|
Your Life and a Pot of Boiling Water
It is dinner time and you’re hungry for pasta, so you throw a pack of spaghetti into a pot of water. Except you don’t boil the water first, in fact, you don’t boil the water at all. Ten minutes go by and you’re wondering why all you’ve got is soggy spaghetti. Do you ever feel like you’ve served up is a plate of soggy spaghetti in your life? Am I joking? The analogy is actually closer than you think. Both you and the pasta live in a vibrational universe. Vibration is where the game is at my friend. To be cooked, your pasta needs to align with the vibe of boiling water. That vibe is the heat it takes to cook pasta; hot water molecules moving (vibrating) a lot faster than cold ones. That’s the vibe that creates cooked spaghetti. While the vibe that brings cooked pasta to life (manifests it) is expressed through heat energy, the vibe of your broader life experience is generated from your thoughts and revealed through your feelings. Both the pasta and your thoughts can be hot or cold, positive or negative, and a wide range in between. Your feelings tell you whether the vibe you are choosing is hot or cold. A hot vibe signals that your thoughts are in alignment with your broader good and your soul’s desire. A cold vibe is letting you know that you are out of sync with your own best life. There is a specific vibe to being joyful, grateful, excited, in love, healthy, wealthy and all the yummy experiences that you desire. Likewise, the experiences you don’t desire have a specific vibe too. How can you translate this attraction concept into everyday living? If you are going about your days in cold emotional water, just be aware that you are not going to cook up the kind of life that you want. So it really pays to engage in internal, spiritual work – to boil the water of your life. Doing that comes down to one thing: alignment. What you are seeking to align is the vibe you are experiencing right now, in this moment, with the vibration of what you want. Put another way, you want to feel right now the way you will feel when your desire is realized. You want to feel right now the way you’ll feel when you are experiencing the joy, health, love, wealth, etc. that you want to experience. When you find and stay in that groove, you are attracting what you want and its manifestation is a certainty. Alignment is about finding that feeling place that matches the life you want. That means feel that life right now, even if you are using your imagination to create the thoughts that match that feeling instead of allowing your physical senses to dictate what you think. Does that seem like a shell game? Again, it’s a vibrational universe. You get what you vibrate. Your mind can’t tell the difference between thoughts that match your current physical experience (what we usually call “reality”) or the equally real vibrational reality that you can create with your imagination. Wherever the thoughts are coming from, they set up the vibration that determines what you will attract… and you get to choose what that is going to be. The idea that the “real” reality is that available through your physical senses is a preconception, a belief system that can be very limiting to your attraction abilities. You have a sixth sense which is the broader knowing of your soul. You experience this sense through the phenomenon of your feelings, intuition, and even what healers may experience as “seeing” energy. So give yourself permission to turn on the power of choosing your thoughts and using your imagination to attract what you want. It’s that simple – align your vibe FIRST and you’ll attract what you want. First means first! That way as you act, the vibe you are attracting with is drawing to you what you want. If you move into action while your dominant vibe is focused on what you don’t want, you are applying energy to attracting what you don’t want. That means that your key work is to get aligned before acting, so that your actions are endowed with the inspiration and power of that alignment. Bon appétit.
|
||
Julio Blanco wants to see you deliberately create your own experience today and every day hereafter. As the founder of Envision Lifeworks, he inspires and empowers clients to choose joy in life and experience the thrill of creating it as they learn to play with the Law of Attraction.A contributing author to the best-selling Overcomers, Inc., Julio can be found enjoying the great outdoors in his beloved Colorado and playing with his kids. Catch up with Julio on Facebook and Twitter! The greatest compliment you can give me is to forward this eZine to others who will enjoy and benefit from it as well. My sincere thanks for spreading the good word! |
||
Archive for May 2010
I just watched the movie Tortilla Soup again, and if you haven’t seen it, it truly is a feast for your eyes, as well as your soul. It is a feel good movie. Carmen, one of the daughters, asks a friend, “Do you know why we clink wine glasses when we are sharing a glass of wine? It is so the experience nourishes all of our senses.” First, there is the sight of a red (or white) liquid poured into a glass, there is the smell that is distinct for each wine, there is the feel of the wine glass in your hand and the taste of it on the tongue. And the clink is for the sound of a great moment shared.
