Today I am grateful for seeing the truth.  Even if it hurts, it’s better to know exactly where we stand and how people really feel.  Yes, it can be a harsh reality but it s better for all involved to know rather than guess or develop ideas on false pretenses.  Find the people who show they support us rather than those who say they support us—it’s a different behavior entirely.  Someone can say they’re helping only to undercut at the last minute and the truth is that isn’t support.  Trust the gut and, above all, watch people’s actions.  What they do will tell us all we need to know. 

Today I am grateful for the ability to give.  I’ve been so excited to give back this season and to have the opportunity to share and provide and make things magical for others.  I’ve been more in my head than usual lately, feeling the pressure of everything that needs to be done, and it has been nice to get out of my head and do nice things for people.  I’ve read before that sometimes giving is selfish because of the high we get—and I used to think that was a bit exaggerated.  But I totally understand it.  Seriously.  When we’re feeling down or overwhelmed, it can really help to look at what other people need and see where we can be of use.  I haven’t always been able to give back as much as I would like to and this year I have found myself in a position where I can really enjoy the spirit of giving.  This season constantly reminds me of how lucky we actually are and how much more we can do than just give things.  The presence is more than the presents and we need to remember as we prepare to enter this time of gratitude, giving, and love, that it comes from the heart and we are lucky to give.    

Today I am grateful for breath.  We so often take our autonomic functions for granted.  As I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen the impact of imbalance and overwhelm on all areas of our lives—mental, physical, social, financial, spiritual.  It’s easy to get carried away and to feel like things are out of control—they are out of control.  All we can deal with is what is right in front of us and I constantly forget that, feeling like I need to handle everything all the time and I know my body is so tense most of the time that I don’t breath correctly—which then impacts everything else in the body from cellular and system function to cognitive function.  The breath is the single most centering thing in the body aside from the beat of our hearts, the electric impulse that keeps us moving and runs the show.  We are amazing creatures, and all we have to do is let our bodies do what they do.  The rest is covered.  The rest isn’t that serious.  Yeah, we have a bunch of made up rules that tell us what’s important in life, but without the breath, without the basic function of our being, those rules mean diddly.  And this year has shown me how quickly life can change or how unbelievably stubborn it can be.  Both scenarios dictate all we can do is breathe.  I appreciate what my body does for me, how it keeps me moving.  How the air moves me. 

Today I am grateful for big, astute hearts.  During a panic attack this weekend, I lamented that I didn’t know what to do.  I was on my knees with my head on the floor and my son, my little 7 year old, said, “You’re just overwhelmed.”  I fully admit I don’t give my son enough credit for what he perceives, what he feels, and how he interprets things—his feeling nature in general.  His awareness of the major portion of my problem, the overwhelm, was definitely a perfectly timed reminder that all is not lost, and sometimes the mind goes a little wild.  Sometimes all we need to do is remember to breathe (like I talked about above) and get a little perspective.  Kids are so aware.  They feel the truth and trust that knowing to BE the truth.  My son brought me right back to where I was, and I was able to get through it.    

Today I am grateful for another shot.  Because of my sensitivity and proclivity toward anxiety I have a tendency to think once something is over I won’t get another chance again—or something else won’t come around without difficulty.  This year with so much time spent in limbo or loss, I felt myself stagnate a bit.  I mean, I definitely took big strides but I’m not feeling they were as big as they could have been.  On New Year’s Day I saw an Eagle and was ready for this year to take off just as big as that symbol.  The year wasn’t awful, it just had some huge swings.  Just because we don’t get where we thought we’d be, it doesn’t mean we didn’t progress.  We may be a bit battered in some cases, but we are here, and as long as we are here, we have another chance.  One rough inning doesn’t mean the game is over—we get to bat again. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.

“Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly,” JFK.  This is the next level to what we were talking about yesterday. This is more than discomfort, this is a willingness to outright fall on our faces and what that failure can do for us.  I know the times I failed, I took it as permanent.  I believed that the failure was a resounding no from the universe and that I wasn’t meant to go that path.  I often wonder, knowing what I do now, that if I had continued to pursue any of those paths what would have happened.  I would be an entirely different person.  If I had gone past the discomfort of that initial failure, I may have become an expert in any one of a million things that fascinated me but I lost the courage to go after because I was once told no, or once made a mistake.  I feel that is also part of the reason why I stuck with the wrong things for so long.  I wanted to prove that those choices weren’t a mistake, that they could turn into gold.  I digress a bit.  Failure isn’t a life sentence and it doesn’t mean it’s over for good.  Sometimes we have to learn to redirect and we have to understand that when we take risks and push ourselves to the limits of our comfort, we find new ways to get what we want.

Failure is a milestone toward learning how to create what we want.  It shows us what doesn’t work on that path and guides us toward what does.  It also shows us that we need to be clear and direct on what we are doing.  For example, I spoke about clarity the other week (not a new topic) in regards to focus and how we achieve what we are looking to.  We have to decide to commit to one thing and see it through and that means accepting any failure that comes with it.  We don’t always get it right on the first try, we aren’t experts the first time we walk on the field.  And when we focus, we need to learn all the points that fail in order to develop the strongest result in the end.  We need failure to learn the weak points so we can make them better.  And the bigger we go, the bigger the potential for failure—and the bigger the failure may be.  But as we develop our skin and learn about ourselves and about the task we are trying to accomplish, those failures become easier to handle, the things we thought were life ending become a stepping stone.  Failure puts things in perspective.

Without failure we lose the ability to adapt and we close our minds to what we may need to know in order to achieve the highest level of success.  Failure doesn’t feel good for many reasons—sometimes a lot is hinging on the success of an idea and when we don’t get the results we are looking for it can feel overwhelming, like we will drown if we don’t do it right the first time out.  But as we develop and grow our capacity and tolerance for failure increases and our learning curve goes down, meaning it takes less and less failure to get the results we need.  If we want big, we have to do big.  We have to trust that it’s all part of the plan, that we will find our way.  Failure isn’t some scarlet letter we have to carry around and it isn’t a stopping point—unless we let it be.  Take failure as an opportunity to redirect and refine ourselves and the goal and to hone our skills.  Don’t let failure become regret.  Don’t let temporary discomfort become a permanent block to permanent joy.  We are meant to be adaptable and change and sometimes we have to fail in order to get to the right spot.  It’s no reflection on who we are, it’s a guidepost to who and what we want to become.  Stay focused on closing the gap and we can’t go wrong.  

“Pushing through discomfort gives us the belief and the confidence in our word,” Bishoi Khella.  Knowing new people and seeing their success, hearing their stories gives me the confidence to push through my own crap.  Collectively I am surrounded by people who have literally pulled themselves up from the depths of things and who have created lives for themselves.  One of the biggest regrets I have is that I never allowed myself to fall.  I never wanted people to see me at my lowest, I didn’t want them to see me fall because they already thought I was weak and any sign of failure was more than enough for them to pounce on me and make me feel worse about myself.  But the truth is if I had just said fuck it and gone with my instincts, even if it meant falling, I would have learned more about who I was rather than trying to fit all these pieces into my life to create a version of myself that was always a couple sizes too big or small.  We know when things aren’t a good fit, we know when things don’t feel right but we try to convince ourselves that it will work or we buy into our shit and we stop trying.  That lack of follow through creates a story that we can’t do it, that we will never succeed and it gets easier and easier to say no to what we want to do.

But when we push through the discomfort of failure and fear, we learn that we are capable of infinite things.  Our power is limitless as long as we stick with it.  Our decision will take us exactly where we need to be, we just have to stop pretending what we do and don’t want.  We have to get honest with ourselves about what we want and what we have to do to close the gap to get there.  Every time we stop ourselves because of some limiting belief or fear, we tell ourselves it is ok to give up on what we want.  We give ourselves an out to creating the life we’ve been dreaming of.  What message does that send to the universe?  That’s the energy of, “thanks but no thanks, I don’t really want it.”  And then we get upset when we reject what we wanted and it doesn’t come back to us.  We need to learn to trust ourselves, to trust that we can handle our dreams and that what we want is meant for us, that it wants us too.  Discomfort is temporary but regret is permanent.  The fact is we only have so much time on this earth and no one knows how much time that is, and if we can face our fear of failure head on even at the risk of temporary pain/embarrassment etc. then we potentially create the greatest joy in our lives.  And if we do it once, we can do it again and we have the confidence to do it again.  Greatness is on the other side of fear—believe we can get there.

