guidance

I like the word appreciation over gratitude.
It’s cleaner,
It’s clearer,
It feels better to me.

Gratitude can still have the energy of overcoming something attached to it.
“God! I’m so grateful THAT is over”!

Thankfulness can carry a similar energy to gratitude.
“I’m so thankful to be done with THAT”!

Don’t get me wrong, reaching for gratitude and thankfulness,
can pull you up and out of the sticky tar of hate, fear and anxiety.
But I have found that through the years, as my gratitude journals
evolved, I could read back and feel in those words of gratitude, 
the wounds that had not healed, 
the fear that I was trying to banish.

It felt like gratitude and thankfulness were part of the healing
process, part of the energy working to sooth me.

Appreciation feels like the finish line.
It feels like the wind is at my back, the past is far behind me, and
I am reaching that line, having stopped to heal along the way with:
1) forgiveness
2 gratitude
3 thankfulness.

So…currently the clean air of appreciation stands waiting for me at the finish 
line, with a towel and some Gatorade.

Try it and see if you can feel the difference.
XoxJanet

http://daily.represent.us/matt-damon-blows-your-mind/

This got me thinking. Do we blindly continue to “follow the leader”?
History shows that allowing others, even if they are in a position of authority, to dictate our actions, can undermine a society.
It is the slow drip effect. It starts slowly, it is subtle, and most importantly, it doesn’t FEEL right.
What does YOUR heart say?

Your ability to lead a healthy and happy life depends more on your perception of the events that unfold around you than it does upon the actual events themselves.
– Christiane Northrup

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.”
~Gilda Radner~

I LOVE that!! What a contradiction! Right?!!

In AA they call it letting go,
And letting God.

AMBIGUITY (noun)

the quality or state of having a veiled or uncertain meaning 
Synonyms ambiguity: ambiguousness, darkness, equivocalness, equivocation, inscrutability, inscrutableness, murkiness, mysteriousness, nebulosity, nebulousness, obliqueness, obliquity, opacity, opaqueness

Sounds scary, right?
But then you add the word…the perception of
Delicious

I saw this quote a couple of weeks ago and it’s been rolling around in my head.
What did she mean?

The lack of clarity about a situation does not necessarily mean it cannot be desirable.

Delicious Ambiguity means to Revel in the Unknown. What appears
ambiguious has many delicious things for life. Keep your eyes open,
Your MIND open, and things will reveal themselves.

Then I found this on the Web just the other day and it all started to make sense.
It’s a prayer of sorts that feels to me like it can help put us in a place of 
Delicious Ambiguity. 

I’m saying it every morning.
It goes like this:

Dear God, 
Put me in the right place even though I don’t know where it is. 
Dear God, when you do it, make it comfortable for me and help me to see the sense of it. 
Make it easy and bring me the right situations and synchronicities to put me in this place I don’t know about.

XoxJanet

“If I have harmed anyone in any way either knowingly or unknowingly through my own confusions, I ask their forgiveness. If anyone has harmed me in any way either knowingly or unknowingly through their own confusions, I forgive them. And if there is a situation I am not yet ready to forgive, I forgive myself for that. For all the ways that I harm myself, negate, doubt, belittle myself, judge or be unkind to myself through my own confusions, I forgive myself.”
~ A Buddhist Prayer of Forgiveness

My darling Diana used this prayer in a meditation the other day
in honor of the current full moon energy.
We get together once a month to pay homage to the energy surrounding each full moon, in hopes it will kick our ass that much less.

We were talking about the inflammatory nature of the word 
Forgiveness

People will get furious and fight for their right to NOT forgive.
I would love to hear the argument for this and how it serves them in their lives.
How is staying mad and resentful working in their favor?

NOTHING is unforgivable
No Thing.
There is always a choice
The choice to stay right..and miserable,
Or the choice to be happy..and free.

Some things FEEL unforgivable, they are so horrible.
Forgiveness does not mean forgetting, nor does it mean condoning or excusing offenses. 
It is accepting and moving on.

“Holding onto Anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die”
~Buddha~

I have a story that demonstrated this to me so perfectly.
I was once walking with my husband through one of those beautiful,
outdoor malls, when suddenly, I saw someone who had visited torment,
in the form of horrible verbal abuse and hugely expensive, unjustified
legal action on me.
He acts like a MEAN guy.

