Today I am grateful for opportunity.  Sometimes we don’t realize how many opportunities surround us.  True, there are some we need to look for, they aren’t as obvious as we’d like.  On the surface some may look like the exact thing we are trying to avoid.  But when we learn to lean into who we are and find our rhythm, seeing those opportunities becomes easier.  Things become clearer faster and we know the direction we need to go it.  Suddenly the opportunities we need are right in front of us.  I am grateful to learn how to make those opportunities for myself through recognizing them and being aware of their presence.  I don’t claim this is easy—I still miss things because I’m too stubborn to see things for what they really are at times. The more gratitude we can express for something, the more opportunity comes into our lives and all the more apparent.  How cool! 

Today I am grateful for fun.  There are moments when we finally see how inhibited we’ve been.  I recognize that I have had fun, don’t mistake what I’m saying, but those moments I had fun do not compare to the actual release of endorphins felt in the midst of genuine happiness.  We do things that entertain us and distract us, but when we learn to be actively involved where we are and to embrace and engage in the moment, fun takes on a different meaning.  Fun feels different.  Learning to activate and release those joy hormones is life changing and it is pure joy.  Sometimes things become fun and we don’t even realize it.  Fun activates and unlocks a flood of creativity.  It shows us who we really are. 

Today I am grateful for love.  This is another feel good one.  We don’t always know if we can trust people and we tend to live life pretty guarded.  When we drop our inhibitions, we see how similar we all are.  We find new ways to connect and to feel good about ourselves and those around us.  I am also grateful for the connection that comes with love.  When we are close with people, there is a connection and an intimacy (not on the physical plane) that allows us to become who we are meant to be. Love is being seen and accepted as we are.  Sometimes we don’t know how people will perceive us and we live our lives carrying a shield to make sure no one sees the real us.  When we allow ourselves to get vulnerable, we feel the full weight of someone appreciating who we are.  The connection we feel from others also awakens the reciprocal action—we appreciate that person as well and we learn how to appreciate ourselves as well.  Love is a grand spectrum and the more I have sunk myself into it and embraced it, the better I have felt.  Love improves communication and joy and improves our sense of connection.  It’s a powerful thing and we should be so lucky to experience it.

 Today I am grateful for identity.  My town has a celebration the week after the 4^th of July and my son and I walked in the parade for a group he is involved with.  I had decided to invite a large group of people over in order to eat, recover, and celebrate after the long walk and my husband agreed.  I invited my parents so they could see my son was in the parade but they decided not to come.  At first it bothered me because I don’t want them to miss out on those moments plus they haven’t seen him with his group.  I realized, however, that I didn’t want them to be miserable if it wasn’t something they were going to enjoy.  So we walked and enjoyed the day with our friends and it turned into an amazing party, something I know would have made them uncomfortable.  It may have made me uncomfortable as well had they been there.  While it was a bittersweet moment, I realized that the time would have passed one way or the other, it was the time to enjoy it with the people around us.  It happened exactly as it was meant to.    

Today I am grateful for power.  Along with identity comes power.  We operate differently when we know ourselves and step fully into our being.  When we embrace the intricacy of who we are with no reservation, we see we are different people than the image we project to the world.  The more we invite that person to the table, the more we embrace our power and become comfortable with showing the world who we are as well as with setting boundaries.  As we are seen, the more comfortable we become owning who we are.  Power is about owning and taking responsibility for who we are.  It isn’t about making people see things our way, it’s about expressing our way and allowing things to fall where they may.  We learn what we are capable of and we learn how to use that power comfortably.  Love, identity, power, connection, it all ties together to make us a formidable force that flows within this world.  We find our power in love and sense of self and that is a gift.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.