A theme has popped up over the last few weeks.  If we want things to change then we need to change, that is a given.  Sometimes that new skin, that new feeling is uncomfortable.  If we had been tainted or given ideas about a particular person, it can be difficult to trust and learn about the real them.  But taking the time to get to know people and see where we are actually similar is interesting.  Sometimes the very people we think we couldn’t stand are the very people we need in our lives.  It’s also interesting to hear another perspective on people who have known each other a long time.  There are multiple sides to every story and I recently was reminded that I need to hear all sides before making a judgement or decision about other people and about who I am.  I always talk about the importance of knowing who we are to make decisions but the truth is that we can’t always know until we are in a specific circumstance.  We don’t know what we are made of until we go through it or expose ourselves to an alternative, face what we fear, etc. 

We can only learn the truth about people by taking the chance and letting them in.  Deciding who someone is without our own interaction with them is wrong.  Talking with new people and creating new feelings and learning to control the emotion opens doors and build bridges.  Life is about more than just about getting done what we need to or about surviving—we need relationships and sometimes those relationships form when we least expect them.  Relationships built on creation rather than competition and sometimes we have to find our own version of someone rather than believe what we are told.  I had an amazing conversation with someone I hadn’t been given the most favorable view of.  And I saw within this person similarities to myself.  The drive, the passion.  And this person was able to take that energy and actually do something with it.  For them to be able to do that and for them to come into my life at this stage while I am in the midst of stepping out on a very steep ledge shows me that it is possible to have a big dream that can seem uncertain, risky even, and that we can make something of it.  That we are meant to take the leap.  Sometimes people come into our lives as a reminder of what we can do.

We can’t know the depths of people if we don’t even scratch the surface.  I’ve had to go against my better judgement with people before and allow myself to be proved wrong, and that has been harder and harder to do as I’ve gotten older.  The cool thing is that every time I’ve been proven wrong I’ve learned something about myself.  I’ve learned that sometimes when we shut people out before we know them, we are missing out on the opportunity to learn something about ourselves as well.  It’s funny that the very things I thought I didn’t like about certain people were the very things I also had within myself.  Not that I was totally denying that I had those traits, but that, like so many things, I repressed those traits thinking they were somehow bad.  There are times we need to keep tight to our boundaries but when our instinct tells us differently than what we have been told, or when we constantly cross paths with certain people, we need to listen.  We have to hear all parts of ourselves and we have to trust our gut—we can’t always rely on someone else’s opinion of the matter because other people’s opinions are always skewed by their experience and beliefs.  Or on anything really, we should always taste it to see the flavor and develop our own perspective.  If I had continued to ignore this person, I’d have missed out on the potential of a real relationship as well as the potential to know myself. Change the story, take the chance, and get to know who we are while we get to know them.

Deciding what relationships to keep whether they are partners, friends, work is the biggest challenge.  See, even if I’m cynical and realist for other people, I always hold out hope for the best in someone.  I see their potential and I hope they realize it and want to be that.  I have hope that the best will always come through.  The problem is I’ve been waiting on hope for the best and that potential for over 20 years in some cases.  I didn’t want to let go because of the time invested and the belief that, if we hold on for a bit longer, things will turn out how I see them, they will see it how I do.  At what point do we realize we have no control, and even if our intention and belief is good, if the person doesn’t want to be that version of themselves, then we need to let it go? It’s hard because there are good pieces in the things that cause us stress: jobs keep roofs over our heads, food in our stomachs, and clothes on our backs.  We have to understand that the hope isn’t always enough for things to change, that somehow everything works out how we want it to, that we are right and the things we want and how we want them to go them were right.  And as much as we love people, we can never make them be who we want and if we know they aren’t right for us, if the situation isn’t right for us, then we need to let it go.

