Rise Above All Odds

When you see beyond the impossible, the way to achieve your destiny clearly surfaces

We hear things such as someone is on a path of self-destruction or acts as his own worst enemy. Rarely do we hear accolades of emotional rebirth or those rising from adversity or overcoming obstacles. We need to turn our attention and focus to different routes of growth and methods of self-evolution.

As social beings, we adapt to our environment. In doing so, we select the best part of ourselves to demonstrate our competency to the world as a productive member of society. Perhaps we adopt a likeable laugh or a pleasant appearance to fit in with our immediate social strata. Or, sometimes we may change the language we use to fit in with smaller groups of people who can easily relate to the colloquialism. Undoubtedly, aware of our socio-structions or not, we all mould ourselves into an acceptable façade for the approval of
our society at large. While some may consider this malleability as selling out or even as disingenuous on it's face, it remains something we rely on, for our survival in a world where adaptation ensures survivability.

Take a look within yourself. In what ways do you put your finest qualities together to create something even greater of yourself ? In what ways do you make the most of your lesser characteristics and work with your strengths to present to the world a surprising, revitalised you?

When we build ourselves and our lives using affirmative elements, we can bask in the shining accomplishment of a newly created self, standing tall in the world and strong in foundation. Move forward with only the best ingredients of thought and action you can gather and your constructive efforts will reward you.

Like it or not, we don’t go through life alone. We may think we do, but every day our interactions with others balance our sense of self with the rest of the world around us. Sometimes our partners help us to costruct something far larger than the relationship at hand.

Together, we can work towards common goals and build even greater contribution to the world. Two heads are better than one, but any size group, working in unison holding similar visions with focus and balance can produce exponential and extraordinary results.

Often, we are reminded to read between the lines when looking for a situational meaning not evident on its surface. The same holds true in inter-structing your life. You may perceive that your gifts and talents are unrelated and when first recognising your abilities you cannot imagine how they would interact with other characteristics you possess, but step back and see how interstruction can bring about a more fulfilling expression of your spirit.

At first glance, you may not envision a practical use for your sense of artistic taste, but when coupled with your love of cooking and a solid business sense, you may create a fantastic restaurant visited by many patrons who appreciate how you've assimilated your flair. Turn your attitudes away from negating your delicious eclectic nature and treat the world to your unique panache!

Each one of us faces the challenges of impasses. Certain situations, or even emotional or attitudinal roadblocks attempt to prevent us from our greater good. However, when you see beyond the impossible, the way to achieve your destiny clearly surfaces and you reach the other side of the river of your discontent with a new mobility of spirit. Visualise what lies ahead of you and focus on the other side of the issues and be willing to go beyond what you know and transcend into the champion you were born to be.

The Void That's Within

Begin the journey towards love, in order to fill your internal void

Emptiness makes you feel as if you are hollow on the inside. I recently asked a friend, “how are you feeling?” and he replied, “i feel like i am rattling around over the face of the earth.” This response overflows with a feeling of being lost and alone or the ‘empty’ feeling.

It speaks of experiencing yourself as having no sense of belonging or purpose. If you ask yourself the question: “how am i feeling right now?” and the answer is “empty” or “numb,” for no apparent reason, it is a sure sign of being disconnected from yourself or blocking off from your own feelings. This suggests that you are either repressing deep pain or fear or maybe you have experienced a pattern of being neglected, probably from an early age. I have often facilitated quiet meditations with people to help them to make contact with their deep inner core and often they will say “I feel nothing.” Neglect or trauma in our past can make us hide away our precious souls that we don’t even know how to begin to connect with our sacred inner selves. Being separate from yourself is the ultimate loneliness. We are neglected as children if our needs and wants are continually not heard and we are left to our own devices.

One of the most important self development processes is deficient in this type of upbringing: that of validation. The journey of understanding, trusting and responding to your feelings, begins when your early caretakers regard and direct your myriad of emotions in a loving way. This validation process empowers you to makes sense of your unique needs, wants and responses to the world and in this way you begin the journey of knowing who you really are on the inside. As an adult we self validate ourselves by continually confirming who we are through our words, actions and life decisions. We also self validate by finally accepting ourselves with all our shortcomings.

Don’t keep running away from yourself. Problems will arise if you simply focus on filling the void. We devour volumes of self-help books or study psychology. We even take the empty feeling literally, as being hunger and we binge on food, cigarettes, take drugs and generally put whatever we can into our mouths.

Keeping yourself busy is another way to dull the experience of yourself. Unfortunately, at the end of every busy patch there’s always a lull and then ‘empty’ returns with a sick familiarity. It must be said that it is invigorating and vital to do exciting things, you just need to locate your intentions. If you are doing all because of a need to run away from yourself it is an impossible task. The more lasting solution to filling the void is to begin to have a relationship with yourself that is meaningful and enjoyable enough to sustain you through the empty moments. It is important to consider how social conditioning has made an impact on your direction and choices in your life. For instance, we have been taught that being selfish is wrong and that taking care of others and sacrificing our own wants and needs is real giving.

