Archive | April, 2010

Do You Bloom Where You are Planted?

 


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“I feel like I did something wrong,” my client, Sarah, said. “I tried and tried to think myself healthy, but somehow I ended up back in the hospital!  I don’t understand!”


She had recently come home from the hospital, after being seriously ill.  She wanted to feel better, and was trying to will herself to be better.  But one evening, she knew beyond a doubt she had to go back.  And so she did.

As her story unfolded, she shared that one evening her husband left, she was feeling a bit sorry for herself.  Flipping through the channels on her TV, she came across Joel Osteen, a well-known minister, giving a sermon.

 

“Bloom where you are planted, “ he said. “Appreciate what is going on around you right here, right now.  Trust that you are exactly where you need to be.  Be happy about it.  Give thanks for everything you can see.  Offer your faith to God that your life is just what – and where – God needs it to be.”

 

She said she felt he was speaking directly to her.  In that moment, she relaxed.  She stopped trying to will something into being.  She just decided she’d appreciate what was going on in her life.  She decided to bloom where she was planted.

 

And so she began, “I’m grateful for the drugs I’m getting.  I’m grateful for the nurses.  I’m grateful they are figuring out what’s wrong with me.  I’m grateful for the care here in this wonderful hospital.  I’m grateful for how clean it is here.  I’m grateful that I don’t have to worry about taking care of anything.  I’m grateful that my husband and my sons have come to see me.  I’m grateful that I’m so loved.”

 

And in her relaxing and just “being,” she began to heal.  She began to get better very quickly.  Within a few short days, she was well enough to be released.

 

When we talked later, she shared this story with me.  She wanted to understand why she hadn’t been able to will herself into being better.  And even more, she wanted to understand why she hadn’t been able to avoid it to begin with.

 

She told me how she had been upset with herself for getting so sick.  She couldn’t understand why she had done this to herself.  She was healthy, she had a good relationship with her husband and her sons, she had sufficient abundance.  What was going on?

I suggested that maybe she didn’t need to know right now about the “why” of it.  That, perhaps more than anything, her job was to do just what she learned in the hospital … to simply appreciate what she had right here, right now, and let go of her desire to know why it all came about.  And to trust that the “why” would be revealed in time.

 

Hearing this softened her.  She was able to return to a soft state of allowing and trusting, and let go of needing to understand all of the bigger reasons, which often don’t show up in our lives until time has passed.

The irony here is that in the appreciating of those around us, and appreciating the things that are going right and well in our lives actually gets us more of what we want.  It acts as a magnet for us to see more – more wonderfulness, more health, more joy, more love, more abundance.  But we have to do the work of appreciating. We have to do the work of being grateful.

Our work is to get out of our heads and into our hearts, to stop trying to figure things out and to stop worrying about them.  Our work is to just simply be.

Be gratitude.  Be appreciation.  Be love.  Be joy.  Be humor.  Be peace.  Be kindness.  Be compassion.  Be grace.  Be abundance.

 

Because it is in the being that we then are in the space to manifest what we want.  More health, more joy, more peace, more love, more abundance, more ideas, more happiness.

And that is what we all want.

Your Action Steps

1. Look at your life and answer these questions:

a.      Where are you spending time and energy?

b.      What are you worrying about?

c.      What are you making yourself wrong for?

d.      What can you appreciate right here, right now?

2. Decide you will start appreciating your life – even the little things that believe me, if you didn’t have, aren’t so little … like your feet carrying you around, or your fingers picking things up, or your teeth for chewing.

3.      Say “Thank you!” to everything you can see and to everyone you see (even if you say it in your heart and not out loud).

4.     Choose today to be grateful.  This moment, right here, right now.  Be grateful even for something that you are struggling with.  Be grateful for the parties involved.  Be grateful for the challenge to learn and grow (because you are learning and growing through it!).  Just say “Thank you!”

5.       Have fun with it!


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Why Forgive? (What’s In It For Me?)

 


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After someone has “done you wrong” and profoundly hurt you, why should you forgive them?  Why should you spend all the time and effort letting it go?  And should you let it go?  And if you forgive them, what does this mean?  Does it mean you go back for more?

 

I have gotten these questions a lot from clients through the years and I believe I have some answers not only because of my own experiences (yes, I’ve had to forgive big-time!), but also because I’ve spent years studying what forgiveness does for you.  (Did you hear that?  What it does for you.)

