Don’t be scared to start over, you might like your new story better.  Last week we ended with new beginnings and taking action.  This is a little reminder/encouragement that it’s natural to get scared along the way.  It’s natural to fear letting go of what we know because we don’t always see what’s down the new path.  It’s natural to feel sadness at letting go.  When we start over, there is indeed a sacrifice.  The person we were needs to be laid to rest so the person we are can come out.  We have to believe that what is coming is better than what was and have faith that we are able to follow the signs and see it through.  The fear of staying the same has to be greater than the fear of the unknown to really inspire action.  We also have to be in a position where we are willing to let go of what we know in favor of the belief that what’s coming is better.

The trajectory of life isn’t just about safety, it’s about change, evolution, creation, and expansion—those things almost the antithesis of safety.  While it seems counterintuitive, we can’t deny we’ve all felt the urge to go after things that, at first, may seem unrealistic.  On the same token, we’ve all felt stuck before and I personally know that what I’m doing now will not let me use the gifts I’ve been graced with, the things I am meant to share with the world.  The thought of playing it safe and allowing talents to develop on one side or the idea of being fully ready before leaping into the new means straddling both lives and we can’t steer multiple ships at once.  As I discussed yesterday, release and leaping is not easy—I’ve fallen into the same patterns millions of times.  We can’t help but lean toward familiar.  But I have an awareness of when I start repeating those patterns now and I have a much better idea of where I’m going and the beginning of any meaningful change is awareness.

The most beautiful thing about change, starting over, and expansion is that when we finally put the puzzle pieces together, there is a click and a resonance that simply makes sense in a way we couldn’t have imagined before.  I can attest to that for the moments I’ve taken the leap.  The point is that there are twists and turns and things in life that we can’t imagine coming forward.  We can’t project what will come based off of what we know because that doesn’t account for what we will learn.  The more we think we know what’s coming the more we strip ourselves of the potential for the magic that can unfold if we simply let the story unfold.  There is no reason to fear the unknown, even if it feels like the unknown can kill us.  The truth is, as I’ve said before, there is a death in the unknown and that is what we fear—but that death is the release of who we’ve been and what we’ve known.  The reward from taking that leap is far greater than staying where we are.  We may find true joy on the other side, it may be the awakening we need.  There is peace there.  Just let the story unfold. 

Today I am grateful for signs.  It’s been a while since I’ve spoken about signs.  I truly believe in the power of the universe.  In some ways it acts like the algorithms on social media—what we like we see more of and we notice more of the things we focus on.  As I work on my mental health journey, I notice that I am particularly susceptible to the desire for encouragement.  I don’t think I had a lot of encouragement when I was a kid, I think I simply received praise for a job well done.  My family wasn’t equipped to guide people through the learning stages so it was easier to be there when the task was done.  The beautiful part of this is that over time I’ve learned to find my own encouragement.  I ask for signs all the time and I truly do see them more often than not.  The universe shows us what we are willing to see and it communicates with us in thought, in feeling, in obstacles, in clear paths, in signs both big and small.  It’s up to us to what we do with it—I choose to bolster the belief when I see them.

Today I am grateful for friends.  This has been an emotionally challenging week and a huge reminder that I need to continue practicing emotional control/restraint.  It’s funny because I always wanted a supportive group around me, people I could lean on but I had a tendency to push them away.  There was a lot I had to figure out on my own as a kid so I learned to self-soothe and I learned what I thought was best for me.  As I’ve gotten older, emotions got harder and harder to manage so I’ve learned that I need a better system.  Help isn’t necessarily about people fixing things for us—I honestly used to believe that too.  A lot of my early “friendships” and “relationships” were solely based off of where I could help people.  As an adult it made me incredibly shy to help others because I didn’t want to be taken advantage of.  But as the emotional baggage got too heavy and I learned to discern the real from the fake, I understood the importance of having an authentic support system.  I am grateful that they helped me through some incredibly challenging moments.

Today I am grateful for the destruction of ego.  I realize how much I have tried to call the shots in my life and how much I’ve defined success by how things have gone my way or people doing what I’ve told them.  it’s a power play because I’ve felt so insecure about many things.  I haven’t fully defined what I’ve wanted in life so I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around.  I’ve lost a lot of time and this has made me feel totally out of control—so I sought control in my relationships and with people around me.  I thought that having a title at work would make me feel better, I thought that calling the shots about how we spend money as a unit would make me feel better, I thought that things playing out how I saw them would feel better.  I see now that it has made me weak and a volatile mess.  I don’t want to be controlled by how I feel.  I don’t want people to be controlled by how I feel.  I don’t always know best, and finding other opportunities and other ways comes from letting go of that belief.  Ego is a fine line because we need enough to know we are worth going for it but not so much that we make ourselves the center of the universe. Let go of the inflation and allow ourselves to soar even higher.    

