To Self-Improve or Self-Accept, That Is The Question!

Oh, the continuous burden of choice in this reality can drive one up the walls!

After all the hoopla in our very industrial-revolutionized, efficient, competitive, bottom-line driven society in regards to maximizing one’s potential, it is absolutely no wonder that the Self-help industry is an increasingly growing sector of our economy.  Self-improvement seems to reign supreme and win, hands down.

The other day, I stumbled across an article where the author, fed up with all the self-improvement gadgets and hype was urging his readers to stop self-improving and to work on self-accepting. Interesting, I thought as I read the piece, he certainly had me hooked until about half way through his article. That is when he started coming up with some concrete examples. 

Here are a couple of the ones, I remember:

1. If you have bad skin, stop spending money on beauty products and love yourself and accept yourself just the way you are.

2. If you are overweight and you struggle to diet, stop worrying about it and love all of you.

Here is where my brain feverishly started interjecting questions?

But what happens if the weight poses a health risk and you develop diabetes that could have been prevented? What if you don’t feel good in your own skin and you really want to get back to manifest your fullest healthiest potential? What if your skin is sending you a message that your liver is overworked and your body is desperately crying for help? What if you are suffering from heavy metal toxicity and ignoring the surface symptoms will make things much worse?

In my book, these are all situations where I choose to self-improve but the concept of self-acceptance still does ring a strong bell.

I walked away from reading the article, not being able to shake it off completely, even though I disagreed with the examples given.

One day, while I took a shower (always a place of great epiphanies for me), it dawned on me how the pieces could fit together.

Yes, in our society we strive at times for things that are unachievable for us this lifetime. So, let’s work on self-accepting the things we can’t change i.e. body height, family heritage, the past and choices made, karmic contracts, talents or the lack of etc. Let’s learn to make peace with our true natures and realize there is always somebody bigger, brighter or cooler around the next corner.

But by all means let’s keep self-improving in all the areas where we know that we are slacking and where we are called to self-improve, grow, learn, evolve and heal because the lessons don’t go away and symptoms do tend to get louder if we ignore them.

So let’s self-accept while we continue to self-improve, which will guarantee a smoother ride!

10 Signs that it’s Time for an Attitude Make-Over!

True enjoyment in life doesn’t grow out of external circumstances being perfect.

Because really, when does that ever happen?

 The perfect day: everyone you know is happy and for once they are behaving themselves, the weather is wonderful, your house is clean, all your annoying chores are done, you have plenty of money and you get to do with your day just what you always wanted without a care in the world. Oh, and of course, you look and feel fabulous and there isn’t the slightest hint of any unresolved karmic issues. Oh, I almost forgot, we have to add world peace and nobody is suffering, so that you don’t have to feel guilty for enjoying your perfect reality.

At times, we all project the power to make us happy onto our external reality.

Any efficient spiritual practice will assist you to find and practice your ability to stay centered, to be happy, to experience contentment and fulfillment on the inside, to cultivate the wisdom to learn and grow with all of life’s experiences and to become an excellent surfer in the ocean of life.

Remind yourself that your attitude has a great deal to do with the quality of life you will experience in your every day assistance. If you continuously give your power away to external circumstances you run into the danger of major disappointments as well as stagnation in your soul’s growth and being an annoying fellow traveler on the bus of life.

(“Are we there yet? I am hungry! Why is it so hot? I have to pee. Why is nobody providing me with my favorite sandwiches? Are we still not there yet? Who is responsible for my discomfort? Somebody will pay for this!”)

So here are 10 signs that you have been slacking on your spiritual homework and it’s high time for and attitude-makeover:

1. You think that the perfect partner will insure your happiness and make up for all of the shortcomings in your life; you will only have to find them. As long as you haven’t, you will give hell and punish all the “imperfect” partners for being the “wrong” one, while living in a constant state of pity-party.

Well, stop it! Treat the people around you with respect and love yourself!

2. You will start to act like the fabulous person that you are, once the world gives you the recognition that you deserve. (“Don’t these people know who I am?”)

Are you waiting for fame, fortune or that perfect job and a big life? It’s a trap!

Roll up your sleeves and show the world what you are made of today!

3. If you had the perfect, bigger house, your place wouldn’t be so messy.

REALLY? Honor the roof over you head and turn it into a temple. Remember the lifetime where you didn’t have a place to call your own?

4. a) You would be happy if you had a child.

 b) You’d be happy if you had more time and a nanny. Children are a lot of work.

c) You would be happy if the child was more according to your expectations.

d) You would be happy if the child had married the “right” person and provided the “perfect” grand children.