Jerry, a client of mine, is a favorite example I have of how what opens up in your life when you to forgive someone else. In 2003, Jerry came to my office in Charlottesville, VA, to work through some challenges he was having at work.  As we worked together, a very traumatic story came out.

 

Fifteen years earlier, Jerry and his then-wife had triplets.  One day, when the babies were several months old, Jerry came home at lunch to surprise his wife.  He was the one surprised.  He discovered his wife in bed with his best friend.

 

No surprise here – they divorced.  Then his former wife married the former best friend.  Then she asked Jerry to allow the new step-dad to adopt the babies. “You can stay involved in their lives, but it will be better for them to be part of a whole family.” After much consideration, Jerry acquiesced.

Somewhere soon after Jerry signed the papers relinquishing his parental rights, they got into an argument and his former wife said, “Go away.  You have no rights here.”

 

Through the next 12 years, even though Jerry sent his children gifts at Christmas and on their birthday to stay in contact, he was not allowed to be a part of their lives.  He hadn’t seen his kids in all that time, and he had a whole lot of (very understandable) anger toward his former wife.

 

We began to work on the feelings he had about this experience, one by one, tapping through his feelings.  When we softened the anger a bit, I offered a statement to him, just to check in with how he was feeling. “I forgive her for taking my kids away from me.”

 

Nope. Not happenin’.

We then tried “I’m willing to consider forgiving her for taking my kids away from me.” There was much less resistance to this, and as we tapped through it, I could feel his anger really releasing.

 

We tried again. “I forgive her for taking my kids away from me.” This time, the resistance was gone and we were successful.

 

Then, we worked on forgiving his former best friend.  This took some time, as you can imagine.  As we walked all around his anger at this man, Jerry found places he could really begin to let it go.  And as he let it go, he forgave.

 

Last, we tackled his anger at himself for letting his children go.  As we released shifted it, his whole being softened, and he was at peace.

 

He had forgiven himself.

 

Several weeks later, he called me. “You won’t believe what happened!” he told me, breathless with excitement. “My daughter, Susanne, contacted me and she wants to meet!  We’re meeting next week for the first time!”

 

“You know how this happened, don’t you?” I asked him.

 

“How?” he said.

 

“You forgave.  You changed your energy.  You changed how you feel about what happened.  You raised your vibration to love and compassion instead of anger and blame.  And when you did, she responded.  She heard you.”

 

Susanne was 14 years old when she saw her daddy for the first time.  It was a tearful reinion.  That was 2003.

 

Since then, she and her two siblings all got re-connected with their dad.  Their mother also reconnected with him, and they had the first of many profound conversations.  When she welcomed Jerry back into their lives, he got to be his kids’ dad.  It was a dream he’d longed for for so many years.

Last December, I heard from Jerry.  Two of the triplets are living with him while going to college and he was sharing how challenging it was at times!  I laughed as I heard how they are living and loving one another as any normal family.

 

So… why forgive?  What’s in it for you?  You forgive because your life will show up in a whole new way when you do.  In a way you cannot even imagine right now.

 

You don’t know what’s possible when you let go of your anger and your blame.  You don’t know what’s available when you lighten your being.  You don’t know who’s waiting to meet you, to dance with you, to love you, to give to you, to share with you, to play with you, when you release that blocked energy.

 

You just don’t know. And you don’t know what you don’t know. And because the freedom and the love and the abundance and the opportunities and the joy are all in the realm of you-don’t-know-what-you-don’t-know, your job is to step out in faith and Let It Go.

 

Always.

By the way, Jerry still had to work through some issues – and we did, through the course of several months.  But his original anger and bitterness and deep shame never, ever returned.  (That’s the power of EFT, my friends.)

 

Your Action Steps:

 

1. Decide right here, right now, that you are willing to forgive.

 

2. Decide which steps you need to take to forgive, then take them. (I highly recommend the book “Radical Forgiveness,” by Colin Tipping.  This book will have you look at forgiveness in a whole new – and very beautiful – light.)  By the way, choosing to forgive doesn’t mean you have to forget.  It just means you’re going to let the past go so that you are free now.

 

3. Get help if you cannot figure out how to forgive. Get help.  Get help.  Get help.  (Did you get that? Get help. There are many good therapists who can help you, but I highly recommend you find a good EFT therapist. By doing so, you will be releasing the blocked energy in your body and it is the blocked energy that causes all of the anger, shame, guilt, fear, and other negative emotions.)

 

4. Watch and see how your life changes. It will change.  It will become unrecognizeable.  And that’s a very good thing.


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