So here are some of my favorite things in the kitchen.
SIGHT: I love the look of fresh vegetables and fruit piled high on my kitchen counter right after I come back from the grocery store. I love the sights of the farmer’s markets with fresh everything laid out for the eyes to take in. I love the look of fresh tomatoes sliced on a good bread with basil and melted fresh mozzarella. (Is anyone hungry yet?)
SOUND: I do like the dripping sound of coffee brewing, the sound the knife makes when chopping vegetables on a cutting board, and the sizzle of bacon frying in a pan. Oh, and the sound of laughter and the clink of wine glasses toasting the moment.
SMELL: I have to say that although the smell of coffee is amazing, I would say the smell of fresh basil, garlic and lemon all mixed into an amazing stir fry is my favorite.
TASTE: This is a toss up between the before mentioned stir fry and a great piece of dark chocolate followed by a swallow of great red wine.
TOUCH: I like the feel of fresh vegetables beneath my hand as I chop them for dinner. And I love the feel of my hot tea mug in my hands as I curl up for a morning meditation.
So, did this get the wheels in your head spinning or is just your stomach growling?
In this next week, spend time with a friend or your family and run through the senses and find your favorite images around food. I can guarantee that you will feel nourished by the experience, and my guess is that the food you eat will be a little more nutritious too.
Consider emailing me with your favorites in the kitchen. I will compile them and make them available to all of you for your eating pleasure!
You’ve Been Called to Greatness – Have you answered?
As I have experienced my own challenges and growing pains – I seek to gain a greater awareness about the work that I am doing and how I can best serve others. Tuning into my deepest hearts desires and “feeling” that pull to do and be more I’ve asked the question – am I really being called to greatness? Knowing that the answer can only come from a deep place within, the response is always a resounding YES!
In this realization of my own call to greatness, I know that who I serve are those exact same people. Those people – like you – who have been called to greatness; to participate in service to humanity, contribution, healing, consciousness, and evolution of the human spirit.
Recognizing that you have been called, or “tapped” as some would say is the first step into your greatness. Many of the magnificent people I work with and come across are not able to fully see their own greatness. At times they seek outside approval – needing others to validate their ability before they have internally accepted it. It’s time that you make the decision, that yes indeed – YOU have been called to greatness.
Knowing that you have been called upon to serve humanity and making a commitment to that calling is the second step into your greatness. This means losing the doubt that you’ve made this up in your head, that you aren’t good enough, that you’ll never make it, or this route is too painful to endure. Whatever it is, let go of the head trash by allowing your greatness to shine through.
Next, let go of comparison to others – their journeys, their path, and where everyone else is in this moment compared to you. Their paths and journeys are not relevant to your own. Seek what you can learn from others, but do not let others successes or failures become a measure of your own greatness.
Lastly, follow the guidance of your Higher Self (God, Spirit, Source, or Universe). Stop trying to do it all alone and seek support from those that are following something greater. Turn within to find your own answers and let your life be lead.
Heading the call does not mean that life will come without lessons, pain, failure, or fear. It does; however, ensure that if you have felt that “tap” than what you have felt is real and it is your duty to humanity to answer that calling and step into your greatness.
Andrea M. Costantine is the Service & Soulful Marketing Strategist, helping conscious business owners find easy and authentic ways to market their services utilized whole person and spiritual marketing strategies. She’s passionate about freedom, self-expression, and inspiring human potential. You can find out more about Andrea and her work at www.andreacostantine.com
Today, I had coffee with an amazing woman named Donna Mazzitelli. She is the owner of Bellisima Living, and she helps you create and connect to a more healthy green and beautiful life. We had a wonderful conversation, sharing stories like we were old friends, and laughing at our own personalities, the ones that keep us striving to do more, and struggling to play. We both agreed that play needs to come into our lives more often so we can be balanced.
