life
why do you need a logo designed for your business!!
You’re just starting your business. Opening a bank account, getting a business license, and setting up your office are top priorities. And, of course, the question of stationery and marketing comes up. If you’re starting a business, you need business cards. And probably stationery. And a website. All this means you need to design a logo immediately, right?
Maybe. But maybe not.
A lot of small businesses start out with one vision, but by the time they really start rolling, things may have changed. Services or products may wind up being modified to better match customers’ wants or needs. New product and service lines may get developed. You may discover, after you start making sales and talking to customers, that you’re doing things in a revolutionary way. You may be serving a different type of client than you’d originally envisioned—or solving a problem you didn’t expect to encounter for those clients.
Any of these factors can play a major role in your logo and brand design.
Starting out your business with your logo, stationery, and marketing materials all perfectly designed can certainly jumpstart your brand building process. But the key word here is “perfectly.” If your business is in the very beginning phase, you may not have had enough practice running it to know what it is really all about, so you can’t use that information to design the perfect brand.
Here are questions you can ask yourself to determine if you’re prepared to create your logo:
1. Do you have a solid plan that lays out exactly what you’re going to do in your business? If you’ve only sketched one out, or if it has gaps and holes, then waiting until those are filled in will result in a stronger logo and brand.
2. Are you committed to sticking to that plan? Or are you planning to stay flexible and make changes in your business as you try things out? If you’re willing to make changes, then those changes may mean that your brand ends up not matching your business—which means that the effort and cost invested in design and printing has been somewhat wasted. You have gained some value from your brand, but you have to do everything all over again.
3. Can temporary marketing materials work for your business, or will they detract from potential sales?How important is it that you get off the ground with your marketing materials finished perfectly? Don’t postpone the branding process if it will cost you customers or hurt your business. However, do be aware that if you try to brand too early, you may not design your brand correctly.
4. Have you started a business and/or created a brand before? If not, you may want to take it slow. Branding is easy to rush into, but it’s a major business decision. Waiting until your business is stable and established can really pay off.
If you have definite answers for these questions, then you may be ready for your brand. However, if you aren’t sure that you’re settled in your business and on its personality, services, differentiators, and target audience, it may be better to hold off creating a logo so that it will be as accurate and as lasting as possible.
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You can tend to your busy life later, but from time to time stop and just BE
Make no mistake about it, change is challenging whether it is conscious or unexpected. Viewing adversity as change, not loss or failure, is part of empowered and positive thinking.
Humans develop resiliency through change, both physiologically, and emotionally. It’s necessary for all life forms to evolve. Change comes though many vehicles — some hit us hard, others
are rather sneaky. But despite the challenges change brings, we know it is our natural state — the world grows and we grow with it fueled by our emotions.
We are already designed to cry, express sorrow, frustration, anger, and resentment and most of us choose to explore these feelings. But we are also designed to have hope, recover, be stronger, and inspire others as a result of change. You are never alone because emotion gives us plenty in common — as a society, we are not yet Vulcans. What makes one person triumphantly survive loss and turn it into positive energy, while another in similar circumstances resign? It has to do with our underlying assumptions on change.
I have two very dear friends; each has had a double mastectomy from breast cancer. Losing body parts is devastating, not to mention living with the daily uncertainty of not knowing whether you continue to remain in remission. Yet one woman has forged ahead as a life-force warrior, focusing on triumphs and wins of today. She doesn’t look back.
The other has difficulty moving forward — not engaging in work outside her home, quitting her job, waiting for something to happen while in a state of self-imposed limbo. They’ve processed their information in completely different ways. Why? It’s because people want certainty before they decide to accept change. It’s a natural reaction.
Certainly our culture has become more comfortable with making choices that have predictable outcomes. A current cultural disease we suffer from is predictability, reflected in our inability to accept change at a deeply personal level.
It applies across the board to choices we make with our finances, careers, or our relationships. Science, especially when applied to health issues, has given us a false security blanket when it comes to certainty. After all, it seems we’ve been able to control nature. We like to think we’ve cornered the market on predictability and good planning, when the truth is we live in a time where prediction is more intuition and common sense than science.
To embrace change, we need to release the umbilical cord we think we have to outcomes of certainty. In other words, stepping off of the plateau requires a huge amount of trust. Your fall will be broken somewhere at the right time.