It might be time to give your children, born and unborn, a break and work on being a happy mommy or daddy!

5. Life would be so much better if you only could become a member of that exclusive club and hang out with famous people.

You might want to check into your neediness and lack of self-esteem. A lot of people have an allergic reaction to those frequencies and the life you desire actually keeps moving further away from you.

6. You think the world would be a much better place if “those people” got their act together and fixed things properly.

The truth is: planet earth is a multi-dimensional school with many different classrooms. The best we can do is to live our highest potential in the life we have.

7. You would write that book, go to the gym, paint, spend more time with your friends, if you only had more time!

Many of us live our lives filled with excuses! My question to you is: How many hours a week do you watch TV? How much time do you spend on Facebook?  How many hours a week do you fill with things that you don’t need to do but that you’ve made part of your routine? We usually have areas in life that we can adjust to do the things we really want to do. Be honest with yourself and take responsibility for your time management.

8. You experience road rage and take out your bad mood and dissatisfaction on service personnel, i.e. your hairdresser, your mechanic, you nanny, your in-laws, your friends and whoever else gets in your way!

Consider anger management and remind yourself! If the whole world seems at fault, you are the problem! Sorry! (You can thank me later! Whenever you are done being upset with me!)

9. You wish you had been born at a different time, into better family circumstances and/or a different country/culture.

Embrace your circumstances! They are perfect for what you have to learn and remember this too shall pass! You don’t want to get yourself stuck in this classroom for the next few lifetimes by rejecting it, do you?

10. You feel that earth is beneath you and that you should be floating in some divine dimension or zooming around the Universe in your golden, fabulous UFO.

If you are “stuck” here, there is a reason and the sooner you surrender and become a good sport the sooner you’ll get to go home.

Become An Expert In Untangling Energetic Knots

Many times, we get stuck on the surface layers of an issue. The details of a situation can push anyone who is an obsessive problem solver over the edge.

You might find yourself running through a conversation a million times and wonder:

I don’t understand why she yelled at me! All I said was, I will pick up the ice cream.

Why would anyone do that? They never even called to apologize.

I did say, I was sorry for forgetting their birthday, I wouldn’t hold a grudge if I was in their shoes.

A lot of situations that don’t make sense on the surface are more complex than meet the eye.

If you or someone in your life seems to have overacted and you have spent a fair amount of time unsuccessfully trying to figure it out, it is safe to say that you are dealing with a multi-faceted issue.

Here is a visual:

Picture a tight knot created out of five different colored strings. In order to untangle it you have to follow the pathway of each string and pull them away from each other in a matter that allows more space in between them. That is the only way to ultimately effectively separate them.

How does that work in practical application?

When you are faced with yourself, a person or a situation in your life that doesn’t make sense, stop reacting! Give it some breathing room and meditate on it. Journal about it, discuss it with someone that you know has the capacity to be neutral and who tends to be a good investigator.

Here are some helpful investigative questions:

1. Are you or the other person under more stress than usual? (Divorce, death, change of job, financial troubles, etc.)

2. Are there any health issues to be taken into consideration?  (Low blood sugar, chronic pain, hormonal issues, etc. are just a few examples that might add extra tension to a situation)

3. Is there a prior conflict between the two of you that wasn’t resolved? (Long standing unaddressed issues, will explode sooner or later)

4. Have you and/or the other person changed a lot and the rules of engagement need to be revisited? (I.e. you have happily played the doormat and assistant in other people’s lives for many years. They have gotten used to you playing that part and won’t even question it. Your health issues have forced you to take better care of yourself therefore; you are no longer available for the usual suspects. You set firmer boundaries, they get mad, and you wonder what happened? All you said was that you couldn’t go out with them on Saturday night. If you don’t examine what happened you might see yourself slipping back into an old behavior pattern.)

5. If the same topic can provoke you to a boiling point over and over again, you might be dealing with an unresolved past life issue. (I.e. if your current partner can’t get it right, no matter how much effort they put into the relationship and you feel abandoned as soon as they have to put their attention somewhere else, there is a high possibility that you are dealing with a past trauma that can’t be resolved through the here and now. If this is a the case, I suggest past life therapy, energy clearings and the appropriate set of flower essences to support the internal healing of the issue at hand.)

6. Be open to any other questions or insights that come to mind when you re investigating the energetic knot at hand.

Life is complex and it takes willingness and creativity to get to the bottom of things.

Have some patience and invest the time in determining what it is you are really dealing with.

The good news is that every knot can get untangled and you might just find yourself capable of turning into an expert!

