Vision Keeping

January 22, 2010:  It’s good to feel good

Isn’t it wonderful when you know that the absolutely best thing that you can do for yourself is to feel good!  We are so used to feeling so-so a lot of the time that we take it as “that’s the way it is.”  Well, it’s NOT, people, it’s just not.  For most of my life I experienced being happy or really feeling great as something that just happened to me and if I was looking for a reason it came from something outside of myself.  And then when that reason became diluted over hours or days then the good feelings went as well.  Feeling really good was always elusive to me.

From Louise Hay and Abraham (see side bar) I learned the important of my thoughts in creating my life and then began to see that feeling good was more than feeling good, it was a way to bring me my heart’s desire.  Law of Attraction shows us the energy we are putting out by simply looking at our current experience.   If we are putting out positive energy then we are likely to have cars that work, uplifting clerks, meet interesting people, etc.   If we are putting out a complaining, angry energy, a depressed energy then our lives will likely be unhappy as well.  Angry energy, depressed energy brings us traffic jams, people angry with us, crabby clerks, lost, keys, etc.  Being in sync with our dreams brings us the parking place we need, the friends we want, interesting people, great food, green lights.  And it brings us this on our way to showing us our dreams.  I’m sure you can think of examples of your own.

For me, daughter of a depression mother, a bible belt mother, feeling good was not really high on the list of what was important in life.  She literally said to me and I’m sure this sounds common, “Life isn’t a bowl of cherries.”  Plus the fun thing just sounds too close to sin.  So, for me to finally get it that feeling good is important was big. 

I remember the specific moment when I had that ah-ha moment about the importance of enjoying myself and having fun connected at a deep level with having my soul’s desire.  I felt tears on my face in the recognition of truth and of the love in the Universe.

I’ve reached a point in my journey from depression where I’m much more confident in my ability to feel good.  I have used the focus wheel (see yesterday’s entry) to get myself to a good feeling place every morning and am finally waking up actually looking forward to doing the focus wheel to feel even better!  Practicing on feeling good has kept me in the feel good place long enough that I know good things are in my future and feeling good is the best way for my path to emerge.  The better it gets the better it gets.  That was my path emerging this week.  I’ve come a long way.

In my next entry I’ll share with you some of the tools I use to keep myself feeling good.

With Love, Connie

January 20, 2010:  Focus into the day

The single most important thing we can do to create the lives we want is to begin to focus.  Focus on the positive rather than the negative.  Focus on what we want rather that what we don’t want.  Focus rather that let just anything going on around us to steer our attention for us.

Trouble is, most of us aren’t used to focusing.  It’s a muscle we learn to use and, like most people, we need a really good reason to change if we are going to do anything different.  Change can be uncomfortable, takes effort, blah, blah.  Yuk. 

I began to focus in earnest about 3 years ago when I had had all the therapy any human being could tolerate and still was unhappy.  I knew therapy was not the answer and at about the same time, knowing I was looking for some help, the Universe led me to Louise Hay in a book display at a spa I was visiting.  I got the message, said thanks Universe and took Louise home with me.  If you don’t know about Louise look at her website through the side bar on this page.  She is very big on changing how you think to change your life.  I began “reprogramming” my brain and changing the messages I was sending to myself.  In short, I found her methods very effective.  Through her web site I found Jerry and Esther Hicks and the teachings of Abraham and learned more about how important it is to feel good and also gathered tools to help me feel better.  The focus wheel is one of them.

During the past months when I was so very depressed about no longer having my job of 32 years and feeling totally lost, I began doing daily focus wheels.  I found them a grounding mechanism for beginning my day and now I use them as a ritual along with meditation to begin my day feeling as good as I can.  Please refer to yesterday’s entry for how to construct a focus wheel. 

Every morning I use a blank artist’s sketchbook and using it horizontally I draw a circle in the middle of the page.  In that circle I write how I want to feel.  It usually goes something like, “I enter my day with a sense of growing freedom.  My joy increases in finding new ways to being richly in the moment and embracing the Now.  I’m more eager, more positive, more confident that the year ahead is awesome and I can excitedly watch my path emerge.  My path is beginning to rise to the surface.”  This was my entry for January 16th.  The statements of what you want need not be that lengthy. 