The trouble is we fear letting go as we are so trained to focus on the absence of things.  Saying goodbye doesn’t have to be forever, but we have to know that sometimes it’s still necessary to say goodbye.  When nothing is going to change, and this isn’t about right or wrong or who has power, but when we simply know that something isn’t going to work out or change and we know it needs to change, then we have to make the choice to leave it behind, to let it fall.  We have to understand our limit and know that we aren’t always meant to be the one holding things together.  There is always the possibility that once something falls it’s irreparably damaged and it will never be the same again.  But there is also always the possibility that when something breaks it will reveal a gem inside.  Sometimes we have to be broken open in order to see what we are really made of.  We have to break the outer shell to let who we are meant to be shine.  It’s terrifying to break our heart and risk our peace of mind and all we have accomplished, but here’s the truth: the universe always plays out how it is meant to so if it breaks beyond repair, let it go.  If it shows us who we are, that’s all we need to know to move on.  Be grateful either way, and allow the heart to repair.  We are resilient, and we will heal.  We will find what we need to move on. 

“The only way to protect our peace is making a decision we know will break our heart,” JB Copeland.  This was a tough one.  I thought of all the moments when I had to say goodbye to people I knew weren’t good for me.  the moments I should have said goodbye.  The goodbyes I missed but really wanted.  I think of all these decisions and each one broke my heart in its own way.  We create this zone of comfort with people and events and things we bring into our lives and sometimes we have to accept the very thing we designed to give us an idea of safety and comfort is the very thing that chokes us.  We need to cut ties.  The part that breaks my heart is that I know in some cases I made the wrong choices about who to cut out—and sometimes I was the one cut out.  Truth be told I’m not sure which hurt worse—the one doing the cutting or being cut out. 

We’ve all had losses and over the last couple of years I’ve dealt with some challenging ones.  I lost both of my aunts, my only two blood aunts.  The first had been relatively estranged, cutting us out for her own reasons (and reasons I actually do understand) but my siblings and I were on the end cut off.  Not being able to see her until she was on her deathbed, hearing her say she missed us nearly did me in.  The time wasted, the love we had, the good times we missed over the years.  Again, while I feel her choice was understandable, she missed out on my life and I missed hers.  My other aunt is more complicated—not that I didn’t love her, but her own troubles got the best of her and she partially cut us out.  And I decided to cut her out because I couldn’t deal with what she needed to work through.  I regret that to a degree and I understand my anger may have been misplaced in some ways.  But the finality of it hit hard.  Her death was completely unexpected and I still feel numb about it.  Each one did what they did to protect their peace.

I am fortunate to have people around me that are willing to go to bat for me and who are there in a pinch if I need them.  I am grateful for it.  That doesn’t mean the relationship isn’t complicated by the fact that some of those kind things are met with expectation—and sometimes I can’t afford that bill because that bill is often giving up what I need to do for what they want me to do.  They are lovely, wonderful people but they aren’t good for me.  Friendship means reciprocity of feelings and problem solving and when one is always the center of attention it isn’t healthy for the other person to work through their stuff.  It breaks my heart because they would do nearly anything for me, but they won’t help me grow and the won’t support my efforts.

“The little you can do is what you should do,” Anna Kai.  This was in reference to when things happen out of our control.  We’ve all had that caged rat feeling where we have so much emotion that we don’t know how to channel it, when there really isn’t anything we can do and things feel out of our control.  As counterintuitive as it is, all we can do is what we can do.  Fine, that may seem like a trite tautology but it is the truth.  We can’t force ourselves to be somewhere we are not and we can’t force ourselves to operate beyond our capacity or what resources allow.  We can’t control people and we can’t predict what will happen.  And wasting our energy trying to change what we can’t change only exacerbates the caged feeling.  All we can do is what we can do—and that is all we need to do.  If we were meant to do anything else, resources would appear and we would be able to do that. As with most of our topics, this deals with mindset and understanding that even if we are unable to control the situation, we can control how we react to it and what we do next. 