“We all eat bread and we know that bread has an expiration date.  Just because it has an expiration date it doesn’t mean we can’t try and eat it.  It might have mold on it, it might make you sick, it might not be healthy for you. The same can be said for people.  When you try to deal with people and situations where you know the time has expired, you’re going to get the worst of what is left.  Stop dealing with expired situations.  Know when that bite isn’t worth it,” via Malibuhannah.  In the vein of perspective, growth, moving on, this is the most timely and appropriate metaphor I could have come across.  I’ve written about not sitting at a table where we are made to feel unwelcome.  When they are no longer serving what is nourishing, it is time to leave.  We will keep ourselves unhealthy and unsatisfied as long as we are comfortable.  Even if we start to mold ourselves, even if we feel sick ourselves, we operate where we know, so we will continue the behavior out of comfort and habit. 

When we gain enough perspective and remember who we are and what we are capable of, we learn how to move forward.  We learn that eating that expired bread and partaking in those unhealthy situations is unhealthy for us.  There is no separating us from the experiences we have.  That knowledge helps us make better decisions and we understand that we can no longer eat the dregs, the crumbs, the mold of what is left.  We are worth the meals we prepare, we are worth inviting to the table, we are worth building the entire table.  There is no need to keep ourselves down for fear of missing out on something we can provide ourselves.  We learn to empower ourselves and adopt a new perspective and we learn to walk away from what no longer serves and what is no longer healthy for us.  We learn to invite in the experiences we want and that are aligned with who we are.

If we know not to eat moldy foods, then we can learn the same for our relationships whether it is with people who have known us our whole lives or other, we can learn the same for the jobs we take and the work we do even if we fear changing how we operated with money before, and we can learn the same for what we ingest through any type of media.  We can learn to break these habits any time and in any situation because the same message applies: if it isn’t healthy for us, we no longer partake.  We don’t need to focus on doing things that make us sick for the sake of another person.  We learn how to effectively stand up for ourselves and how to nourish who we really are.  Never feel guilty for taking the perspective of keeping healthy.  Learn to provide satisfaction for ourselves over comfort and life changes dramatically.  Expired anything is no longer an option.    

As silly as it sounds, Google asked me if I wanted to hear a poem the other day and it chose A Foreign Land by Robert Louis Stevenson.  It expresses what a child feels climbing up a tree and seeing the world around them from a different perspective.  As adults we see things as ordinary or even plain where as children we find the extraordinary in the ordinary.  Kids see possibility in things we take for granted.  Sometimes we need a reminder that for a different perspective, we have to get above where we are now. Sometimes we need to venture out of what is ordinary in order to find a new way of doing things—or we need to remember that there is magic in the ordinary.  Too often we take for granted the fact that we are alive, that we are able to breathe, that we can move, that we have access to all of this information at our fingertips. 

At the simplest level, we can’t make new decisions with old habits as mentioned in yesterday’s piece.  Sometimes we need to get back to that childlike wonder where we see possibility in everything, where we see magic in what’s around us.  The level of imagination in children is a reminder that we can make anything extraordinary.  The ability to see things differently, to see them for more than they are is a gift, and sometimes, especially when we feel our lowest, it’s those simple things and that shift in perspective that helps us see things a different way.  That can start with gratitude and appreciation and that can evolve into a new way of doing things because we see a different perspective.  The days when things seem especially challenging are the ones where we need that tree the most.  Instead of falling into old habits and reactions, break the pattern and do something else.  There is magic in each of us, there is magic in this world, we just have to remember how to tap into it.     

We create versions of ourselves to bear the weight of where we are.  Those versions work with what we know and create opinions and solutions and responses based on information they have.  They can do nothing different than operate within the framework of where they are.  As we heal, evolve, progress, and learn different ways to do things, that version expands.  After time, the way we handled things previously no longer works.  It doesn’t serve.  The people we created to get through and survive are not the people who can go forward.  We can love and honor them and we can even retain the skills, but those responses and reactions are not what is going to help us progress.  We tend to go back to those versions in the heat of the moment when a familiar situation arises because it is familiar.  With time, as we learn and recognize we need operate differently, we can make conscious choices to change the behavior.

