“One truth you must consider. You are only as expansive, successful, joyous, peaceful and free as you truly love and accept yourself.”
~ Joseph
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
I sensed a shift in a brief moment of awareness. In that moment I realized that experiences never end. They keep flowing through our lives and either we are aware of them or not.
If you take this moment now and expand your awareness you will see what I mean. Right now you are reading this and having responses to these words and ideas. There is the flow of energy in your body as you sit here. There are feelings activated by your thoughts.
You are a stream of experiences flowing through the now. If you pay attention, there are thoughts telling you what is going on and under those thoughts, just experiences.
Your thoughts are you trying to make sense out of the moment. Your experiences don’t need understanding, they just happen.
These never ending experiences represent more of who you are then your thoughts.
Truth is what matters. It is what you and I are here in this lifetime to explore. And it is something we each have to find on our own. No one else can know what our truths are.
There are many institutions and organizations that have their opinions about what truth is. Religions, political parties, media, and science all claim to hold the truth.
But they cannot possible know what your truths are. It is not something told to you or found in reading sacred writings. It is an inner experience of awareness.
Your truth is unique to you. It’s most easily found by listening inward to the voice of your soul or higher nature. It’s your sense of inner knowing or it isn’t your truth.
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:
Recently an encounter with several people who were angry and fearful brought a clear question to my mind. How did they allow their thoughts to cause such anger, fear and discomfort?
This may challenge you but - all fear and worry are self-created. Your thinking generates them. Yes there are occasional situations (a train coming as your car stalls on the tracks) in which fear is a natural response but almost all fear is born within your thoughts.
The opposite of fear, worry and anxiety is being at peace, being open, observing, and trusting. Changing your thoughts can bring peace, allow you to be open and just observe what is going on.
Not getting caught up in the drama of the moment is such a relief. Try trusting things will work out and watch how they do.
Ultimately it is very liberating to come to the awareness that you are fully responsible for what you think and how you feel. Yes, blame is very tempting but really it is just an avoidance of responsibility.
You might wonder - how do I take back my power and stop pointing outward when things are not how I want them to be? How do I bring more consciousness to this process?
Recently I promised you several tools to enhance 2013. The first tool is a plan to become the conscious author of your life story.
In November I experimented with writing a novel that included rewriting my past and writing my future. The experiment went very well. I have noticed that what I wrote for my future is already beginning to come into existence.
Experiences and inner sensations imagined in the writing of the novel are now in my life. I had a sense for what the next phase of my life would feel like. I now feel that.
As I was writing my recent story I also rewound some of the past by creating another view, a kind of bigger picture focused on the benefits of what I learned even in difficult times. The advantage of looking back is that you can usually gain a fresh and larger experience of what happened and what benefited you.
This process is one of creation. Since you are the creator of your life experience, why not consciously create the experiences you want to have. The heart and mind, your intentions and where you put your attention all are powerful factors of creation.
My offer to you is:
Recently, in a conversation with friends, I had an insight about how each of us had our own ways of seeking fulfillment. That may seem obvious to you but at some level I saw that I had a belief that we all seek to be self-realized. That I found isn’t true.
Fulfillment is an interesting perspective as a way to guide your life. To be fulfilled may not be something you even consider until later in your life.
The qualities of being fulfilled will vary uniquely to your heart’s desire, the guidance of your intuitive voice or through your contact with your soul. Insights really come from a tuning in process.
You and I get to decide what fulfillment is for us. We can also redefine what being fulfilled is as we grow older and more aware of what matters.
My observation is that there are certain paths most conducive to making fulfillment possible. Opportunities to experience being fulfilled come to you along these pathways. Your choice is about how you explore and express the different paths.
These are the most traveled paths of fulfillment. Each vary in intensity as you explore them:
Welcome to 2013. What lies ahead is unknown but one things is for certain - you will be the creators of your experience. Exciting isn’t it?
What matters to you?
What has purpose and passion for you?
What inner messages are waiting to guide you forward?
Who do you want to become over the next 36O plus days?
What are you committed to make happen this year?
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.
Each day is a new day. This moment is totally fresh if you don’t bring thoughts from the past or worries about tomorrow to clog it all up. In this moment you can create whatever experience you want.
You don’t have to be haunted by a past relationship, or something you felt you should have done better. This moment is free to be fully experienced as wonderful moment in your life.
Too often you can show up with a trail of regrets and disappoints and fill what could be amazing with what wasn’t. Have you ever done that? It doesn’t have to be that way.
You can let all that isn’t happening go. You can release the past hurts and regrets. If you don’t, you carry them with you. Then you miss out on what good things are happening because you are too busy with what went wrong.
Living moment by moment makes if possible to enjoy the gift of the present. The present is truly where:
Holy Mole there has been a surge of interesting motivation running through me recently. I already workout and write everyday but I find myself wanting to do more.
Maybe writing a novel in November got the juices flowing. Wow that was fun as I wrote about my life in the future through the main character.
Maybe the frustration of feeling like my workouts have flattened out and pushed a get-into-gear button inside. Holiday sweets are looming and the beltline could be booming.
Or maybe my now 15 months of inner work since moving here has activated new levels of life force for whatever I do. This has been a most amazing life-altering and awakening stretch. I feel so alive and filled with joy.
Do you ever come to the end of a day and wonder where your day went and why you didn’t get more done? Maybe you were distracted. Consider this: Was your distraction self-induced?
By self-induced I mean you were doing things that spent the minutes of your day unconsciously. Examples could include time spent on: Facebook, Twitter, surfing the Web, playing video games, rehashing past dialogues, watching TV mindlessly, too much time viewing sports/movies/YouTube, stuck in the habit of worrying, and wasting time doing things that don’t matter to you.
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.
One day after a very expansive experience, I decided to go looking for people that have had similar experiences. It was my good fortune to find a number of resources including books, interviews, videos and audios and even several live presentations. In these resources a number of people shared their experiences of awakening and self-realization. One of the insights that stood out for me is what I want to share with you today.
You and I live in a dynamic ever-changing world and we are in constant response to our thoughts and the world around us. In those responses there are basically two reactions. One reaction is to open and be receptive to what is present. The other reaction is to contract and close down to what is present. We are either opening or closing, expanding or contracting in all we encounter.
November is National Novel Writing Month. This is my third year participating in this adventure. The goal is to complete a novel of 50,000 words in 30 days. My two previous novels sit here on my computer. One day I will self-publish the first one.
The second novel was a story that was fun to write but very personal. I noticed it stayed with me after I finished it. Traces of the story seem to become part of a greater reality for me.
As I began plans for this novel I decided to approach it in a unique way. I would use it to influence my mind - especially my unconscious mind in ways to heal my past, to invite new possibilities of experiences, to encourage the expansion of my consciousness and to assist me in growing my abilities to be present, be aware and be more self-realized.
