“Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.” Earl Nightingale

You know what? I NEVER thought of this way! Hmm…well said, Mr. Nightingale, well said! I think I need to make a list of dreams and, even if I don’t accomplish them all, I’m still going to work towards them all….because the time will pass anyway, right? 😉 I think I’ll start my list right here with a couple:

Run my own business.

Complete a triathlon.

Fall in love again, and, if it fails, again, and if that fails, again…….And, in the meantime, fall in love with myself over and over again 🙂

What are some of your dreams? Have you actually ever stopped to think about them? Give it a shot. I think you’d be surprised what you truly aspire to do and be.

“Life provides losses and heartbreak for all of us – but the greatest tragedy is to have the experience and miss the meaning.” – Robin Roberts, GMA

I figured this was applicable today being that it is the 11 year anniversary of the attacks on 9/11/2001.  9/11 was the biggest day of loss and heartbreak my generation, and many others, have probably ever felt before. But as with any experience, it is up to all of us to not miss the meaning and lesson that came with such a loss and tragedy. I know what I learned that day, that life is short and precious. That reminding your loved ones how much they mean to you as much as you possible can is necessary. Most of all, I learned from the uniting of the citizens of this country as well as witnessing how other countries around the world united with us, that cooperation and unity is possible. That when we all start to look at one another as PEOPLE, with families and loved ones like the rest of us, things get accomplished and people work together versus against one another. 9/11 meant to me that Democrats and Republicans, Christians and Atheists, Homosexuals and Heterosexuals were all just PEOPLE. People that bleed the same, feel the same pain, love with the same emotion and passion and put their differences aside because they realize how much more we are all truly alike than we are different.

This is the meaning I got from the massive tragedy of 9/11. Our country suffered an indescribable loss, but I think it’s up to all of us to help each other through it and not miss the meaning and lesson it can teach each and every one of us.

“What do I believe that I deserve in this life? I think I deserve something beautiful.”―  Elizabeth Gilbert,  Eat, Pray, Love

This past weekend I witnessed multiple beautiful things in Salt Lake City for the wedding weekend of one of my best friends from college. On so many different levels my heart felt love and beauty as the weekend went by and I want to share these moments and experiences with you.

1. Nature: The wedding was at the Soltiude Resort in the mountains of Utah. I honestly can’t put into words how amazing it is there. The trees, the leaves, the wildlife, the stars, the moon, the clouds, the silence and the purity of it all take your breath away. I was in awe the entire time! I stuck my head out of the car window the entire ride back down the mountain taking it all in just one last time.

2. Commitment: My friend and her now husband were together for 8 years before they tied the knot and you can still tell how much they love eachother when they look into eachother’s eyes today. They wrote their own vows and they were beautiful! There wasn’t a dry eye in the place! They put into words what I think we all dream of in a committed relationship. All bases were covered: loyalty, commitment, love, honesty, patience, admiration, you name it. And, by the tones in their voices, and the looks on their faces you could truly tell they meant every word they spoke to one another.

3. A Mother’s love: My friend’s mother is one of the most beautiful women I have ever met! She lives life to the fullest, she has a wonderful sense of humor, she has one of the biggest hearts, she isn’t afraid to shed a tear regardless of what it represents and she raised the most beautiful daughter! Watching her all weekend and seeing her love for my friend pour out of every smile, every hug, every stare, every action was inspiring! I know that if I ever get married one day, my mother will look the exact same and I’m lucky to have a mother like that. That kind of love is beautiful and an honor to have witnessed.

4. Friendship: This weekend was full of old and new friendships. I nurtured 2 of my best and longest friendships and am about 20 friends stronger now that I’m home. I witnessed friendships of others and saw new friendships being created for them as well. It’s amazing how quickly you can relate to someone new and it suddenly feels like you have known them your whole life. You create a beautiful bond that fills empty holes that, prior to that moment, you never knew you had. With each thriving relationship and each new friendship you learn more about who you are, more about who you want to be and more about what you want from life.

5. Music: Music on it’s own is beautiful! But, I have to admit, listening to music for 3 hours during a reception at a wedding is one of my favorite things in this world because it allows you to dance, to express yourself as much as humanly possible and to make a fool of yourself in the meantime. Watching others do the same is beautiful to me 🙂 The happiness that exudes from someone while they dance makes me smile!

I could probably go on and on, but I’m going to stop myself. This quote above is from my favorite book. And I don’t think I ever really focused on these particular words until today. It’s true, I deserve something BEAUTIFUL…in every facet of my life. I deserve beautiful friendships, beautiful relationships, beautiful scenery, beautiful music, beautiful love! And I intend to live my life in search of only the beauty found in everything. That’s what we all deserve. Not all circumstance or realities appear beautiful at first glance, but I truly  believe that there is beauty in EVERYTHING if we look hard enough. Just writing this makes my soul come alive, I can feel it. Think of how much happier and more alive you can feel when you see the beauty in everything versus the negative.