Believing that is what allows us to cope. It is the first step, unsupported by any scientific doctrine. And it’s a big one. No matter what science pronounces, whether it is in the form of a diagnosis or the state of the environment, there is no sure thing. Science has already given us permission to accept truth with a margin of error in just about anything. There is always the possibility something may exist or not exist, despite what patterns indicate.
Truly, it is a useless endeavour to let science hold you back from moving forward. Whether it is health, or other issues surrounding job loss, divorce, or death, you will s u c c e s s f u l ly n av i g at e through change and elevate the quality of your life by knowing anyone can beat the odds.
A l m o s t everyone you know has a story of beating the odds. Let’s pay attention to the real evidence instead of looking for ways to prove that we cannot make it or the odds are just too great. Adopting a new attitude on adversity requires big picture thinking on the subject of change. View life, and spiritual development for that matter, as an upward spiral where you experience some of the same lessons over and over again.
Is it because we just aren’t getting what the lesson is telling us? Perhaps, but that’s not the only reason. We’ve deliberately put those circumstances in our chart in frequent doses to allow ourselves an opportunity to see how we’ve been progressing on the upward part of that growth spiral.
Adversity is an inescapable performance indicator — a frequent reminder of our upcoming 360-degree review in how we handle the bumps. We are meant to be stronger, more insightful each time we get walloped.
ENJOY THE MOMENT
You can tend to your busy life later, but from time to time stop and just BE
Have you ever in your quest to be more and do more, experienced the feeling that you were going backward? We all seem to be over-stretching ourselves. I am always saying, “I never thought life would be this busy”. Could all this busyness actually prevent us or be creating blocks in our lives to what we are truly
seeking? Could we actually start slowing down and asking ourselves different questions that would end up creating a more profound awareness in our lives? Can this hectic life with so many distractions keep us from a life where we are in appreciation of each and every moment of our day?
We live in a world with so many expectations and so much to accomplish. Financial well-being, relationships that work, looking good and to be everything society wants us to be. All these burdens and expectations are like trying to push a bowling ball up a hill. Can we actually be causing damage to our well being, to the physical mind and body and in turn slowing the real growth we seek here on this planet?
Does this damage that we have possibly caused need to be healed and will we slow down enough to heal ourselves?
We pursue all these things to create a place of wholeness. We seek a life that is complete and whole and dream of enjoying all that life has to offer. But do we ever get to the place of peace, calmness, and serenity and do we ever find the love for our lives?
When will we start to
recognise that this is not working? And that we just keep doing more but the wholeness of our lives is just a big hole. Well, there is hope. When we start to recognise what is going on and pay attention, we can take steps in creating and changing our lives to make a difference.
When we recognise that we need to be responsible for our own life and that we are the ones who ultimately create our reality, we can actually break through all the expectations others have put on us and take the time to enjoy the moment. I am not saying that we just sit around and do nothing. The point that I am making is that we are so busy that we are never where we are in that moment. We are doing one task and thinking about the next task. We never take the time to be in the moment and enjoy the moment for just that. We are in our cars, talking on the phone and thinking about the meeting we have later that day.
We pick up a friend from the airport or we are at lunch with our mothers and we just have to answer that call from a friend who just wants to chit chat. When does it all slow down? When do we just be with someone or something? Like taking the time to read a book, or just sitting there and listening to your child, without all the noise going on in your head of what you have to do next? How about just being? Breathing and being in that moment from time to time and just enjoying it.
A good friend of mine would sometimes take a Friday afternoon off from work or her chores and just be with the day — enjoying the sunshine and feeling the warmth of the sun as it kisses her long flowing hair.
Do you ever slow down and listen to the birds sing, or watch a humming bird hover like a helicopter as it pecks at a bougainvillea? Do you still feel the coolness and that little tickle of the grass on your feet or are you just traversing this planet in pursuit of something you just cannot get your hands around?
Try breathing in and out slowly and feel the air move through your body. Do it now! Appreciate this moment and be in gratitude for this moment. Yes, you can tend to your busy life later, but from time to time stop and just BE.
Be open to seeing and feeling what is going on around you and really appreciate the moment for whatever it offers. Let the world take care of itself for a while. You don’t have to always fix everything.
As you get good at being in the moment you will learn how to do this even when you are busy. You can take on tasks and just be in that task. You can actually enjoy the task and do it so well that you don’t even realise how quickly time has passed and how efficient you were in accomplishing and enjoying that task. You can talk to someone and actually hear what they mean, not just what they are saying.
So pay attention to the moment for this moment will never appear again. Every moment is a precious gift and the decisions and things we do in every moment create our reality. Please enjoy this moment and every moment of your life.
