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How is one to live a moral & compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself?

If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding & accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

Barry Lopez

reflect on what you're saying more often!

make sure you keep going to counseling!

Listen to What You’re Really Saying
By Nancy Wasson, Ph.D.
 
Have you ever really listened to yourself thoughtfully & analyzed the deeper meanings & implications of what you were saying?

Doing this can be a "sobering experience." Recently, after something really positive had happened unexpectedly, I said to my husband Lee, “I don’t believe it!”

Immediately, I realized what I'd done & exclaimed, “I take that statement back!! I do believe good things can happen! I do believe it!” In the flash of a moment, I suddenly understood the deeper message I was sending to myself and to the Universe.

Reflected in my original statement was an underlying feeling of doubt that I deserved good things to happen in my life & that good things would really happen to me. It was a left-over remnant of what I call “scarcity thinking” instead of the “abundance thinking” that I focus on now.

You may say that I’m being too picky in looking so closely at the words I say & the statements I make, but I've found that the language we choose to use is extremely important.
 
You're co-creating your world with every thought you think & every word that you utter.

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Have you ever heard a co-worker or friend who has applied for an advancement position at work say,
 
“I really doubt that I’ll be picked for this, but I applied anyway”?
 
 
Can you hear what a negative message this sends?
 
The energy of doubt will permeate everything the person does, including body language during the interview, tone of voice in responding to interview questions & their general confidence level that'll communicate in many subtle ways.

Now take these two examples & translate them into relationship situations. A spouse who says,
 
“My husband would never go to counseling with me”
 
is setting up the very situation she doesn’t want.

It may be true that her husband isn’t going to be enthusiastic about couples counseling & maybe she’ll have to try various approaches to let him know how serious she is about this.

But by making the negative prediction, she's contributing to a negative outcome. Instead, she could tell herself,
 
“I’m going to need to be creative in how I approach this because I know there’s a creative solution to this situation.”

Or what about the spouse who, when her mate does something really thoughtful & nice, tells a friend,
 
“I don’t believe it! He actually thought of me & went out of his way! I almost fainted!”

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Reflected in this response is an underlying belief that her spouse is going to be thoughtless & neglectful of her needs. By reinforcing this image thru her statements about her mate, this wife is helping to perpetuate the husband’s cycle of behavior.

Another important concept to be aware of what happens when you speak words of negation, such as “don’t” or “not” or “no.” The Law of Attraction says that you attract into your life what you think about & focus on, but it doesn’t compute the negative words you may use.
 
i.e., the statement “I don’t want to argue” sends the message “I want to argue” or “I want more arguments.”

Mother Teresa knew the power of words & being careful to focus on what you want instead of what you don’t want. When she was invited to join an anti-war protest, she replied, ‘Let me know when there’s a march for peace.”

Think of the difference between saying to your partner,
 
“I want to be in harmony with you,”
 
vs. saying,
 
“I don’t want to fight all the time.”
 
Or what about the difference between saying,
 
“I love it when we can spend time together on the weekends,”
 
vs.,
 
“You always ignore me & never spend time with me.”

Become aware of what you’re creating when you say “I’m not” or make negative statements. Also be aware of the power of saying the words “I am,” such as “I am unhappy,” or “I'm bored with my marriage,” or “I'm always a loser in love.”
 
You’re setting powerful energy into motion that may deliver your request to your doorstep.

Over time, the words you say to yourself & to others & the thoughts you dwell on all impact what you create in your marriage, in your job, in your family & social relationships & in the quality of your life.
 
Words contain power - it’s up to you to use that power wisely to create more of what you want to experience.
 

Send me an e-mail!

your dictionary definition of:
 
par·a·dox  
–noun

1.

a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth.

Do You Know the Stories of Your Parents & Grandparents?
By Debby Bitticks
 
Celebrities such as Oprah, Tim Russert, Tom Brokaw, Larry King & President Clinton have discovered how enlightening & rewarding it is to write your own story & read the stories of their parents & grandparents.

"I urge you to pursue preserving your personal history to allow your children & grandchildren to know who you were as a child & what your hopes & dreams were." Oprah Winfrey,
on her TV show, January, 2003
 
Anyone who’s fortunate enough to live to be 50 years old should take the time, even if it’s just a couple of weekends, to sit down & write the story of your life. President William Clinton

There's an easy-to-use, comprehensive tool to organize & chronicle the story of your life or the life of a loved one.You can leave future generations your most cherished memories, values, wisdom, life lessons & even a personal health history, all in one attractive portable 3-ring album / binder with over 100 pages of thought -provoking questions & more.