Too many of us spend time lamenting repeating the same actions or even being angry when we fall into old habits.  I don’t deny how frustrating it is to fall into the same pattern, especially when trying to bring more awareness to our lives, but sometimes it’s more than habit.  The protective behaviors and patterns are so engrained in us that breaking the pattern sometimes means becoming a new version of ourselves all together.  That isn’t easy work.  It’s painful and raw and delicate.  It needs to be done with patience, love, and gratitude because those versions of ourselves have seen things and done things that brought us where we are now.  We need to appreciate what we have done to get ourselves where we are.  I’m not suggesting we hold every moment of our past in reverence because no one is happy with everything they’ve done and if we are too fond of it, we live in nostalgia.  But I AM suggesting that we need to spend a bit more time in gratitude for what we endured and the work the mind, body, and soul have done to carry us through.

Moving forward requires honoring and appreciating who we were.  The past isn’t something to completely dismiss, and honestly, even if we aren’t proud of it, it is nothing to be ashamed of.  We learned something from everything we’ve been through as long as we are willing to see it.  This IS where it gets tricky: while we have to honor and appreciate the past, we can’t take the past with us.  We have to be willing to let go of the responses and reactions we had in order to move forward successfully.  The reactions, and quite frankly the person we were before, will not be able to experience new reactions or feel differently because all we know is what that person knows until we learn to change our behavior.  The healed version moves forward, the survivor version must be left where they are.  Be grateful to that version and integrate those lessons, and with love, step through.  That is how we figure it out and how we progress.  New responses, new reactions, new feelings.  That is the new version of us.  Love and honor the past but respect the present enough to know when it’s time to move forward with new behavior.

Have you ever been attracted to someone outside of the physical realm?  Like, you wouldn’t want to get physically intimate or anything, but there is still a powerful draw to that person?  These people tend to have something we are looking for emotionally or energetically in ourselves.  For example, we are looking for safety and security so we are drawn to people who seem to be resourceful and able to solve problems or who have created something from nothing.  Or we are looking to get out of our own minds so we are drawn to people with a strong sense of humor or very physically active.  Attraction is about more than physical appearance.  The fact that we are attracted to different things speaks to the fact that we are attracted more to what we feel than what we see.  The same is true for the universe.

Yes, it’s true we receive the energy we emit, but it is also true that the universe shows us the energy we need to align with via what we are drawn to.  While the physical aspect is easier to understand, those desired emotions and feelings are just as real and just as strong.  In this regard, we can look at the Law of Attraction as a reciprocal of what we want and what we need.  It is the mirror we have been talking about.  It wasn’t until I became close with someone energetically that I truly understood this.  This helps us understand that what we want we can attract through our energy and vibration.  While we may expect to receive things in a certain way, when we look at energy, we see it wasn’t the “thing” we were looking for, it was the feeling.

It’s so important to become extremely clear in this regard otherwise the universe gets confused.  We can’t say we want to feel happy and continue to choose unhappy thoughts or things that bring us down.  The things we are attracted to whether physical or energetic pick up on what we are ready to receive.  The universe shifts and it’s our job to be open to receive what we asked for.  We can’t always assume that we will receive a physical manifestation of an object to fulfill us, but we need to use our feelings as a guidepost.  Make choices aligned with what we feel.  Don’t second guess ourselves.  Trust that things will work out and bring us exactly where we are meant to be.

This year’s annual freedom post means something a little different to me.  I’ve recently spent some time away from my 9-5 to work through things that have been building for a while.  I also needed some time way to redefine and evaluate what is important to me.  I mentioned last week that we recently went through a trauma in my family and that, too, has shifted my perspective.  While I’ve been doing this work of unbecoming for several years now, I see that this only scratched the surface.  In freeing ourselves, in becoming who we are meant to be, we have to be willing to let go at an unprecedented level.  We must learn surrender in a way that is so terrifying it becomes liberating. 

Life is precious and short and if we do it “right” we learn to spend that time doing things in alignment.  That alignment is the freedom we’ve been looking for.  This day commemorates a time when we sought freedom from various oppressions all while oppressing others.  It speaks to the illusion that freedom was something we needed to earn and that others have innate and total authority over us.  We are trained to give our freedom away from the time we are born.  The reality is, freedom has ALWAYS and will ALWAYS be ours to claim.  I never said it was easy, but it is available for us to take up at any time as long as we are willing to take accountability and responsibility for those decisions.

