FINDING YOUR TRUTH

A (Sort of) Survivor’s Guide

I wouldn’t really call this blog a “survival guide,” but my intent is to offer a bit of positive “coaching” along the lines of how to expand your life perspective—especially pertaining to your personal goals and explorations. That, and I focus on encouraging how to better navigate the challenging obstacles you will inevitably face throughout your life because those obstacles are often your more important personal growth opportunities, even if they don’t feel like opportunities at the time.

Check out the graphic above to better understand that “growth opportunities” concept. When you are sitting in the “Comfort Zone” you either feel safe doing whatever you are doing at the time and have no desire to change, or you are so laid back that you just allow life to flow on by you while you ride the waves of blissful apathy.

True, that current ‘comfort zone’ might feel good and safe at present, but it likely isn’t permanent nor is it personally expansive. So if you want to expand your horizons–that ‘be all you can be’ sort of thing—you have to leave your existing ‘Comfort Zone’ and enter the new ‘Learning Zone;’ but to get there you must first must pass through the ‘Fear Zone.’

Now some of us don’t linger long in the Fear Zone. We may pass through it in moments of serious discomfort—perhaps questioning ourselves and our abilities to achieve the desired goals ahead, but we don’t spend a lot of time and energy on FEAR because we learned long ago that fear gets you nowhere. FEAR is the La Brea Tar Pit of life. If you stand in fear long enough, it will suck you down and swallow you whole.

Those of us who have overcome our nagging fears have learned to continually move forward with our lives in whatever way that’s necessary to do so. We are never LIFE’s victims—we are the survivors of life’s challenges. And that’s what survivors learn to do ASAP: overcome your paralyzing fear and move forward into the challenge ahead.

FEAR can be like that snarling grizzly that suddenly steps in front of you and stops you in your tracks—leaving you shaking and frozen. I’ve been face to face with FEAR a few times and learned that whatever is making you fearful only holds power in your life if you ALLOW it to do so. That’s why when hiking the unknown of LIFE you learn to carry bear pepper-spray and pack a .45 Ruger on your hip. He may not know it yet, but the bear should actually fear you!

So don’t allow FEAR to take your power. Do what you need to do in your current life to get physically and mentally stronger so you feel more confident inside—more self-assured; and then push past your existing fear so you can learn to believe in yourself and your own ability to deal with whatever life throws your way. They should teach this in grade school, but it’s more of a beyond-school acquired skill. Most self-defense classes stress it. You must learn to stand up for yourself and learn how to protect yourself at all times. Don’t rely on others to do it for you.

Be willing to learn those new self-help skills or to challenge yourself in new and exciting ways because it feels so good to meet your intended goals. Learn how to push yourself out of that stagnant comfort zone and into something new and exciting, even if you feel uncomfortable doing so for awhile. Find a way to survive through the discomfort—get more physical—walk, workout, move your body to feel more alive.

Extra physical workouts burn off stress-induced adrenaline—or cortisol, the ‘fight or flight’ hormone. The extra body effort also provides more serotonin release—the ‘feel good’ neurotransmitter—into your system, making you feel more at peace and more satisfied with your efforts. You benefit both ways.

So as you reach out to learn new skills and explore new options you may find yourself similar to the graphic above, where your COMFORT ZONE moves along with you into that new territory as you build your confidence and self-acceptance levels. Eventually you will feel comfortable doing new things and visiting new places that previously had only been your dreams of exploring.

My advice for what it’s worth: Aim for the GROWTH ZONE—that’s your best choice for personal happiness and inner peace.

“Let It Be”

“There will be an answer, LET IT BE.”

That old Beatles song “Let It Be” has been playing in my head the last few days. So I’m going to just go with it and agree. Here are a few of the lyrics:

“Let It Be” – (a song by The Beatles)

“When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom
Let it be

And in my hour of darkness
She is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom
Let it be

Let it be, let it be
Let it be, let it be
Whisper words of wisdom
Let it be

And when the brokenhearted people
Living in the world agree
There will be an answer
Let it be

For though they may be parted
There is still a chance that they will see
There will be an answer
Let it be

Let it be, let it be
Let it be, let it be
Yeah, there will be an answer
Let it be

Let it be, let it be
Let it be, let it be
Whisper words of wisdom
Let it be …”

***

Much of my life I’ve tried to understand whatever was occurring to me or around me; and sometimes I make a good stab at it, and other times I fail to comprehend why something is ‘what it is.’