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YOU ARE A LIAR
You may not be who you think you are
Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human. First they told us what we are — a boy or a girl — then they told us who we are, and who we should or shouldn’t be. They taught us how to be a woman or how to be a man. They told us to be a proper woman, a decent woman, a strong man, a brave man. They gave us a name, and they told us the role we would play in their story. They prepared us to live in the human jungle, t o compete with one another, to impose our will, to fight against our own kind. They filled us with knowledge, and of course we believed them.
From the storytellers around us, we learned how to create our own story. By exploring the story that we create, I discovered that the story has a voice. You can call it ‘thinking’ if you want. I call it ‘the voice of knowledge’ because it’s telling you everything you know. It’s always trying to make sense out of everything. That voice is always there. It never stops. It’s not even real, but you hear it. You can say, ‘‘Well, it’s me. I’m the one who is talking.” But if you are the voice that is talking, then who is listening?
The voice of knowledge can also be called the liar who lives in your head. The liar speaks in your language, but your spirit, the truth, has no language. You just know truth; you feel it. The voice of your spirit tries to come out, but the voice of the liar is stronger and louder and it hooks your attention almost all of the time. You hear the voice, and what is it telling you? ‘‘Look at you. Who do you think you are? You will never make it. You aren’t smart enough. Why should I try? Nobody understands me. How can I be happy when millions of people are dying of starvation?”
That voice is usually lying because it’s the voice of what you have learned, and you have learned so many lies, mainly about yourself. The voice of knowledge can come from your own head, or it can come from people around you, but your emotional reaction to that voice is telling you, ‘‘I am being abused.”
Every time we judge ourselves, find ourselves guilty, and punish ourselves, it’s because the voice in our head is telling us lies. Every time we have a conflict with our parents, our children, or our beloved, it’s because we believe in lies, and they believe in them, too.
But it’s not just that. When we believe in lies, we cannot see the truth, so we make thousands of assumptions and we take them as truth. One of the biggest assumptions we make is that the lies we believe are the truth! For example, we believe that we know what we are. When we get angry we say, ‘‘Oh, that’s the way I am.” When we get jealous: ‘‘Oh, that’s the way I am.” But is this true? I am not sure about that.
I used to make the assumption that I was the one who said all those things that I didn’t want to say. It was a big surprise when I discovered that it was not me; it was the way I learned to be. And I practised and practised until I mastered that performance.
Two thousand years ago one of the greatest masters said, ‘‘And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Free from what? From the storyteller who lives in your head and talks to you all the time. When the voice in your head finally stops talking, you experience inner peace. If you follow two rules, all the lies that come from the voice of knowledge won’t survive your skepticism and will simply disappear.
Rule one: Don’t believe yourself. When you hear the voice in your head, don’t take it personally. You know that it’s usually lying to you. Lies can only survive if you believe them. If you don’t believe your own lies, you can make better choices based on truth.
Rule two: Don’t believe anybody else. When people talk, you have no idea if what they are saying is coming from their heart or from the liar who lives in their head. Listen because the communication can be wonderful.
You can change your life by refusing to believe your own lies. Start with the main lies that limit the expression of your happiness and your love. If you take your faith away from the lies, they lose their power over you. If you stop believing in lies, your whole life changes just like magic. You will be free of fear, drama, and conflict. This is the absolute truth.
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Run at fear
My family raised beef cattle. Hundreds of cattle roamed the pastures of the 400-acre farm. When I was twelve my older brother was away in the army and my mother depended on me to look after the cattle. One fall day my mother noticed that a young heifer had just given birth to her first calf in a small yard next to the barn. Concerned about coyotes getting the calf, my mother asked me to herd the cow and calf into the barn for safety.
As I began to herd the cow she turned on me and all 1500 pounds of her began to charge. I was still near enough to the fence to easily retreat to safety. I was stunned. I had grown up with cows and had always been safe a ro u n d them. To be charged at, like that by a cow was a first.
The foll ow i n g spring my brother had re t u r n e d home and as the weather warmed I began my f avo u r i t e pastime of roaming the open fields of the farm. One day I was crossing the wide-open pasture behind the farm buildings. Roaming safely among the herd was something I had done all my life. So it was a shock to suddenly notice that one cow on the other side of the herd had begun to charge towards me. I was frozen in fear. It was the same cow that had charged at me in the barnyard the previous fall.
