Are You Listening to the Big You or the Little You

In the last decade or so the popularity of personal life and
spiritual coaches, counselors, therapists, healers and meditation
teachers has literally skyrocketed. A primary reason, I think, is
because we live in a society so geared toward encouraging
distraction and developing the external that until we feel stressed
to the point of having no other option, we spend little to no time
trying to learn who we are. We are self-un-aware, having no real
sense of who we are, what we are or where we are. By the time we
get around to trying to find out, the idea is filled with such
trepidation, we immediately seek professional help.

And that's certainly understandable. Getting to know ourselves can
be scary, exciting and downright depressing all in the same moment.
If we want to be able to fully embrace the very best life has to
offer, however, if we truly do want to walk the Blessing Way path
so that we can not only be a blessing, but experience all the
abundant blessings life has to offer, we must develop a sense of
self-awareness. We must connect with who we really are. We truly
must.

Of course, that doesn't mean total self awareness is going to
develop overnight. Learning to recognize the signals our inner
selves give us takes practice, but the practice is easy, and when
we incorporate blessing into the process, it becomes a fun, light
and absolutely joyous endeavor.

That's because blessing allows us to happily accept difficult
situations whenever and however they arise. We don't have to grit
our teeth and pretend that everything is a-okay while our insides
our churning and our fears are rising. We remain at peace,
steadfast in our knowledge that a seed of benefit is hidden within
the experience and, now germinated by our blessing, will sprout
and bloom.


Consider a minor problem. Let's say for the purpose of
demonstration, that your computer is not working as it should and
you can feel your irritation growing by the second. While you know
that the problem is not major, it's still just aggravating enough
to make you feel unsettled, as though you hit a minor rapid on the
stream of life. You feeling out of kilter with life and not sure
how to get back into alignment.

Begin by blessing the computer and accepting that the beyond the
faulty work performance being currently displayed, there's a
benefit. You may not be certain yet what it is, but you can trust
that it is there, just the same. This like everything else in your
life deserves a GOOD label because good will come out of it. Take
a deep breath and begin making statements like, "I don't know what
the blessing is, but I know it's here somewhere," and in your
mind's eye, see the computer working perfectly as it should. As you
do this, peace will begin to fill every cell and molecule of your
body. Imagine yourself diving into the center of a deep and
tranquil pool. Feel the peace surrounding you.

Now, take another deep breath, and imagine that your Inner Self, a
beautiful being of radiant light and wisdom is standing beside this
pool. Ask this higher part of you, this holy and sacred Self, to
disclose the reason for the computer malfunction, (or the reason
for any minor problem you might be experiencing) and then listen
quietly for the answer to come. It may come as a memory, a
suggestion from someone else, an inner knowing or a simple hunch.
Just wait and listen.

Try often throughout the day to communicate with your Inner
Guidance this way. Ask and then listen. This will open up an avenue
of communication between the "little" you and the big YOU. And
that, my friend, is a blessing in and of itself.




Today's affirmation:

"I ask my Inner Being and my Inner Being answers."

Today's quote:

"We need to ask ourselves honest, powerful and searching questions
in order to stimulate our inner growth."

-- David Vennells, from "Everything is a
Blessing"



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Don't Check the Classifieds

Since the dawn of time, philosophers, sages and mystics have been
advising us that if we really want to make things happen in
our lives, we need to look within. That's usually not the first
place we take a peek, however, when we want to create change
in our lives. If we decide we want a new career, or a new home, or
even a new world, for instance, we're more apt to check
the classifieds, tap into our network of friends, or join an
organization than we are to venture into the great unknown of Inner
Spirit. Maybe we'll look within later, we promise ourselves, after
we've run out of other options. But first, there simply must be
something we can do.


Blessing is that something. The process of blessing serves as a
bridge between our need to do and our ability to be. Blessing helps
us tap into the unseen creative processes that
bring change into our lives and the lives of those around us by
providing us an opportunity to look more closely at any given
experience and then determine what it is trying to communicate to
us. The act of blessing allows us to acknowledge that we, in
partnership with the Divine, create our world from the inside out.
Ultimately, through the process of blessing the world around us, we
become consciously aware of what is happening on the inside. Simply
put, blessing causes us to look within.