I can’t even put a name to what I am feeling now after the latest US election results. ‘Shocked’ at first, came close; ‘disappointed’ was long, long ago. Now I’m feeling more morbidly curious, like “There’s something I’m not seeing at work behind the scenes here, and I can only wait and watch to see what that ‘something’ really is. No fear allowed here. Just keep an open mind, and watch it all play out.”

The words most prevalent in my head at present are: “Wait and watch. Expect the unexpected.”

So that’s my NEW cobbled philosophy: “Wait and watch; and let it be whatever it is going to be,” because I’m only in the observation booth for the duration of this game. Get some popcorn and a bottle of water and settle in for the show on the field. I’m not even sure who the teams are that are playing down there. That’s the really strange part. This may turn out to be a ‘Hunger Games’ sort of experience. Who will be left standing at the end? I have no predictions. Very strange.

Believing in Yourself

In a world of constant turmoil where your patience has long run out and you find that your limited finances are sadly dwindling in solidarity with your patience—while increasing chaos and mind-numbing media cacophony scatter your remaining wits, with friends and loved ones backing away from your personal crisis situation in self-preservation—there comes a gradual inner realization that the only thing or person you have left to believe in or to rely on, is yourself.

During this tumultuous time of constant challenges, as difficult and inopportune as this ‘I’m cast-off-alone on an island’ discovery may seem to be, THAT is the very time when you finally comprehend how the only person you can ever truly rely on to have YOUR best interests at heart, is YOU. It may be devastating to you emotionally, or socially disheartening at the least, that this ‘you’re on your own’ discovery has to come about in such a severe slap-down manner, but it often does.

I know it may sound cynical and hypercritical of those closest to you—with both your family and friends considered in that stinging condemnation of desertion, but the fact is that this is YOUR life experience to live; and whatever decisions you make and/or repercussions that befall you arising from those decisions will fall primarily on YOU alone.

And those repercussions are meant to do so because this is YOUR learning situation and whatever life choices are to be made must be made by YOU, not someone else. That’s why you are here in this plane of existence—to raise your own consciousness—to increase your own awareness of all aspects of the human experience, from lesser learning endeavors to greater. Difficult experiences teach you to trust in your own judgment more. They help you learn how to believe in yourself even when others stop believing in you.

Just keep in mind that your actual decisions and actions whether later proven right or wrong, are YOUR responsibility alone here. And that’s what they are meant to be. You can’t push blame or judgment for your words or behavior on anyone else if things go wrong because this is YOUR show. YOU run it.

So in truth, YOU alone must focus on how best to meet whatever latest challenge is presenting at any given moment; and you must be completely honest with yourself while doing so. Self-awareness is our perpetual goal while in earth-plane; but self-awareness doesn’t mean self-focus because we aren’t in this human exploration by ourselves. Self and OTHERS are perpetually twirling a slow waltz across the life-experience dance floor.

While the decisions you make are yours alone—and likewise the responsibility for having made them, the fallout from those decisions can affect others besides you in unexpected ways, but that’s why this on-your-own ‘cast-away living’ is so clarifying for you. With the elimination of those once-trusted voices yammering in your ear, distractions have been removed allowing the bare-bones choices to be more easily seen by you, while also allowing for the ‘other’ people in your life to be more fully vetted for reliability in the process.

Anyway, I thought the image above and sentiment expressed within it are indicative of that harshly clarifying moment we often have with those we once relied on for guidance—whether friends or family. You don’t need tainted BS from others to make your most important life decisions. You only need total truth, which is often found only within yourself—BY YOURSELF. Learn to believe in yourself for those important life decisions. You are the most reliable, ever-constant friend you will ever have. If you haven’t realized that fact yet, you will. Believe in YOU and your own natural resilience to survive any challenge.

“Sometimes self care comes down to setting the whole damn thing on fire and watching all the bullshit burn.” (jennifergardenpoetry)

The Root of Woundedness

Did you ever just automatically erupt over something someone said or did and then wondered where that nasty reaction came from inside you?

