A safe harbor where beliefs are respected and kindness prevails.

Traveling Backwards

by

airplanewithmeLast spring my short trip to Portland turned into a real test of my ability to stay positive. I left my house just after dawn in Southern California and drove north an hour to Ontario Airport. I got on the plane and out came the captain (never a good sign) who said there was a minor repair that needed to be made to our plane…the good news was that we could get off the plane to wait….more good news was that there was plenty of time for my connecting flight…additional good news was that it was an easy fix.

So we deplaned to the terminal, no need to panic yet! I watched out the window and observed the single mechanic taking his time with the engine cover open. Good he isn’t rushing I thought. Then an announcement comes over the loud-speaker that the repair is taking longer than expected, but we are still good on time. A little while later we are invited back on the airplane and confidently buckle up for take off…not so fast. Out comes the captain again. The good news is that the connecting flight for the 42 of us that need to make that flight is waiting for us…how nice. HOWEVER, the repair is done but there is a LOT of paperwork to do before we can take off. Hummmmm

The next bad news…the paperwork is taking too long and the connecting flight to Portland can wait no longer. But more good news, they have found a way to get all 42 of us to Portland, even though it is the end of Spring Break and all the flights are full. The bad news is that our new flight, after we finally get to Sacramento and wait there for 3 hours, is back to SAN DIEGO, 60 miles south of my house! We are already on the plane and there is no other way to get to Portland that day. There is a special memorial ceremony for my husband’s sister the next day that they rearranged for my attendance…so what to do but do what they say and stay on the plane!

Now I could have gotten mad, and did for a flash of a second, but instead the group of us supported each other in small ways. One woman let me use her charger for my phone in Sacramento (NEVER pack your charger in your checked bag!) Another young mother was traveling with her little child…very little…so I shared a table with her in the crowded restaurant. She was inspiringly calm and had her hands more full than the rest of us.

By the time we were at the airport in San Diego (the sun has now set), we were all having a good chuckle about the whole thing! It made for a very long day and my relatives in Portland had to pick me up late at night instead of the middle of the day, but they too were gracious about it.

One woman started to complain “Well I will never get back these twelve hours!” She was right, but how to spend those twelve hours was up to her. She could have spent the time in anger and frustration, or accepted what was out of our hands and looked at the adventure of it. Do you have any idea what staying in a state of stress for twelve hours will do to your body!

Travel these days is just not as much fun as it used to be, but this day was over the top. The funny thing is that the rest of the trip continued in the same pattern. When we left the memorial service the next day, we made one wrong turn and ended up on a freeway crossing the river with no way to turn around…a 30 minute delay getting home to where people were waiting for us. But I got to see part of Portland I wouldn’t have seen otherwise! The day after that my friend Cheryl Maloney (yes, that Cheryl) and I were walking to a neighborhood restaurant, using the app on my phone to guide us…and it sent us in the wrong direction! Luckily we figured it out and decided it was just how this trip of mine was going!

The day after that I drove to a nearby town to visit relatives. Again I was relying on my phone to guide me there…and home. HOWEVER, the phone went dead during my visit and I had to rely on instincts to get me back home…since I couldn’t even call for directions! I just relaxed and used my wits to get me back home.

So it seemed my whole trip was trying to spin me around and confuse me…but I just let it go each time and enjoyed the trip. It became a very different adventure than I had planned, and I got everywhere I wanted to go…except that I had to travel backwards to get everywhere!

Think of this next time you travel and things go a bit wrong. Do you choose twelve hours of stress or twelve hours of adventure! I pick adventure and my body says “thank you.”

A Fresh Look At Coincidences

by

Fotolia_56955943_Subscription_Monthly_MPerhaps you have heard the term “There are no coincidences.” It is usually said when there is a
“chance” meeting or phone call that almost seems orchestrated. For example, you think about an old friend, and within five minutes they call you. You go to a new kind of gathering and find many friends there that you know from completely different circumstances. You reach for a book in a bookstore, and there is someone you know reaching for the same book at the same moment.

Pure coincidence?

I pay attention to these seemingly random events and wonder at their meaning. I don’t always know right away but wait to see how things unfold. Years ago I used to run into a woman I worked with at the local farmers market every Saturday. I went at different times each week, and walked a different ‘course,’ but yet there she would be. Many of my friends also went

to this market, but I always just ran into this one woman. I decided to make an effort to get to know her better and found we had many things in common outside work. It was like our souls GPS monitors were directing us to the same

spot at the same time.