This time there was no fence close by, only open pasture in every direction. In the distance I heard the screen door of the farmhouse slam. Then my brother’s far away voice, yelling in the distance, ‘‘run at her, run at her!’’ My mind was a still impenetrable siren, but my thin little legs heard the message and began pounding on the new wet grass, carrying me directly at the cow. Suddenly she veered away and settled calmly into grazing again. I retreated as calmly as I could with a pounding heart and amazed to be physically in tact.
That summer and the following year, I continued roaming in open pastures and she continued charging at me. I also continued to respond by running at her with decreasing fear. Each time the distance between us diminished before she veered off to resume grazing. Until it just didn’t happen anymore.
That incident has stayed with me all my life. I continue to be amazed at my brother’s response to fear. ‘‘Run at her!’’ It was an act of intent to not be frightened by her. Running from her would have been sure defeat. She could have easily out run me and with something to chase she would have been
spurred on to over come me. In that experience my body-mind learned a profound lesson about how to meet fear.
What actually happened that day, that summer? What is fear? A feeling? An emotion? One of the things I have come to understand is that feeling is perception. Feeling is the perception of our energy ‘the energy’ that is the Creative Source of what is happening momentarily in our life and in life around us. That energy in any given moment has a particular quality. The nature of energy is to move, to transform. I perceive the quality of the energy in the moment by feeling it, by meeting it, by running at it.
An emotion is a particular feeling or perception of charged energy. The charge is caused by the energy not being able to move. A thought or a belief has become attached to the energy, holding it stuck unable to move or transform.
Thought and belief by their nature are always of the future or the past. It is hardly possible to be fully present now and think at the same time. Thoughts and beliefs are particularly active when emotion is present. Normally we tend to run away from emotion by simultaneous thinking, rerunning habituated thoughts and beliefs as strategies not to feel the emotion. This is like running from the cow. The emotion always continues to over take us for quite a while.
When we run at it, when we fully attend to the feeling, leaving no room to be aware of thoughts, beliefs, stories of the past, the future, then the energy of life is allowed to return to its natural flow towards transformation. Only full awareness feeling, free of thought can perceive the present, the quality of life energy and allow transformation.
This is the inner skill that was demonstrated to me back those many years in the pasture in my meeting with the cow. In that situation the outer events were a clear mirror or direct result of the inner reality. When I was running at the cow, there was no thought, only full awareness of feeling. Since I was fully focused on the feeling, the energy wasn’t held by thought or eventually even by belief. I was simply present. The energy was free to transform. Fear transformed to presence and finally to calmness.
Let go of the story and just feel. Give your whole being to perceiving the quality and intensity of the emotion. Be fully and completely present to it with full feeling. Give yourself a little time and silence to get accustomed to the feeling. Now that you are there fully embracing the feeling can you feel it begin to shift? Stay with the feeling as it moves, go deeper into the quality of it. You don’t need to put words to it just be present to it. Yet if you did name it, would it be more like still? Calm? Peace? Gentle? Emptiness? Love? Or not? Just allow whatever it is to be. Have you noticed that your cow has stopped charging?
The full circle
Have you ever wondered what your subconscious mind looks like? There is no need for meditation, crystals or changing dimensions of consciousness for this miracle to be achieved. Simply look at your life and you see an exact physical reflection of your subconscious self. But how can this be? It is, I believe, based on a form of magnetism. This process allows us to determine our destiny and experience, even though our lives may appear to be controlled by events over which we have little or no influence. We all control our lives minute by minute. We just don’t realise it.
As this decade proceeds, the psychic and the openminded scientists are enjoying a fusion of perspective. Agreement is emerging outside the scientific establishment that our consciousness, the eternal us, is a series of energy fields working through, and animating, the physical body. This is our multi-dimensional eternal Self, that part of us which leaves the physical body at the moment we all ‘death’. We have a conscious level which interacts with the brain and the body and is therefore subject to the limitations of this world of dense matter. But guiding this level like some spiritual ‘mission control’ is our subconscious. This subconscious level contains all the thought patterns we have held onto from the past, all our concerns and ambitions for the future, and whatever we are thinking in the moment.
This amalgamation of thought and perception is, in short, what we think of ourselves: our personal sense of reality. These subconscious thought patterns are imprinted in our ‘aura’, the eternal Self. When we speak of someone having good or bad ‘vibes’, we are in fact describing the thought patterns (vibrations) that are being broadcast from that person’s aura. These are the vibrations that we feel when we walk into a house and immediately sense the ‘atmosphere’, negative or positive.