I’ve dealt with significant loss in my life and I spent my time worrying about what or who I would lose next.  This most recent close call made me question all of the time I spend working for others (even more than I normally question this), and where my focus needs to be.  That is a different kind of oppression because that comes from the weight of our own thoughts.  But what I’ve realized is that this life, in finding freedom, we have to be willing to face all that we were taught to be ashamed of.  We have to redefine what we are willing to settle for and we have to redefine the rules of who gets to play.  I don’t want to lose another person because I’m/society is confining us in a way that pushes us to be who we are not. 

If you’re feeling this way, like there is something more, then it’s time to dig deeper.  It’s time to find the freedom in doing what we love, in what matters the most to us, in prioritizing our lives differently.  This isn’t about being selfish, this is about learning new ways of doing things.  This is about taking back that accountability and giving up comfort and convenience for what works for us.  This is about breaking out of the cage we’ve put ourselves in and becoming who we are meant to be.  Freedom is taking the lessons we’ve learned and applying them to what we want to build.  Freedom is living in the love we create without fear of others tearing it down.  Freedom is loving ourselves and those around us enough to do better without the rules/constraints and without fear of retribution for being who we are.  If we need time to figure this out, I highly recommend taking it—it will be life altering.    Prioritize figuring this out because the sooner we do, the sooner we reach the goal: living how we are meant to live.  Happy 4^th.  

Choose love.  Life is too damn short to not choose love daily.  Choose to love ourselves, love the people around us, love life.  Love living and creating this life.  Love being part of this life.  We had a horrific moment the other night, one of those moments you know you can never go back from—it will forever be a before and after.  These things happen and they come suddenly and out of left field.  In that moment I knew that I needed to choose love over and over again.  I needed to choose support.  It was no longer about me and my comfort, it was about saving someone, loving someone completely.  It was about diving into the lion’s den.  While I wish to never see anything like it again, I will say the moment provided the utmost clarity about what is important to me.  Anything personal, any demands I had of life didn’t matter in that moment, it was about projecting the energy of love onto someone to hold them long enough so they could think.

Not to sound cliché, but love truly is one of the most powerful forces in the world.  It creates an energy of protection, an energy of sustenance, and an energy of wholeness.  Loving in general is used loosely, but when done with spirit behind it, it can change the course of our lives and the lives of others.  Admittedly, I have a tendency to be hyper critical of how others do things and I compare a lot.  While this may not make it any better, this behavior comes from two things: 1. I’m just as critical of myself and I hold myself to those expectations as well.  When I’m not meeting my own expectations, this behavior can worsen. 2. I spent a lot of time cleaning up after people who could have made a better choice and decided to let someone else (me) be responsible for their actions.  What I learned from this experience is that there are some moments when that shit doesn’t matter.  As hurt as we are, as much as we think we can’t keep doing it, we find the way to push through because it’s about someone else’s sanity and not our ego.

When we truly love someone, that ego tends to go away regardless.  Think of the vulnerability we have with those closest to us.  Our closest relationships know the most about us and there is very little we can hide in the way of body language and what goes unspoken.  That doesn’t stop us from trying to control them at times because we are still human and trying to protect ourselves because that vulnerability can be too much.  When we spend too much time protecting ourselves, however, we can let the other person’s needs to unnoticed.  Don’t ever let it get that far.  Take the time to stop and dwell in love.  Communicate in love. Find out what is needed in the present moment with love.  Don’t let someone slip away because we are so concerned with how we are impacted.  It may take a drastic action for us to remember what is important, but once we have that wake up call, don’t let it slip away.  Find a way back to what matters because life  and love are the most important things.          