Then I draw a line to 1 o’clock and write how I’m actually feeling in the moment.  I wrote, “I wake feeling blank but ready to “rise”.  My line to 2 o’clock says, “I’m more confident of my ability to enter my body and find good feelings.”  3 o’clock says “I’m beginning to know that good feelings are becoming more normal for me.”  With every line I stretch into more statements of how I’m feeling better and then my last statement is, “It’s fun to wake knowing I can get to a place of freedom and jou and also know that that in my natural state of Being.”

Remember that each statement has to ring true in order to be helpful.  Clearly I’m feeling much better now but my focus wheels two months ago were from my going from being very empty tearful and afraid at 1 0’clock to finally arriving at being willing to accept my feelings and being tender with myself believing but not knowing yet that things would get better for me…and they did.

Why is it important to feel good.  Ahhhh, that’s next.

With Love, Connie

January 19th, 2010:  Focus on What is Wanted

I don’t know what I would have done these past months to get me to a better feeling place if I hadn’t used the focus wheel daily.  It’s still how I begin each day and remains a central way I use to ramp of energy to a feel good place or to change my feelings to a better feeling place.

If you are feeling depressed using the focus wheel is not about feeling great but it is about experiencing some relief and once you have the experience of having a bit of control that can be a big deal if it has not seemed to you that you have control over the way you feel.  Learning to change the way you feel is a powerful tool and can feel liberating as well.

Each subject is really two subjects, that which is wanted and that which is not wanted.  So if  you are not feeling good and would like to feel better it is crucial to first identify the feeling and what the feeling is about. 

For example I notice after I have just had lunch with my daughter that I’m feeling a bit anxious.   I connect my anxiety with worrying about my daughter not having enough money, not seeming to be taking good care of the money she has and not  feeling happy with her current situation.   So then I’m worried if she is going to get herself “launched” and be self supporting.  And I wonder if I somehow messed up my job as mother by not teaching her better  about money management.   You get the picture and it is a real one for me.

I can do a focus wheel to get myself to a better feeling place.  The most important part of the exercise is to identify what you are feeling and why.  Then figure out how you want to feel instead.  Remember, you are not fixing the situation.  You are only wanting to feel better about what is.  

Take a blank piece of paper, printer copier paper is excellent and using the paper horizontally  draw a 3-4 inch circle in the middle.  Inside the circle write what is wanted.  In this case what I write is “I know that Meredith (daughter) can find her way in the world and that she is very talented and I’m very proud of her. ”

There are any number of things that could go into this center circle but the important thing is to write what is wanted and what you actually have control over and this is your feelings.  

Next make a line from the center of the circle straight up to a 1 o’clock position and at 1 o’clock write what you are actually feeling now.   Like, “I’m worried that Meredith is never going to be able to support herself and be happy and I’ve failed as a Mother”…or something like that, whatever fits.  Then draw a line to 2 o’clock and write something that feels just a little better.  The crucial thing here is that it really has to ring true to you and really feel better.   Something like, “I have had this feeling before and the situation with Meredith will change and we will both feel better.”  Now that is true and I’ve found just a bit of relief. 

Then, draw a line to 3 o’clock and write something which will inch you up the emotional ladder a bit more.  Like, “She doesn’t handle her money like I do but she is a responsible person and she has done pretty well for herself so far.”  Then I draw another line to 4 o’clock and inch a bit further with “I know she is a very talented young woman and will find herself because she wants that for herself even more that I want it for her and I know she will do just that.”   And so on. 

Your sheet will look like a sunburst clock with better and better feeling statements around the outside of the wheel as you inch yourself forward.   My last statement may look something like, “I feel really good now and I know that as her mother to feel good myself is the very best that I can do to help her as well as hold her in the light that I truly see her, a bright spirit who is on her way to discovering who she is.

I hope this is helpful.  It takes practice.  Leave me a comment or question and I will do my best to answer.  In my next entry I will give you another example, a wheel that I do every day for myself when I wake in the morning.