And yet this could be called coincidence.

I recently went on a trip to Costa Rica with a tour group, and the first night as a ‘get acquainted’

that was so much like me it was like we had known each other forever. Judith lives in the Yucatan in Mexico and leads spiritual gatherings at her Bed and Breakfast. During our conversations, she shared with me the word “Dios-idencia” … a combination of Dios, which means God, and coincidencia, which means coincidence in Spanish.

For me, my English version is “God-incidence,” a combination of God and coincidence. Now it isn’t likely that we can all agree on who or what God is, but if we can agree that it is an invisible force for good in our lives, then we can accept that

recognize these events as special and worth trying to understand the meaning they have for us.

Why is it important to start to recognize these Godincidences? Because they are just another way of paying attention to our divine guidance system. I do know people who take this to an extreme and try to find meaning in EVERY small event in their lives. I myself just pay attention to the big ones and am in awe when they happen … like meeting Judith. We may never meet again, but I will carry her lovely energy with me the rest of this lifetime … her faith in the divine order of

connection for your career … or finding a resource for your home that makes your life easier. They can be small or really big, but when they happen, and you know when they do, try to get a sense of how you feel at that moment. Let that “feeling” be your guide. Let it tell you if something that happens is just a random event or truly “guided.”

This is a very subtle skill but one that we can all develop. So be on the lookout for these miraculous meetings when you least expect them. Be open to them and acknowledge them for what they are … Godincidences!

The Life Cycle Of A Baby Boomer

by

Fotolia_49434368_Subscription_Monthly_M

I was born in the Fall of 1946, which makes me one of the first souls to incarnate after World War II. Every generation has a unique place in history, but I believe there has never been a single generation that has experienced as much change as we have, and I LOVE how we have handled it!

If we look back at the average life expectancy just one hundred years ago, it was 52 years for men and 56.8 years for women. Today, it is 76.2 years for men and 81.1 for women! So even if change were happening at the same pace it was a century ago, we would have even more change to adapt to because we are living so much longer. But, of course, the pace of change is nowhere close to what it was in the last couple of centuries.

According to an article published by “Industry Tap,” the total amount of knowable information is “doubling every 12 months, soon to be every 12 hours! … Buckminster Fuller created the ‘Knowledge Doubling Curve;’ he noticed that until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years.”

Does that scare you!

It shouldn’t because we baby boomers have had a big advantage in coping with this change. For the majority of us, our childhoods were protected from war, hunger and disease in our homeland. We were given television, bicycles, comic books, ice cream, swimming pools and Disneyland for entertainment, along with libraries full of books, playgrounds that were safe and schools where we could go as far as we wanted because college was affordable. For most of us, mom was there in the kitchen cooking dinner when we came home from school. Bottom line … we were able to grow up with optimism.

In our 20s, most of us got practical and started careers. We were able to purchase our own homes and cars, take fun vacations and work reasonable hours with reasonable security, especially if you worked for a large company. We had families, and they too, for the most part, got to live the good life … although for them most moms went off to work during the day, for we were now ushering in the women’s rights revolution. Women wanted careers too, being optimistic that they could do it all, and that they had the right to express themselves in leadership positions at work while remaining “mom” at home.

Things started to get stressful because it was hard for families to really do that, and even harder for men and women to make the adjustments in their relationships. And then came the technical/information age revolution … right in the middle of our careers! But our optimistic attitudes born out of our comfortable childhoods carried us through. We were confident we could learn these new things, and we were excited about participating in this knowledge frontier.

Unfortunately, at the end of our careers, a lot of the security we experienced most of our lives started to shatter with the recession. Times truly have been stressful, especially now that we are really part of the global community, and every day we see the horrors around the world.

We long for the “good old days” of our childhoods.

The good news is that in most of us that optimism has survived and is thriving and can hopefully help generations to follow to learn about the importance of attitude. “Your attitude is your latitude,” a Canadian in his 20s named Rob said to me … and I have lived by that ever since. And we have learned tools to cope with stress, such as meditation and yoga.

For the generations born in the 70s, listen to our positive experiences. For the generations born in the 90s, learn to adapt without fear. You are the ones we are counting on to carry us through this world-changing at lightning speed … especially because we are going to live to be really really old, we need you to stay positive! Learn from our optimism. It was the gift given to our generation, and teaching it is our opportunity to help you cope with a world we cannot even imagine.