Today I am grateful for love.  We attended a party on my brother’s property yesterday for an early July 4^th celebration.  There were a ton of people, many of whom don’t know each other but we are all connected to my brother somehow.  Seeing this group of people is truly a thing of beauty—even though some of us don’t know each other, we are still family in many ways.  We’ve known some of this group for upwards of four decades and some we’ve only known a few years—some we just met yesterday, but we all come together and we have a great time.  Hearing stories from my childhood, remembering all the times together, seeing everyone come together again is always such a gift.  Not everyone who usually attends was able to make it, and while it was sad, it makes us appreciate the time together that much more.  Love is an amazing thing and it transmutes everything. 

Today I am grateful for comfort in my own skin.  I’ve worked on self-esteem and becoming the truest version of myself for years.  Nothing ever felt quite right and I found myself falling into old habits more often than allowing my real self to come out.  But sometimes it only takes a second for things to change.  The time I’ve enjoyed away from work has been incredibly productive and has provided a significant amount of clarity.  I’ve had a certain level of discomfort at work for a long time now, and when I went back for a couple of days, I knew with everything in me that the time I’ve taken away and the things I’m focusing on now are exactly where I need to be and what I need to be doing.  Stepping in and immediately feeling all of the shame, ostracism, and fears showed me exactly how toxic the environment is—and they don’t even know it.  That’s not something I’m interested in fixing any longer.  I’m ready to move forward.

Today I am grateful for my son.  Being a parent is no joke—like, these little versions of ourselves know exactly what buttons to push from one second to the next and then they throw their little arms around you and suddenly all the anger and frustration goes away.  They can be sadistic little creatures at times.  In spite of (or maybe because of) all that, it is also one of the most rewarding things. Kids grow so damn fast and we spend so little time truly present with them that every moment I’m able to, I try to dive in with my kid.  He has taught me so much about where my focus needs to be and about what’s important.  It’s taken me several years with him to finally get it, but he has persisted with me.  I see that as much as I felt responsible for him, he has shown me what it means to really love and be aware of others and how to have fun and to explore creativity without shame.  Parenting is tough, but it is an amazing gift and I truly feel privileged to see this little human develop.

Today I am grateful for my body.  I’ve dedicated a ton of time to movement during my time away from work.  I can’t say I’ve stopped all my bad habits, but I can feel a significant difference in my body by incorporating so much movement.  We are truly not meant to sit behind desks as much as we do. We need to move and explore and appreciate what our bodies can do.  I am so grateful for how responsive my body is to movement and seeing how I’m helping myself.  I’m also grateful for the improvement I feel in my mind as well.  It’s amazing how we allow ourselves to wither away thinking it’s normal.  I personally want to become the best version of myself, and yes that requires changing more habits, but I am grateful that I’ve been able to recognize other areas I need to change so I can align with this new need in my mind and body.

Today I am grateful for connection.  I’ve always been one of those people who did it on my own—for a lot of reasons.  I still trend toward that habit, but as I’ve been stepping more comfortably and more completely into who I am, I’ve seen how important it is to have people.  It is so important to know how to connect with ourselves and others.  To learn and adapt to what works for us, to honor what works for us and to figure out a way to incorporate more of that connection into our lives.  For a long time I wanted everyone to like me and that left me searching for what I even liked about myself.  Now that I’ve gotten more clarity on that, I see the people who I genuinely connect with and those I don’t.  I also see the need for connection on different levels: spiritual, emotional, physical, and with humor, grace, and honesty.  It’s a beautiful thing, and this is a small world.  We have so much more in common than we think—all it takes is one conversation.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.        

What’s underneath the underneath?  What is really there that’s holding us back?  Why do we fear and procrastinate?  This is a bit of a deeper dive into the conversations we’ve had over the last two days.  Finding our limits requires knowing where they come from.  Hendrick’s suggests four main beliefs that hold us in place, and I would add that yesterday’s piece on not following our purpose is another way we pin ourselves where we are.  This requires shining a light on the things we would rather not discuss but it reveals not only what we are afraid/ashamed of, but the why behind it.  In some cases it’s a relatively simple thing (I said simple, not easy).  For example, we learn that what we feel about ourselves isn’t what we feel about ourselves (i.e. our parents/siblings thought we were a burden so we feel we are a burden).  Other times we learn we have to take accountability for our actions (i.e. we learn to accept that we caused issues in our live and that we are not always the victim or that we have to set and maintain boundaries with others).  Other times we have to learn and accept who we are (i.e. what we are doing fulfills no other purpose than what we were trained to do because that is what we were told we must do). 