The way we are trained and the way the world works today often confuses us about our role, our abilities, and what we can/should/want/need to do.  We so often feel like we have to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders, like if we allow ourselves to have fun when we “Should” be working that the world will fall apart or that we will have to somehow pay for that fun at some other point.  The truth is when we are having fun we are much more receptive to new ideas and possibilities.  The world will not fall apart because you learned to laugh at something difficult or painful.  The world will not collapse if you decide to take a day off your routine and do something that truly interests you.  The world needs us to do that more often so we can better handle situations we feel are out of our control.  The world feeds on our joy and love and that only happens when we are in a state of love and joy.  That is something we CAN do all the time, we don’t need permission.

The other side of this game is to remember that there is always a purpose someone has to make us feel a certain way and we are the ones who allow that feeling to take place.  Don’t let anyone derail our plans or make us feel incapable of something.  Don’t let anyone convince us of what we cannot do.  Instead, take stock of the situation and boldly move forward, deciding on the step to take and understanding that we can handle anything.  All the world asks is that we do our part.  The world responds to frequency and we need to be comfortable in who we are, we need to believe in ourselves, we need to trust our energy and our work so we can move the needle on creating positive change, on spreading love/light/energy.  We don’t need to move the mountain in order to effect change—sometimes all we have to do is take the first step and that’s enough to inspire the masses to come with us.  It’s not about leading, it’s about understanding who we are.  So when we have the feeling and are called to do something, trust it is the right time, it is the right feeling, and trust that we can trust it—it is ours to do what we must, and if we are given the ability to do, then we must do what we are called.    

Today I am grateful for giving.  Admittedly I spent a lot of time worrying about making sure I would get what was mine.  I spent a lot of time giving to others, being taken advantage of, being bullied, and when I was old enough to start building something for myself I approached it with self-doubt instead of confidence and that led me to fear—which led me to looking at my life from a place of lack.  It’s incredibly easy to look at the absence in our lives we believe that one thing may turn our life on it’s heels, one thing may be the ticket, that we have one chance.  I believe in the power of magic so the truth is I do tend to believe it may only take that one moment to change things and I was/am dramatic enough that I feel the pressure to get those moments right or it’s gone—maybe I’ve watched too much drama in my life.  But the truth is for as much drama as I’ve witnessed and created, I have learned that there are many chances to get what we want.  Yes, certain doors close if we don’t act, but other doors open and we can’t ignore that.  Sometimes we aren’t being taken advantage of, we are being asked to expand our skills.  Sometimes we need to get to give and sometimes we need to give to get. I used to count what I was losing in giving, fearing I wouldn’t get mine if I gave too much.  But the truth is there is power in giving, there is learning in giving, and there are new worlds opened for all parties in giving.  Giving stretches our muscles, our hearts, and it opens the doors to creativity.  It’s a privilege to be able to give and I am grateful to be part of that cycle.

Today I am grateful for power.  Today’s society seems to be stuck in the premise of victimhood.  We wear our traumas and our pain points and where we’ve been hurt like a suit of armor.  We use those past events to justify treating each other like crap, having unrealistic expectations, and forming crappy boundaries (too much or too little), under the premise of being strong and standing our ground.  Boundaries are always necessary, but using our past experiences as a means to build a false sense of power through controlling others or as an excuse to ignore someone else’s experience isn’t power.  Real power comes from being still, learning who we are and our skills, making decisions based on love not fear, understanding where we are going and our impact on the world.  Power is about honing our skills and sharing them while keeping our boundaries.  Power is about deciding.  Making choices is one of the most powerful things in the world.  To make the right choices we need to know who we are and understand that the “right” choice is a combination of knowing who we are, faith, and understanding the big picture.  When we embrace our power, magical things happen.  Magic that opens the doors to the life we are meant to have rather than wasting time hoping someone comes along and saves us.  Power is an awareness of who we are and what we can do.  We need to be grateful to that power because it does, indeed, make the world go around, because power makes us move.  We are not victims, we have choices—choose to use our power to move forward and create new rather than repeat patterns.