The aura consists of magnetic energy which reflects in every second of our lives, the magnetic patterns created by our subconscious – our sense of personal reality. These patterns attract to us other magnetic thought fields (people, places, ways of life) which create an exact physical replica of our subconscious sense of self. In this way we create our own reality. We are in charge of our lives and no one else. Back in the 1970’s when I was a news reporter with the BBC, I visited a hostel for what were then called ‘battered wives’. Some had suffered violence from two, three or even four different men, one after the other. I was amazed at the time. Why did they continue to live with the same kind of violent partner? I now realise the answer. The common theme of all those women was a lack of self-worth and self-love, an attitude that clearly went back a very long time. That sense of self, that subconscious belief that they deserved to be punished, created the magnetic attraction with violent men. The men, in turn, are those who have such a deep subconscious hatred of self that they are seeking a ‘mirror’ at which they can thrash out and so avoid looking within. I have yet to meet a violent person who did not have a deep hatred of themselves. When the women escaped from one violent partner, they merely attracted another because the magnetic pattern they were broadcasting (a lack of self-worth) was still there. That sequence can only be broken by changing the pattern – by loving and respecting themselves. The same applies to the men involved.
This magnetic attraction of thought fields is how we draw to us what we most fear; it explains love or dislike at first sight; why we are attracted so powerfully to certain places and ways of life. What we call ‘karma’ is, for me, just another word to describe this process of magnetic attraction. If we act negatively towards someone, it means there is an imbalance in our inner self. This imbalance (thought pattern) will eventually attract to us an experience that reflect that imbalance – our karma. This is not a form of punishment, it is an aid to our evolution because it means we are constantly facing our inner self. What can be seen, can be dealt with.
All this is more than esoteric contemplating. It is fundamental to changing the world for the better. The world that we see is the collective physical reflection of the sum total of what humanity thinks of itself. Humanity, in general, is programmed not to love, respect or forgive itself. These thought patterns have created the global reality, a world in desperate need of more love, respect and forgiveness between peoples. We can’t give to other what we don’t have for ourselves. We are also programmed to give our minds away and look to others to tell us what to do.
These thought patterns have created the reality in which a very few people actually control the direction of the world. We created all this by what we think of ourselves. Two things are worth remembering: the victim mentality creates the victim reality; and if you believe it, you will achieve.
FORGET THE PAST
No matter what you have been through, you can always get up and make changes, says Dawn Fields
Just think about this for a moment: How many times have you done something in your past that you were not too happy about? It could be anything.
Let’s say that you are an addicted person. You may be addicted to drugs, or alcohol or the wrong type of man. Perhaps you are addicted to stressful jobs that bring you little pay. It doesn’t matter what the circumstances may be. Hey, it doesn’t even have to be that harsh. Perhaps you have tried to start your own business or create something in your life where you could make a living doing something you are passionate about and it failed, so you gave up. It doesn’t really matter. But every time you turn around, you are falling victim to the same thing over and over again.
Hey, it happens. We all fall down. But the good thing about it is we get up. Just because you fell down doesn’t mean you have to stay down. Get up! Why are you still sitting there? We all make mistakes. But the great part about it is that God allows us an opportunity to learn from our mistakes and move forward. Just because you fall down today, doesn’t mean that tomorrow you must remain down.
Ever slipped out in public and actually fell down? Jumped up real quick, didn’t you? The next thing you did was looked around and prayed that nobody saw you. Just as quickly as you bounced up from a real fall, you can bounce back from a figurative fall. One thing that I have noticed from speaking with a lot of people is that they understand that we fall down but never understood that we get up too.
No matter what the circumstances are in your life that might have tripped you up, no matter what you have been through, no matter what happened in your past, you can always get up and make changes, right now, that will forever banish or
make obsolete, the bad things that caused you to fall in the past. Don’t get me wrong…I hear some very legitimate sounding excuses as to why people feel that their life will forever be the way that it presently may be. I hear things like “I was molested when I was young.” “My mother abandoned me when I was two years old and left me because she was out chasing the pipe.” “I have an addiction. How can I possibly get a job that pays more than minimum wage.” “I don’t have an education. How can I ever expect to get a good job?”
Stop living in the past! We all fall down. But remember, “A Saint is just a sinner who fell down and got up.” Your past should be a reference point, not a residence. But so many of us continuously live in the past. We went out and bought a welcome mat and promptly placed it at the door of our past. We can’t break away from it. We wear it as some sort of badge of honour because we simply won’t let it go.