With Love, Connie

January 17, 2010:  It’s all about focusing

Most of us don’t understand the power of our thoughts in a creative sense.   Most of us don’t give a lot of thought about where we are giving our attention and just allow whatever happens around us to set our feeling state for us.  We just kind of expect to feel so-so a lot of the time and if things are good then great and if we don’t feel so hot we just wait to allow something else to come along to feed us something better.  How we feel seems many times like it is dependent on things/events/people outside of ourselves.  In that way we create by default and not purposefully.

I’ve believed for a long time in the power of focus and to be aware of what I am giving my attention.  When I was still employed as a non profit executive director I was in contact with many bureaucracies and many of these contacts carried varying degrees of negative energy and frustration on my part.   I did what I could to mediate the consequences by taking walks during the day, taking time to meditate at my desk and even going to the gym but I knew I didn’t have the time I needed to really do the kind of focus work I thought I was needing.  I would daydream about being a cloistered nun for awhile or staying in an ashram.  Just get me out of here!

And then wonder of wonders my asking was answered and I was given the opportunity to create a new life.  The details of how this came about while interesting, are not on point here.  The point being I had lots of time and I simply had to learn to focus because I was in a very dark place and very much wanted to feel better.  I knew that some of that feeling better would just require time and grieving but I also knew that everything I could do to focus my energy into a better feeling place would be the best use of that energy.

Paying attention to how I feel and feeling the very best that I can has become my #1 priority.  I finally get how powerful this is and how crucial to what comes into my life.  On days I feel shitty I notice that Dudie (bff dog) and I meet the aggressive dog in a muzzle on the elevator, have near misses in traffic, seem to get the crabby check out clerks, can’t find the parking spot.  When I’m feeling good, things just roll better, I get the green lights, the person to open the door at the elevator when I’m loaded down with groceries, the most friendly people on the street.  Law of Attraction in action.

One guy said to Abraham (see side bar),  “but when I focus it doesn’t feel good.”  Abraham explained that when we are not used to focussing then our base line beliefs have created a strong point of attraction that holds us at a certain point and when we attempt to focus away from that point we feel the pull and it can be challenging.  It just takes practice.  I can attest to that.  If you look back at my blog entries I was waking up in fear and emptiness consistently for months until I began to grow away from that pattern.  Our brains need to literally create new thought pathways so our neurons can fire in different directions creating different feelings in the wake.  Our brain chemistry can become addicted to firing in certain set patterns that feel “normal” to us even if it leaves us feeling crappy.

I’m going to share with you what I do and have done to help create these new pathways and tools to use in learning to focus.  I’ll begin with the
Focus Wheel next time.

With Love, Connie

January 15th, 2010:  Happy Birthday

Today is the 25th Birthday of my daughter.  She has been the greatest single teacher of my life.  This week there is much to celebrate because she is taking steps towards manifesting her dreams and that makes a mom happy.

I remember being terrified in my early twenties because I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life.  She has had her share of anxiety about her future.  In a way things have been more easy and more difficult for her.  More easy because she has parents who are willing to be patient and trusting in her process even when she doesn’t and providing a safety net for her.  More difficult because there are many more choices for her than there appeared to be for me.

It was assumed that I would go to college, perhaps graduate school and find a ‘professional career.  There was never any doubt about my education.  Daughter Meredith was a different story.  She had about 2 and 1/2 years of art school before calling it quits and then time working at non traditional jobs where she felt she could keep her sanity.

She taught me to be patient and to trust that she could and would figure out what her passion was and allow it to lay a course for her.  There were times when I had fears about my parenting…should I have kicked her out?  Was I making it too easy on her?   All fear based thoughts and feelings on my part.  I watched as my friend’s children finished college, found great, well paying jobs and are standing firmly on their own.  My baby was at home still germinating.

I continued to remind myself what I believe.  And that was that my path as well as her path would reveal itself as we are ready.   I had to keep telling myself that she was not the only hold out in the Universe that would prove this wrong.

And so let the celebration roll today, the day of the 25th anniversary of her entrance into this world.  Her pathis lighting up for her.  She’s happy.  Mom sure is happy too.  We will both create the lives we want.  2010 is looking good.