Today I am grateful for excitement.  We are in a month of Thanksgiving, not just the month of Thanksgiving, and this is when we start to review the year with new eyes.  This year has been a mixed bag and it has been emotional.  There was a lot of uncertainty, a lot of waiting, a lot of loss/near loss, a lot of pressure, a lot of fear, a lot of speculating, a lot of sad, and a lot of growing up in understanding exactly how things are changing—and all of that is in reference to my personal life.  I started this year explicitly hopeful that everything was going to turn around, that this is the year I’d be able to make some really big moves and then, as things progressed, bump after bump hit and confusion set in.  With all of those events, some creating their own type of trauma/psychological impact, I haven’t felt excitement in a while—uncertainty, questioning faith, fear, yes, but exciting no.  It felt like I was buckled in on a ride that lost its track in certain places and I couldn’t stop it let alone exit.  I knew I didn’t want to continue to feel like that, I didn’t want to be a victim, I wanted to embrace my power and understand what I COULD do even if it wasn’t everything I wanted.  For months I vacillated between excitement, anger, love, and fear, and now that we are approaching the end of the year, I’ve somehow managed to pull things together enough and have been granted some miracles.  I’ve made the choice to change, I’ve regained my health in a lot of ways, I’ve taken massive strides forward in my projects, I’ve decided to engage with people differently, and I’ve been gifted the means to give generously this coming season.  It feels good to be excited, to find some hope, to let go of fear of the future and to want to participate in building it.  Excitement includes hope, and even if I don’t know the outcome, I am hopeful. I am grateful to feel that. 

Today I am grateful for perspective.  We’ve struggled with many of the changes the family has faced this year, everything from health scares, to death, to the fear of losing sanity/cognitive ability.  The world changes in ways we don’t understand sometimes but each day, especially as we enter my favorite time of year, I’m seeing little miracles and reminders along the way that everything works out as it should, in its own way.  I have made no secret of the challenges at my 9-5 and I had a realization this week that I’m tired of managing people in the corporate environment.  Its been nearly impossible to leave because I’m fixed there, I’m used to it, I genuinely do have some nice benefits for having been there so long, and frankly, I like my house and have nothing else lined up at the moment.  I’ve told you about challenging weeks before but this past week and a half has been a doozy after a few months of already being put through the wringer. My personal life and the contradictions and fears and being left out didn’t give me much solace at home either. Quite frankly I started questioning my faith again.  And right in the middle of frustration with helping my parents I was not understanding what the hell was happening—I felt crazy.  My uncle (who lives with my parents) has been officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and it has been hard for me to even look at him—that’s for a lot of reasons, not because of the diagnosis—walked out of the room after a minute and then beckoned me right before I was leaving.  He handed me a beautiful study Bible.  So look, I’ve been looking at my faith differently since over the summer, and the fact that right as I was about to concede and feel angry again, this man who barely recognizes his own family, comes in with a gorgeous tome as a direct reminder of connection to source.  Even if people don’t seem to understand, they understand our energy, and on some level he knew what I needed—and as difficult as my feelings are for the man, there is something there.  Sometimes perspective is having faith that we are understood more than we think. 

Today I am grateful for the next steps.  I am approaching the next phase of my creative journey and it feels surreal.  I’ve been fortunate enough in my life to have experienced moments of pure alignment where the doors just seemed to be open for me and these things I wanted simply appeared.  It was effortless.  I’ve had this dream of sharing my words and my story for so long, I’ve had this knowing that I NEEDED to share this story forever, and I had a particular knowing that this was the time it would all come together—when I was learning to be at my strongest.  And very shortly (incredibly shortly, actually) I will be taking my next steps in that journey.  The beautiful part is how easy this has felt.  It has been a ton of work, a lot of effort, years of pulling this together—but it has been so easy.  The flow of putting this together has been unlike anything I’ve ever done.  I was trained to fear easy, to distrust easy, to be waiting for the other shoe to drop.  In this case, that isn’t happening.  This feels like everything is exactly aligned as it should be and I’m ready to move forward.  This is positive momentum and I am going with it.  The next steps arrived at exactly the right time and it is time to move to the next phase, the next steps, the next location and accept the gifts I have, to receive the life I have been envisioning.  It’s here and ready for me.  And now I am ready for it.  I am grateful to be one step closer to that vision every day—and I have every intention of living it to the fullest.  Sometimes it takes time to get to where we need to be, things happen for a reason—we just have to trust that all of those things make us who we are so we are able to handle the things we have been asking for.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead   

