Yesterday Was A Super Sad, No Good, Very Bad Day

As is sit here and write this blog post I can honestly say, yesterday was one of the hardest days I’ve had in a long time. See, yesterday, Sunday November 10th, 2013 my spiritual center closed its doors. We made a decision, and yesterday…it was over. Rummaging through the sentimental and packing up an era wasn’t the easiest thing to do…

But you see, amidst the change, a new idea was born. I came to realize, the place I worship, the place I find the “church” in my life…isn’t a brick building or a space that is filled with the aroma of coffee or the comfort of a padded chair…my Spiritual Center is within me. My glorious moments of enlightenment aren’t founded or birthed in realities outside of myself; they are discovered one thought at a time, one action at a time in the creative power that lies in every fiber of my being. Sure, I will miss the routine of making Sunday morning more than a day to sleep in. I’ll miss the opportunity to feed my children their spiritual food prepared by someone other than me. But, I won’t stop visiting the spiritual center that resides within me. It won’t stop me from continuing to remind my children, friends and family the creative power that resides in their souls.

Spirituality is more to me than planting my ass in a chair on Sunday morning. It is more than finding comfort in the rituals I so amicably claimed as my own. Spirituality is beyond any form of religion or governmental definition. My spirituality is what governs my ability to understand and practice my religion. IT is what moves me to write this blog. IT is the Creative Process that is born and reborn, renewed and rejuvenated in every cell of my being every moment of every day. IT is what powers my thoughts and creates the miracles in my life daily. Today I will say, “It is done unto you as you believe” and truly mean it. I will wipe the sand of disappointment off my feet and walk forward with a renewed commitment to give unto others as I would give unto myself.

Today is the day I look into the eyes of the people around me and tell them they are loved. They are powerful beyond any limiting definition, and that Freedom, Love, Joy, Peace, and Abundance is theirs for the taking! Today, I look into my future with a new found excitement.

Thanks for hanging out and reading my ramblings….

I truly appreciate you!

Gretchen

Why Won't They Listen?

So even when I think I’ve heard it all…something tends to come up and bite me right in the ass; yep…teeth marks and everything. It caused me to pause and question just what in the hell have I been trying to do all my life?

Simply put…

Why can’t people just be what I want them to be? Why can’t they just fall into the role I see them as? I mean I do it all the time with the characters in my head. And for the most part…my characters will listen. I mold and shape their personalities or at least I think I do, I tell them what to wear, how to talk, what they are going to do. Hell, I even tell them when they can pee, eat, have sex, and sleep. So, then, why can’t breathing, living, individual people do what I tell them to do, when I tell them to do it? Can’t they see I know what’s best for everyone? (yeah right!)

First, let me just say shoulding on people sucks…for you and them. But I’ll be damned if life doesn’t make shoulding on people super easy. It is so effortless to do. What? You have no idea what I’m talking about? Come on, you should know, it’s the act of telling them what they should or shouldn’t do. “Hey, So & So, you should do this,” and “you should do that.” Our lives make it soooo easy to cast the first stone doesn’t it? But I heard something this weekend that made me straighten up, listen, and begin to re-evaluate my habit of shoulding people.

“YOU CAN’T MAKE PEOPLE BECOME SOMEONE THEY AREN’T.”

WHAT????....SERIOUSLY???  

Yeah, seriously.

Let me say it this way…You can’t make someone into something that suits you. You can’t define what you think that person can or can’t be…because it isn’t your job. It isn’t your birthright to try and mold people into what you want them to be. They have their own perceptions, their own aspirations, and their own ideals of what makes them who they are. Your birthright is to be the best, most loving, authentic person you can be, while discovering all the wonders life has to offer you. It’s about changing your own idea about yourself and how you take shape in your experience of life.

There is nothing noble about taking someone who might not understand where their power lies and try and mold them into something you want them to be. Life is a journey. It’s as individual as the skin and bones that house your soul. Taking on someone’s responsibility of how they should act and how they should behave is only setting you up for disappointment, believe me…because they will NEVER live up to the expectations you’ve set for them. And on the flip side, they might not conform to the limited definition you labeled them with either. So why do we continue to do it? Why are we hurt when they don’t become what we want them to? I’ll tell you why (of course right?)…because it isn’t your responsibility to define who they are and what they should be doing. Do you hear me? Let me say that again…It isn’t your responsibility to save or change anyone.

OH…YEAH…BUT…but nothing. It isn’t your job, responsibility, or right to project your definition of who they should be on anyone…ever. Who gave you the right? Certainly not any Divine Intelligence that I am aware of. I know we all have such good intentions but sometimes those good intentions end up smacking the people we love right between the eyes.