Unfortunately for our bruised egos, sometimes we discover that we aren’t in as total control of our emotions as we had assumed ourselves to be. I dislike realizing that personal flaw as much as anyone—letting what I was really thinking/feeling slip out of my mouth before I had a chance to stop it.

There is a good reason for that caustic reaction slippage; and it’s often one we may not like but it still exists all the same. At some deeper level within us we may have been damaged or wounded in some way, but we refuse to accept the possibility because we feel that acknowledging that deeper woundedness makes us weak; and weakness is something we just cannot tolerate, especially in ourselves. I’m certainly guilty of that, and imagine others are as well.

I could go all shamanic on you here and talk about ancestral wounding or past-life wounding and how to release the energies of trauma long held in your ancestral bloodline or in your previous-life existences—the karma factor per se, but I want to talk about THIS life—right here—right now. The wounds you’ve received from THIS life are as affecting and sometimes more powerfully disruptive to your current life as those wounds long accrued by previous others before you ever existed in this timeline.

What I find most personally affecting are the chronic, rather than the acute woundings—the angry words continually slung at you or the too frequent unkind deeds toward you that build long-fermenting resentment within you because they continue their affectation on you for such longer periods of time. So then the real question is why do we tolerate this abuse of us while in the presence of another?

Maybe it’s because of the ‘LIFE IS COMPLICATED’ excuse we often give. If there were easy choices all around us, we would snatch them up. But when the choices are harder, and the emotions more raw, and the ties more binding between you and the offender, that’s when we start to question the rightness or necessity of what we might pursue next.

I don’t have to tell anyone that family issues are particularly complicated. There is the family we are born into, and then there is the family that we choose to gather around us. Families are messy situations with rightness and wrongness issues all mixed together because we have often learned to accept and tolerate more abusive family members in their imperfect handling of the world around them—mainly because we had no other choice at the time.

But within every situational ‘tolerance’ we mustered to get through the situation with our family members, that ‘tolerance’ had an impact on us at some deeper level because pain is pain. When people say or do nasty things to us, it hurts. And because whoever is hurting us so deeply is someone we love or even depend on (as children), that makes the pain sting longer and go deeper than a verbal slight or glancing blow from someone we cared less about.

These deeper root issues are the fodder of therapy sessions far beyond my capabilities, but I do want to mention here that you are not alone in your festering resentments or your chronic self-doubts or even your misting eyes during weaker emotional moments, because we all have them. It’s an aspect of what we often call LIFE EXPERIENCE; and sometimes that so called ‘experience’ can be not only character building on the positive upside, it can also be ‘hard to accept’ on the down side.

Sometimes you just need someone to talk to, to help release the pent up anger and frustration. Find a professional who can help vent your pressure valve before you truly blow your stack. Get to the root of that hidden woundedness before it pulls you under. Forgiveness may be a panacea for all ills, but forgiving yourself for allowing the wounding to occur in the first place in adult relationships is often the hardest task of all.

Double Negatives

Are we in math class or real LIFE? One wrong times another wrong equals one right, correct?

If that were true we would be doubling up on our wrong decisions just to be right a third of the time. That amounts to being 66.6% wrong in decision making to only 33.3% right. Not good odds. Perhaps there’s something flawed with that logic.

When I look at my own life and reconsider all the dumb things that I’ve done, I doubt I knew at the time that those decisions were dumb until I felt the repercussions from them, because negative repercussions teach us enhanced awareness. Non-negative response teaches acceptance of the behavior.

But the key question to me is asking “WHY?” we did dumb stuff in the first place. I usually justify my past by simply saying I was “young and dumb” at the time—which means inexperienced, naïve, too trusting, too restless and searching for something I had no idea what I was searching for, or too easily manipulated into something I knew was potentially wrong but thought I could handle anyway.

But let’s be honest here, are those accurate descriptors of how my wrong choices occurred? Probably not, because I doubt anyone could make me do something I didn’t really want to do. I’m far too stubborn for that and always have been.

So the wrongness of my actions must have been solely my own choice. But then were those or any previous actions really wrong if they led me to my current life and point of awareness? Did their rightness or wrongness make me who I currently am—older, wiser, more aware of how easy it is to hurt others, more compassionate toward those who are still struggling to find themselves or to believe in themselves? Maybe it did. Or maybe that’s just how I choose to view it.

