Wishing you a wonderful weekend full of smiles!
Once we understand that the best place to BE at home is within ourselves and that we can be at home whenever and wherever we are, we just need to practice actually doing it. For today, I want to share a quick tip for staying at home within when distractions arise.
The term being at home is really about inner peace. Somehow “being at home” sounds a bit more attainable than inner peace, kind of like a stepping stone to the real deal. Plenty of being at home within will take us toward inner peace…where else would it lead?! The path toward peace begins with quieting the mind. There are many stages and paths and practices that help with quieting the mind. Different things work for different people. I want to just give a quick tip today that might help us all stay home well this week.
Let’s identify a few of the many things that take us from our true home and fill our mind with noise:
To be clear, we are meant to live a peaceful life and feel at home within ourselves all the time. So, anytime we are not experiencing utter peace, we have left our rightful home and chosen fear instead. Most people live in constant stress, so they may be surprised to hear that what many consider to be “normal” stress is actually not living at all and a complete waste of energy.
Knowing our home is within we can use our bodies to anchor us there. A little thing I like to do throughout the day when I feel my mind stray or stress begin to take hold is to simply shift my attention towards some part of my body. If I am walking when I notice the mind activity, I simply change the thought to “I am home” and feel my foot hit the ground or floor with my fullest attention, then I keep my attention there for my next steps. Repeating the “I am home” thought again, I then notice more of my body. I soon notice my heart feel good and a smile always comes to my face; when you stop to notice your heart feel good, it is impossible not to smile (try it). As you keep walking, you find the quiet mind and peace again. If I were doing the dishes or writing when my mind went towards noise, I would bring my attention to my hands and do the same thought replacement and feel my heart relax and inevitably feel a smile on my face. It really works and can bring you right to where you are most at home…in joy. You can use an arm movement, notice your fingers, stretch your neck or simply stand still…anchor yourself anywhere in your body and out of your mind…it will bring the peace of being at home within.
On this wonderful Wednesday, I just have to say…I wouldn’t wish happiness on anyone. That may sound strange, let me explain. To me, happiness means something has happened that brought it and inevitably it swings to the opposite at some point. What I wish for everyone is true peace that comes from within. I wish it for you with all my heart! Try this little tip to anchor your attention in your body and you will love how it feels to quickly and effectively quiet the mind and all the trouble it likes to create. When I first started watching my thoughts years ago, I remember I would often find myself counting my steps. It was as if my mind was so used to constant noise that it couldn’t just be quiet, it had to count. It was okay, I just went around counting steps and stairs…it passed. The quiet is where life is at…I am so grateful for the quiet.
I hope this little tip helps you enjoy the quiet. I am sending you love and peace!
What better place to truly be at home than anywhere in the world?! When we can be our true self no matter where we are, who we are with or what the circumstances are, then we are really living and we are at home within. Figuring out how to find this space and dwell within it is the most important achievement we can ever accomplish in our lifetime. That space is in there waiting for us…we need simply follow the path to it. There is no fear there and none of its many disguises. There is unwavering comfort. There is only love for all that is and ever was and ever will be. There is peace.
Live What You Know is all about figuring out how to stay in this place. I have peeked in the door and even stopped in for a bit…only to allow myself to be pulled back to all the things of this world that can pull us out of peace if we let them (and only if we let them). How lovely it would be to take us residence there. I would have that peace and I could bring it to everyone I meet. I could show them my space and share with them that they have the same space within them awaiting their arrival. They would be able to see it and recognize it as their own as well. Oh, how lovely that would be.
We will get there. There is no way we can’t. The timing is fine, it all works out as it should. We will find our way within.
Now is the only time there ever is.
Today, as I walk, talk, breathe and be I will remember that I am at home. I will be in that space today because my soul is ready to be there today. That is the prayer today. I pray the same for you. Whether you peek in the door, stop in for a visit or are ready to live there always, I pray you see home in you today and always.