If you truly want to know…your responsibility is to be the best person you know how to be. Be the encouraging friend, supportive partner, caring parent, compassionate relative and loving human being you were placed on this earth to be. We all are born to shine; we are all here to experience the creative urge of life.

What goes around comes around in this world... “It is done unto you as you believe.” So now the question is…what do you believe? Do you believe you are a mighty moving force in this world? Or are you willing to sacrifice your happiness to the judgments of others? 

Don’t let fear dictate how you experience your life. You are born in love, made out of love and are animate from love with every breath you take. You wouldn’t long for something better if you weren’t meant to have it! You wouldn’t ache for peace and harmony in your life if it wasn’t something which already existed in your DNA. You can't see love, but you know it exists. You can’t physically hold a thought in your hands, but you know it’s there. We exist in a material world governed by invisible laws. Laws we use every day and yet never comprehend their true power. Let’s face it…you reap what you sow! So what are you planting in the garden of your life?

Thanks for hanging out and reading my ramblings.

Love,

Gretchen

 

Face Your Fear, and Kick Its Booty!

All my life I’ve been afraid of birds. Yeah, I know, sounds silly right? Well, it stems from almost being attacked as a kid when I rode my bike too close to a momma bird’s nest. From that day on, I owned this fear of birds. I owned it to a point where if I was walking down the street and a little brown bird was on the sidewalk in front of me, I would cross the street to go around it. Yeah, thinking about it…it was pretty silly.

Funny how fear of something we don’t understand can petrify us, and cripple our lives to a point of altering who we are in order to avoid dealing with it. I had friends who had birds, BIG, parrot type birds, that scared the “you know what” out of me. Out of courtesy, those bird owning friends would keep the birds in their cages for me when I’d visit. This soul gripping fear, continued for years, up into my late thirties.

Can you imagine, being afraid of something for most of your life? I bet you can. We all have some type of fear that we’ve held onto for most of our lives. However; this is where my story changes! It wasn’t until my 14 year old (at the time) came to me with his birthday wish. He wanted to get an Xbox 360 with a game called Black Ops. Now, I’m not a prudish mom at all. But for me, that game was way over the top. We argued, he tried to make me see his point of view, and basically it came down to my final answer of NO. Well, in his attempt to call my bluff he announced that if his father and I weren’t going to allow him to have Black Ops, then he wanted chickens! Yes, you read it right, he changed his birthday wish from an Xbox 360 with Black Ops to wanting chickens. Well, the last time I checked, chickens were a form of bird that fluttered, pecked, scratched and were at the top of my fear list, right up there with heights! But being the determined parent to stick to my word, I agreed that indeed, he could have chickens for his 15th birthday. The only stipulations I had were that he had to do the research and choose birds that weren’t aggressive, and didn’t flutter a lot. Oh, yeah, and there was no way I was going to have anything to do with them. They were his and his brothers’ birds…PERIOD.

Well, as promised, on his 15th birthday his auntie and uncle show up with three little birds; a Road Island Red, a Plymouth Rock and an Americana. They were cute and come to find out they needed to be held, they needed to be taken care of, and they needed to cure my fear of birds. So over the next couple of weeks, while they lived under the warming lamp in a plastic bin in my son’s room, Jared took his sketched plans for the hen house, and with the help of his uncle, cousins, brothers and dad, they built a coop for the birds. All the while I started to become invested in these little creatures. I started to see why they stretched their wings, why they squawked, why they scratched at the ground and tried to fly. Slowly I began to look at the birds as something not to fear, but admire. They had their own personalities, their own pecking order, and their own way of living. 

Eventually, our small flock of three grew to the rounded number of eight. And, yes, eight was enough. But as they grew larger and larger, I noticed I my fear of birds grew smaller and smaller. Suddenly, the girl everyone would chuckle at for being afraid of birds became the woman who loved them.

But it was the day that I came upon a pigeon on the sidewalk in front of me and I didn’t feel that twirling anxiety in the pit of my stomach anymore that I realized, I wasn’t afraid anymore. I actually watched it bob its head as it meandered its way around, pecking at the crumbs of a dropped cookie. Wow, how liberating! I wasn’t afraid of it. As a matter of fact, I actually found myself enjoying the moment I took to admire the colors of its feathers.

I know my lack of fear was the result of my being subject to my own brood of birds. I finally understood the relationship between the birds and me. It was Love! When I approached my fear of birds from Love, I was able to see through the ridiculousness of that fear. Fear is nothing more than the result of lack of Love and understanding. We fear things because we don’t understand them. We experience something traumatic, and instead of using that moment to grow, we build a cocoon around our experiences and begin to identify with the situation, which ultimately leads to a phobia or fear. But once we face the fear, dismantle it piece by piece, and eventually imbibe the remaining slivers of fear with Love, we come to see, it wasn’t the thing we were afraid of paralyzing ourselves, but our reaction to it that caused us to limit our lives.

