Part 1 gave you a few ideas about where to begin your journey from where you are to where you want to be—meditation, setting your intention, clearing out limiting beliefs and blocks, and discovering your life purpose.
In Part 2, you learned that you need to communicate your vision or dream and were given SMART goals to clarify what you need to say by writing them in your journal. You now need to move your idea into the world of relationships.
Part 3 asks you to write down all the things you love about your dream, as well as questions to ask yourself to bring it to fruition successfully. When you create something beautiful, it will attract love.
Part 4 is where the rubber meets the road, so continue to visualize, sit in meditation, and ask for guidance. Here is where you must claim your personal power and use it for a higher purpose. You do this by strengthening your will by following through with what is necessary to move you closer to your dream.
How do you strengthen your will?
To become empowered and master the manifestation process, you must take charge of your reality by taking action now. Don’t wait for the perfect moment—it will never come. If you miss the mark, you can always readjust later. You will run into obstacles, but you strengthen your will and personal power by finding ways to overcome them.
Measure Your Personal Power
In your journal, rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 in the following:
I control and focus my attention.
I manage my physical energy during the day.
I manage my money, finances, and resources.
I keep my word to myself and commit to my daily discipline.
I keep my word to others and say when I can’t.
I can manage my thoughts, beliefs, and reactions.
I am organized in my work and accomplish my goals.
Choose the area where your personal power is the weakest and dedicate a certain amount of time to strengthening it—a week, a month, whatever you decide. For instance, if you can’t manage your finances, talk to a financial expert.
You need the willpower to follow through to do what’s necessary to move you closer to your dream. To travel the road paved with good intentions, you need the fire.
To raise your fire, you need more energy. To have more energy, use more breath, dance, or rest. If you use too much, however, the fire will burn out.
Intention↓ goes down ↓
Energy ↑ goes up ↑ , and they meet—WILL.
To manifest your dream, you now take action on the SMART Goalsyou set earlier, which is where you put your plan in motion. Always begin with the end in mind. Step into your fear and do it anyway. What’s the worse thing that can happen? You fail, right? Big deal! You have to fail sometimes to succeed.
Take charge, and like Nike, the slogan says, “Just Do It!”
If you happen to come across an obstacle, keep moving forward—no matter what— and remind yourself of your intention. Clear each block as they come along; don’t let them build up. Ask for help, feedback, advice. Do whatever it takes, and the fear you have will be overtaken by your desire, energy, and fire.
Be willing to put it all on the line for your dream. It’s what you’ve always wanted, so go for it!
Part 5 and the final blog post in this series will tie everything up in a neat little bow for you. Stay tuned; you won’t want to miss the end piece for creating the life you want. Namaste!
To learn more details in creating your dream on purpose, contact me for a complimentary 30-Minute Discovery Session.
Part 1 gave you a few ideas about where to begin your journey from where you are to where you want to be; meditation, setting your intention, clearing out limiting beliefs and blocks, and discovering your life purpose. In Part 2, you learned that you need to communicate your vision or dream and were given SMART goals to clarify what you need to say by writing them in your journal. You now need to move your plan into the world of relationships.
What Do You Love About Your Dream?
When you are passionate about your dream, you are opening your heart to all that is possible. Since the heart is the link between energy and matter and the mind and body, it is the foundation for unifying these opposing sides. It connects your energy (spirit) and matter, as well as your mind and body, enhancing their relationships.
As with anything in life, your dreams, visions, or goals will incur challenges and hurdles to overcome, making it vital for you to remember what you love about your dream.
Write down all the things you love about your dream.
Ensure they are in alignment with your core values, inspire you, and elevate your heart. Use the list to reaffirm your passion when you encounter hardships along the way.
An important element for obtaining your dream that it benefits not only yourself but includes others. In what ways does it serve other people? Are you helping, being of service—or is your vision all about you and what you want? This is the heart of relationships—emphasizing your service to others.
As a result of service to others, new relationships will be created that will help you attain your dream. You’ve communicated your needs, received support for them, and now the right connections will be formed. When you live in heart consciousness, the network of friends, family, co-workers, and others you’ve established will help you find the right relationships necessary for the manifestation of your dream.
Questions to ask yourself if you want to bring your dream to fruition successfully:
Who do I know? Who do I want to know?
How can I connect with more people? How can I make deeper connections?
Who knows me? Who should know me?
Who are my ideal clients or customers? What are their needs, wants, and desires?
Who would benefit from being connected to my dreams? How would my goal serve them?
Is what you are creating filled with beauty and love?
Beauty opens our hearts to love and connects heaven and earth, just as it is between mind and body. The act of creating something of beauty is a way of bringing good into the world. Infused with optimism, it says simply: Life is worthwhile. The effort to create enduring beauty is not dependent on style but truth. Beauty is resilient; it is life-affirming, it gives back to create more life.
