challenges
Living Life – A Message From My Guides
Are you living the life of your dreams? Are you happy or content most of the time? Do you face challenges with confidence, or perhaps dread? Do you compare yourself with others and feel sad, miserable, or even angry at their success? Regardless of whether you feel as though you are at the bottom of the barrel, or soaring among the clouds, there is always room for improvement, and it is never too late to get started.
One of the biggest errors in judgment is all-or-nothing thinking. You do not need to drop everything in your life and start with a blank slate. Not only would that be impossible, it would be totally impractical. Your life so far is a culmination of all your experiences, education, career opportunities and family interactions, and cannot be wiped away like a chalkboard. Instead, you can, and should, start by making course corrections and taking baby steps in the right direction.
Set your intention first. Visualize the end result. Begin the process of redesigning your life gently and allow the universe to conspire in your favor over time. Whether you choose to go back to school, read a book, take a course, attend a conference, learn online or join a group, do something that makes you feel happy and fulfilled. Do it because you want to, not because you have to.
Set realistic goals and deadlines. If you are juggling a family or career or both, be sensible in your expectations of yourself. Things take time and if it is worth doing, it is worth doing well. Do not expect overnight results. Life is not a success-only journey, however, each setback holds a series of invaluable lessons. Deal with each issue, learn from the experience and move on with confidence. Continue reading
How To Live A More Spiritually Aware Life
To lead a more spiritual, and therefore a happier and more fulfilled life, you do not need to develop a passion for incense, or hire a guru to assist you in going through some form of spiritual awakening. Instead, you may be comfortable with more down to earth approach.
Firstly, it is important to recognize that religion and spirituality are not necessarily the same things. Religion is just one form of spiritual practice. Spirituality itself is something that comes from within the individual.
Spiritual awareness is a sustained belief that there is much more to life than meets the eye, something greater than yourself, even though you have no evidence for it. Hold onto this belief or feeling, as it is very, very real!
One of the best ways to get in touch with your spirituality is to spend time in nature. It does not matter whether you live, in a town, city, or rural area, connecting with nature is imperative, as it will help to bring a sense of peace to your overworked mind, and it will uplift your spirit with its rejuvenating power. By doing so, it will assist with your spiritual development.
To become more spiritually aware it is also important to learn to control your inner dialogue. Becoming a more spiritual person involves monitoring your inner voice and making sure that your self-talk is healthy. Meditation can be particularly helpful in this respect, as well as recognizing any negative thought patterns or false beliefs that you may have.
Choosing A Spiritual Path With Heart
There are many blind choices we make when we are too young or inexperienced to make the best decisions for ourselves. We are born into a family, or raised in a culture, for example, with its unique traditions and beliefs, or lack thereof, and we are usually quite susceptible in our youth to these influences.
In the process of becoming an adult, the questioning of such beliefs and traditions leads us towards who we will become, to discovering what truly resonates with us, and what does not. But this is something we may have taken lightly in our youth, and therefore needs to be looked over several times in our life to find out with real sincerity what is truly calling us.
It is possible that being born in a traditional Christian home, for example, we felt constrained and limited, even small and powerless, ultimately causing us to reject all dogmatic religion. For someone else, brought up maybe in an atheist home, the search for God or faith may bring a profound sense of empowerment and life purpose that nurtures their life. It all depends on us as individuals, and how we process our own reality.
Carlos Castaneda writes in The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, “Before you embark on any path ask the question: does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him.”
The Power Of Gratitude In Difficult Times
It is just as important to express gratitude and appreciation when we face the difficult times in our life, as it is when things are going well. In fact, it is even more important to express it during the hard times.
When our lives are on a downswing, the last thing on most people’s hearts or minds is to be thankful, or in a state of appreciation and joy. When we are struggling, our soul tends to be more aware of the negative energy of what is going on around us. This can ultimately attract the manifestation of even more negative energy, stressful situations and unpleasant events. In the end, even more bad days will come our way.
However, when we decide to stand strong and stop the downward spiral of our energy, and to be grateful for all of life’s lessons, whether good or bad, our energy begin to shift for the better.
When I pay my bills (a task that most of us really do not enjoy), I always write thank you under the last entry in my bank journal. When I think of the reason for doing this, especially when it means spending money on things that are not tangible and sitting in my hand, the explanation comes very easily. I am saying thank you for actually having the money to pay these bills – the hydro bill so I can have lights, the gas bill so I can have heat in the winter, the credit card bill for those urgent things I had to purchase, and the medical bill that allowed me to purchase the medication I need to keep my health in check, and so on. Even though these things may not be material things that I can feel or see every day, it means something at some point to make my life better.
Our Spiritual Contracts
Before we come into this lifetime, we design a soul contract. We choose a family that we want to be born to and we plan specific things that we want to accomplish, such as career, relationships, children, and so on. The contract is about our spiritual self and therefore also includes those things that we need to overcome and learn from.
Some of the more important things in your contract may come as a surprise, because often they are those things you do not want to do! This is usually a sure way of knowing that something is contractual. The things we prefer to do, or have done, we’ve already mastered, but the challenges and obstacles offer us opportunity to overcome our fears and anxieties, to step forward and learn more, to grow spiritually.
Some contracts are also much longer than others. Some of us remain here for a long time, while others do not. I doubt anyone knows for sure, but for the time that we are here, we must make every effort to learn and grow from every life experience.
This is also why some of us attract the wrong people, and constantly get into the wrong relationships? In these cases it is often your soul contract trying to teach you to speak up for yourself and claim your self-worth.
When old souls come in, usually nothing bothers them. They tend to take things with a grain of salt. However, when new souls come in, they are often very excited about so many things and can’t seem to get enough done.
Slow And Steady Is The Best Path To Lasting Love
In today’s superficial world of online dating, hookup apps and sexual promiscuity, it’s has become a daunting challenge to find a suitable partner who is genuinely ready for long-term commitment and relationship monogamy.
Also, in the dating scene, people typically wear masks, especially during the initial introduction. Everyone wants to give a good first impression and rarely want to discuss their truth, or past traumas. Dates also like to exaggerate or omit information, to make themselves sound more important or successful than they really are.
A few weeks into a new relationship is usually when the cracks start to show and the truth begins to float to the surface. For example, he comes from a good family and appears to be successful on paper, but he is emotionally fragile, or verbally abusive and narcissistic in relationships. Or, he claims he is totally single when you first meet him, but there’s actually someone else in his life and they’re not breaking that up anytime soon, because they have money invested together or are married.
We too often get so caught up in the fuzzy feeling and fantasy of a person possibly being ‘the one,’ that we forget to question if they are in alignment with what we truly need to add value to our life. Always listen to what a date is telling you, without sugar-coating it for yourself.
The Challenge To Remain In The Light
What is the one area of your life that you would prefer to improve or change entirely? Mine without question would be to remain in the Light.
We live in a digital age, where we have instant access to information of all varieties… some truthful, others not so accurate. Once in a while this leads to something of value, but for the most part it is just a bombardment of noise, which is mostly designed to make us purchase and consume more products and services than we really need.
Scare tactics, for example, encourage us to buy more medication and nutritional supplements than any reputable doctor would recommend. Fearmongering convinces us to install excessive additional security for our homes. And airbrushed models tempt us into buying an endless assortment of goods that seldom add much value to our daily lives.
Meanwhile many of us have the tendency to complain about the government, the exorbitant rates charged for our monthly utility services, and the escalating cost of food and basic necessities.
The personal challenge for me is to allow myself the guilty pleasure of discussing any of these topics without vibrating into a negative state of mind. I can physically feel, in my body, the moment my energy starts to get into that negative energy frequency.