Thank you Felice and Caleb for allowing me to realize all of this last weekend, to realize that I deserve something beautiful and for letting me be a part of such a beautiful and precious moment in your lives!Felice, it’s as if you were born to be a bride…you were as beautiful as the day is long my love! Your heart and your soul inspire me! Thank you for teaching me about love, friendship, beauty and commitment! I wish you nothing but a lifetime of love, happiness, beautiful memories and good heath!

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard

 “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

“Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux

A very good friend of mine recently shared an article with me, “Why you should travel young” by Jeff Goins in Converge Magazine. I honestly feel like I have actualyl written something similar to this in my head a few times haha I’d like to share a few lines from it and you can access the whole article from the link above or by clicking the first two pictures below. I hope it hits you like it hit me.

“As we get older, life can just sort of happen to us. Whatever we end up doing, we often end up with more responsibilities, more burdens, more obligations. This is not always bad. In fact, in many cases it is really good. It means you’re influencing people, leaving a legacy.

Youth is a time of total empowerment. You get to do what you want. As you mature and gain new responsibilities, you have to be very intentional about making sure you don’t lose sight of what’s important. The best way to do that is to make investments in your life so that you can have an effect on who you are in your later years.

I did this by traveling. Not for the sake of being a tourist, but to discover the beauty of life — to remember that I am not complete…While you’re young, you should travel. You should take the time to see the world and taste the fullness of life…

Traveling will change you like little else can. It will put you in places that will force you to care for issues that are bigger than you. You will begin to understand that the world is both very large and very small. You will have a newfound respect for pain and suffering, having seen that two-thirds of humanity struggle to simply get a meal each day.

While you’re still young, get cultured. Get to know the world and the magnificent people that fill it. The world is a stunning place, full of outstanding works of art. See it.

You won’t always be young. And life won’t always be just about you. So travel, young person. Experience the world for all it’s worth. Become a person of culture, adventure, and compassion. While you still can.

Do not squander this time. You will never have it again. You have a crucial opportunity to invest in the next season of your life now. Whatever you sow, you will eventually reap. The habits you form in this season will stick with you for the rest of your life. So choose those habits wisely.

And if you’re not as young as you’d like (few of us are), travel anyway. It may not be easy or practical, but it’s worth it. Traveling allows you to feel more connected to your fellow human beings in a deep and lasting way, like little else can. In other words, it makes you more human.

That’s what it did for me, anyway.”

My sentiments EXACTLY 🙂 Below are some pictures of a few of my favorite places in this world! I look forward to a life of getting out there and meeting as many people as I can and seeing  and experiencing as much as possible!

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

From Emerson’s Essay 12 “Art”:

“…Though   we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or   we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces,   in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work   of art of human character, — a wonderful expression through stone, or   canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature,   and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes.   In the sculptures of the Greeks, in the masonry of the Romans, and in the pictures   of the Tuscan and Venetian masters, the highest charm is the universal language   they speak. A confession of moral nature, of purity, love, and hope, breathes   from them all. That which we carry to them, the same we bring back more fairly   illustrated in the memory…”

The full essay is linked to the picture below. It’s worth a read 🙂

“Grant that I may be given appropriate difficulty and sufferings on this journey so that my heart may be truly awakened and my practice of liberation and universal compassion may be truly fulfilled.”

– Tibetan Prayer

I think the quote speaks for itself ,but I wanted to add parts of this article I read today, A Way Out of Suffering: An Interview With Sharon Salzberg, that really stuck out to me and reminded me of this quote:

 “I could do something about the suffering. I couldn’t change the circumstances, or make the loss or hurt go away, but I could change how I dealt with it. I could approach my pain with compassion instead of bitterness, in community rather than isolation. I realized the same was true of changing my relationship to pleasure. I could be so distracted, I wouldn’t notice when something good did happen. And with neutral things, like my daily routine, I was barely aware of being there. The Buddha offered a very simple, pragmatic tool — meditation — to transform one’s relationship to everything…

Meditation can be thought of as sitting quietly and being with what is. It’s also a process where we train our attention. Both ways of viewing meditation help us be with whatever experience we are having. Concentration helps us steady our attention, which is important, because if we aren’t centered, we’ll get sucked into whatever painful experience comes along, and we won’t be able to see clearly. Mindfulness helps us refine our attention so we can be with the present moment rather than projecting out into the future or the past, or judging ourselves. Lovingkindness helps us open our attention so we can stop being cruel to ourselves and others in the face of suffering and instead be more graceful and caring. They are all trainings in attention…

If someone said to you, “Here’s something you can do to end the suffering of someone you love, a friend or family member, and it will only take 20 minutes each day,” we’d do it. But when we think of doing it for ourselves, we think it’s selfish, or we have too much to do. The irony is, doing it for ourselves is doing something for those we love. The choice requires a level of self-care and the willingness to commit.”