On top of this our ego driven model of living then coaches us to believe that we can only be fulfilled if we are young, attractive, thin and have loads of all the right things. The end result is that we feed our self esteem from the outside first. In other words we focus on others needs and on what others think or say about us; we strive to have the most stylish career, the most chic clothes, the most envied relationship, the apartment with all the trimmings and so on.

This can be termed the weak ego. Believing that we will find the answer to self-fulfillment and happiness from acquiring more or doing more. Social conditioning has brought us up in a way that actually diminishes real selfknowledge and grounded self-esteem. Your search for happiness is really your yearning for your own self.

The biggest test of how you really value yourself is when you imagine being stripped of everything and then ask the question: can i still respect, accept, trust and nurture myself ? Can you feel connected to your beautiful life force within which feels solid and fluid at the same time. This takes enormous courage. Be still with yourself and allow yourself to contemplate who you really are, on the inside. Learn to meditate or pray; Begin a validation journal and start to record thoughts and feelings once a day.

Practice focusing on the here and now as often as you can. Remind yourself that you really only have this moment. Stop worrying about the future and rehashing the past. Make a commitment to yourself to protect and treasure your life force energy.

Open yourself to love by softening your heart. Recognise the beauty and wonder in the world and in others. The most healing way to fill your internal void is to begin the journey towards love.

Don't Feel Guilty

God wants to elevate you out of your guilt-induced self-blame and help you to become whole

The experience of guilt is an enormous burden. People actually feel guilty for feeling guilty. Often, those in the religious community are prone to complain about guilt. Unfortunately, people may doubt their salvation, feel like God has abandoned them and immerse themselves in obsessing over minor infractions. It is my opinion that we need to kick out any God that would make us feel small. A loving God cherishes His children, forgives them and elevates them in His eyes. We are His kings and queens, and we need to stand tall in His presence.

Real guilt can be defined as missing the mark. We fall short of our convictions and need to make amends. We do this by accepting the forgiveness that is already our inheritance, forgiving ourselves for being less than perfect and reconciling with those we have hurt and disappointed. An interesting example of real guilt is when we fail to live up to our capacity. We may have been sitting on a goal or dream and put it off because we are too lazy or afraid to act on it. Addressing our true guilt makes us feel complete. We restore our integrity and bring healing to our significant relationships.

Those who have experienced negative parenting may find the concept of forgiveness perplexing. If one’s parents were punitive, critical and unloving, it makes it more difficult for people to grasp the concept of a loving, forgiving God. Intellectually, they may understand forgiveness, but emotionally they may remain immobilised with self-blame. God does not want His children to victim-posture. We can’t be ambassadors of the good news if we are stuck in a sinkhole. Accepting forgiveness is our right and responsibility. Some may need help in processing this truth —God is patient.

It is important to differentiate real guilt from false guilt. Much of the guilt we experience is false. It has nothing to do with falling short of our convictions. I define false guilt as allowing other people to have power over us. Due to inadequate parenting, many of us learn to give our power away. As children, we become overly-compliant, passive-aggressive and we learn that it is in our best interest to thwart our anger. If we were raised in dysfunctional families, there was generally no dialogue or exploration of feelings at home. It is important to understand that what happened was never our fault.

When people tell me that they feel guilty, the problem usually involves false guilt over core childhood issues such as feelings of abandonment, acting overly-responsible, childhood abuse, and lack of confidence. False guilt is actually a form of disguised resentment. If others over-control our lives, we resent the intrusion, but find false guilt easier to accept than anger.

Accept Life as it Comes

If you take life as it is, you will understand your frustrations, grow from them and enjoy life’s abundance

Those living on the highest levels of life have learned to accept life on its own terms. There are some realities about life that we must accept. This is the key to living joyfully in communion with the heavenly while abiding here on earth. Life, no matter how we choose to look at it, is a challenge. It is the beginning of a struggle that continues until we breathe our last breath. Life is something that we did not request. None of us asked to be born. Neither did we ask to be poor, or black, tall or short. We did not ask to be a part of one family as opposed to another.

Life is full of risks. There is a certain element of risk taking that is inherent in every venture we undertake; whether it is in business, or in marriage, in a profession or in athletics. We never have complete security within ourselves. For we know that every moment we live, our lives are in constant danger. A stray bullet may hit us, a car emerging out of nowhere may crush us, and a slip of the foot may result in our death. So life is unpredictable.

Identify and move from the limiting and conflicting, “either/or,” “black or white,” “all or nothing”, illusory perception of life to an attitude that is open to all aspects of reality. We do this by accepting life on its own terms — accepting that pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness are all a natural part of the human experience.

Fighting against life’s realities and adopting a stance of negativism only creates unnecessary pain and difficulty in your life. Accepting life allows you to understand your frustrations, grow from them and experience life’s abundance.

You have heard people who make comments such as “I go with the flow.” What they are saying is this: I accept in life what i cannot change. I deal with it as it comes within the framework of my own knowledge and capabilities and spirit. When inner negatives are dissolved, our outer life will be more harmonious and fulfilled. Understanding life helps you make the unconscious conscious; to see your misguided beliefs and negativity clearly, to understand their roots and causes, and most importantly — to transform them.