I like to teach other women self care, and balance is one thing I always talk about. They say that when you teach what you most need to learn, the learning comes quicker. I hope so. After my meeting, I gave a healing touch treatment, spent two hours in the garden pulling weeds, and an hour on the phone, following up with leads for The Trump Network, cut rhubarb for my neighbor and made a rhubarb crisp, and still I didn’t feel like I had done enough. Even though it was a balanced day between my work, and home work, and a little time in the garden, I still felt like I needed to accomplish something. I think the thought that goes through my head is “What activities are supporting my family financially?” My husband put it so politely when he said,” So you did all this today and you want to call yourself a little Sh- -!
Wow! Coming from him, the words stung, but in fact, I had been calling myself that for not getting enough done. It just sounded louder coming from him. Isn’t it amazing how we talk so poorly to ourselves and don’t even recognize it until someone says it for us! I had indeed been looking at all my activities in my day and thinking that it wasn’t enough.
I may not look at the glass as half empty. In fact, I like to think of the glass as overflowing with abundance, but yet I can’t offer that same view on my own life and my own work. I always fall short because of the critic inside and I sh- – on myself for being human. Instead of looking at all the good I did today ( meet a new friend, offer healing to another soul and make her smile and feel loved, feed my family and neighbors with a delicious treat, talk to people about a great opportunity, and even spruce up my garden) all I can see is what I didn’t do.
So here I am being honest with all of you that sometimes, I can’t see the good I do in the world. Now of course, writing it down and really thinking about what I did, I can see that I made my little corner of the world a little brighter. If only I could see the good and not worry about what didn’t get done. The truth is, there will always be more work than anyone can do in a day.
I think I need to change my definition of success. Touching another person’s life with love, joy, opportunity, fun, and food are all ways to be successful. And I did all that and more today!
Thank you Tony, for calling me what I was calling myself, so I could really see my day from a different perspective. It is all good!
Turbulence on the Runway
Have you ever noticed that the more we push and force our way to our goals the more obstacles and challenges we come up against? With the flying I’ve been doing lately, I happened to look out onto the tarmac and realize, wow – all this pushing and forcing is completely unnecessary and it’s exactly like experiencing turbulence on the runway. Meaning, things have gotten a little bumpy when you haven’t even taken off yet.
As human beings we often work backwards, making things harder than they have to be and therefore, experiencing turbulence when things should be running smoothly.
I’ve noticed that the more we push, struggle, force, and use sheer will the harder our lives feel. This pushing bring on other emotions as well such as discontentment, fear, disbelief, and scarcity.
At times we run at full speed only to notice that our surroundings haven’t changed at all. You’ve been working “hard” yet have nothing to show for it. When we pause to get honest with ourselves we realize that none of this pushing or struggling equates to how we really want to live our lives.
Having my own major breakthroughs I’ve realized that I’ve been running full speed, experiencing turbulence on the runway, and rowing upstream for awhile. While I’ve been achieving great things over the past year, I still easily fall back into the patterns of pushing.
Exhausting myself, I’ve put thing into place and have been practicing the art of letting go, tuning in, and following even more divinely inspired guidance. And wow – how good does this feel. I am checking in and asking myself – is this really how I want to live my life? That question has brought some great awareness and some new direction.
If you are or have experienced something similar I wanted to offer you a few tips for gaining more awareness and getting rid of the turbulence on the runway and instead move into smooth sailing – high up in the sky!
1. Let go of EVERYTHING that no longer serves your highest good. This means people, obligations, clients, and commitments. If you said yes to something that doesn’t truly light you up – come clean and let it go!