Just because you made a mistake or circumstances led you to do something that you now regret, doesn’t mean that for the rest of your life you will have to beat yourself up because of it. Doesn’t matter if you made two mistakes or three. Heck, it doesn’t even matter if you made over a million mistakes in your life. What matters is today, right now.
You know the mistakes that you’ve made because you have that mistake as a reference point now and for the rest of your life. You weren’t born for sorrow. You weren’t born to be a doormat for others to wipe their feet on. You weren’t born to be used up and then disregarded. You were born to glorify God and live a happy and abundant life. And if you aren’t living that way, it’s simply because at some point, you fell down. But now is the time to get up and start living the life that you were born to live. And that is a life of purpose. That’s a life of happiness and abundance.
Now, you ask, “How do I get out of the past and get up?” Well, I would like to say, “it’s simple.” But that wouldn’t be the truth. There’s nothing simple about it. It’s a daily process that you must work on. You have to be committed to making changes in your life. You have to believe that God has a purpose for you. You will have to work on you. You will have to realise that what happened yesterday, is gone. You can never get that time back and, therefore, there is nothing you can do about it. But right in front of you is another minute or another hour or another day, week, month, year. Those things haven’t happened yet, so you can start to orchestrate your present so that your future will be more to your liking.
Start by telling yourself, over and over and over and over again, “My past has no bearing on who I am right this second. And, therefore, is not important. I am here to glorify God. I am God’s child and, therefore, worthy of greatness.” If you take this simple phrase and say it to yourself all day long, over and over again, you will soon start to notice changes in your life. All of a sudden, without even thinking about it, you will start to pack your old baggage from the past and move them to a closet that you will lock and throw away the key.
Let love find you
At a seminar I presented, a woman named Georgia reported that she had been married to a man who was emotionally absent. After long and frustrating attempts to infuse life into her ailing marriage, Georgia felt she needed to leave.“I told my husband I wanted a divorce, but he refused to give it to me,” she recounted. “So I decided that even if he didn’t love me, I would love me. I decided that I would give myself the love and kindness I had been seeking from him. So every day I wrote myself a long love letter telling myself how beautiful, wonderful, and desirable I am.”
“Then one day my husband found one of these letters. Since it was unsigned, he assumed it was from another man. He came to me waving the letter in his hand and told me, I cant compete with this you can have your divorce!”
Everyone and everything that shows up in our life is a reflection of something that is happening inside of us. All events and experiences in our field of awareness represent the out picturing of a feeling, belief, or attitude we are holding.
Thus we can use every event as a barometer of where we are on our path. “We think in secret and it comes to pass; environment is but a looking glass.”
This universal Law of Attraction means that we ‘hire’ everyone in our play to act out the script we have written. This is why we experience repetitious patterns in relationship, work, or health; different actors are showing up to play out the same role.
Eventually we recognise that it cannot be an accident that the same type of people keep doing the same things; it is we who have drawn them according to the signals we are radioing to central casting.
The good news about the Law of Attraction is that the moment we change our mind, heart, or attitude, the outer world must reflect it, often immediately.
In Georgia’s case, she was holding an unconscious attitude that she was unlovable and did not deserve a husband who was present and attentive.
As soon she grew beyond that limiting belief, released her husband from the onus of her emptiness, and gave herself the love she sought, he had no choice but to match it or leave. I have every reason to expect that Georgia’s next relationship was a vast improvement.
We can save ourselves all kinds of pain, and escape the struggle of endless manipulation, by determining what we would like to receive from other people, and then giving it to ourselves.
This all-important shift can be difficult in a world where we are daily bombarded with the notion that we are empty and needy, and everything we want and need is ‘out there’.
Out there in a romantic partner; a hit record; a new car; a more prestigious job; a better house. The funny thing about getting things from out there is that if you did not know you were whole before you got the thing, you will not become whole when you get it; in fact you will feel even more empty and confused. As Buddha asked, “If you do not get it from yourself, where will you go for it?”
Cool Runnings is a delightful (based on true) story of a group of young Jamaican men who decide they will enter the bobsled competition in the winter Olympics. The team faces and overcomes tremendous odds to make it to the competition.
The night before the big race, one of the team members confides to the coach that he will feel like a failure if he returns home without a medal. The coach has some good advice for this fellow: “If you do not know that you are good enough without the medal, you will not be good enough with the medal.”
All of us truly want to be in love, for love is our natural state literally who we are. The question is not, “Should we love?” but “Where will we find the love we desire?”