An act of unconditional giving, blessing also acquaints us with
that most Sacred part of ourselves. The energy of a blessing
unfolds from within our imaginings to expand outward into the
experience we envision. We are able to observe both how we connect
with Spirit and how that connection changes the world around us.
Blessing makes us keenly aware of our part in the transformational
process.


Quiet your mind for a few minutes and tap into your Inner Being.
Imagine yourself being "plugged in" into all the wisdom and power
in the universe and then envision that with every breath you take
the connection grows stronger. Just being aware of the power
within us is a blessing in itself. Take a deep breath now and feel
how blessed you are.

Today's affirmation:

"I am centered and connected to my inner spirit. I am blessed."

Today's quote:

"Affirmation of life is the spiritual act by which man ceases to
live unreflectively and begins to devote himself to his life with
reverence in order to raise it to its true value. To affirm life is
to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will to live."


-- Albert Schweitzer



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"No matter what may happen today, I can bless."

My friend Jimmy is a candle maker. A very good candle maker. So good,
in fact, that his incredibly scented and beautifully designed soy
candles are sold in posh stores all over the world. Jimmy is not
only a candle maker. He is a successful one.

Ask Jimmy the secret of his success, and he'll tell you its the
blessing, because almost since the day he began his candle making
business well more than a decade ago, Jimmy has gone about the
business of blessing his candles. Daily he, along with other
members of his staff, pours love and peace and healing into each
candle being created, imagining the blessings settling into each
jar along with the wax and fragrance. Jimmy understands that this
is a world of energy and when we put good energy into something,
good energy naturally comes out.

And sometimes that good energy comes out in the most unexpected
ways. A few years ago, while utterly content making and blessing
his candles, Jimmy wasn't prepared for the dynamic change about to
occur in his life. He walked into work one morning only to find he
no longer had a company. His board of directors, thinking merely
blessing a business into success was not a savvy marketing plan,
had voted him out.

This is where Jimmy could have gotten really, really angry and
probably no one would have blamed him. But instead of fuming and
fussing and flying into what most would have considered a clearly
justified rage, Jimmy went on a cruise. He relaxed, emptied himself
of every hurtful judgment and then, once the cruise was over,
moved on to create a new company from scratch, blessing it just as
he had the first. Soon the new company was doing better than the
old.

That's how blessing works. It takes the sting out. It turns the
totally impossible into infinite possibility and transforms tragedy
into triumph and it does so quickly and without fuss or muss. When
we go about the daily business of blessing, we literally weave the
best possible outcome into every situation in our lives. Blessing
puts us in a good place.


Begin to develop a blessing business plan. Ask yourself ways you
can incorporate more blessing into the daily business of living and
then record the answers come to mind in your Blessing Way Journal.
And most importantly, once you've figured out new ways to bless,
then do it. It's nice to think about blessing someone or something.
It's infinitely nicer to bless.

Today's affirmation:

"No matter what may happen today, I can bless."

Today's quote:

"The great blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach;
but we shut our eyes, and, like people in the dark, we fall foul
upon the very thing we search for, without finding it."


-- Seneca



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Change Your Life in a Heartbeat

In order to bless others, we must step away from the busyness of
our world and into a place of neutrality. Sufi poet Rumi eloquently
invites us there with these words...

"Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a
field. I will meet you there."

Intuitively, at least, most of us are aware that feelings like
love and joy, gratitude and appreciation have a positive impact on
our bodies while unresolved anger, hurt and guilt have the opposite
effect. It makes sense, therefore, to find a way to transform those
experiences that hurt us into experiences that do not. That's where
blessing comes in.