A complete path, it offers a practical, rational, honest, and above all, gentle and self-accepting way to move from an attitude of you versus the world to one of you and the world; from you versus life to you and life.

Fundamental to accepting life is to give recognition to the supreme life-giver. Whenever we praise God or give God recognition and acknowledgement, it is for life.

Whenever we give God a spiritual applaud or standing ovation, it is for life. God has given us life, something so tremendous, potent, and marvelous that no scholar has ever been smart enough to detail its composition or understand from where it derives its sustaining energy. Life is a force so complex that it cannot be duplicated. And, most amazing and thrilling of all, He has given us minds! It is through our minds, the thoughts we think with it, and the impressions we store in it, that we are conscious of living.

In short, your life becomes just what your mind makes it for you and just what it tells you life is. Few people go deep enough within their soul to realise in its entire fullness, breadth and scope the amazing gift of life that enables them to pursue a lifetime of accomplishment. What a marvelous gift. What power!

God has endowed us with the power to think, to believe, to create, to imagine, to choose, to feel, to aspire. Having a wonderful sense of appreciation puts all our petty complaints and frustrations, irritants and negativity into perspective. You live on a realm beyond grudges, ingratitude, selfishness and take-forgrantedness. You enjoy and value each moment and are determined to get the best out of every second.

Growing In Love

In relationships, we learn as we go and aspire naturally towards a certain perfection

In order to feel the effects of our actions, we often associate feelings together that are better left separate. We tend to act, sometimes in enabling ways, out of the goodness of our hearts; nonetheless not really serving in the correct or optimal manner the needs of both parties in a relationship.

The emotion of love often will become mixed with other feelings such as guilt, obligation, respect and loyalty. What we say we are doing in love sometimes turns into a continuation of a lessthan-optimal exchange of energies. This effectively roots us in lower relationships, where expectations are not met.

When you are engaged in such an exchange, it is often extremely difficult to see the true dynamics of the relationship because of personal investment of emotions and personalities. Do you notice that you come to a point in these relationships beyond which you cannot pass?

Would you accept the possibility that you already have the answers to these seeming dilemmas within you, and that you are playing out the experience? Often, the answer comes from yourself, and your desire to outwardly manifest solutions to the dramas unfolding within you to bring to wholeness and completeness. It is your courage to love yourself enough to command the blessings that are your due. The individual that seeks true healing will always manifest the healer, in manifold ways. The finger of God is the ultimate decision that you make in order to refine and define the boundaries that are the posts of your comfort zone. Sometimes, the most loving word that you can say to another
is ‘no.’

For, in stating what is and is not allowable for you, sets the conditions of what you allow into your life. It is separating love from guilt and fear, and treating each in their own due regard. If you were in an enabling relationship where, for the intense love you feel for another you allow an unhealthy relationship to continue, it may indeed be most healthy by saying ‘no’ to the continuation of allowing the other person to transgress your boundaries.

If you can look at it as loving that other person in the highest possible way, you are actually helping them more by setting them free from specific interactions with you. And you know that the interactions in life do not change unless you change them, for you are consciously altering your position and acting on your increased perception of where the energies in a relationship are really going. Do you sabotage yourself in relationships, capitulating to an expectation that you have in your partner that may or may not come to pass? Do you expect them to someday change or to become what you desire in the best for them, meanwhile sacrificing and sabotaging your joy in the now? Do you have a dread of commitment to your partner, for fear you may be tied down or obligated? Have you attached to your fervent love of your partner the feelings of guilt and obligation, obscuring the beauty you saw in that person in the first place?

We learn through our experiences. In relationships, we engage in an exchange of emotions, feelings, and actions that pass through the nexus of our evolution’s snapshot in time. We learn as we go, and aspire naturally towards a certain perfection, made the more holy by a spiritual commitment to perceive the higher truths of our existence.

Opening such a foray into truth, swaddled in the folds of the search for God in love, wisdom and the will, we will obtain levels of truth that are sometimes unsettling, often surprising, and definitely unpredictable. If you engage in such a path, you will learn discernment where it applies most; within yourself. Sometimes painfully and sometimes repeatedly, these lessons of life come as surely as the tide and are made ever more so intense according to your desire to aspire.

In relationships, those challenge points you come to are set up by you, for you. It is in the claiming and stating of your will, that the terms of your relationships are set. It is in the constancy of the maintenance of your will that the relationship gains continuity according to your desires. It is also in the open heart and the open mind that you allow your will to shift and grow with new information that inevitably comes about through the living of life.

How much sweeter it is to have a clear mind and a clear heart; not harnessed to the millstone of guilt, obligation, or fear. Can you say at this time that you are clear in your relationships? Are there some illusions within the body of your relationships that are ready for dispelling and clarity? The illusion you clear, you do for yourself, and the effect it has on your partner is a reflection of the harmlessness, love and clarity you put into it.