The annoying thing about the past is that you can’t change it—not in this lifetime. You can learn from your previous mistakes and make adjustments in your behavior to prevent making them again, but you can’t NOT DO what you actually DID DO. That’s just how it is.

Can’t NOT DO—hence the ‘double negative’ approach to learning here. We cannot undo what is already done. Our only choice now is to use that enhanced awareness to guide our current and future actions. We can beat ourselves up for our previous stupidity and think less of ourselves for being that dumb in the past, but doing so is clearly unhelpful to others and to ourselves. The only positive thing we CAN do is move forward from this point on with our hard-won education in how NOT TO act or what NOT TO do.

Make full use of your past pain and current knowledge to better guide your future actions. We all make mistakes. Give yourself a chance to do better next time. Intentionally living ‘a better tomorrow’ is a choice that we make daily.

Still Swirling in the Energy Blender

Are you feeling it yet? I think my blender button must be set to ‘PUREE’ because I’m starting to feel a little mushy.

Patience is not something Aries are known for and I’m definitely struggling with my own, but I think the end result will work out the best for everyone if we can just hang on long enough for these current turbulent, swirling energies to shift higher. So that is my focus now: Hanging on and holding the highest possible personal energy every moment that I can.

My suggestions for fellow blender-contents:

Stop watching the news—it’s the greatest energy disruptor flooding the airwaves.
Stop listening to political BS from ALL sides. Trust your own intuition on what is right for all of us.
Spend more moments in silence and preferably in a calm nature environment. I know even Nature has been violent and unforgiving lately in many locations. Let’s help her hold a more calm and quiet presence overall.
Focus on this moment—the beauty, the joy, the potential for wonder that exists if we allow it to emerge.
Breathe deeply and slowly into your life. You are still alive here on the Earth plane; and with that life comes the unceasing possibility for you to be all that you wish to be and do all that you wish to do.
Clarify your thoughts and beliefs. WHO are you? What do you really want from your life? Why are you happy or dissatisfied with your current situation? These questions are why we journal—to better understand ourselves. And if you aren’t currently journaling, maybe it’s time to start clearing out all that mental detritus onto a blank page of paper and getting it out of your head. You might be surprised at what flows out of the pen in your hand and onto the paper beneath it. I often am.
Dream of your ideal existence—what does it look like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like? Define it to yourself and hold that concept internally with love and appreciation.
If you really want change in your life, then BE THE CHANGE that you want to experience. Actualize it. Live it. BE it.
Seriously focus on holding your own energies as high as you possibly can. You must become your own little island of Divine Love and Light—feel blissville—pure joy—feel that ‘float-on-the-clouds’ sort of energy without drugs of any kind. No matter what anyone else around you is saying, or how they are acting, or what they are trying to project on to you—don’t accept it. You can’t change others—you can only control yourself and your own life direction. Let them be and do what they choose, but don’t let it affect you. Isolate yourself from them if necessary until they tame themselves. Sometimes it’s hard to do, but it IS necessary to do it to hold your own energy higher and stay out of the anger, hatred, resentment, doom and gloom type of vibes emitted by those around us.

And lastly, do something nice for yourself today. Give yourself a treat for just caring about yourself and your own welfare. You are the best friend you will ever have. You will never leave you. You will always be there for you. So learn to better appreciate yourself for your resilience and tenacity. We may not be perfect in many ways, but we are capable of improvement if that is our desire. *** BE YOU! You are awesome!

And will someone please pull the plug on that energy blender? I’m getting dizzy.

Releasing Despair

Despair—”an utter loss of hope—a feeling of being without hope and being unable to improve the situation. Despair synonyms: desperation, despondency, discouragement, hopelessness refer to a state of mind caused by circumstances that seem too much to cope with” (from various dictionaries)

***

Again, it is often hard to put into words the ‘feeling’ of these energies engulfing all of us at present, but I think Lee Harris, who is also an energy intuitive, described it pretty well here and suggested a possible helpful aid to shifting what you might be personally feeling at this time.