Have a WONDERFUL Monday!

How to Avoid Any More Secret Hurts by Russel Bishop

“Hurt feelings often stem from expectations or unspoken demands you place on other people.  You know the drill:  If you loved me, you would… Of course, half the battle lies in the fact that you probably haven’t even shared your expectations with the other person in the first place.  The first obvious fix might be to tell the other person what you hope will be true in the relationship and how you hope they will behave.  At least that way there’s some chance the other person might go along.

Even this direct approach belies a problem that needs to be addressed.  If you take this route, you then set yourself up for more reasons to be upset…The other person is not responsible for how you choose to feel!  Fritz Perls, my early inspiration in this field of personal response-ability, wrote what has become known as the Gestalt Prayer:

I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped.

(Fritz Perls, “Gestalt Therapy Verbatim,” 1969)

However, knowing this did not necessarily make it any easier to go through my life free of hurt feelings.  It wasn’t until my spiritual teacher, John-Roger, helped me understand the difference between the underlying spiritual essence of who people are and what they do that I began to experience increasing ease and grace in my life.

A couple of years after I had created Insight Seminars, I was talking with John-Roger about how disappointed I was with a particular individual and his behavior.  J-R asked me what was disappointing.  I told him that the other person seemed to be saying one thing and doing another in a way that betrayed the greater consciousness we had been discussing as our business relationship was developing.  That’s when J-R helped me with a distinction I am still learning to this day: The personality and behavior of another person just can’t hold a candle to the soul, to the divinity of who they truly are.

He basically said to me:  “Whenever you see the soul or spirit of another person, you unconsciously project onto them behaviors that you think are consistent with what soul or spirit mean to you.  When their behavior varies from your definition of soul-centered essence, you feel betrayed, let down or somehow lied to.”

You Are a Spiritual Being Having a Human Experience

Bam!  What an eye opener that was.  I have often allowed the behavior of another to cloud my vision and forget that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, not human beings having a spiritual experience.  Part of the human experience is to err, to listen and behave more in accordance with our Self-Talk than to live from the divine essence of our Soul-Talk.

When I can hold the difference in my consciousness, when I can recognize the Divine in the other as independent from the choices the personality might make, I find my life is easier, characterized by more grace, acceptance and loving.  Not surprisingly, I not only experience greater acceptance and understanding, but I also walk free of hurt feelings, of the imagined slights, disappointments or feelings of betrayal.

In truth, the only betrayal is that created by my own Self-Talk, that age-old programming that would have me focus on the behaviors of myself and others as though that is who we truly are.  When I do so, I lose sight of the Divine in both myself and other person, forgetting that the soul is here having a human experience.  Turning a blind eye to the underlying spiritual essence makes it easier to step into judgment, and, as noted last week:

That deep pain you have experienced in your life, the one that won’t seem to let go, is anchored in having forgotten your Divinity and focusing instead on the part of you that has erred.  Denial of your true source is easy enough to come by — it’s simply a by-product of having a human experience in this world and losing sight of the ultimate truth that you are soul having that human experience.

You Are Not Your Mistakes

So, if you would experience your life in a greater state of acceptance, grace and ease, free from hurt and disappointment, try looking for the Divine first in your own self.  Start to notice the difference between your deeper soul-centered essence and the mistakes you make in life.  You make mistakes, but you are not your mistakes.  The more you can bring this level of awareness to your own self, the easier it will be for you to see the difference in others.  The more you can experience the Divine in your self and others, the greater will be your freedom and you will, indeed, step free from the source of your deepest hurt — forgetting that we are all Divine, each souls having a human experience.

How does this match to your own experience?  Have you noticed that you sometimes act in ways that are inconsistent with who you truly are at a deeper level?  How can you bring this greater awareness into your daily life, with your family, your friends, and your coworkers?

Access the original posting of the article by clicking the title above or HERE.

“You may think the grass is greener on the other side. But if you take the time to water your own grass it would be just as green.”

This quote is double edged to me, teaches me two things: 1- Don’t compare yourself to others. We are all on our own journey; 2- Stop taking care of everyone else and helping them to better themselves and their lives. Start helping yourself and make yourself better or you’ll get left behind in your own life.

It’s time to stop focusing on every one else and time to start focusing more on ME! I swear I have to constantly be reminded of this. Gotta “water my own grass” and stop trying to make sure everyone else’s grass is maintained.

“The only way that we can live, is if we grow. The only way that we can grow is if we change. The only way that we can change is if we learn. The only way we can learn is if we are exposed. And the only way that we can become exposed is if we throw ourselves out into the open. Do it. Throw yourself.” 
― C. JoyBell C.