If we decide that another person is the source of our love, we set ourself up for a roller coaster ride of heady ecstasy followed by painful frustration. Sometimes our partner will do things that make us feel loved, and sometimes he or she will do things that make us feel unloved.
But as long as anything she or he does can make us feel one way or another, we have set ourselves up for a fall; we have given our power away in a most unkind (to ourselves) way, and we become little more than a yo-yo on the string of life.
There is another way to love, far more magnificent, real, and rewarding. This way finds the source of our love, power, and life within us. This way teaches that our purpose is not to import love, but to express it.
Instead of being a love seeker, we become a love finder. We do not wait for love we generate it. Then we get to bask in the warmth of our own beauty any time we choose, potentially all the time.
DH Lawrence elucidated this principle most eloquently:
Those who go searching for love only find their own lovelessness. But the loveless never find love; only the loving find love, and they never have to search for it.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Love starts with the self
Love yourself… being both the ‘lovee’ and the ‘lover’, one doesn’t have to guess what loved ones want, says Deepak Chopra .The new focus these days is to ‘love ourselves’. We are moving away from the old ‘martyr’ ethic of suffer and sacrifice yourself for others, to one of realising that if we are to love humanity as a whole, we must first love humanity in a unit of one — our own self.
Now, I’ve been working on this ‘loving myself’ lesson for many years… and I’d been thinking that I had succeeded. That I finally loved myself. And then, on reflection, I realised that I had only touched the surface. I started looking at what loving someone really meant, and when I applied those definitions to myself, saw that I was missing the mark, in many ways.
So how do we define love? What does it mean to love someone? When we love someone we desire their happiness. Do I desire my own happiness? Well, of course… at least on a ‘first reaction’ basis. I obviously don’t desire my unhappiness.
But do I follow up on it? It is one thing to say that one loves someone and desires their happiness, but when we have to make choices that prove us truthful or not, do we pass the test? If we truly desired our happiness, would we remain at jobs that deaden our sense of life? Would we stay in situations that are harmful to us and lead us into depression? Would we refuse to give ourselves the nurturing and love that we need?
Are we willing to set ourselves free from our own restrictions and patterns and limitations? Are we willing to step away from the safety of our present, to go forward to the unknown which may hold our abundant happiness?
Are we afraid of what we will lose if we take the risk to step out of our cocoon of safety, of our daily routines that feel save and familiar? Are willing to set ourselves free, or are we afraid? Do we desire our happiness enough to be willing to take great risks for it? To follow our bliss, to reach for our dream, simply because it holds promise of happiness? Or are we holding back for fear of losing something that we know is only a portion of happiness, not the whole manifestation of it… How much are we willing to love ourselves? When we say we want happiness for ourselves, are we willing to walk our talk?
When we love someone we give them the best we can. Okay, so if I love myself, why do I not give myself the best food, the best attention, the kindest care? Why do I put my work first, my deadlines, my bills, my spouse, my obligations, my whatevers… If I loved myself, I would be willing to lay aside other considerations to give myself these things that would be of benefit to me — take time for a walk, a massage, a good meal, a chat with a friend, whatever… Am I really giving myself the best I have, or am I simply settling for leftovers? Whatever time is left after my busy day is for me. Is that love?
When we love someone, we accept their foibles, their errors, their imperfections, just as we celebrate their being in our life. Do we celebrate our ‘being’? Do we appreciate ourselves even though we are not ‘perfect’? Are we willing to overlook and even laugh at our own foibles and imperfections? Are we willing to say ‘no problem’ when we commit an error? I must say that upon self-examination, I found that I had a long way to go before I could truly say that I loved myself.
Perhaps, an easier goal would be to simply take it one day and one action at a time. Rather than set such an abstract goal as ‘I will love myself completely’, it would be better if we set more concrete goals. Perhaps we need to make our goals more action-oriented.
First, ask yourself how you could show yourself that you love yourself. Imagine you were in a relationship with yourself (which of course you are), what would this dream lover (you) give you to show that he/she loved you? Would it be flowers? Would it be a gift of a massage? Perhaps tickets to hear a favourite band, or play, or movie… Perhaps, a day off in the middle of the week every now and then. Perhaps a weekend away from the phones and any ‘obligations’… perhaps….
What would this dream lover give you? Prepare a meal for you? Well, then order some food from your favourite restaurant to be delivered… Bring you flowers? Stop and pick some up. Give you a massage?