With Love, Connie

January 13th, 2010:  Kissing the Ground

I’m continuing to dance with Rumi’s words, “Humans are not for seeing distances.  In one hundred ways, I kneel kissing the ground.”  I’m moving in on being in the present moment, kissing the ground.  I know that the more I can do this my need to control the future will disappear.  Those two vantage points can’t co-exist.

Living in the present moment also is freedom to me.  I want to feel like my eagle brother skimming the lake in northern Wisconsin.  Sometimes I imagine being the eagle and looking out on the lake through eagle eyes.  It’s exhilarating.

So, waking and remembering Rumi I began to make a list of the many ways I kiss the ground during the day.  I listed all that my spirit and body engage in every day from breathing to tasting to remembering to praying to listening and the list got longer and longer.  I so enjoyed making the list and in doing so I realized how rich my days are and what a miracle life is.  I got a sense of what people who have had a brush with death speak of when they talk about savoring life.

There was so much on my list I let go of my sense of what “being productive” means.  What it really means is somehow by my behaviors and actions I can justify my being alive because I accomplished a and b and c, things usually outside of me.  But my list is just me being alive and how rich that is.  It was wonderful to write and feel each word on my list.  Abraham (see sidebar) says that when we are feeling good that our path lights up for us.  I am feeling that.

Then in direct contrast I just opened a letter from my insurance company which rejected a claim I had submitted for several hundred dollars of reimbursement.  I was furious and wanted to pound walls and stage a sit in at the insurance office chaining myself to the door and calling Chanel 4.  Then I began to write this entry even though my heart was no longer in a calm place.

As I wrote and changed my focus and I began to re-experience what I was writing about my feelings changed, my need to strangle a warm neck fading.

I will deal with insurance tomorrow.  What I know for sure is that being human on this planet, kissing the ground is what is important.

With Love, Connie

January 11, 2010: 

Monday mornings used to have their own kind of terror.  A going away from what is home.  I loved my job but many Monday’s had me in its grip and I would sit at my desk waiting for time and the day to pass and with it the fear as well.  I sometimes thought of Mondays as a collective energetic separation anxiety because it was beyond my ability to comprehend.

So now Mondays can have the flavor of an eccentric, marginalized “older” woman thrust into a strange sort of holding position.  At least I don’t have a cat.  Nothing is as I thought it would be.  I’m not in a home with a husband waiting on imminent grand children.  I’m not still at a job I love with time to plan my next move and the celebration of leaving a legacy.

I woke up this Monday feeling the fear and loss of what I just described.  And then I remembered having the nerve last week to write  about embracing my uniqueness and I thought it was an excellent time to do just that.  Put you money where your mouth is, Girlie Girl.

So I return to what I absolutely know about me and about my Source within and I gradually begin to feel my boat turning and going downstream.

I know that my power lies in accepting my uniqueness and recognizing the gifts that lie in what makes me different from everyone else.     I can imagine seeing these gifts as jewels and as I pick each one up I can examine their interesting facets and their brilliance.

The confirmation of the truth of this comes from how I feel when I write these words.  I feel good.  That means that the Source within me agrees as well and that’s all the confirmation I need.

Now my day has turned downstream and I did that and it was rather easy to do once I remembered to do it.  I can do this over and over as many times as I need to to feel better.  This is a powerful tool and knowing I’m getting better at it feels good as well.

Happy Monday, Friends.  With love, Connie

January 10, 2010:  We’re All Doing Time

Most of us are in prison…doing time.   And when our lives are thrown into upheaval for whatever reason…illness, death of a loved one, loss of a job…we have a chance to escape.  The prison walls have become shakey and we can see light if we can look.

That’s how I feel about my job loss are resulting emotional meltdown.  I’m grateful for the chance to become more free.

My morning wake ups have gone from fearful and tearful every day to only occasionally and when I do have a tearful morning I am genuinely curious about what there is to learn because it never fails to come.  The other morning I woke up frightened and empty.  Rumi, the wonderful poet actually said something like this.   He said, “I wake frightened and empty.  It’s not for humans to see the distances.  There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”  I feel so good to be in such esteemed company.  If Rumi’s scared, I can be too.