Don’t Despair! All Roads Lead Home, Eventually!

One sentiment that a lot of souls share as they wake up to their soul reality is a longing for HOME! It is the awareness that earth isn’t home and an aching in the heart that reminds us of where we came from. That desire can be so strong that many of us disassociate from our physical bodies and live primarily in our upper chakras during these periods.

 At times, we find ourselves judging earth reality more harshly than usual and there is a sense of impatience for this part of the journey to be completed.

It’s painful! You are homesick! I get it! I have lived in this place for many years myself.

Now, the good news is that we are all on our way home. No matter how long the journey is, how many twists and turns there are in the road or how often you want to give up because you just felt too exhausted to continue. You are still continually getting closer to that place where you will be reunited with your loved ones in a dimension that suits your soul perfectly. When exactly, I don’t know but eventually it will happen. The question is: how can you be a good sport until you get there?

I spent most of my teens and early twenties longingly gazing up at the stars with a deep knowing in my heart that home was somewhere out there. Even though, I was never suicidal, I wasn’t completely committed to life on planet earth either. I wasn’t respecting my physical body or space that well and experienced any aspects of earthly manifested reality as rather superficial.

Well, here is what happened that made me rethink my point of view and taught me a valuable lesson in “be careful what you wish for”.

It was during my first year in college, a friend of mine and I decided to spend a long weekend in January in New York City. We drove from Ohio in her car and had a great time talking, smoking, stopping for endless cups of coffee and felt like we owned the world. Other than the freezing cold, we had a fun weekend.

On the way back we were pretty tired and decided to spend the night in a motel.

When we woke up the next morning, it had snowed. The car wasn’t equipped for snow but my friend was in a hurry to make it home where her little son was waiting for her. We decided that even if it took many extra hours we would make our way back.  We crawled along the Interstate at about 15-25 miles an hour. It was still snowing and there were few other travelers on the road. Ten hours went by. We stopped for gas a couple of times and continued on our journey. It was now dark when we pulled back onto the freeway. All of a sudden, I was filled with a sense of unease.

As we drove, two street lamps went out right as we passed underneath them.

My first thought, we are going to die on this freeway tonight! (Now, for anyone who knows me, I am not the paranoid type at all. So, this thought was rather unusual to enter my mind.)

I saw my life flash before my eyes and I realized that I had evoked this moment through my strong desire to go HOME!

My friends, my family and all the things that I love about planet earth rushed to the forefront of my consciousness.

And with a jolt, I realized that I wasn’t done living my life. I started to pray with every fiber of my being to be spared on that snowy, January night somewhere in the middle of nowhere between Ohio and New York. Ten minutes later, a street lamp on the other side of the road turned on as we drove by. It was a brighter lamp than the two that went out. I continued to pray and thought to myself,  “something is going to happen but we will live.”

Ten minutes later, my friend who was driving screamed:

“Sh**, oh no!”

“What?” I asked

She doesn’t answer, but has her eyes are filled with horror fixed on the review mirror.

I turned around just in time to see two gigantic lights rushing towards us at high speed.

Next thing I know we are hit hard from behind. The back of the car caves in, we are spinning at high speed into the opposite lane. The semi-truck that hit us keeps going. We slam into the center divider. The impact on the slippery surface keeps us spinning until we finally come to a stop on the shoulder, mere inches away from a steep cliff.

We were both shaking, but miraculously okay. The car was totaled front back and sides were demolished. We couldn’t open the doors and had to wait for the rescue team to cut us out.

I repeated silent prayers of gratitude as I fully committed to life.

We suffered only from shock and severe whiplash.

I got back to campus and started to clean up my act immediately. I quit smoking, I started working out and I stopped whining. I took full responsibility for my life and have made the best out of every possible moment since.

It was humbling to have to be reminded, in such a drastic way, about how poorly I had been conducting myself.

I have to say that that  was one of the most profound experiences for me this time around.

So, if you feel homesick take a moment and look around you. Who and what would you miss if you were to leave today? What would you regret not doing at least one last time? There are many souls that you have come to love during your stay on planet earth that don’t call the same place home that you do? Enjoy them while you are here. There are so many things that are unique to this location that you owe it to yourself to pause and take inventory?

After doing that, are you really that much in a rush to depart for good?

Remember, HOME is ultimately where the heart is and our hearts are big and have the capacity to expand. The place you are longing for is your destination ultimately but maybe not today.

(And remember, there is this place in your heart where you can visit with HOME whenever you want. Go there in your meditation. It works like an Intergalactic version of SKYPE.)