“Releasing our feelings rather than turning them into a story really pertains to recognizing that feelings are feelings and they need to move through us, otherwise, they get stuck. And when our feelings get stuck, we tend to take them to the mind and play out a story. So, for example, any despair that you are feeling right now about collective issues – things that you’re seeing in the world and collective confusion – is despair. So, you have to feel it as despair to release it. …

…the story that you were running in your mind about what’s going on, or more importantly, what’s going to happen in the future, is holding you in a place of despair. Whereas actually, this is a time where all of us need to grieve, feel despair, not like what we’re seeing, but have that experience for a series of minutes or hours at most – not for weeks at a time because then we’re locked in the story and the emotion cycle.” (feel it, recognize it as despair but release it—let it go—don’t keep holding it)

–Lee Harris

***

This part of what Lee is saying I agree with: you DO have to recognize what is actually flowing through your mind and affecting you—affecting how you feel about yourself and affecting how you feel about the world around you. That is just basic self-awareness and self-honesty. You feel what you feel. Recognize it for whatever it is, and pinpoint or even NAME IT if you can. That gives you a starting point to more effectively deal with whatever you are feeling.

But how you react to and/or whether you wallow in what you are feeling are choices that you make 24/7/365. I think Lee is emphasizing that first we need to be aware that those “helplessness and hopelessness” feelings so prevalent in today’s energy environment are also choices that we make daily to accept feeling ‘despair energies’ or by refusing to feel that way. For me personally, they may well be the energies all around me, but that doesn’t mean I have to make them MY energies.

Now to release those unwanted energies, no matter what they might be (anger, rage, sadness, grief, feelings of hopelessness or helplessness) I make ‘statements of release’ for each of them and forcefully blow them out of my body with the 3 largest breaths I can muster. (Seriously, it helps.)

For example, I might say this after recognizing the unwanted emotion that I am feeling: “I release the energies of ________(insert one recognized emotion: anger, sadness, grief, hopelessness, helplessness, etc.). I release them completely now.” And then take 3 strong breaths and intentionally blow those energies out your mouth forcefully. If that doesn’t shift your emotional state at the time, then say and do the same thing again and even a third time if needed, to help shift your mind out of that tar pit it was previously mired in. It really works. Try it.

Then ask for the highest frequency of energies to refill you. “I request and hold only the purest and highest frequency of true Divine Love and Light now and always.” Now say that 3 times.

Try it for yourself. Don’t ever hold onto despair energies—they aren’t worth your effort. If you want to hold onto to anything, hold onto “never give in and never give up” energies. Have some faith in yourself to successfully deal with whatever you must face now or in the future to survive through the darkest night out there. Remember, only in the depth of such darkness can you see the overwhelming multitude of background stars that are still shining down upon you.

And if you are really into Finding Your Truth, THAT is your real truth. You are far stronger and more resilient than you might think you are. This is YOUR show here on Earth. How do YOU want it to play out?

Flip It

When I saw this graphic, I thought, ‘Yes, exactly. It’s the GOAL that you work toward, not the process that takes you there, that is the most important aspect to keep in mind.’

“…You are healing to be able to handle joy and to accept happiness back into your life.”

That IS the goal of working through old pain, trauma, and heartache. You might be doing therapy to remove the bad stuff, bad memories, and bad habits from your life, but the REASON you are doing it is to get to the GOOD stuff afterwards. You have to flip it in your mind—flip your perspective on why you work so hard to self-heal.

You aren’t just tired of feeling beat down and angry about your life’s direction—you actually want to feel joyful and happy about LIFE itself. We all do.

So how do you get there?

Flipping your perspective is a good trick to learn to improve both your overall attitude and your life situation. Try it.

Let’s say you are feeling anxious over some event or situation in the near future. What would the opposite feeling be from anxiety? Feeling at peace? Feeling totally relaxed? Or depending on how capable you are of flipping your feelings, maybe you could actually become excited about the unknown possibilities that lie ahead.

Now by maintaining those flipped, alternative ‘feeling’ goals in mind, what would it take to get you there—to shift out of your lower-energy mindstate—to actually be able to pull that new, happier possible reality to you?

That “whatever it takes to shift your existing state of mind to feeling ‘at peace’ or ‘relaxed,’ or ‘eager and excited’ to view the future in a more joyful or happy way”—THAT’S what you need to do instead of sitting around and moaning about how miserable you feel about it all. You have to DO SOMETHING to change your current life situation into a more desired reality.