In thanking the ground I find my freedom.  The ground is here and now.  Sometimes I have this tension in my body.  It’s as if I’m completely covered in a heavy wool army blanket and I must hold up my arms straight out in front of me to see the light and to see where I am going.  And I can’t put my arms down even though they are tired because I won’t be able to see.  I don’t have choice, it’s a survival issue.

But I can put down that heavy dark musty blanket.  It’s not for humans to see the distances.  My Inner Being, my Source knows where I’m going so I don’t have to take on that job and can just kneel and kiss the ground.  Putting down that burden of having to know when I can’t know anyway feels like freedom to me.  I don’t have to take “reality” so seriously.  I can trust that the Universe has my back. 

And my power is in the present moment.  I can reel in the parts of me that have gone on a scouting expedition into the future and reel in other parts of me that I’ve left beating the drum of what has gone wrong or what was and I can feel all of me now.  As I do that I feel more clear eyed and crisp and whole.

With Love, Connie

January 8, 2010

Owning my power is owning my uniqueness.  It’s not giving a rip about whatever the peanut gallery thinks.  And this is a challenge for m0st of us.  We kill people because they are different.  We are anxious if our kids aren’t the same as everyone else’s. 

As I think about the new year ahead and what it will bring me I’m both excited and afraid.  I know it will be an amazing year because at the end of every year I always look back over the year just finished and am in awe of everything that has happened.  Every year is like that and this one will be no different.

I’m excited when I think of the possibilities for me this year.  Abraham (see side bar) says every subject is two subjects, that which is wanted and the lack.  I’m afraid that I won’t get…whatever.  To stay with the excited end of the stick I have to step into my power and not only know my uniqueness but trust my uniqueness.  Embracing what makes me who I am will bring me what I want and bring it faster.  That’s that Law of Attraction.

We worship at the feet of sameness to the extent that we are numbed to how we feel about it.   It’s too dangerous to think about not liking and doing what everyone else is liking and doing.  Better to just suffer and stuff it.

I think there is this wave of apocalyptic thinking in our culture because our religion of sameness has finally pushed the other side of the subject which is difference to such an extreme its as if we feel the energy around us stretched to capacity in some way.

Something’s gotta give.  And for me I’m committed to allowing my differences first and then developing a greater acceptance of the world around me.   Accepting what is and even appreciating what is.  If I don’t like what I see, I can allow it simply by not focusing upon it and turn my attention to something that feels better.

Now can I apply this to the muffin top I see in the mirrow with the jeans I put on today!

With Love, Connie

January 7, 2010

Therapists say the scariest things.  Two days ago mine said, “Do you know how talented you are?”  Without hesitation I said in a rather low voice, “No.”  This has had me thinking like a stick that just keeps poking at my brains.  Poke.  Poke.  Poke.

Why should that be so unsettling?  I’m feeling better.  I’m doing some work which will be posted on this site in a couple of months.   I’m able to visualize a future doing something I like.  It’s not like I believe I’m a loser and have just cheated the system all these years.

Actually I believe most of us have difficulty really owning our talents and if we do own them we sure don’t talk about them.  God, how arrogant.  Women, especially,  have difficulty owning their strength and personal gifts.  Women identify themselves through their relationships and their connection to others while men self identify through their work.  And the truth is women fear that if they own their strengths and put themselves out there, that they will be abandoned.

And there is some clear truth to this.  Marriages are more likely to fail if the woman makes more money than her husband.   Women in public office are in the spotlight not just for what they say but how they wear their hair.  Historically millions of women have been killed for even the suspicion of witchery or some kind of power.

I have said this before but most of us are drawn away from our core selves at a young age in order to first please our parents, then our teachers, our friends, our mates.

So when I contemplate really finding my soul’s desire and participating in the world hitting on all 6 which will surely involve owning my talents, I can also feel fear in my belly at times.  Then I need to remind myself that I am at the controls and trust that the future will unfold for me as I become ready.  

And I remind myself continually that I’m not alone.  I have my village walking with me.

With Love, Connie