“I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear.  Knowing what must be done does away with fear,” Rosa Parks.  All the pieces are falling together this week and we continue the discussion about letting go of fear.  Finding our power through our vision and taking the first step, having the courage to apply our vision to what we believe in and allowing it to be shaped by ideas.  These topics have created a bit of a circular discussion but I firmly believe until we learn the lesson, it will repeat so the fact that these quotes all came within the course of this week says this is a lesson we need to learn. 

Right now the world needs people who know who they are, and people willing to share new ideas and beliefs regardless of what the masses say.  It needs people who aren’t afraid to be who they are and stand up for what believe in and for what is right.  Stand in the certainty and the belief of our vision and trust that our knowing is what will guide us.  Decisiveness, clarity, confidence all cut fear away.  Without fear, we are more confident to step into our power and do the work to bring our vision to life.  Deciding eases the fear because it shows us who we are and which way to go.

Life is filled with many questions, many uncertainties, many fears—and many reasons to feel all of those things.  But the truth is they are all manageable through action.  Not reckless action, but appropriate action.  As we have been discussing this week, we need to have belief in ourselves and understand how to follow our convictions and ideas and be willing to share that with the world.  When we slow down and listen to the truth, we are guided, the universe always shows the way and if we are called to stand up for something, to do something, to take some action that feels right, then all we need to do is be bold enough to accept the assignment and do the work.  Decide to have that trust and faith and believe in the timing of the universe and step forward into who we are.  That is courage.   

“When I dare to be powerful—to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid,” Audre Lorde.  Continuing the discussion on the importance of doing/belief so we can do, is this beauty of a quote.  In order to take those first steps we need to have belief, and we need to believe enough to take those first steps.  While this may seem like a contradiction, the truth is we need to know ourselves and have enough certainty in both what we can do and what we are trying to do that we push past fear and dare to embrace our power.  Many of us are scared of our power because of what it implies: there is a lot of work to maintain power once we start a movement like that.  It is difficult to stop a moving cart by pushing it.  But one thing that eases this fear and allows us to embrace our power is clarity.  When we have clarity and direction, it is easier to develop that vision and understand what it is we are looking to accomplish, what the goal is.  Fear dissipates when we take action and builds momentum for our power.  The more we develop an idea, the more it changes us and what we can do.  We learn more and we create more and we step more into our power as we become more confident in who we are and our ability to bring our vision to life.  All it takes is the first step.

I think the use of the word “dare” in this quote is especially poignant.  So many of us don’t have enough conviction in our idea or in our own power that we don’t think it’s worth it to even start.  The truth is those ideas do have power we just don’t have enough clarity on where we are going with them to believe in them and develop them further.  We don’t always have to know the exact end goal, but we do need to know where we want to go with this.  We need to have an idea.  Daring to be powerful suggests that we are brave and going against the norm somehow.  In many cases that’s true: in order to do something new, we must do something new and that kind of exposure (for lack of a better word) always means we are showing our vulnerability.  And that’s ok.  We can develop the power of clarity as we move through this and we often can’t learn to do something new without vulnerability.  Like learning to walk or fly, we have to develop the power, the strength, and the skill to learn to balance and trust our own legs/wings. When we have a vision/idea/belief, we have a purpose to keep us moving and developing that thought se we can see it through to the best use for all, to be of service to all.  To make change, dare to be great, dare to be vulnerable, dare to be who we are and let the magic unfold–and our strength is magical at eliminating fear and helping us take those first steps. Uncertain and shaking, power moves us forward regardless, and wonderful things happen.