Today, I have no fear of birds! Yeah, even my friends are amazed. Is it amazing? Not really. Losing the fear and finding the Love was what made the difference in my life. Approaching my fear from a place of Love, instead of terror was the turning point for me. Now when I walk down the sidewalk, I don’t avoid the birds…I stop and take a moment to admire just how harmless they truly are.

Thanks for hanging out and reading my ramblings.

Now who could be afraid of these little things?

Don't be Limited by Conditional Thinking!

First off let me apologize for being pretty much nonexistent on the blog for the last month. I’ve been taking a class about Ralph Waldo Emerson, Judge Thomas Troward, Dr. Ernest Holmes and Emma Curtis Hopkins that really has stretched and pulled at my spirituality as well as my intellect. It made me really grow in ways that I never knew I could! Yeah, I’ve learned so much more that I get to pour in this blog and some really great ideas I can’t wait to talk about! But let’s get onto the topic I thought was important today…getting caught up in the nets of conditional thinking.

How often do we get caught up in the drag-nets of race consciousness? How many times a day are we affected by other people’s moods? We all have days where we are going along; having a great day until… someone’s bad attitude decides to show up. We could be singing along with the greatest songs that move us to shiver inside, but the minute someone enters our mental space—all the power goes out and we are left sitting in the pitch dark waiting for someone else to turn on the lights of flip on the power breaker. Why is that? Why do we allow other’s follies, moods, shortcomings, or otherwise affect us? It’s because we haven’t learned how to be of the world but not part of it. Now wait a minute…what the heck does that mean? Simply put, it means as we grow in our spiritual consciousness, we begin to learn that conditional thinking of people around us is nothing more than chatter for the fishes. When we learn to let go of other’s negative energy and replace it with love, we inherent the ability to let what others say, just roll off our backs.

You all are familiar with the statement, “It is done unto you as you believe.” If you don’t know that statement, stick around, I tend to state it…a lot.

See, if we are going to live with a conditioned consciousness, our lives we be conditional. We will be affected by the going-ons around us. When it rains we will find fault with nature, when we get in the car, we’ll be pissed at other drivers, when we interact with people, we will experience them in limiting ways. When we decide to be in the world, we will find that every interaction we have with anything can be affected by our negative or limiting ideas. Let’s remember the quote from Einstein, “You can’t fix a problem with the same consciousness that created it.” See we can’t become at peace if we are running around pissed off at people. We can’t be happy if we allow other people to define who we are. We can’t really have prosperity if we keep telling everyone we don’t have any money! 

Thoughts are things. We know this—we know it because we experience the outcome our thoughts all the time. We even claim it, when we say, “I knew that was going to happen.” How many times do we keep chanting a future event we are afraid is going to occur…only to see it happen? “God, I hope I don’t lose my job.” Oh, man, I have a bad feeling about this.” We are ALWAYS claiming our experience. ALWAYS! What we think about today becomes our experiences tomorrow. So why are we mucking it up with limited beliefs or conditional thinking.

Remember, I’ve stated this before…don’t be bound by precedence! Don’t think that just because it’s never happened that it can’t. We have hundreds upon thousands of examples where society wasn’t bound by what was conceivable. If that were the case, women would still be dragged around by their hair and men would still be chasing around mammoths with spears. Just look around and you will see where we have effortlessly leapt over the idea of being bound by precedence; where conditional thinking has crumbed to our evolutionary thoughts. From the discovery of electricity to the invention of the personal computer we haven’t let race consciousness, or the collected thoughts of people, limit us to what has always been.

We as a species have volition, freedom of ideas, thought, and intuition; that’s what keeps us in a forward motion, in a movement towards greater understanding of the power within us. We have a power within us that gives us the capability to move mountains and the only thing stopping us is our idea that we are limited in our abilities to do so. We become conditioned to what has happed as the only truth, whereas, if we truly looked at it, it is nothing more a link to our past. We must live on the highest point of discovery, willing and ready to take a faith-filled leap out into the vastness of our future. Be ready to accept the multitude of greatness coming your way, be willing and open to the harmony and peace permeating your every experience, and be able to see the overflowing abundance of Love in your life, right now! Spend your day in gratitude and forgiveness. See the Love within everyone…and I mean everyone around you.

When we let go of other people’s ideas and form our own thoughts filled with Peace, Love, Harmony, Abundance, and Joy…the world around us changes to what we expect it to be!

Thanks for hanging out and reading my ramblings~