Today I am grateful for life.  This has been one of the busiest years I’ve had in a long time.  I legitimately cannot believe it’s November.  I feel so unbelievably blessed at the events of this year, the connections I’ve made, the events that have unfolded, and the new experiences we’ve shared.  This is truly what life is all about.  We often spend our time envisioning what we think it should be and then we notice that it either isn’t happening or we are going through it alone.  The more we align with what is, we start to feel the veil lifting and we suddenly find ourselves right where we need to be.  We allow the magic to flood in and adventures and stories are created.  Life is entirely of our own design and we are able to make it what we want.  It truly is of our own design, and that is a gift.  The more life we allow in, the more life we get to experience—and it can begin at any time. 

Today I am grateful for the perspective I needed to get and continued confirmation of my instincts.  I am also grateful to separate someone’s opinion from what I know about myself.  Someone told me they were disappointed in me this week.  That same person tried to equivocate a particular circumstance to something I had been complaining about previously.  She tried saying that something directed to me under my scope should have been shared with her because she felt excluded and she knows I don’t like being excluded either.  The difference is the things I was excluded from were responses to projects I had started or things impacting my team directly that she allowed to go to other managers.  I’m not going to lie, I was infuriated.  Not by the fact that she said she was disappointed, but by the fact that after all this time she still had no clue what I was upset about in the first place, she still couldn’t see her role in what bothered me.  She can keep her disappointment because that is a story she is telling herself to feel better and she needs to grasp at straws to make me the bad person.  That too belongs to her.  I don’t need her approval and I am not there for her praise—I have a job to do.  There is more than one way to get things done, it doesn’t make anything wrong if the goal is accomplished.  I am fine with that.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.

Get to work to get the results.  Once we make the decision to move on a new story with confidence and faith in our ability to do it, we need to act on it.  Follow through is what gets you there.  Yes, the vibration is important but we can’t get where we need to on thought alone.  We need to show the universe that we are willing to do the work required by this new energy.  I wrote a piece a while ago about setting intention and I used the example of wanting to go to Bali but buying a ticket to Florida.  That won’t get you where you want.  Similarly, we can’t say we want to bring about change and continue to do the same thing every day.  I’ve done that for decades.  I told myself I was doing the work by reading, by feeling righteous, by getting angry of what has done.  Those feelings all inspired belief and understanding, but I didn’t move.  I didn’t act on those beliefs to tell the universe I believed I was worth more.  For example, I have never walked out of a job that treated me like crap—I was living with one foot in each camp thinking that was getting me forward.  We can move forward like that but there comes a point on the line where the gap is too great and we need to pick a side.

Don’t get me wrong, establishing belief and understanding for ourselves is a huge step—it just isn’t enough to create the change we need.  Only action can do that.  I got myself stuck here as well.  1. I would create these plans for how to bring about that change and then I would inevitably get exhausted continuing to prioritize my old way of being.  Like, I’d get up early to work on things for my personal goals but then end up cutting myself off because it was time to get to work when I really wanted to take a personal day and keep going.  2. I’d get overwhelmed because I would lose focus and stop prioritizing what I needed to and end up right where I started.  I’d also be overwhelmed because I focused too much on the end result, got frustrated when I didn’t get it, and go back to old habits.  I had to learn to break down the goal into smaller bits-understanding and accepting that big changes are brought about by small daily changes in support of our shift.  3. I had to learn to really let go of ego and my timeline.  I’d get so frustrated when things didn’t happen on my schedule that I’d give up.  I had to believe differently.

Undergoing change in our lives is simultaneously exhilarating/exhausting and empowering/humbling.  We need to be humble enough to pick up that what we are doing isn’t working and empowered enough to change it and it’s exhilarating because it’s something new and an entirely new world opens up to us but it’s exhausting because we aren’t used to that energy.  We can’t assume we are able to flip a switch and become a new version of ourselves.  That’s when we are most likely to give up.  We have to move slowly and integrate every day.  Some days it will go faster than others but there are some lessons that take time.  Regardless of the challenges, we are meant to keep going.  We are meant to ignite the spark of change and let it become a blaze that lights our path and inspires the flame in others.  We have to be willing to burn away the old so there is room for the new.  That is a terrifying moment. They key is that we keep the lessons we need from the past and release the rest.  That way we have what we need and we honor it but we are firmly in a new direction.  We can’t always take the past with us.  New destinations require new moves.  What work are you willing to do?   