Immediately my blood ran cold.
I darted around him like an idiot, trying not be be seen, or breath the same air.
He on the other hand, was walking and smiling and having a perfectly lovely time with his wife.
He was fine.
I was miserable.
In my anger, resentment, and ultimately my inability to forgive him or move on,
I was hooked up to an intravenous feed of poison, that was only hurting…
ME. 

I work hard literally EVERY day to forgive this man.
And to forgive myself for attracting someone like that into my life.
The moment I met him I should have turned and run!
And I knew that! 
My bad.

Forgiveness is the scent the violet leaves on the heel that crushes it
– Mark Twain

Think about that statement. That feels so sacred to me.

I’d love to open a discussion on forgiveness.
Forgiving others, and forgiving ourselves.
Let me know your thoughts.

XoxJanet 

“A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain. ” 

– Mildred W. Struven

I need a show of hands, who thinks time is messing with us??
I mean really!
I feel as if I’ve lived about five lifetimes INSIDE this one ragged, crazy life!!
Clay that has been molded, then flattened out, then re molded,
over, and over, and over again.

A thousands suns have fired me into porcelain.
I’ve been broken, then glued.
I’ve been chipped…repeatedly.
I’m too fragile for everyday sometimes,
Too fancy.
But porcelain is shiny and it’s pretty.
And remarkably durable.
And I’ve lasted.

People used to be dead by 50!
These days we’re just hitting our stride by then.

In Kabbalah, that wonderful form of Jewish mysticism,
You don’t even get possession of life’s secrets until after 40.
What a gype, you were allowed all the answers,
then you died?

I don’t know about you, but the past me’s
bear little resemblance to the current me.
I can follow their trajectory to see how I got here,
but honestly, it could have gone any number of other ways!

Sometimes I’m right back in the 19 year old me’s skin,
looking thru her eyes, and she feels familiar, I can relate to her thoughts.
Other times, I can look at a picture of me at 26, 35, 47 and a complete
stranger stares back.

What I know for sure, is I’ve been, we’ve all been,
given the opportunity to take our time to evolve this time.
We’ve all lived several lives inside just this one.
And I for one, was not trusted with life’s secrets until after 50.
I didn’t have the gravitas, I couldn’t be trusted.

Not until the clay was molded into porcelain yet once again,
this time using all the broken pieces.

I had a dream the other night that I was on a wide open plain,
riding a bike in a lightning storm.

It was really vivid at the time, and I can remember thinking
” well, this can’t be safe”! as I rode along, lightning all around me.
The interesting thing was that the flashes were limited to the horizon,
…and there was no thunder.

I completely forgot about it until later that day when something,
I can’t remember what, triggered the memory.
So I asked the universe for insight…cause that’s how I roll.
“Hey Universe, What did that dream mean”?

The answer I got was profound, but it also made me laugh.

It said you are seeking balance (the bicycle) 
inside your inspiration (the lightning).
How creative of the Universe to pick those images,
but also how PERFECT!

Lately I have been wondering a lot about balance.

When I was younger, balance was nonexistent.
I got a boyfriend, and lost myself so completely
that I couldn’t manage to comb my hair or go to work, let alone returns phone calls or see my friends! I was THAT girl. Ugh.

Total immersion had worked well for me in the past, but 
I’m not sure that’s the answer any more.

I’m feeling all this inspiration, but I often feel I’m riding a unicycle, 
spinning plates on a pole…in clown pants.

My life for a looooong time was very predictable.
Then I got married, and the plates got thrown in the air,
but I got used to that too.
Now as I’m embarking on this new life, of writing, and doing readings,
I’m not exactly sure how to integrate this with all things old.

Balance…what does that look like?
Old life…New life…
I think I may need training wheels on that bike in the storm
just for awhile.

Am I a writer?
Am I a teacher?
Am I a jeweler?
Am I a singer?
Which one am I? 
I NEED A LABEL, so total immersion can occur!

The conclusion I’m coming to is this,
No titles or labels.
Check in with my heart, then do what feels good.
If I want to write, then write!
Doesn’t matter if I’m a “writer”.

If I want to sing, for crissakes sing!
I don’t have to have the title “singer”.

Be in the moment doing what feels good,
Just do the best job I can, and the time for everything will present itself,
and eventually riding in that lightning storm,
won’t feel perilous at all…it will feel invigorating!

“For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

– Steve Jobs