Our friendships provide such valuable opportunities for us to learn, to grow, to love, to share and to express ourselves with others.  I remember the time I first heard the phrase that friends come into your life for a ‘reason, season or a lifetime’ and the saying has stuck with me ever since – this week I’d like to share a short article about friendships, titled Reason, Season or Lifetime, written by an unknown author – I hope you enjoy it.
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Whether it is appreciating the beauty of the sun rising in the morning, admiring the innocence of a newborn child, acknowledging the joy of spending quality time with friends or the intimacy of making love to your partner – pleasure in it’s many forms is one of the most important things for us to respect and cultivate in our lives.

Whenever we hold a pleasurable thought in our mind we create a biochemical reaction in our body, which releases nitric oxide from the lining of our blood vessels. As the level of nitric oxide in our blood stream gradually rises, natural chemicals beta-endorphin and serotonin are released, in turn causing our muscles to relax and blood to flow to all our internal organs. This chain reaction is extremely good for our health because these feel good chemicals counter act the negative effect of illness inducing stress hormones.

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Love is the energy of all creation and we came into the world positively filled with it. The essence of who we are is love, and us such we were all born with an innate ability to experience unconditional love within us and around us. As children however, many of us actually unlearned how to love others and ourselves. We modeled the way our parents, caregivers, teachers and others around us expressed or in most cases, suppressed love.

Right back since 50BC, when the myth of Narcissus was written, there is evidence of our society holding the false belief that self-love is shameful or wrong. Many of us adopted this belief in order to fit in and belong. We thought that insulating our love would somehow protect it and keep us safe. But, doing this has the opposite effect. Instead of protecting our love, we contracted it and restricted it. We blocked the natural flow of our inner source of healing, of joy and delight.

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Whether it is the start of a new year, the change of a season, a move from one house to another, becoming a parent or changing careers, there is much power in new beginnings.  A chance to reinvent ourselves and step into a more expanded version of who we really want to be, what we want to do and the things and people we’d like to surround ourselves with.   But we don’t need to wait for a significant event, change in circumstances or new lunar cycle to turn a new page.  We can start our lives over on any day, in any moment.  New beginnings start first with our imagination, followed by the setting of an intention, then the commitment to take action and make it so.

To access our imagination it can be helpful to begin by letting go of what was, so that we can turn our focus to what we would like to experience instead.  By releasing ourselves from resentments, past mistakes, fear, hurt, sadness, guilt and disappointment, we are better able to let go of anything that we no longer wish to carry.  This permits our attention the opportunity to rest on what we want to experience now, in this moment, from where we can then move forward with renewed awareness and the expansive feeling of a fresh start.

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Under the spotlight of Christmas it can feel like both our hopes and despairs get mixed together and magnified.  While festivities help to keep us distracted and our spirits running high, there can be underlying stress due to the financial pressure of presents and parties, disagreements over family obligations and disappointment of unmet expectations. After the New Year bells have rung and it’s time for the decorations to come down our most deeply resisted emotions often bubble to the surface, hence the January blues!

Many people experience a sense of sadness with the anti-climax of the fun and games ending after Christmas.  The come down is compounded by the fact that friends and family have gone, our purse is empty, we’ve gone up a dress size and our body feels tired and lethargic.  We can beat ourselves up by creating a list of things we should have done differently like ‘I should have done hand made-cards, I should have behaved differently at the office party, I should bought cheaper/more expensive presents, I should not have eaten so many chocolates’.  This can make people feel guilty and depressed resulting in mood-swings and irritability.  We then experience a desire to shift the blame (and unwanted emotion) onto others, so there is the tendency to take things out on partners, kids, the dog – anyone around!
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As we move into January many of us start making resolutions for the New Year ahead, but only a very small percentage of them are ever kept.  This is because resolutions are often made based on things we think we should do, rather than from our heartfelt desires.  Resolutions tend to be fuelled with negative energy.  We load them up with guilt, disappointment and fear, then use them to beat ourselves up about all the things we feel we’ve failed at or should have done better with.  Approaching the start of a new year in this way feels depressing and draining – a recipe guaranteed to cook up more of the same!  No wonder people find themselves year after year setting identical resolutions to the ones they failed to keep several years in succession.
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Vision boards have transformed the lives of celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Oprah Winfrey – and they have the power to transform your life too. They are a modern manifestation method combining concepts taken from creative hobbies like scrapbooking with motivational mind-mapping and brand development techniques used by marketeers. A vision board is quite literally a collage of pictures, phrases, poems and quotes visually represent what you would like to experience more of in your life. An increasing number of Hollywood celebrities, Olympic athletes, television personalities and top motivational speakers have started to share how vision boards help sustain their success. Vision Boards are fast being recognised as more than just a bit of creative fun, and credited by leaders of our time a powerful tool for transformation. From Barack Obama’s Campaign Manager to Olympian Rueben Gonzalez vision boards are helping millions of people worldwide to manifest their dreams.

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Expressing gratitude and acknowledging the positive things in our lives expands our energy, enables us to appreciate the blessings we have and helps us to attract more of them.   It also helps us connect with our inner guidance and tap in to our creativity.  But being thankful for the good things in life is something we can so easily forget to do, especially whenever our focus gets stuck on what’s going wrong, rather than appreciating what’s going right.  It is so easy to get caught up in daily struggles and forget the countless blessings all around us.  I’ve always loved the concept of the American Thanksgiving festival, traditionally celebrated every November to give thanks for the autumn harvest, now used to express gratitude in general.  Families and friends gather together to take time out from their busy lives and give thanks for all the wonder they experience, including the love they share with each other.

When was the last time you paused for a moment to smile and behold the beauty in your life?

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Do you find yourself saying that you would like to try meditation, take a yoga class, go for a walk after lunch, but that you’re just too busy?  The most common block to having a spiritual practice is busy-ness.  We women who do too much try multitasking so many things each day that we end up prioritising, consciously or subconsciously, all of them as being more important than ourselves.  We put  our to do lists before any time devoted to making contact with the place within us that is true and real.  But, when we finally take time out to connect with our inner guidance, we enter into the bliss of unlimited unconditional love, peace and creativity, which infinitely improves our experience of the world and we once again begin to remember how wonderful we really are. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever found yourself asking Who am I? Where am I? Why am I where I am? or What am I doing here? Modern day spiritual messenger, Neale Donald Walsh claims that these are the four fundamental life questions we most commonly ask and yet paradoxically many people go their whole lives never asking, much less answering them.

In our preoccupation with the humdrum of life, accumulation of material possessions, moving up the career ladder, settling with a partner, having children, getting a car, buying a house, getting a better job, buying a better car, moving to a bigger house… it is easy to lose awareness of what life is all about. Read the rest of this entry »