2. Ask yourself is this what I really, really, really want? Is this my juiciest, deepest, most delicious desire or am I stuck in a pattern of doing what’s good enough, and what I think I can achieve?
3. Ask yourself if I died today and people said “That (insert your name) was a great (insert what you are currently doing)!” Would you roll over in your grave? Example “That Andrea, she sure was a great marketing coach”
The point is most of the time when we experience turbulence it’s often because we are taking the harder path. We believe that where we are headed is the path of least resistance, but in actuality if your soul is calling you to be and do something greater with your life and you are playing small, the Universe is going to rock your world until you wake up to your magnificence and your brilliance.
If you are feeling the pull to stop living a mediocre life and start living the life you’ve always desired, then I am inviting you to take advantage of a complimentary “Maximize Your Potential and Discover Your True Worth” coaching session with me. See details below for more information.
I only have a limited number of openings for these sessions, and they are given away at first come, first served. Simply email us today to schedule your complimentary session.
Andrea M. Costantine is the Service & Soulful Marketing Strategist, helping conscious business owners find easy and authentic ways to market their services utilized whole person and spiritual marketing strategies. She’s passionate about freedom, self-expression, and inspiring human potential. You can find out more about Andrea and her work at www.andreacostantine.com
The Self Care Scoop
Feeding Your Soul
I love sharing the story of an 8 year old girl named Gracie who wanted to eat nothing but junk food. Her mother was complaining to a coach who specialized in emotional eating that her daughter just kept gaining weight and she was afraid she had given her daughter her own food issues.
When the coach found out that there were no immediate health concerns, she told the mother to create a chocolate cupboard, Gracie’s favorite food, and keep it stocked. Gracie could eat however much she wanted. In the first week, the mom filled the cupboard four times. By the second week, she had to restock it once, and the third week, not at all.
What about you? What if you could give yourself a cupboard full of your favorite food? What if you let yourself eat it without criticizing yourself?
This exercise was not about food. It was about Gracie’s desire to have her mother’s attention. Gracie wanted her mother to trust her, and in the process, she also learned to trust herself. The drama around food and weight gain was the language that Gracie used to communicate with her mother. Food was never the issue.
We use food all the time to communicate with our bodies. Unfortunately, we are not always listening. Do you really believe that if you let yourself, you would eat your way across your entire kitchen? The question is, what do you really need? Consider asking yourself that question next time you feel the need to shove anything in your mouth. “What do I really need?”
If you could put anything in that cupboard, my guess is, it wouldn’t be food.
It would be love and self-acceptance, so that you could see yourself as you really are, worthy of the abundance that life has to offer. Or maybe it would be the time to take care of yourself.
When we become aware of our relationship with food, we can better nourish our souls, and our bodies.
For more information on emotional eating, check out
Geneen Roth
Connecting to the Women in our Lives
In one of my favorite books about feminine spirituality, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, by Sue Monk Kidd, Sue talks about Matryoshka dolls, or nesting dolls where one fits neatly inside another until you get to a little baby doll. She bought one for her grandmother and mother, letting them know that all women are linked through feminine heart, memory and soul, and while we are separate, we are inseparable. She quotes Carl Jung who said, “Every mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forward into her daughter.”
There is such comfort in knowing that I am a part of all the women in my life, from great grandmothers who died long before I was born to my daughters who each carry a part of me in their actions, their looks or their personality. I know that I come from a line of very strong women whose strength and determination I carry into my own life.
My grandmother on my father’s side was a school teacher in a one room school house in Nebraska. She rode horses and did many things proper women wouldn’t do. I remember her most as the cookie baker, and the scrabble queen, and the woman who had a big heart for her family. She adored the Denver Broncos and would watch games at our house every Sunday. From her I learned the love of games and cards, anything that keeps a family together.
On my mother’s side, there are stories of my great grandmother being a very staunch German catholic, surviving a stroke and having another 4-5 children after that. She bore her burdens with great strength. My grandmother was a farm wife with 11 children, of whom my mother is the oldest. Mom became a surrogate mother for many of her brothers and sisters, and didn’t really have a childhood in which to play. One day, her mother told her to make a chicken dinner which meant she had to go out and kill the chickens, pluck them, cut them, batter them and fry them up for dinner. One learns quickly on a farm where you are thrown into responsibility. I inherited my mother’s work ethic… and also her non-ability to sit and do nothing. Some things we inherit are things we want to change before we pass them along to our own daughters. And oftentimes, we seem powerless to do anything about it.
When the family had to move to Omaha to make a living, my grandmother spent her mornings making pies for a local bakery, so she could put food on the table. A rare treat for the family was a loaf of store bought bread, because they grew up on homemade bread their mother baked. Who wouldn’t love to have homemade bread everyday?
My mother’s family continues to gather each year for a family golf tournament, usually held in Omaha where the bulk of the family lives. Grandma died many years ago and yet her legacy lives on in 160+ people who are a result of her love with her husband Sylvester who died long before she did. It was her love of family that held the brothers and sisters together, who shared that legacy with their own children and grandchildren.
The women who have come before each of us have given us gifts that we may not readily recognize. Did we gain our love of reading from a great grandmother? Did we learn to love art or gardening from a great aunt? What about our ability to write, or draw or work with our hands? I believe my love of baking came from my grandmother who passed the trait onto my own mother. So much has been handed down to us from the women who went before us. Their stories thread through our lives and give us the courage to attempt new things, stand in our own strength and speak our truth. And this same wisdom we pass to our own children.
I often wonder what gifts and sometimes negative traits have been handed to my own children. My oldest is following in my footsteps and becoming a teacher. My middle child loves poetry and writing and nature. My youngest has empathetic, healing qualities that make allow her to empower others. She is often my best teacher. She is also stubborn and strong-minded like me. Just like my mother and I fought when I was young, my youngest daughter and I are the quickest to quarrel, I think because we are so much alike. I only hope that means that someday, she and I will be as good of friends as I am with my mom.
Take the time to think about the gifts you inherited from your own ancestors. May their stories strengthen you on your own journey and be sure to take the time to thank the women in your life for gifts they have given you. (Happy Mother’s Day Mom!) Positive or negative, these traits have made you the person you are today. ( We will thank dads later!) And know that you are never alone on your journey. You are one more link in the chain, and someday, someone will be looking back at your life and telling your stories. What will they say about you? !
Spring Planting
It is seven o’clock in the morning, and the sun is rising over the black neat rows of freshly plowed farmland. We are traveling back from visiting a friend in Moorhead, Minnesota on our way to pick up our oldest daughter from school to bring her home for the summer. I breathe in the smell of black fertile soil and am transported to a deeper rhythm, a more organic sense of time and purpose. On the farm, there is such a deep connection to growing and harvesting, rain and drought, work and rest, and an understanding of the seasons of our lives.
Our friend told us of the death of his mother, diagnosed with stomach cancer and buried three weeks later. The hospice nurse told all thirteen children that they needed to say goodbye to their mother, to let her know that it was fine to let go. When Mike shared this with his mother, she looked at him and said, “Are you kidding? I have lived my whole life for this!” Instead of sadness during her last three weeks, there was celebration of a life well lived, picking out just the right dress in which to meet God, and dancing in the living room with each of her thirteen children.
Rhythm. The heartbeat of our lives resides in the earth, in the seasons that have been constant over thousands of years. I wonder why we choose to live in artificial landscapes of concrete and steel, create artificial time by working long past the day’s end, and eat gas ripened vegetables and chemical concoctions meant to look like food. I am always taken aback when I hear of inner city children who don’t know what a chicken or a cow is, or even the children on Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution show that can’t identify a cucumber or green pepper. We have long left the farm and the gift the comes from knowing the seasons of sowing and reaping, new growth and letting go. It isn’t any wonder that our society is afraid of death because they haven’t seen it as a natural part of life.
