“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.
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.
Recently I was exploring several ideas about how things in life work or don’t work. After spending time journaling and further exploring my ideas I soon had helpful inspiration and guidance.
The guidance was that what determines how well you and I do things is how well we place our attention on what we are doing. That makes sense doesn’t it?
I want to suggest a more expanded definition than how attention is usually defined – it is not only the focusing of your mind but also of your heart and spirit.
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
In the last post, I shared with you the basic life attitudes of Yes, Maybe and No. I advocated for the importance of living the Yes way. Yes is the very best response to the chaotic world we live in.
I decided to follow up the last post with what to say YES too. I know in my heart Yes is more fun, healthier and what works best for creating the life you want.
This is a long list which is exciting because that means there are so many energizing and joyous ways to say Yes.
If you are willing to play with this list of Yes possibilities, I can make you a promise – You will love living your life this way.
Each day, in every way, say YES to the following:
On Saturday I attended an inspiring presentation by a modern mystic - Thomas Huebl. His talk was so bright that his words filled me with light.
Today my goal is to communicate aspects of that light in hopes it will invite a greater expression of who you are for the benefit of us all.
First let’s talk about what your presiding attitude about life is. The simple answer to this begins with this question, “Do you wake up in the morning with a Yes, Maybe or No?” Is it Yes to life or Maybe, I’m not sure or No this is not working?
I realized recently that my journal writing has been much more powerful than I had ever been aware of. Things have shifting in so many ways over the past year.
Those shifts have been powered by the writing I do daily in my journal. This is not some boring account of my day or a discipline I push on myself. It is more a life force vibrating with meaning and aliveness.
The more I explore it the more vital the exploration becomes. Now, I feel an essential piece of life is missing from my day if I don’t sit, tune in and write.
My home sits near Hwy 101 on a rural part of the Oregon Coast. I see huge trailers and RV’s go by every day. So it is no surprise that I would use the following metaphor:
Today I realized that for all my life I have been towing a trailer behind filled with the past, overloaded with faulty programming, jammed with false beliefs and full of trained self-doubt.
For many years I added more and more emotional and mental junk to this trailer. I needed lots of will power just to plod along through life and try to keep my head up.
Too much time was spent thinking I am not enough, good enough or deserving. My mind was trained to be a non-stop judging machine of others and myself. I found it easier to play the blame and complain game than to take responsibility for my own life.
Have you run into any of this? If so, you understand how heavy your trailer can get.
I find myself bringing up the importance of questioning often lately. So I decided to invite you to join me in the questioning process.
It’s always helpful to question your thoughts, ideas, and beliefs; also where you are in life. If you don’t question, there is no doubt, you are the biggest barrier to what you want.
I invite you to examine the following 10 questions because they will enable you to make the inner changes necessary to moving your life forward in hugely positive ways.
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
After a weekend of deep conversations, moments of bright light and insight and a re-examination of ideas and beliefs, I feel renewed. I also feel very quiet and peaceful.
I am now back at home but life seems altered. I’m not sure how or what it all means but that is all right. I am living in the moment with appreciation for all that is as it is.
My seeing and understanding has expanded. That’s exciting.
I thought I must have some deeply profound things to share.
What do you tell yourself about who you are and what your life if about? That is your story. How does your story limit you?
Like computers, you have a set of basic programs that run your life. Many of your programs contain out-of-date stories that too often limit how well you function.
Much of your earliest programming needs serious upgrading. Yet you continue daily to replay that programming with your thoughts.
These programs can be upgraded to expand your life.
By the time we reach adulthood we have very deeply grooved programs about:
My life has moved from a busy doing to a quiet being. I am now living a big experiment of “being” in my life as fully as I can.
Doing life means most days I did a job, exercise, ate, read, wrote, and repeated all this the next day. Life can become a habitual doing more on the level of surviving than thriving.
Being means each day is a new adventure, unplanned, unrehearsed, and unfolding. There is still eating, writing and practices for my well-being but those flow out of a way of life that is not programmed but simply experienced.
An inspirational friend of mind said that living life as an experiment is much more interesting. That made great sense to me but it has taken awhile to fully set this experiment up.
The conscious experiment of being fully in life has now been going on since moving to the Oregon Coast one and a half years ago. This way of being has opened me to a number of interesting discoveries. I want to share them with you because I think we can both learn from what they tell us about life.
Lessons from my life of being present:
Do you ever hold yourself back? Most of us do. How do you get in your own way? Let’s explore why that happens and what you can do about it.
It happens because throughout your life you are being programmed and much of that programming is false. Not only is it false but it goes unquestioned.
What this means is, you have false ideas and beliefs running your life all day, every day and you are not even aware that’s going on.
Are you ready for a healthier expression of you?
You are programmed to think that you:
No, this is not a mythical story about a guy coming down from a mountaintop. It is more about the basics of what you need to keep in mind to live a vibrant and healthy life. (Thought you might appreciate these ideas for 2013)
These commandments may actually be more useful than the original ten in stone. More useful because they are about the well-being of your mind, your heart, your body and your spirit.
One day in my early 20’s something became very clear to me. I was walking up a long set of stairs and was breathing hard. I made a clear decision in that moment to be healthy and keep fit.
I made that decision because I wanted a long and vibrant life. I knew then that my choices about my well-being would shape the rest of my life.
Since that day my study and exploration of health and fitness has been a key part of my life. I have learned there are a number of universally important ways of being in the world that optimize health.
The following are 10 Commandments For Healthy Living. I offer them as a guideline for you in creating a life of true health and well-being.
The big thought I had in mind for today is. “I am in the universe; the universe is in me.”
I am not sure where I first heard this idea. It might have been at a presentation by Deepak Chopra a few years ago. The idea that the universe is in me challenged my imagination to make sense of such an amazing possibility.
In my attempts to comprehend the vastness of this idea I explored visualizing the universe inside of me. These visualizations took me into very expansive places that filled me with energy and aliveness.
The best way to get a sense of what I am talking about is for you to have a similar experience. Here is the practice I use:
