural world is pure perfection.
I have read and written, explored, meditated, walking in awareness and just been at peace for most of the retreat. Over the last couple of months everything began to shift as I move from exploring expansive ideas to being expanded.
How can you get out of your own way and remove the inner barriers to explore all that is possible?
What would you life be like if you allowed the following truths about you to become fully realized?
You are:
Pure awareness
A bright light
Unconditional, endless love
Infinite and eternal
Pure presence
In unity with all of life
A soul having a human experience
Stillness and peace
Bliss waiting to be experienced
Joy and happiness
Grace waiting to be expressed
One with the Source
Free to be anything you want
One with beauty of nature
The expanding universe
Compassion for all
A difference maker
Acceptance and appreciation
How do you realize these true qualities of your nature as a human being?
Sit is stillness and be guided.
In the past few years or maybe it has been all my life, my soul has been trying to keep me heading in the right direction. You know us humans we are always going off course following some tangent of desire or tripping ourselves up with our thoughts.
The voice of the soul is a quiet one. It whispers wisdom for me to listen to or not. It can be in the form of an intuition, an inner guide, a flash of insight or inspiration or the knowing messages from an open heart.
How does your soul communicate with you? Do you listen?
Lately what I thought was real has been dissolving and a new more glorious picture of what is possible has been coming into clarity. This has me shook up inside and very excited. I love change towards higher expression and sharing this journey with you.
This deeper exploration is about “who I am” beyond any past limiting concepts. I have been pleasantly surprised by the ease at which old self-definitions are giving away to a much larger understanding.
This exploration is not for the timid. Your personal foundation will be significantly rattled before the dust of self-remodeling settles. Fortunately your inner resources are more than up to the task.
Today I want to share with you five ways of meeting with awareness as you take this journey towards a greater you. These points of contact with awareness each offer you an opportunity to take a giant leap of growth that will change forever the way you view yourself and the world.
LOVE is really all that matters. Let your heart feel the truth of love. Imagine a world filled with love and more and more hearts everywhere open to love.
All these article and seminars about finding purpose, searching who you are, and what to do with your life can be distilled down to one simple truth – your purpose, who you are, and what matters is to spread love with an open heart everywhere you go.
Love can solve all the world’s problems.
Today I start a series of posts which offer simple solutions to many of the issues we deal with - sometimes on a daily basis. I want to offer you useful and effective ideas/techniques that you can use starting immediately that will enhance the quality of your life.
Simple Solutions #1 - A Remedy For Fear
Fear is a powerful emotion that we all feel. Many deny they are afraid but we know better. Life offers us many unknown situations and fear is a natural reaction.
I lost my father on Monday. He has battled heart disease for many years. He was a kind, generous person who was outgoing and very involved in his community. We often saw the world very differently but he always had unconditional love for me. Everyone needs someone like that in their lives.
Sometimes I asked him too many questions about his ideas and it made him uncomfortable. He was a person who had a strong faith in what he believed and didn’t like different points of view. My nature is one of curiosity, inviting new perspectives and encouraging the search for truth.