New beginnings require two things: 1. Incredible confidence 2. An unshakeable faith in yourself.  This is a perfect follow up to last week’s conversation on auditing our lives.  Sometimes we get the inkling that we need to do something different with our lives and others there are blatant signs that smack us in the face.  Some people have a deep yearning drive for something more and others have a curiosity that leads to more curiosity so they follow it.  Regardless of how the beginning comes about, making any significant change in our lives does require the confidence to do it and the faith that we can follow through to bring it to reality.  I believe the first step in any major change is what we talked about yesterday—audit all facets of our lives to determine where we are at compared to what we want to be.  If the two don’t match, then we can begin the process of breaking down the changes into manageable steps. 

The other part of starting fresh is accepting the responsibility of a new beginning.  When we decide to go in a new direction, no one will shift for us.  There will be people and guideposts along the way, but it is up to us to follow through.  We have to navigate uncharted territory on our own with confidence and trust that we will get where we want to go.  That doesn’t mean we need to know everything, but we do need to learn how to figure it out.  This is the prime example that adaptability is key and knowing what we want, follow through and determination are the steps to get there.  All of this starts with taking an honest, informed, and discerning eye to our current situation and how we feel about it and stepping toward how we want to feel a little bit more every day.  The purpose of a new beginning is to start fresh and we need to audit our lives to see where we need to take a different action. We learn ourselves well enough to take the leap.  We tell a new story. 

Telling a new story is key because the universe understands vibration and if we are telling the story of life before the new beginning, we will simply get more of the same.  We have to believe we can ask for what we want and that we are worthy of getting what we want and that we have the ability to create it.  Believe that everything is happening and that we are already living in a state of love and purpose and that we can get what we offer vibrationally.  That our lives unfold in joy and that we recognize joy and happiness as the way to move forward.  Focus on what is good and draw in more good, allow the vibration to pass and expand.  We need to tell the story of how we believed in ourselves enough to take the leap and create something new.  Once we commit to that, there is nothing that can stop us.  Even if we don’t know the way, the confidence is that we will find the way.  We can’t go wrong on that path.  Trust and take the leap. 

Life audit: an honest look at the results you have versus what you want.  I took this from a speech I heard about self-improvement and it was used in the context of getting from where we are to where we want to be.  The simple way to look at this is evaluating how to close the gap (I have a piece on that further back as well 😊).  The more I thought about it, the more I realized it has a bigger reach and impact than that.  Recent events in the world seem to have made this more of a priority for me.  I don’t like the idea that things need to stay the same, especially if they aren’t working for everyone, and I don’t like the idea that we have to keep doing things a certain way simply because they were done that way before—especially if people are getting hurt.  Any belief that requires hurting someone else because of what they believe needs to be examined further. 

What really made me dive deeper into this idea of auditing where we are at is that, honestly, there are some days it feels like the world is falling apart.  The reality is that the world isn’t falling apart—the systems we knew are falling apart and we don’t know what to do in its place.  We are learning to operate on new ground and it’s intimidating for us all.  We are competitive animals so ridding ourselves of the idea that we need a best idea or that there needs to be a winner is hard to get rid of.  We are all vying to prove our worthiness/claim our power.  In spite of all that, I believe we are fully capable of starting over and making it a new beginning, a blank slate for all.  The answers to anything new don’t come overnight.  They come from understanding our roles, our desires, our talents and our purpose and then learning how that combines with other people.  That’s why it’s SO important to know who we are—I can’t reiterate that enough. 

The whole purpose of the individual life audit is simple: when we do our best and learn to operate at our optimal performance, we spread that light to the world.  We are able to fulfill our purpose easier, we have energy to see things through, we have the capacity to listen and understand people and we are brave enough to bring forward our ideas and humble enough to refine them with others.  Given the climate of the world now, we need people to awaken to this state now more than ever.  We all need to take pause and ask if what we are doing is who we are.  How much of what we do is because we learned it and how much of it is because it’s engrained in us—and we are meant to break the habit (see the post on generational trauma from a few days ago)?  Breaking any habit is hard—spending, eating, drugs, alcohol—but it’s harder to live someone else’s life.  I think that is the biggest source of regret when we go; at the end we realize that we missed out on living our lives because we were living someone else’s.  don’t let that happen.  Wake up, do the work, dig deep and analyze if this is what you want.  The sooner we can fulfill our destiny, the sooner the ideas that work for all can flow. Auditing ourselves is the most selfless thing we can do.        

Who are you storying for? The subtext to this question is don’t make assumptions about what other people are thinking or feeling.  This was a challenging one for me for several reasons: 1. This is a habit that I have that I thought came from a good place.  I decide what people are feeling before they confirm it with me.  2. I got this habit because I had to learn how to interpret and manage the feelings/emotions of others around me. 3. I’m really good at reading people. Even if it’s just a gut feeling, it’s hard to not jump forward when I know my gut is telling me something, especially when it hasn’t steered me wrong before.  It may have taken time to come out in some cases, but I’ve rarely been wrong.  4. I’ve been trained to not trust those instincts because other people didn’t see what I saw “soon enough” so they chalked it up to me being wrong. 

As I’ve gotten older, I clearly know that people are capable of telling their own story.  I’ve also learned that while I can be empathetic and sympathetic to people’s experiences, that doesn’t mean I feel the full range of what they do—it is still their story to tell, not mine, regardless of how similar the circumstance.  When we are trained as people pleasers, reading the room is important.  We need everyone to like us and we need to feel love and accepted and the only way to do that is to make sure people are happy with us and our behavior at all times.  Even if we feel it is for the other person’s benefit, we need to stop telling their story and assuming that’s what they want.  We have to learn to draw the line and understand that if people don’t like us when we stop doing what is best for them, then they weren’t meant to be in our lives regardless.  The other side of this is to stop believing we know how people feel at all times.  Sometimes they are simply tired and we misinterpret that as anger toward us.  Most of the time how people feel has nothing to do with us.    

The most important thing we can do is learn to tell our own story and to stand firm in who we are.  The more we know about ourselves, the more we trust ourselves, the less likely we feel the need to control others.  That is the essence of storying for other people—we think we have a modicum of control over the outcome if we know where their story is going so we start telling it for them.  We can’t steer the ship for other people’s lives (some people barely have the capacity to steer for themselves) so we need to learn to embrace the power and stand at the helm of our own lives.  How people react and interact with us depends on so many factors, we can’t make assumptions about their feelings and we always need to give them space to figure that out first.  We don’t always know how we feel immediately and if we give ourselves and others time to figure that out, communication improves.  Tell our own stories and watch everything improve.  

Trauma doesn’t die with the person who experienced it, it imprints on the DNA.  There was a study done on mice where they were exposed to a particular scent (jasmine or sage or something floral) and when the scent was introduced to the room, they were given a jolt of electricity.  Soon the same jump/fear response would be elicited just from the scent alone.  Through subsequent generations of these mice, scientists found that introducing the grandchildren or great grandchildren of the mice exposed to the shocks also demonstrated the fear response when exposed to the smell even though they had never been injured or experimented on.  The implications of that are huge.  This is the very definition of generational trauma.  While my heart bleeds for the little mice involved in this experiment, the results are demonstrable proof that the things our forefathers dealt with are indeed passed on to us—specifically emotional trauma.  Have you ever encountered a behavior in someone that wasn’t rude or problematic but it automatically set you off without knowing why?  What innate fears do you have that you can’t explain?

While these are mild examples, we need to look at the even bigger implication: the fact that we repeat the same patterns as those before us is quite effectively embedded in who we are.  The ideas we have repeat, we seek safety and comfort in the same ways.  We essentially live the same life as those before us because it feels familiar.  It can be painful for people to break patterns—and it often does feel that way.  Breaking patterns doesn’t even have to be related to a previous trauma, it can be something as simple as a desire for a certain food.  I share this because I know I’ve been a big proponent of changing our lives through changing our mindset and the relevance of this experiment to me is that breaking these patterns can be more complex that we thought and we need to give more space and grace for it.  We’ve talked about simple v. easy before and this is another great example of that.  Learning to trust ourselves is a challenge if every generation before us was afraid to go for their dreams.  Learning to break unhealthy habits feels like losing a part of who we are because we haven’t felt what it means to be healthy before. 

