Integrity and Authenticity … Be True to Who You Are
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest achievement.” … Ralph Waldo Emerson
The word integrity comes from the Latin root word for integrates, meaning wholeness. Integrity goes beyond speaking our truth to include taking responsibility for how we think and feel and what we do. In that sense, integrity and authenticity are joined together. It takes strength of character and integrity to make decisions based on personal conviction rather than popular opinion. With this in mind, living in integrity means you value honesty, commitment, and trustworthiness, and through your authentic actions you inspire trust and loyalty in others.
Why We Cannot “THINK” Our Way Out of Our Problems
Einstein once said, “The same mind that created the problem will never be the mind that is able to solve it.”
Try as you might, you cannot think your way out of your behavior problems. They are a product of your programmed habitual behaviors based on your perceptions of reality. In order to improve your reality, you must understand the mechanisms of its creation. As you continually try to experience the world within and around you, you are creating your own reality by the choices and actions you make.
What You See is Not in the Data.
We all experience life through our own perceptions and our interpretation of the data. Perception is your belief. When you truly believe in a perception, your subconscious mind sees it as the one and only reality, ignoring all other possibilities. This is true even if your database is skewed by old data that is not even something you believe in. Your subconscious mind will dutifully generate habitual behavior patterns that are coherent with those programmed “truths.” The problem is that most of these actions and choices we make are habitual responses to old data.
Are WE Losing Our Sense of Community and Connection With Others?
Our communities need to be safe and our children need to feel loved. It takes a community of conscious and concerned individuals to connect with others as a way of living life. I remember a time when we knew our neighbors well and we shared the joys, burdens, concerns and sorrows of everyday life. We looked out for one another and for the well-being of each other’s children as well as our own. Today our dysfunctional communities are showing up in the form of depression in our children and overwhelm in their parents.
The doorway to social consciousness depends upon our feeling interconnected. There are many different ways of being responsive to this call to action and there are different gifts each of us possess. Some of us will respond through study or conversation, others with art, theater or public office. Using the diversities of our gifts, we can interweave them to enrich our neighborhoods. Sharing them with others, sets us on the path toward building conscious caring communities. Each of us can be the catalyst or “tipping point” by which new forms of behavior can spread.
SECURITY VERSUS ADVENTURE
“You must make a decision that you are going to move on. It won’t happen automatically. You will have to rise up and say, I don’t care how hard this is, I don’t care how disappointed I am, I’m not going to let this get the best of me. I’m moving on with my life.” -Joel Olsen
There is Writing on Your Wall
Our mind is a wonderful tool for thinking, but it also has a vulnerable area known us as the inner critic. Your inner critic gets its voice from something we call the writing on our walls. This writing is from your early childhood experiences. This is true for everyone! You must remember that those who wrote on your wall have also have been programmed down through generations. The others are only able to share with you what they believe, even if they are not your truths. Therefore, there is no Shame of Blame here!
Many of our previous childhood experiences are the roots of our pain and insecurities. They often create feelings of fear, threatening our peace and happiness. Or we feel inadequate, and this social anxiety influences our relationships, quality of life, work, effectiveness and well-being.
Any emotions you had at the time of the event, including any childhood conclusions you came to, are bundled and stored with your original memory of the experience. The mind consults the writing on your walls for every single experience you have in life. The mind looks for a matching template from long ago and you respond to life habitually based on these false past messages, and often without your awareness.
How Embracing Vulnerability Became One of my Greatest Strengths on the Road to Happiness.
“Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy and creativity.”…Brené Brown
Love is vulnerability. Happiness is vulnerability. The risk of being vulnerable is the price of opening yourself to beauty and opportunity. Vulnerability became one of my greatest strengths in life; being vulnerable is not about showing the parts of you that are polished; it’s about revealing the unpolished parts you would rather keep hidden from the world.
“It’s about looking out into the world with an honest, open heart and saying, “this is me. Take me or leave me.” …. Unknown
We are all vulnerable, no matter how we much we try to hide it or avoid it. In one way or another we try to conceal our emotional sensitivity and fragility and avoid showing our weaknesses or our emotional wounds to others.
Life NOT Working for YOU? … Time to Reset!
The Destiny of humanity is always about change. We must continue to evolve, grow and improve ourselves and the world around us until we become perfectly harmonious, beautiful and powerful beings. The force of evolution will never allow us to rest. When life is not working for you, you can ignore it for periods of time; but eventually life events and situations will force us to awaken and emerge from our slumber. There does come a time to Reset!
Forgiveness in Three Easy Steps
CR: There are three major components of forgiveness. First, it helps to remember you’re dreaming that the separation from God is real and that is the cause of the problem.
One of the most profound changes in my thinking along my own path was the ultimate and profound experience of accepting the concept that the mind projects everything. Not only does it project everything is also observes its own projection from a seemingly different point of view. Then it interprets that perception as an external fact.
A Call for Changing the Way we View and Value Our World
CR: We have reached a choice point. In order to create something new, we have to let go of some things that do not work. Change or even death of something no longer useful can be painful. The capitalist system we currently have is not working.
It has created mass poverty, unprecedented wealth in the hands of a few creating inequality and systematic corruption. Some of our collective choices are damaging our Eco system. This has put our planet in peril, perhaps even putting humanities existence at risk.
Here are 7 “What If’s” to Shift to a New World!
Life is Based on what we believe. Some say life happens in cycles of 7. Perhaps a shift in our beliefs can also happen using the number 7.
When we look at the bigger picture in life it’s clear how the conditions that end one cycle can become the foundation that begins the next. It’s also clear that between the cycles is a space where neither is present. This is the moment of choice; a moment of opportunity.
Awakening and Ripening
Spring is the season for renewal, we all know that if we keep fruits and vegetables covered too long, they ferment and rot. Often, we follow this same pattern of nature, if we stay stuck in old plans, once who we are has matured and ripened, we can begin to spoil within.