Cherished Memories includes separate sections for: childhood, teen years, adult years, values & philosophies (ethical will), my favorites, family tree, health history & a place for pictures & treasured keepsakes.

Co-author Debby Bitticks was inspired to create Cherished Memories - The Story of My Life after losing her own mother & mother-in-law without getting their life stories.
 
Bitticks vowed never to let that happen again & after writing Cherished Memories - The Story of My Life with her daughter Lynn Benson MSW, she interviewed her father & father-in-law & their stories are family treasures since they died.

Bitticks emphasizes: completing the questions & discussing your life story serves as a springboard to meaningful conversations that you might have never otherwise had with the important people in your life. It truly brings you closer to the ones you love & celebrates a life’s journey which bring the generations together.
 

The Fear of Truth
By Robert Elias Najemy
 
It is not easy to be totally truthful with others & often even with ourselves.

The main reason for this is our fear or rejection. This fear is often greater even than the fear of death.

We identify our self-worth & consequently our feelings of security with how others perceive us & whether they approve of, accept & love us or not.

Because of this we tend to alter our bodies & personalities in order to "protect" our self-worth, security & freedom.

As children we were free to be ourselves & blurt out whatever might be passing thru our minds. But eventually our unpleasant experiences with the truth caused us to create what we might call the shadow & the mask. We seek to hide in the shadow whatever we can't accept about ourselves or fear that might make us vulnerable or not acceptable to others.

We eventually became afraid to share or express our actions, fears, anger, feelings, needs, beliefs & even our love, appreciation & admiration.

Some of us try to become what we believe others want us to be in order to gain their approval & love. This seldom works because others sense the lack of truth in what we are seeking to be for them. As long as we need approval, we're unlikely to get it. Or if we have it, we're unlikely to see or feel it.

Others seek to protect their needs by playing unpleasant roles such as the interrogator, the intimidator, the victim or the aloof. In such a case, even though we don't seek to be what others want us to be, we're equally not truthful because we're unable to express our happiness, satisfaction, love or needs in a mature way.
 
We're playing a role that doesn't express our true needs & feelings.

Some people are proud of the fact that they can shout & freely express their anger. What they don't realize that they too aren't truthful, because behind all anger is fear, hurt or guilt & they aren't expressing the truth behind their anger.

When we aren't able to express our beliefs, needs, feelings, ideas, love & appreciation freely, we're blocked energy-wise & are much more susceptible to psychosomatic illness.

In addition to that, we don't have true relationships, because our relationships are based on our masks & not on our true feelings, needs & beliefs. We become starved energy-wise because we don't enjoy true energy exchange with others.

Suppressing these aspects of ourselves & seeking to keep up our mask is a very tiring process that depletes our energy & stamina, both on a psychological & physical level - also undermining the ability of our immune system to deal with microbes, cancerous cells & inflammations.

We can gradually become free to be more truthful about our fears, need, desires, feelings, beliefs, actions, love & admiration as we learn to accept & love ourselves as we are & experience our self-worth regardless of external factors, including how we appear to others & what they think.

We need to realize that our self-worth is a function of our being with is divine in nature & not on how we appear, how much money we have, our profession, how we compare to others, what others think or how they behave towards us.

Each of us is a ray of divine consciousness which is temporarily focused in the material world evolving in its ability to express its inner power, beauty, love & divine perfection in the physical realm. We & all others are always worthy of love & respect - simply because of the nature of our being & not because of our appearance or what others think.

If our self-worth were related to what others think & ten people have ten different opinions - depending on their own needs & programming - then according to whose opinion is our value measured?
 
The usual answer is, "the worse opinion". We often fetter & worry about one person that doesn't approve of us - ignoring that fact that the other nine love & accept us.

In the end we will give importance to only one opinion - that our of our inner conscience. We will respect others & their opinions, but in the end our only prerequisite to happiness & peace will be in alignment with our conscience. That means that we feel secure in the fact that we are behaving towards others in the way we would like them to behave to us.
 
This is all we need in order to feel worthy & secure.
We can be truthful about ourselves only when we are free from fear, guilt, shame & in general identification with our temporary body & personality. Meditation & self-observation will enable us to become more detached from the body & mind & observer their various functionings & programmings as - not us.
 
That detachment will enable our clarity & ability to be more truthful about ourselves - perhaps with a sense of humor about our personal dramas - as we take ourselves less seriously.

As we discover exactly what we fear about being more honest about ourselves with the important people in our lives, we can then employ various methods of energy psychology such as EFT, TAT, BSSF, EMDR & Sedona in order to free ourselves from those fears & emotional blockages.

As we learn to be more truthful, this will become even easier & we will enjoy much greater energy, happiness, creativity & love in our lives.

