Remembering

"Over time, I began to acquire the tools needed to live a better life. I didn't want a life of just survival; I wanted to thrive! But to get to this place where I wanted more I had to first hit rock bottom. There was a time in my life when I had worked and worked and worked and nothing worked. I never thought I would have success again, and I was getting the worst sleep of my life. Fear had brought me to my knees!
If you are letting your life be run by fearful thoughts, by a belief that you are lacking and that hard work is your only salvation, my guess is that you are probably not getting enough sleep, either. Let one of your goals for 2010 be to rid your mind of fearful thoughts and begin to replace them with thoughts of Trust, Abundance and Love. " ---Mastin Kipp, the Huffington Post

My daughter asked me if it was okay for her to write about my heart attack again. She has used this topic several times over the past 6 years. It made me pause and think about that time in 2003 when my world turned completely around, upside down and hit bottom. I had worked myself to death, nearly. But I got a second chance to make things right. So for the past 6 years I have been living a life of abundance and enjoying every minute of it. Oh, and by the way, I sleep really well now!

Grace to Defy Gravity

"Grace is mystical force, an intangible spiritual substance that intervenes in all aspects of our life. Certainly most individuals are completely intrigued by the power of this mystical energy. We want to touch it and we long to find a way to make it tangible so that we can know its real. But grace is real and in our “spiritual gut”, we know it. What most people do not realize, however, is how many expressions of grace there are and how truly potent this Divine force is when it sweeps through a person’s life like a transforming wind. Your own life, for example, has probably been saved from disaster more than a dozen times thanks to the intervention of grace, but you never thought anything about it because events seemed to unfold so naturally.
The human soul is blessed with numerous graces that a person is meant to utilize in life – not just in difficult times and not just for oneself. The signature of grace is that it is a force that by its own qualities illuminates your life as well as the lives of others around you, always transforming a situation toward a better place. How does a person awaken these inner graces? And how does grace become a conscious resource for personal transformation? In these chaotic times of great change, can relying upon grace really make a difference?" --Caroline Myss

Grace makes all the difference in the world in our lives. We can access that grace most through gratitude. Just take the time to be thankful for even the simplest things in your day.
I highly recommend Caroline Myss' book, Defy Gravity, for more information on this.

A Balanced Life

"There is nothing simple or easy about becoming a congruent human being. Yet, accomplishing inner congruence is the jewel around which spins all the other goals we associate with the reasons we pursue a spiritual path. You cannot be truly healthy if you are out of alignment; you cannot be truly honest with yourself or others if your head and heart exist as two separate forces within you; you cannot ever know what the fulfilled life is about if you are always compromising your intuition and inner guidance for fear of the consequences; you can never consider yourself a truly honest person if you live a life of continual compromise and self-betrayal. Nor can you fully heal when you fear truth and honesty. " -- Caroline Myss

Finding our balance is the goal of each day of our lives. When we are out of balance, we drive ourselves crazy and all those we come in contact with during our day. A book I read when I was much younger really drove this point home. In I Dare You, the author, William Danforth, states that only about 10% of the population will find that balance in their lives and they will be the most successful.

Transitions

"You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward what happens to you, and in that, you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to master you."
--Brian Tracy

Transitions are so difficult, but we can't avoid them. We can only make the best of them.
We have V all moved into her condo and she began classes today. So many of the feelings I expected to have when she moved to the dorm did not occur at that time because it still felt like she was at home. But now, now that all her furniture is gone from my house, it has all come to the surface. I'm working through this.