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Today, our family is starting a stay-cation at home for the week. We thought about traveling this week, but we all just really want to be at home enjoying family time. As I was pondering staying at home this morning and truly making it the best it can be for my husband and children, the knowing that we are always at home within came through me. I think there is a powerful connection to the actual living space we abide in. I am grateful I had this awareness this morning and I can use this week as a time to honor our sacred space that we share. I pray to use this time to bring more peace and love to my husband and children. Making our living space more like the space we have within can only help us in finding that space, staying there and inviting others to join us. Taking all actions from my home within is the only way to bring this peace to my loved ones. I am so grateful to be at home!
Sending so much love!
The River of Life
It’s not enough to live from day to day
Keeping yourself warm, well-fed and safe
Satisfying desires, chasing after fun
Hiding from the strange and dangerous
Dazed with distractions and daydreams.Life shouldn’t be a tepid pond
But a river flowing fast and furious
Full of struggles and adventures
That open up new depths
And awaken higher selves.The same river that has brought you here
Through billions of years of unfolding
An ever-widening stream, from a trickle to a torrent –
Not to rest, but to keep cutting through
Until your being is ocean deep and wide.— Steve Taylor
Wishing you the courage to make brave choices and follow the song of your soul towards the life you are meant to be living. Whatever tune you hear your soul singing, follow it to wherever it may take you. If you can’t hear it, get quiet and embrace the stillness and you will. Wishing you The Flow of Life! Pure Life! Real Life!
There is a collective energy shift happening all around us as summer winds down and all the responsibilities of fall will soon take hold. We can all feel the new focus taking shape and the promise that a new school-year holds. Everywhere we go there are school supplies around every corner…fresh new pencils to hold and reams of blank paper to fill. The potential is pulsating through the air. I believe that we can harness that collective energy this time of year more than any (even more than the new year) and make real changes and set new goals of things we would like to accomplish or change in our daily lives. The first day of school energy isn’t reserved just for students…we are all students in the classroom of life. Let’s gather our supplies and grab hold of the energy pulsating around us and make amazing changes and set meaningful goals for this new school-year ahead.
I am a big believer in not should-ing on anyone. I also don’t want anyone should-ing on me. Translation – I don’t like to tell anyone what they should do and I don’t like people telling me what I should do. There is a lot of noise in the world, I think the answers come from deep within, not from outside. I like to celebrate how we all know deep inside what is best for us and I think encouraging people to make brave choices from the small still place inside them that knows what is best for them is my calling in life. I am not at all interested in judging what others do or feeling superior in my own choices…yuck! I want to encourage everyone to find what works for them or what their soul is calling them to try or change or do and go for it. I know that we all have the most amazing power within us to harness at any time…we must listen to the quiet within and make choices accordingly.
Having said all of that, I will tell you what the still quiet voice inside me is saying and what I will begin this new school-year working on in my life. I have a lot of things I would like to work on over the year and I am sure many or all of them will come up here in my Live What You Know writings, however, I want to start in that organized back to school way and get specific with one for the first month. I can see the year ahead and I have so much I want to get better at and so many things I know that I want to live, so it is clear to me that I need to have a healthy and energized body or form to do this in. I want my form to be able to support all that my soul wants to live. I feel that I have been so focused on mind health and learning new things and figuring out how to apply them in my life, etc., I have let the health and vitality of my body slip. I don’t have the energy I need to have to do all that my soul is telling me to do. I had a time when taking care of my body was priority number one in the mornings so that I could energize my day – it was awesome. Once I began incorporating writing, reading, praying and meditating into the morning routine as well, things began slipping a bit with regards to my physical health. That coupled with less of a focus on what and how much I am eating has not proved well for my fitness and energy level. I want my energy back and I want to go back to having my body feel good and strong and vital. This form was given to me as a tool to experience my soul with. It needs my attention and care right now. I can hear it calling.