Take time to add beauty to your creation—it will attract love—and what is truly loved becomes beautiful and is eternal.
Part 4 shares how your personal will is strengthened, plans your map to success, and handles all the challenges and obstacles to overcome them.
To learn more details in creating your dream on purpose, contact me for a complimentary 30-Minute Discovery Session.
Part 1 gave you a few ideas about where to begin your journey from where you are to where you want to be. After you have meditated, set your intention, cleared out any limiting beliefs(if you’re not sure how to, I can help), and discovered your life purpose, you now need to communicate it to others.
Telling Your Story
The words you choose when communicating your vision are vital to make it materialize. When you tell your story to others with enthusiasm, it may inspire them to help you achieve your dream by offering support or advice. Doing this gives you the necessary feedback to hone your vision to clarify what you want precisely.
What do you most want others to know about your vision, and why?
How do you want people to feel after you’ve told them about your vision?
What do you fear most about the response you receive from them? What is the best feedback you could hear?
Do you want others to help you after you tell them about your dream? How would you ask them?
Setting SMART Goals
SMART is an acronym used to set your goals, dreams, or visions in a measurable and timely manner so you can track if you’re on course to achieve them. What does SMART stand for?
S—SPECIFIC: What do you want to accomplish? Why is it important to you? What actions will you take? When will this be accomplished? Who, if anyone, needs to be involved?
M—MEASURABLE: How much (money, time, etc.)? How can you measure your progress? How will you know when you’ve accomplished it?
A—ATTAINABLE: Is your dream achievable? Do you have the necessary skills, talent, time, or other resources required?
R—REALISTIC: Is your vision meaningful and in line with the direction you are headed in life? Is it applicable to what you are working to achieve?
T—TIME-BOUND: Is there a specific deadline for you to complete your dream or vision?
Be clear about your vision by listing five goals essential for its completion. Write them down in your journal as a proclamation such as, “I will do whatever it takes to…” Next, place the order for completion timewise. Notice if one needs to be completed before moving on to another.
Once you know what it will take to create your vision, you now need to communicate it to bring it into form. If you need help with it, ASK! If you don’t ask, the answer is always NO! When you talk about your goals, visions, or dreams, they are at the forefront of your mind, and you place your attention on them.
Talking, sharing, speaking, dreaming all bring attention to whatever it is you’re creating. Writing affirmations and then sharing them with others keeps the focus on them and creates enthusiasm with others who may help catapult you in manifesting them.
Remember one thing—don’t die with the dream still inside you.
After setting your goals and communicating them to others, you now have the tools to enhance those relationships and enrich them. Part 3 focuses on the steps you need to take to fulfill your heart’s desires.
Let’s connect on Facebook —you’ll find more bits of wisdom, inspiration, and events.
Have you ever woken up and felt as if you were going through the motions of life—just existing and not living it to the fullest? I have, and I realized I was being dragged and not directing my life the want I wanted it to go.
What did I do?
First, I knew I needed help with several things, like being held accountable, what steps to take first, and goal-setting. It was as if I were starting AA all over again. And in theory, I was. The 12-Steps of AA held me accountable, had the correct order steps, and reached the goals I set when met.
Simple, but not easy. Just like life.
Here are a few actions you can take to begin the journey of life, moving from the caboose of your train—where life drags you—to the engine—where you have the power to redirect your life.
The first and most vital action to take is to quiet your mind. Whether you do that through meditation, a walk-in nature, or quietly just sitting, it is essential because you are opening your consciousness by being present. When you live in the now, you create an opening for a stream of consciousness to flow in, leading to aligning with your higher purpose.
Reflect upon one question each morning, such as, “What is important for me to notice today?”
Next, set a daily intention for yourself, focusing on exactly where you want to be in life. You will soon see your life bending and stretching around it.
Examine your limiting beliefs and then clear them. They are various methods for ridding yourself of them, but one excellent way is through The BeliefCloset Process. (The BeliefCloset Process will be the topic of a later post.
After eliminating any beliefs that no longer serve you, you want to discover your life purpose. There are various means to accomplish this, and the following are just several examples:
Ask yourself, “What do I love to do?” Whatever it is, it should feel comfortable or natural for you. It should feel as if you are swimming downstream, not like a salmon’s upstream journey.
Look back in your past and see what has resonated with your inner world, that part of you that connects with your higher self. Identify those instances where you truly felt alive and living “on purpose.”
See if you can recognize a pattern of qualities from the incidents you chose, which you love to articulate.
Identify your particular life purpose category. Does it have to do with teaching, supporting others, defending, building, leading, nature, or some other type?
Write down what your ideal life would look like using a vision board or some other mechanism to relay your vision.
Once you’ve done these steps, you must then communicate your vision. That will begin Part 2 of this series.