There is a certain amount of trust that must be present when you work on a farm. Without it, I believe you couldn’t be a farmer and flow with the seasons. There has to be trust in the weather that you cannot control, that you will have enough crop left at the end of the growing season not eaten by pests or destroyed by hail that you can turn into cash to feed your family. There is trust that “the good Lord will provide.”
Even driving in the car just passing the farms, I get to see the pattern created by the farmer as he plows the field, or the hawk diving into one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes. I have time to watch the waves get whipped into white caps by the gusting wind and watch the blades of windmills larger than life spin, harvesting the energy for another time. I imagine myself digging into the black soil and connecting to my own ancestors who farmed the land when they arrived in this country. I marvel at the number of calves following mothers around fields. I drive as I watch the orange ball of light fade off beyond the horizon. I look out the car window and see a sky full of bright stars that are hidden from view in the lights of a city. I am in awe of all the beauty around me.
Day begins and ends in the car traveling home to Colorado. But the moments in between were not missed by us. We didn’t speed along only in the effort to get home as fast as we could. And even Harry Potter on audio didn’t distract us from sending our thoughts out across field after field, patchworked green and black, noticing deer and wild turkeys, small churches with a cemetery nearby, representing the community aspect of life and death. We were connecting to this amazing land that we live in. Even now as I write, I am transported back to a farm, and its daily rhythms. And while the work is hard, the rewards are sweet. I breathe in and know that I am simply connected to the rhyme, the reason, the rhythms of life.
Several things have happened over the last few weeks to remind me of the mystery of our lives, and how there is so little we know. The first was the death of my friend’s mother. After ten years of illness, she finally took her last breath when all other family members had left and only my friend was there to say goodbye. It had not been an easy relationship, and my friend did the best she could over the years, taking care of her ailing mother. It seemed as if her mother’s last breath came at 12:21 but then very shortly after, another two shallow breaths were heard. The time was 12:22, the month and day of my friend’s birthday. It was as if her mother was blessing my friend’s life with an acknowledgment of how much her birth had meant to her mother. We will never know why it took her 10 years of illness and 11 long days of hospice to let go, but she did at a moment that would bring healing to my friend.
Within the same week, I got an email about the Hubble telescope, describing how scientists aimed the camera at a blank spot in space where no stars could be seen for 10 days. Some people thought it was a waste of money to use this very expensive telescope to view a place where it seemed there was no activity. When the scientists put the 10 days worth of images together into a 3-D model, they discovered that there were over 300 galaxies in this tiny little space of our universe.
When we are children, we ask lots of questions so we can begin to construct our world and make sense out of it. We learn the difference between green and blue, water and earth, hot and cold, and nice and mean. Yet as we get older, the questions become harder, and we understand less. Our pastor at church equated it to an island in the middle of the sea of mystery. Our little island of knowledge grows a little each year, as we gain concrete knowledge about how things work. However, as our world becomes more gray and less black and white, the sea shore of the island also grows. It is on the seashore that our questions lie, between knowing and the mystery that we cannot comprehend. It is really true that the more we know, the more we realize we don’t know.
I sent my friend a clear bottle with a cork in the top after her mother died. I included a note that said “Don’t ever, ever open it, so you will learn to love the mystery of life.” I kept a bottle for myself. I imagine that the bottle is filled with possibility, that even if I don’t understand it, the world is working in its right order, that all is well, and I can trust our ever present Divine God to look over us and love us in the midst of pain and confusion. Instead of making me anxious with more questions, I am able to look at the bottle and know that goodness beyond my understanding is working in the world. There is a rhyme and a reason beyond my human comprehension, and knowing that an ever loving God is with us through all of our trials and tribulations, that a Divine touch can be seen in 300 galaxies in a dark corner of the universe, is enough for me.
Wise and Witty Women