You haven’t heard a peep out of me about health and fitness until now because I wasn’t ready. I am harnessing the new fresh focused energy around me and using it to get healthy and strong again. I am ready and I need it to accomplish all that my spirit is calling for. So, for the next 27 days (just because that is my favorite number) I will live what I know in regards to my physical form to the best of my ability. I don’t plan to stop after 27 days I just plan to make it the highest priority for this 27 days to restore me to my optimum health. I believe I can do it within that time frame. I will then feel so much better that I will have reformed my habits and will be able to refocus and plan for how I will proceed to maintain that level of health from that point on. I will then be able to give myself a new focus and/or goal, etc. Here are a few specifics on the details on how I choose to restore optimum health to my body:
So, that is my focus for the month. I will also continue to learn and grow and do the other things I find meaningful, I am just ready to take the time and energy to focus on the plan above. I am working on another fun kindness project…but I will have to tell you about that later.
What is your soul telling you to focus on? How will you harness and use the collective energy around you to make positive changes and set meaningful goals in your life. What can September mean for you? The month is going to pass…we might as well use it for creating positive change. Here are some examples of things your soul might be calling for:
These are just a few examples of things your soul may be saying. Only you can know what the best focus of energy for you is. Listen to that voice and put a plan in place. It is fun, it is exciting, it is a great time to do it…the energy around you will support you. I get so excited to plan and change and focus…I am off to get me an excel spreadsheet going. For me a spreadsheet of my goals is like the ultimate gift to myself. Yay, I am excited. A bit relieved to have a plan too!
Wishing you the excitement and joy of joining the collective energy and making positive change to support living what you know your soul is calling for at this time. Sending you love too!
NOTE – in the spirit of not should-ing on you…listen closely to your soul and if its not time to change anything, then don’t. Always remember, you know best…but listen closely to make sure it is the real You talking and not just mind chatter. Wishing you well in any choice you make!
Love is always the answer. No matter what.
Whatever you’re doing, if it doesn’t feel good, it’s not working.
Love is available to access in every single moment.
I can remember a time during childhood (well, it lasted a long while) when my mom would say to me after some silly choice, bad decision or rude interaction, “What happened to sweet little Stacy?” I heard this for a long time whenever I kind of got out of line or needed some parenting I suppose. In the beginning this question really upset me and made me feel like I wasn’t a nice person. Over time it haunted me even more and I began to ponder it myself. Had I quit being sweet? Was I a bad person? During adolescence I distinctly remember her asking this question again and I had this fury inside where I screamed, “She NEVER existed, all I have ever heard is ‘where is she?’, she was never here, it’s just me, quit asking.” (I don’t think I had the courage to say it aloud to her, I think I imagined I did, but didn’t…I probably played that scene in my head over and over, I’m really not sure if I ever discussed it with her).
Now I am the mom to an eight-year-old daughter. I sometimes wonder what has happened to her. I wonder where my sweet baby has gone. That is how I became reminded of the question about “sweet little Stacy” above. I am truly grateful I had the experience of thinking about who I was. I am so glad my mother asked this of me and especially now, at this point in life, I am truly grateful my mom continued to direct that question to me. I can go really deep with this question now and I am thrilled with the answer. I almost feel like picking up the phone to call my mother and tell her that I found her after all these years…I have found Sweet Little Stacy. She is there in me and she is in you too! I will explain…
First, let me say, my daughter is amazing. She is so many wonderful things…too many to list here. Because I am her mom, I also see another side to her. The mom gets to see it all. I can see she is growing and changing. Because of all the reading about spiritual things I do, I can see that the ego is trying to take hold and her identity is changing. I can see when it happens and I am also painfully aware that I am the one she is most comfortable lashing out at. She is so kind in her heart…its just me she will melt down with and show another side to, growing up is tough. I have heard myself say to her so many times, “you would never treat anyone else that way, only me.” Sounds a lot like the question my own mother had of me. I am sure I have said even worse to her in tough moments (forgive me sweet girl). This parenting stuff is not easy. When I can lean back and look at things I can see what is happening and not take it personally. Other times, it hurts so bad.