Whatever your “dream lover” would bring you, give it to yourself… However you would see love translated into actions, take those actions for your own self. Learn to treat yourself lovingly.
Rather than having a elusive goal of loving yourself, someday, after you’ve worked out all your ‘stuff’, just start taking action now. There a methodology called ‘acting as if’. OK, well act ‘as if’ you loved yourself unconditionally, even if you don’t.
So rather than wonder and worry about whether you love yourself, and whether or not you’ll ever be able to do so, act as if. Start treating yourself the way you would treat someone you are totally and unconditionally in love with.
If you don’t know how that would be, just act as if. Start one step at a time. One day at a time. One action at a time.
Start right now. If you were the person you love the most in the whole world, right this minute, what you want to give to that person. What would that person want to receive. You do have an advantage here. Being both the ‘lovee’ and the ‘lover’ you don’t have to guess as to what your loved one would want… You already know… Did you forget to look within and ask?
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )START LIKING YOURSELF
When you like yourself, you go beyond the barriers of loneliness Ayear ago, a beautiful woman came to see me. Her husband had been cheating on her and she wanted some advice regarding her future.
Even though her eyes were dull, shoulders drawn and her face sad, I managed to look beyond that, look beyond her sadness. Did you know that when you go “beyond”, you can create new things? I told her to go look in my bathroom mirror. She came back and I asked her what she saw. “A fool” she replied. I told her that she needed glasses and to go and look again. And again. By the third time she was almost in tears but she managed to acknowledge that she was beautiful.
When we are unhappy, especially in times of extreme trauma, the spirit cracks, even fractures into tiny pieces. In order to put that together, you need to start fitting piece by piece. No one in this world can make you happy.
You need to like yourself and achieve happiness from within. Nothing can bring happiness in you except you. Your lover or husband or your parents can add to that happiness. However, they cannot initiate the feeling. How many times have you said or heard the words: I will be happy if .. and then follows the.. if I win a million, if my husband is less grumpy, if I meet a lover.
Our happiness is based on conditions. Not so. Happiness is the emotion that produces little tingly sensations in the brain. That is
why chocolate uplifts the spirit. The brain sees this as happy food and soon you feel better!
In order to really like yourself, you need to embrace your good points and divide your bad points into two groups. There is a group of bad points that you can change and one that you cannot.
If you are five feet and two inches tall and you do not like it, so sorry, you have to deal with that. No miracle can turn you into a six-footer. There are lots of things in life that you cannot change. In order to be happy, you need to accept them and learn to live with it.
If you do not like it when it rains, and become all depressed, you need to see that the depression is triggered by a symptom. No use treating the symptom if the cause is not fixed. You need to go ‘beyond’ the symptoms to find and fix the cause.
Change what you can and look at what you cannot change from a different angle.
Did you realise that being short has it is own set of advantages? Look ‘beyond’ the physical, emotional and the mind. See the perfection of your spirit. If the spirit is allowed to shine through, your emotions and thoughts will lighten and you will feel happier.
Nothing is impossible. ‘Nothing’ does not exist. Therefore, you need to accept that all things are possible. No one is just good or bad. If you do not have bad points, there is imbalance, because the YOU as focal point needs good and bad in order to show balance. Even the most successful people have weaknesses.
You are with YOU every year, every day, every hour and every second. I did not say like your bad points, I said: like YOU. Like yourself. Soon you will relax and start looking at the things you do not like, changing what you can and accepting what you cannot. That is when the miracle occurs.
When you like yourself, you go beyond the barriers of loneliness. Your appearance changes, even if you did nothing to make it look different on the outside. People will be drawn to you. Your boss, your friends…everyone will recognise your talents.
This is because when you do so, you have a vibration of being content. You will be happy. When you are happy, it just reflects on your face. Having yourself as a best friend has advantages. You cannot lie to yourself. You can be kind to yourself. You will not be lonely because in balance, you will not mind times when you are on your own.
Trust yourself and have faith in the Creator. You are not here by coincidence. Go beyond and see how being YOU, can change your life and others.
That beautiful young woman did all these things. Soon, her eyes sparkled and she was even lovelier than before.
Her shimmering spirit and kind nature drew lots of friends to her. At one stage she even had a choice of men wanting to be with her all the time! She chose one. She shares her secret of inner and outer beauty. She is her own best friend and she really likes herself.
Be you. Like who you are. Trust who you are. You have to be happy for yourself. If you find that hard, look for someone to help you achieve that. Enjoy discovering your inner beauty!
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