“LIFE PURPOSE: Your purpose is not what you do to bring home a paycheck. Your purpose is what you were put on this earth to do with such intensity and passion that it becomes a SPIRITUAL CALLING.”
SIMPLES STEPS TO REDUCE STRESS AND ANXIETY IN YOUR LIFE
What is mindfulness? And what does it mean to you?
Mindfulness is the act of being here now. It is focusing your attention on what you are doing and your surroundings. Your mind is not dredging up memories of the past or in the future, “creating fantasies that haven’t happened yet.” It is living in thepresent moment.
John Cabot-Zinn defines mindfulness as:
Paying attention ‘on purpose’
Rooted in the present moment
Non-judgmentally
Let’s break this down:
On Purpose: Mindfulness involves the conscious and deliberate direction of your attention. So, another way of saying “on purpose” is “consciously.” We are living more consciously, more awake when we pay attention in this way.
In The Present Moment: Mindful attention is wholly engaged in the present moment experience. We let go of tension caused by wanting things to be different from what they are, and we accept the present moment as it is.
Non-Judgmentally: When practicing mindfulness, we aren’t trying to stop or control our thoughts. We pay attention to our experiences as they are without labeling or judging them in any way.
WHAT DOES LIVING IN THE PRESENT EVEN MEAN?
Let’s take an example. Have you ever gotten in your car to go somewhere, and when you arrived, realized you don’t remember how you got there? Or, you walk into another room or upstairs to get something, but once you got there, you forgot what it is you wanted?
MOST OF US HAVE!
These are typical examples of mindlessness—another term for being on auto-pilot or programming, where we’re not fully conscious of our actions.
We lose ourselves in auto-pilot most of the day. Every day, we’re programmed to live in our heads rather than through our experiences.
One point I stress in my yoga classes is to let go of thinking about how a pose should look and begin to experience how it feels. Noting what a yoga pose feels like allows you to go within for the experience instead of looking outward and enables you to be in the present moment.
When you live in the past, you don’t have enough presence; you are loaded down with too much of your history: guilt, regret, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and non-forgiveness.
At the same time, living too much in the future weighs you down with unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry, and all forms of fear.
Whether you spend your time living in the past or the future, you’re a spectator in the stands watching those who live in the present moment on the field, playing the game we call life full-on!
Ideally, you want to be in the now when you focus on the present moment, so you participate instead of watching and cheering.
That’s great, but where do you even start?
If you don’t know where to begin, here are six mindfulness exercises that are 1-minute or less you can do:
Before you sit down to eat a meal
In the shower
When you wake up in the morning
Sitting in your car just before you walk into work
Sitting at a traffic light
Standing in line anywhere
Anytime you feel you need it, at home or work
1. Count your breaths. As you inhale, silently think 1, exhale 2, Inhale 3, exhale 4, all the way to 10. Repeat three times.
2. Yawn and stretch for 10 seconds every hour. Fake a yawn to trigger a real one, and say “ahh” as you exhale. Notice that your thoughts are interrupted, and you are brought into the present moment. Stretch your arms slowly for 10 seconds, noticing if there’s any tension or tightness in your body. Bring “ease” to the spot without judgment. Take another 20 seconds to see what you feel and then return to what you were doing.
3. Stroke your hands. Lower or close your eyes. Take the index finger of your right hand and slowly move it up and down the outside of your left fingers. Once you have mindfully stroked your left hand, change your index fingers and left your left one stroke the edges of the fingers on your right hand.
4. Do a short body scan. Rest your attention on different body parts. Start at the top of your head and move toward your toes. Noticing each one, focus your attention there and consciously relax that part of you. You should be able to scan your scalp, eyes, cheeks, mouth, jaw, neck, shoulders, chest, arms, belly, legs, and feet in a minute.
5. Mindfully eat a raisin (or piece of chocolate). Take a raisin or a chocolate piece and mindfully eat it. Slow down, sense it, savor it, and smile between bites. Purposely slow down. Use all your senses to see it, touch it, smell it, and sense it. Then gently pop it into your mouth and really savor it. Savor its texture, its taste, how it feels in your mouth. Let it linger and then swallow it. After you have swallowed it, let your lips turn up slightly and smile. Do the same thing for each raisin you eat or bite you take.
6.Mindful breathing for one minute. Lower your eyes and notice your breath. Is it going in and out of your nostrils, or do you feel the rise and fall of your chest and stomach? Place your hand on your stomach to feel the rise and fall of it with each breath you take. Focus on your breath and feel the movement of your belly. If your mind wanders, bring your attention back to your breath.
Just like weightlifting builds muscle if you’re disciplined and have a consistent practice, mindfulness meditation, when practiced, increases the amount of time you spend living in the present moment.
SO ….wouldn’t NOW be a good time to start your mindfulness practice?