I think the most important part of all of this is to learn to appropriately question things.  If we have fears or any other emotion we deem inhibiting, we need to learn to peel back the onion and ask the question: why am I feeling this?  Admittedly this is not an easy process because we have to be ready to make distinctions and take ownership and we have to be willing to change.  We have to discern what feelings actually belong to us that we’ve adopted as our own, and we have to know what we want to feel and learn how to take responsibility for it.  I find that this is actually pretty comforting because it demonstrates we are able to make changes and that we can change into anything we want to/need to.  We are able to break patterns, create new ones, or simply learn to live in peace.  We don’t need to be afraid of what we don’t understand, we can learn a new way to live with it and we can pass down new lessons/mindsets about being open to curiosity and creating new things.  We also open the door to understanding how difficult it can be for some people to change things—if they don’t even understand where it came from, starting is nearly impossible.  Have a little patience, but start asking the questions.       

“She quietly removed herself from the drama, built her own lane and lived happily ever after.  Free, alive, and never looking back,” Kelley Webb.  A little over a week has passed since I lost my aunt and I wanted to write a piece that honored her.  A lot of the hurt in this situation comes from the fact that my aunt walked way years ago.  I never held any resentment for that decision, I actually applauded her for it.  I just never thought that she’d include us in that in regards to not speaking to us as well.  We found out she was going to pass 24 hours before she did so after all the years, it was a sudden thing to hear this.  There was a lot of anger in the room, a lot of frustration, and a lot of helplessness.  And, yes, that actually did surprise me.  My family had made their choices and decided where the blame lay years ago—but those choices excluded my siblings and I from the equation as well.  So while I felt bad for their grief as well, I felt sorry more than anything.  My siblings felt more anger. 

While I saw my aunt in that condition, I felt my own guilt and sorrow, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  The things left unsaid, the last conversation we had, the good times we had and the good times we would never have together.  The fact that she didn’t want to reach out to us because of what happened with her siblings.  The fact that we could have done more to reach out.  The resentment that this information was kept from us.  The last words I heard her say were, “I missed you.”  I missed her too.  But with all of this, I knew at the end of the day, I knew when she made that decision to walk away years ago, she had made the right choice.  See, she had been the punching bag for too long.  She had been the one to try and resolve things, she had been the one who lost herself trying to fix it all.  She had made herself weak trying to stand up over and over again, and when she found the truth of what had happened, she couldn’t take it anymore.  It wasn’t a big production—it was much like the opening quote—she simply decided to walk away.  She found a place where she felt better, where she was happy, she let go of the expectation that she would fix anything, she released the weight of “doing the right thing for the family”, and she lived her life. 

While her decision ultimately cut us out as well, I didn’t feel anger for that part.  Sadness, yes.  Anger, no.  Her decision and ultimate follow through on walking away instead of killing herself trying to fix something so broken was quite frankly inspiring and liberating.  She had never been the one to stand up for herself and then she did—and even if we weren’t there with her, I like to think that she had real moments of happiness.  That she lived the last years of her life happily and at peace doing the things she loved.  The thing I remember the most is her smile—and she smiled a lot even though she felt like shit most of the time.  I hope in that time apart she was genuinely happy, following her heart, and experiencing joy.  I hope she felt freedom and release and relief at deciding to put it all behind her.  I will honestly regret missing out on that part of her life for a long time because she so deserved it and it would have been nice to see her that way.  I can only imagine it now, but I hope that’s how it was.  She is an absolute inspiration still, and a reminder to live my life in a way that works for me no matter what that means.  It isn’t about making anyone else happy.  It’s about living as we are meant to. 

Today I am grateful for learning.  I’ve always loved traditional learning.  There was always something satisfying about taking in information and connecting it to how things are, learning about people and what they did—I always loved the stories of people’s lives.  I also truly believe that we never stop learning.  We are meant to live in a constant state of growth and expansion and learning comes from so much more than traditional settings.  Learning to live in confidence and accept happiness and joy, learning the things I need to unlearn to move forward in my life, learning to love again—both myself and others, learning to stand assuredly in who I am, learning to embrace the idea that I can live in a different way—and going for it.  All of these things have been a learning experience.  I’m grateful to learn to develop myself more and to figure out how to continue the expansion of my life.

Today I am grateful for steps.  Specifically I am grateful for every single step I take each day toward something new.  This goes along with the learning—sometimes we have to leap and others we have to learn to find our footing before we can make the jump.  I’m happy to find the footing and to embrace the process.  Trusting myself, trusting that all would work out in the end has been a long journey for me, one that I still work through every day.  I learn a bit more every day about my capacity, my capability, my adaptability, where I need to pivot, where I need to focus more, where I need to let go more, and where I need to lead more.  The most fulfilling part of this has been seeing it through.  It has been knowing that I am shedding layer upon layer, discovering what was mind to process and what was mine to break.  Learning about my family and seeing the bold steps taken before me and understanding the steps I can take next.  It’s all an amazing journey.