May you be well on all levels of your being.

Robert Elias Najemy

* For help with the subject of energy psychology click here

* For more about the fear or truth see the book Petro Faces the Truth by clicking here

* For more about self-acceptance: click here

Realizing for the First Time: The Darkness of Fear & the Light of the Truth
kathleen howe 4/24/07
 
Recently, I had a revelation concerning myself that opened my eyes to so many connected topics that it's frightenly enlightning for me. I was watching a movie, "Stranger Than Fiction," when suddenly I found myself wanting to know more about the main female character in the movie. She'd been portrayed as an anarchist hippy bakery owner, tattooed, confident & mysteriously interesting. She'd refused to pay a percentage of her taxes because she didn't believe in the causes the government had appropriated the tax money to.
 
I was delightfully surprised when the two main characters found themselves in front of her apartment or house, ready to go in because I thought, "Oh good!! We'll learn more about her by seeing the inside of her home!"
 
The thought took me by surprise. I was stunned actually. I didn't know what to think about it because as I thought the thought, I realized that it would be impossible to know who I am by looking inside my house, unless of course, truly I am the definition of clutter & disorganization... oh God! Perhaps that is me....
 
My thoughts left the movie, I allowed myself to "go" with the connecting chain of thoughts that were flowing quickly through my awareness. I didn't have an identity actually; when I married my husband, I moved into his house and he didn't want me to change anything in the house. I've had to fight tooth and nail to change anything for the past almost 13 years I've lived here.
 
Along with the fact that I have never picked out my own clothes, clothes that I actually like... and then it hit me. My entire life I have been afraid of upsetting someone in my life with being who I really am. My family always thinking of me as the black sheep, abusive husbands brainwashing me into feeling "not good enough" with who I really was because they really wanted someone else, not me.
 
I have been living in fear my entire life. Fear of having any feelings or emotions. Fear of stepping outside of the mold my mother & father had forced me to live in. Fear escalating & mental illness developing, living a life that was a total lie to me, abuse, hypocritical parenting, and it all formed a movie screen size picture in my brain - my life is a lie, I am no one, I have no being, no self, no sense of myself...
 
The words calling out to my from my father as a child...."You are nobody. You are the least important person on this earth. Who cares what you want or need. You are no one! You are the least important person on this earth!" and then as a teenager..."You want to go to college? Who cares what you want! You will never be anything but a wife & mother. Go meet some guy and have a house full of kids. That's what women are for! That's what you've been trained to do!"

I can now understand why things have gone the way they've gone for me. But what was revealed to me through this huge revelation is that Fear and Truth have had a tremendous affect on my life. I have recently realized that being brought up in deception caused me to never realize the value of the truth. Deception is one of the main causes of fear. The whole thing is like a world class tornado of negativity. That's what I grew up in. That's what I lived my adult life in until five years ago when I put on the brakes.
 
I put on the brakes after spending one year closed up in my darkness, my fears of everything. I had been afraid of everything in my life. I had discovered how insignificant I was, just like my father had told me I was.
 
And now, as I write about this whole experience, another tentacle of truth protrudes out of the original revelation! I realize now, how in my worst days on this earth, my most painful experience when my ex-husband was taking my son from me in a custody fight - using parental alienation tactics, I allowed myself to fall into that person I had been told I was. I accepted those descriptions of me. I became that person out of a self fulfilling prophecy.
 
And now, I long for the truth. I yearn to live a life in the light of the truth as the person I truly am. The only problem here is finding out who I truly am. I really don't know me very well yet, but I am so happy and fulfilled with each revelation and truth I learn. I am thirsty for truthful conversations. I am in need of a truthful reflection in the mirror of myself. I'm getting there in my recovery. I'm getting there.... 

I am not afraid of the truth. I welcome it into my life. I welcome it into my being. I need to be full of the truth now. I need it. Empty deception from within me, I continue to search for my truths. I am completely satisfied with my personal growth, my recovery from deception. I am happy, finally and happier with each new revelation.
 
I want to thank the author above, for helping me so much. I have many of his articles within this network of sites because I have felt his words. I can feel them in my heart. Reiterating the fact that there is power in words, power beyond comprehension, I thank him for his contribution to my recovery, to my personal growth. Robert Elias Najemy - his articles are priceless.
 
Stay true to yourselves in your personal growth. Keep your level of awareness at it's highest level possible, allowing yourself to see the truth when it comes to you. It's worth its weight in happiness! Keep yourself in counseling until you feel you are ready to find these priceless gems of wisdom through your own self study. Reflect upon your thoughts often. Find out who you are through your own words.

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