This digging takes effort but once we get to the bottom of it, life becomes a different game.  We find our chance to connect and see how simple life actually is.  We see the complexity we’ve put in place and we eliminate that for a journey of connection that, while still complex, is far more fulfilling.  It’s the purpose we’ve been looking for.  Nearly everything we do outside of our purpose and the things we do for survival is distraction.  We treat those distractions as normal, as what normal people do.  To a degree we do need those things—but how we focus our time is key.  Anything we do should be done with intention whether it is creating work, speaking with people, or even sitting on the couch watching T.V.  When done with purpose behind it, we receive a different energy than simply distracting ourselves.  We no longer do things for the sake of doing them, but for the results we see in our lives and the lives of those around us.  Nothing holds us back any longer because we no longer operate from false beliefs, we operate with intention. 

That light we feared shining on things we didn’t want to discuss becomes a beacon for ourselves and others.  The intent with shining that light isn’t to find fault, it is to find the truth.  So often we are afraid that we will get blamed for things or we carry shame about what we did when we didn’t know better.  But the truth is we can shift that focus as well, change the energy to one of learning and sharing a common experience.  Underneath shame is fear of isolation and separation, when the reality is, sharing those experiences and learning why we do things creates far more connection that creating the illusion of having it all together.  People see through that anyway because we are all learning and guessing here.  Some people are gifted and able to operate in their genius more often than others, but they are learning too, they just learn and experiment with intention.  The more we shine light on our humanity, the more we see our personal intention and the motives behind what we do.  Nothing can stop us then.      

“It is worth everything to get out of autopilot, the limbo space, and journey back into our hearts.  When you have experienced glimpses of what it feels like to be fully connected with your soul, everything else (even when you think you feel good) can seem disconnected,” Ashmi Pathela.  The becoming of who we are meant to be is a beautiful journey.  Responding to the call and making choices and moves from our full authenticity is the most freeing experience in the universe.  This may mean approaching those limits we discussed yesterday, and that means going through anyway.  Once we stop doing things because we’ve always done them, opportunities present themselves.  The first step to eliminating any limiting beliefs we have is to identify them, but the first indicator that we have a limiting belief is when we hear our hearts tell us that we need to do something different. 

Our society glorifies the busy life, the time spent doing things that we feel obligated to do or the time we waste doing things to distract us from the things we don’t want to do.  There is little in between in the way of doing what we are called to do.    There is little in the way of identifying our own barriers and moving into something different.  There is little in the way of clarifying how we keep ourselves small because of what we were taught.  One of the most impactful things I saw was in high school and it was a sign that said, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got.”  How can we move forward if we constantly go back to what we know, if we constantly live in the world of what people tell us to do?  We will never fulfill our purpose or ambition if we are focusing on the purpose and ambition of others.  The more we disconnect from ourselves, the more disconnected we are from each other—and the easier it is to lose our footing.  But when we connect to our soul, the guidance is different and we find new ways to do things that produce results in our lives. 

We are trained to fulfill the business and the busyness of life and told that is how life is, that we are supposed to spend our time this way.  If we ever want more, we have to trust that we have these feelings of something new for a reason.  The dreams we have are our own and we are meant to see them through.  We are meant to share our experiences with others.  When we truly connect to our soul and our purpose, those limiting beliefs we discussed yesterday mean very little.  We know we can trust what we feel in ourselves and we know we are being guided toward our purpose.  It is a completely liberating experience to connect with our purpose.  We build confidence in the follow through and that completely shatters the beliefs that keep us in place.  This means following our hearts and acting on what we know to be true for us.  When we can imagine something different, something better for ourselves, that is when we know opportunity is calling.  Follow that calling and watch that purpose unfold.