And what’s the first “something” you must do? First off, you have to flip how you are thinking about your life.

The goal isn’t to just eliminate the BAD stuff from your life—the real goal is to replace it completely with GOOD stuff. The therapist is just showing you how you can do that very thing. She/he is showing you how to shift your focus on life—to shift your reaction to life, and to develop better life-response strategies than what you had previously been stuck using.

You might need to dig long and hard to find that hidden treasure of joy and happiness—might need to dump out all that old nastiness (memories and reactivity) that have previously kept you hostage in your mind; but that treasure of ‘finding joy and happiness’ is what you are really working toward in those therapy sessions. You are getting rid of the bad stuff first to get to the better stuff that life offers.

You are not as irreparably broken or as psychologically damaged as you might believe yourself to be. That ‘happier you’ is simply hiding away undiscovered beneath all that ancient dirt and debris; but if you keep working hard to uncover it, you’ll eventually find your true self of higher light and divine love. And that discovery is well worth any effort. YOU CAN DO THIS!

Revelations

“People are going to be having experiences of revelation, wonder, and the multitudes; seeing things in a more multidimensional way (which is the antidote to division).

… Many of you might be stewards of multidimensionality in your life, and you are going to feel an up-shift around bringing things to people more. But this makes me think of when people have awakening experiences; some people initiate them using psychedelic ceremonies: Color, vibrance, and multidimensionality are coming into our consciousness as human beings in a new way.

This also makes me wonder what’s going to be put into the world.

For you, it can very much look like revelatory experiences, connecting back to the wonder of this mystery of life that we’re in …”

–Lee Harris

Overall just to mention, I read energies with my body—it’s like being a living barometer of atmospheric pressure. I feel my dial’s needle shifting up or down with the incoming energies of the time. Some incoming energies are extremely higher-frequency and can make you almost light-headed, and some cosmic energies are more jittery feeling and destabilizing that may make you feel increasingly agitated or hyper—like they are shaking your tree.

But back to what Lee Harris is saying here, for me the three most important concepts above are the image slogan “Cosmic Waves Are Incoming,” then the word “revelation,” and lastly the word “multidimensionality.”

If you are also energy sensitive, you know that there is so much happening in the ethers right now—energetically it feels like we’re spinning in a blender—getting all chopped up and reprocessed until we liquefy into something different than we were before the reprocessing started.

Will we be the same people we once were before the chopping and blending began? I doubt it. We may look the same on the outside, but we will process and interpret the world around us in a new more fluid way. We will likely notice subtle changes quicker, comprehend their greater significance faster, and almost instantaneously shift our thinking to maximize the newest revelation of the moment.

While we think of ourselves as physical beings living an earthly experience, we are far more than that. We are actually multidimensional beings having a physical experience. When the physical aspect of our existence ends we still continue as energy beings in other dimensions of existence; so we never really cease to exist in the broadest sense, we just shed the physical body and move on to other frequencies of experience where our learning continues. That is our multidimensionality aspect.

So as you go about your day now, be alert and aware of the non-physical influences all around you that may be affecting others besides you in strange and unusual ways. And hopefully you can also recognize that we all are rapidly changing states of realization in mid-stride.

One day you may view the world around you in one way, and the next day it will seem completely different, and you can’t comprehend how you could have previously considered it any other way. That’s the primary revelation here: Your comprehension level has just shifted higher without giving advanced notice. It may not be how you thought it would happen, but it did happen all the same. And that’s a good thing.

Like Sea Glass

Just sharing the awesome image above and the poem accompanying it.

***

I want to age like sea glass.

Smoothed by tides, not broken.

I want the currents of life to toss me around, shake me up and leave me feeling washed clean.

I want my hard edges to soften as the years pass , made not weak but supple.

I want to ride the waves, go with the flow, feel the impact of the surging tides rolling in and out.

When I am thrown against the shore and caught between the rocks and a hard place, I want to rest there until I can find the strength to do what is next. Not stuck, just waiting, pondering, feeling what it feels like to pause.

And when I am ready, I will catch a wave and let it carry me along to the next place that I am supposed to be.