It’s tough to juggle knowing if we’re parenting or judging. I have been thinking about this recently and trying to watch it with her. I don’t want to judge her or make her into me. I want to help her be the best version of herself. I want to honor her growing and help her learn to make good choices. If she feels judged by me, she won’t be able to feel my love, she will turn towards her fear instead. Oh, how I want to be the mother that doesn’t judge. I am so trying to figure out how to parent well without judging.
Recently, she lashed out at me because she was struggling learning something. Often, when something seems hard, her fear brings out the worst. Understandable. Anyway, like I said, I struggle with allowing her to be herself and still guide her towards making good choices. After appealing to her with explanations of kindness, etc., she just kept pushing, I allowed her actions to hit my buttons and I decided she needed a break and told her she would be in timeout. In fact, I gave her a double timeout. This would mean 16 minutes to think about her actions. As she stormed down the stairs in anger, I had a change of heart. I sent her brother to tell her that mom had changed her mind, this gave me a minute to breathe and pause and choose well (that non-reactionary living I am striving for). When she returned to me, I said to her, “You get to choose who you want to be.” That was all I said, she returned to her work.
Within a few minutes, she came to me and gave me a sweet kiss and hug and apologized. She had found her “sweet” and turned towards love. I knew she could do it! We talk to the kids so much about character and our choices. We explain that your choices make who you are. We have so many ways of explaining it to the best of our ability. I also believe that people treat you how you let them treat you and I don’t want to raise kids that are rude and disrespectful to their mother. Not just for me, but I know they won’t feel good about themselves if they choose that. Allowing my sweet daughter the space to find who she wants to be on her own with just the right amount of guidance and a big dash of modeling my own good choices seems to be the recipe. For now.
I am going to continue pondering parenting without judging. I think it’s worth the effort to try. As I embrace the freedom from being right or wrong, I do want to impart some of this concept to the kids. It is tough because they so badly want to be right…all the time. I told them recently that I really don’t want to parent every single little thing and be right and make them wrong…but what I do want to do is parent for peace. I explained that even when they are corrected or get in trouble, they really haven’t done anything wrong, but we must try to work towards creating more peace and harmony. If we’re behaving in a way that creates more peace and harmony, then there won’t be much chance of getting into trouble. As we discussed this more and exactly what harmony means…we were turned to look outside at nature and observe the perfect harmony all around us. I love how the answers are always there in the perfection of nature.
Mom – THANK YOU so much for guiding me towards finding “Sweet Little Stacy” – slowly over time I am finding her in the essence of my true nature. What a gift it is to know she does exist and she is there in the purest form in me just as she is in everyone else.
Wishing you all a quiet moments with the Sweet Little One inside you. Joy!
“When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see.”
―John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
Beauty. What is it? Where does it come from? Why does it touch us so? What happens to us when we experience it?
When we experience true beauty, everything stops. We take it in. We experience the stillness that it came from. I believe that we remember where it came from and it feels like home to us. It awakens us from our daily life for a moment and takes us somewhere else. It moves us. It thrills us. It is love sent to remind us of who and what we are.
When we experience a beautiful song, a masterful dance performance, a great poem, a theatrical production, a scene in a movie, a sunset, a beautiful piece of artwork, even an amazing sports moment…anything that has true beauty, we are changed in that moment. Beauty can wake us up to more of life, it takes us out of the ordinary and out of our thinking mind — into our senses fully and it is a gift when it does. We stop thinking, we have no worries, we aren’t planning or distracted or bored…we are really there experiencing the beauty and relief in being taken to a more meaningful moment. We all have experienced those precious moments when we sit in awe of something so beautiful, we feel it deep inside. Remember it and you can feel it now.
That moment is always there for us. We must remember that stillness and invite it to visit more often. We can bring more beauty into out lives, we simply need to be open to seeing it. We need to add enough space to let it in. Beauty is all around us. It is everywhere, not just in the so-called works of art. There is magical beauty in the smallest of things everywhere. Everything was created in that stillness. The truest of beauty is in the lines on an elderly face, the wag of a dog’s tail, the way the sunlight hits the sink full of dirty dishes, laughter, smiles, eyes, the book in your hands, the sound of your child calling “Mom”, kindness in any form, the mess you made having fun…beauty is everywhere. We don’t have to wait for the sensational, we can see it everywhere. We can let it wake us up to more of Life.