So boomers, I ask that you be grateful for the blessed lives we were given and find ways to help guide the younger ones … with optimism. It is truly the greatest gift you have to share. We all have the opportunity to interact with generations other than our own, so how can we make the most of those interactions?

For baby boomers, share the stories of our youth when we believed anything was possible. We shot for the moon … and landed on it! We had to believe that was possible to make it happen, and we did. We actually gave birth to the computer generation that has shifted the world. We explored space, the deep oceans and the human personality without fear. So when you see a younger person doubting what they can do, remind them that television didn’t even exist when we were born! We looked forward to all the technological advances as wondrous events in our amazing lives.

For younger generations, hold onto your vision of a better world and what you can do to make it happen. When you hear “That’s impossible,” be polite but walk away. In our youth, we had NO idea what we would accomplish in our lifetimes. The same is true for you, but even more so. Follow your passion and “knowingness” about what can be done. Our generation helped make the shift up from the industrial revolution to the information age … that is the gift of our time. We can’t WAIT to see what you shift us up to!

And remember, “Your attitude is your latitude!”

Shifting Up From Judgment to Discernment

by

Most of us fear being judged on some level.  It doesn’t feel good at all, and depending on how much emotion is attached, it can feel really awful.  Most of us, however, tend to do it to other people or events.  While we can’t easily control being judged by others, we can learn to shift what we do ourselves in our daily situations and that can improve the quality of our lives.  It doesn’t mean that you just “accept all that comes your way.”  What it means is that you stand back and try to see what is motivating you to decide if something is right or wrong for you, shifting from judgment to discernment.  Following are some steps you can take to do that, but first let me explain the difference between the two.

Let’s say you are an interior designer. Your client is color blind, but knowing that green will represent “healthy and organic” for his new store, has decided that he wants all the items in a particular room to be green. He can’t see the difference between green and blue. Your job is to select only green items, using your ability to discern between the two colors. There is no emotional judgment involved in this; it is just a simple matter of observation and choices.

But let’s say your mother always dressed you in green when you where a child and everyone in school made fun of you. Now when you look at something that is green, it inspires a negative emotional judgment about the color. It puts your emotional body into negative vibration mode and out of sync with the rest of you. It takes you away from your higher source. If that happens and you are aware of it happening, you have to work at bringing yourself back into balance or spend the rest of the day “out of sorts.”

So if you find yourself “not liking” something, step back and evaluate what is going on with you, what is the reason for the reaction. Ask yourself:

1. Is this opinion based on prior experience about this subject?

2. Does the situation evoke a twinge in my belly?

3. Am I thinking about what OTHERS would think of choosing or not choosing the situation?

4. Have I rationally thought about the pros and cons of this subject?

Too often we have to make snap decisions, and there may not always be time to go through these questions, but if you practice when you have time to ponder something, it will in time become second nature to you and you will run through the questions in a flash of a second. If your answer was “yes” to 2. or 3., it is likely that you are in a state of being judgmental, or having an emotional reaction to the situation that might have nothing to do with the current situation.  So what is wrong with that you ask? You might just make the wrong choice.  You might let some past experience stop you from what could be a very good experience for you…now, with this new situation…not the old one in your emotional memory banks.

When you are pointing your finger at someone else in judgment, energetically you are pointing THREE fingers back at your self. Being more tolerant of people or situations that aren’t living “up to your standards” will not draw those types of people toward you. Not being tolerant just might!  We are learning how our own energy draws certain things to us and repels others. So if you are in a state of being emotionally judgmental, you are going to attract people that are also in that state around you…inviting them to judge you.

Our emotions play a very important role in our lives, as long as they are in balance.  Feeling love and joy are very positive experiences to be sure.  If you are feeling anger or fear, those feelings may be protecting you from something about to cause you harm.  What is good for us to learn is if what we are feeling, be it love or fear, is really about the situation immediately in front of us or about something that happened in our past.  Thinking that you are “in love” with someone who reminds you of a past love can match you up with the wrong person.  If you are in a state of fear, lets say of being fired from your job, if that fear stems from a previous experience when you were actually fired, not this situation, you may react inappropriately and actually get yourself fired again!

Don’t be discouraged if learning to master this “discernment” about your emotions takes some time. But taking the time to try to see the difference can’t help but make your life better, help you make better choices. Just think about it next time you are in a state of judgment.  Run through these four simple questions and see what is really going on with you.  We all have this ability, we just have to

 

Feedback