I want to be picked up on occasion by an unsuspected soul and carried along , just for the connection, just for the sake of appreciation and wonder.

And with each encounter, new possibilities of collaboration are presented, and new ideas are born.

I want to age like sea glass so that when people see the old woman I’ll become, they’ll embrace all that I am. They’ll marvel at my exquisite nature, hold me gently in their hands and be awed by my well-earned patina.

Neither flashy nor dull, just a perfect lustre.

And they’ll wonder, if just for a second, what it is exactly I am made of and how I got to this very here and now.

And we’ll both feel lucky to be in that perfectly right place at that profoundly right time.

I want to age like sea glass. I want to enjoy the journey and let my preciousness be, not in spite of the impacts of life, but because of them.

~ Bernadette Noll

Artist Credit : Essoldo Design

Serendipity Corner

Celebrating the Divine Feminine

(Image from 7th Dimension Energy)

Today, especially now midst the USA Presidential campaign and one party’s verbal assault on truth, justice, and women in general, maybe it is time to celebrate the DIVINE FEMININE in our lives and throughout our world.

Women don’t need someone else to define us.

We define ourselves!

Expecting Change

While I certainly wouldn’t call myself a change agent, I am more of a change accepter and have eventually learned to just roll with whatever obstacle LIFE tends to throw in front of me. This ‘accepting the necessity of change’ concept goes along with that ‘riding the stream’ theme I’ve written about earlier. You either adapt to unexpected or necessary change in your life or you drive yourself nuts attempting to prevent it from happening. And while some suggested changes might be preventable, others definitely aren’t: like major health changes, relationship changes, or the pending mortality of those you love or even facing your own suddenly-shortened timeline.

The most difficult thing about CHANGE is that it forces you into dissonant and often uncomfortable situations where you must learn new behaviors or learn how to flip your perspective on a situation; OR you must develop your normally unused mental and physical muscles to perform a different task than the one you had been so accustomed to performing.

Major change tends to break or even demolish our habitual learned-behaviors; and as difficult as it might be to accept that this CHANGE is happening to us, it is likely to force us into some completely new situation quite different from the previous or habitual one with which we had felt so comfortable.

Example: There is what we THINK we will do tomorrow or the next day, and then there is TOMORROW that evidently didn’t get the memo on what was supposed to happen that day because all HELL broke out and we ducked for cover because of it.

Major crisis events create major shifts in the collective endeavor as well as the personal one: think Pearl Harbor Day (December 7^th, 1941) or the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 (called 9-11). Those two events forced changes no one wanted, but they definitely shifted perspectives on many aspects of our lives and forced major changes world-wide.

Like the Chinese curse: “May your life be interesting” where interesting here means not like usual, it portends a situation that requires you to shift your thinking, your actions, and even your life goals because it might mean that your survival is in question by doing your usual same thing.

But maybe you like USUAL—maybe you liked the sameness, the comfort, the security of performing your usual tasks and meeting the usual people doing their usual things. LIFE in its sameness allowed you to tune out the extraneous noise to some degree. It allowed you to zone out and run on autopilot for awhile. What’s so wrong with that?

Well, if you are zoning out the usual mindless activities all around you, then maybe you aren’t really living. If you are not aware of what you are thinking, saying or doing, are you actively engaged in your life?

CHANGE forces you to reengage, to reassess, to restrategize how to move forward with your life from this day onward.

So is that a GOOD thing or a BAD thing to be suddenly forced to reexamine and redefine your life?

There will likely be short term effects one way or the other, but there will also be longer term advantages and/or disadvantages that will eventually become apparent as well. Some effects you might have predicted to happen and others you could not have foreseen, because it is…well, LIFE; and that’s just how LIFE rolls for most of us. It is always unpredictable to some degree—keeps us on our toes in a sense.

My only suggestion here is to learn to expect change in LIFE in whatever form it presents for you because at least then you will have prepared yourself in some way to be more flexible and adaptive to whatever tomorrow brings, because change is actually a normal state of Earth and species affairs. In other words: CHANGE is just NATURE being natural.

Learn to think of CHANGE as “your invitation to personal evolution.” It’s easier to accept that way. Then think how difficult your ‘tail’ would have made your wearing skinny jeans.