Today I am grateful for honesty.  Oh, I’ve spoken about this a bunch of times but it still remains one of my favorite things.  I’ve had a large dose of reality lately and it has shifted my perspective.  There has been a long series of events that came to a head in several arenas, personal and professional that literally made me flip the switch toward a purpose.  This is the first time this amount of loss has hit me as logically as this has.  I still feel all the fear and sadness, but it does not consume me.  This is where honesty has kept me objective and allowed for better understanding.  Being honest has led me to making different decisions with my career, with my business, with my family, with my health, with the people I surround myself with, how I move in the world, with making decisions for both the day to day and the long term.  It has been empowering.  If we need to make any type of decision, we need to practice being honest, especially honest with ourselves. 

Today I am grateful for support.  I spent so much of my time doing things on my own, being responsible for everything, carrying weight that I didn’t need to that letting go and reaching out was always difficult.  Like I never did it.  I was that stubborn.  As I’ve embraced the changes in my life and stepped toward what I want to do, I see this new network evolving in my life.  People are there.  People surround and embrace me as well and it really feels good.  I mean, it was completely awkward at first and I still have moments where I feel like I put my foot in my mouth or I’m socially awkward, but knowing there are people I can lean on and they actually show up is a gift.  I understand now the idea behind things “taking a village” to complete.  I mean, I still need my alone time, but it is nice to have people around me who complement my energy and who I can return that support to as well. 

Today I am grateful for confidence.  The ability to believe in self and trust that self can do anything is a remarkable thing.  I heard something at one point about needing to have a delusional belief that anything can happen, that we can create anything in our lives. I think it was from Jim Carrey.  Regardless, there is truth behind that statement because our thoughts, feelings, and energy determine so much of our outcomes.  If we think we can do it, we likely will.  Even if we don’t get as far as we want, we will certainly be further than the person who doesn’t believe in themselves enough to even begin.  Aim high and we will certainly gain momentum.  Learning confidence is a skill I wish I had a long time ago.  It isn’t ego, it’s assurance and trust and faith.  It’s powerful enough to move mountains—and if it can’t move the mountains, it shows us how to blaze a train around or over them. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead! 

“Elevate consciousness, choose a source, the sooner we do that the sooner we will awaken to the matrix and ascend,” Richard Miller (Richard readings).  I liked this take on ascension and stepping up into who we are.  When we have a guiding light, it’s easier to make decisions because we know the direction we must go.  That guiding light is when we choose to follow our hearts and let go of what we have been told we need to do.  We are meant for more, we are meant to do more.  It isn’t about being better than the generation that came before us—it’s about applying what they new and expanding on it.  This universe is meant to grow us and evolve who we are—meaning we need to grow and evolve with it.  Our growth is contingent on taking what we know and questioning it, thinking of ways to improve it, or really taking the time to understand all the implications of it.  We can’t do something new by repeating old patterns so it’s our job to determine the new path—that implies doing something new.

The patterns that we are so familiar with are illusions of what we think needs to be done because they worked for someone in the past.  We create this idea of who we are based on what others tell us first—there are a few lucky ones who are able to confidently step into who they are from the time they are young.  They have an unshakeable awareness and they are here to grow themselves and others from the beginning.  Most of us take some time to figure that out.  Breaking patterns is never easy—it takes bold action, often unknown steps, and certainty in ourselves/our faith to walk into that.  We aren’t meant to be replicas of the times before, we are creators of the time to come.  We honor those who did their best and we improve on it for ourselves and others. 

At the simplest level, consciousness is an awareness of our actions and the impact of those actions.  It is the ability to make a discerning decision considering the outcomes.  It isn’t an all-knowing thing, it’s an all feeling thing.  We step into a different awareness and we maintain a different perspective.  Things lose their jagged edges and they no longer seem to be directly pointed at us.  We understand the actions even if we wouldn’t react that way.  We don’t judge what happens, we process it and we move forward with it as is.  It’s an acceptance—not a condoning, but a realization that it is how it is.  Once we see that all things fall together as they should, we can release our hold on the outcome, the attachment to the way we think it should be—that’s ego.  We can find presence and awareness not by controlling the outcome, but by understanding it as it is.  Once we operate with that level of certainty, fear slips away and we begin to elevate.  Find our guiding light and we find the way on our path.  Don’t be afraid to follow that—there is no wrong way.