Today, in many ways, beauty has been reduced to idealized notions of what society deems beautiful. It is actually rather frightening to see what is happening in the name of beauty. That is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about true works of Life. God is experiencing himself in so many ways and through that experiencing, comes beauty. We can bless our lives by looking with fresh eyes that are open to the beauty that surrounds us all the time. We can help others see the beauty too.
Let’s take the time to touch beauty in a more meaningful way today and see how it changes our experience of life. Let’s not wait for the big obvious moments, lets find it in the imperfection that is called Life.
Have fun seeing the beauty around you today, your soul knows how…today is the perfect day to spend more time with your soul. Your soul is pure beauty!
Below is my son’s favorite poem, Little Things by Julia A. F. Carney. The beauty in his five-year-old writing and the sweet joy he gets in reading this poem and knowing he is one of my favorite little things is simply stunning…to me, better than any masterpiece or work of nature I could ever encounter.
Wishing you lots of joy in the beauty found in little things today and always!
“The human emotional system can be broken down into roughly two elements:
fear and love.
Love is of the soul.
Fear is of the personality.”
~ Gary Zukav – from “Seat Of The Soul” ~
I distinctly remember the moment I learned that hate is fear. It’s intriguing. Even if we have never felt hatred, we have all seen it in its various forms. It’s just fear? Yep. And then you go on to figure out that all those other behaviors and emotions that go along with anger, resentment, jealousy, sorrow, spite, judgment, arrogance, even loneliness (it’s a long list)…they all come from fear. Once you connect those dots, it’s no longer just intriguing, it changes everything.
First and foremost, when you begin to see what is behind all of those terrible behaviors that come from fear based emotions, you can open your heart with forgiveness immediately to almost anything (truly anything as we get better and better at it…it takes practice). When I deal with these less desirable attitudes and behaviors in people or just things you see around you that stem from them, right before I judge it or react to it, I do my best to remember what it really is. I get a helpful little visual to remind me of what it really is…I picture a scared little child running to its mom for help. Maybe it’s the mom in me, but I think of how awful it feels to be scared and how children instinctively run for mom when something frightens or hurts them. Fear creates all kinds of toxic reactions when really the person just wants to be comforted by love. Next time you are faced with toxic behaviors, remember that person just needs some love. They are having a moment in fear…your love could bring them right out and you have plenty to spare…the more you give, the more you have to give. You will know best how you spread love. You don’t have to tell them you’re providing love for their fear (in fact, don’t do that, they don’t know it’s fear), you can give love simply by not judging them, by being a calm pure loving presence.
Practicing forgiveness in this way changes you and opens your heart. Next place to practice it is with yourself. Forgive yourself for your fear based emotions, attitudes and behaviors. When we realize that all that stuff we sometimes think or feel, and even our actions that we are not proud of, all just came out of fear…we can love the scared little child in us too. Give yourself some love and move on.
Creating space around our choices and actions will allow us to practice spreading love and forgiving everything else. When you put a breath or just a moment of stillness around your choices, you can choose love. You can picture yourself standing in the middle and you can decide if you want to turn towards love or towards fear. In every single thing you do, you can choose love or fear. Even the thoughts you think, do you want them to be love-based or fear-based? You can even choose the thoughts.
Another term for fear that I loved learning about is powerlessness. Whenever you choose fear instead of love, you have chosen powerlessness and given your power away. Your soul wants to live in love and knows that it is the most powerful force in the universe. Your ego chooses fear and creates suffering for you and others.
There is no need to explain the behaviors and emotions that come from love, we all have a deep knowing and connectedness with those…they just feel good…your heart delights in them and your soul remembers them well. Today, and always, let’s spread LOVE and forgive fear EVERYWHERE! Have fun experimenting with how you spread love!
I am sending YOU so much love!
Live What You Know 