In his book, "Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer" author Gregg
Braden defines blessing as an "emotional lubricant", because, like
a healing balm, it allows us to free the hurtful and unresolved
emotions we feel rather than stuffing them down inside where, like
acid, they only serve to erode and embitter. "To lubricate our
emotions, "Braden writes, "we must acknowledge (bless) all aspects
of those hurtful things: such as those who suffer, the cause of the
suffering and those who witness the outcome.

"I often find at this point in any discussion of what a blessing
is," he continues, "that it's important to be very clear about what
it is not. When we bless someone who's hurt us, clearly we aren't
suggesting that what has happened is okay or that we'd like it to
happen again. Blessing doesn't condone or make excuses for any
atrocity or act of suffering. It doesn't put a stamp of approval on
a hurtful event, or suggest that we would ever choose to
re-experience it.

"What blessing does do is free us from our painful experiences. It
acknowledges that those events, whatever they were, have occurred.
When we do so, our feelings about those experiences move through
our bodies instead of getting stuck inside them. In this way,
blessing is the key to reaching Rumi's field beyond wrongdoing and
right doing. Blessing is the key to accessing the space between. It
temporarily suspends our hurt long enough so that we can replace it
with another feeling.

"...the single act of blessing gives you the power to change your
life," Braden adds. "And it does so in a heartbeat! When we can
make our choices and offer our prayers from a place of strength and
clarity, rather than from the weakness of rage and hurt, something
wonderful begins to happen.

"Sounds too simple to work? Such a powerful tool can be as simple
or as difficult as we choose to make it. The reason that blessing
works so well is easy to understand. It's impossible to judge
something while we're blessing it at the same time. Our minds won't
allow us to do both things at once."

How can you expect me to bless the person who has
singlehandedly made my life a living hell for the past six months?

The question is a good one and the answer deceptively simple. When
life hurts, we can deal with the pain by replaying the hurtful act
or situation over and over again in our minds, or stuffing it deep
down inside where silently and insidiously it continues to eat away
at our emotional core until it eventually destroys us completely.
Or we can choose to heal by simply acknowledging the hurt and then
letting it go, moving on with life with the understanding that we
are far greater than whatever pain we might feel in any given
moment. The choice is ours. And, as Braden points out, "If we
choose the healing, blessing is the path."

The truth is that the "living hell" is not
the result of what someone else did , but of her reaction to what
someone else did. chose to accept the actions of
the other person as having happened and then determined to move
beyond it, to that field beyond wrong and right doing of which Rumi
speaks.
It is our thinking that determines the rightness or
wrongness of any given situation as much as the situation itself.
And even if, in our thinking, we determine that something bad has
happened, we are still given the option of holding it to us in the
form of unresolved emotion or letting it go and moving on toward
life.

When we bless, we make the second choice. Essentially, we say "OK,
this really awful thing has happened. But as long as I keep
thinking about it, rehashing it in my mind, retelling it to any and
all who will listen, then it will keep on happening. And I don't
want that. So, instead, I am going to bless this entire experience
and every person in it and then I'm going to let it go. I am going
to accept that it has happened, determined that with my blessing
something beneficial will rise out of it, and then I am going to
move on with my life, because I really, truly am far bigger than
this thing that has happened to me. I will prevail.

" And I am also going to bless the perpetrator of this situation
because if I don't, that means I am still sitting in judgment over
him, still labeling him as "bad" and unworthy of a blessing, and as
long as I do that, I am caught in my own act of condemnation just
as surely as he is. So, instead, I choose to free us both. He is
blessed. I am blessed, We are blessed. And in this way, I am
choosing freedom from every hell this experience would bring me and
fully embracing whatever slice of heaven it holds, instead."

In order to do this, we must first be willing to confront our own
inner belief systems. We may find ourselves faced with questioning
an entire life-time of conditioning and old worn-out thought forms
that tell us we must get even, defeat every foe and right every
wrong, In order to move beyond these barriers to blessing we have
to get to the point where we are ready to choose healing above all
else. When we are finally willing to give up all the old beliefs
and judgments that have kept us trapped, the the true blessing work
can begin.


Quietly confront your own inner belief system. Ask yourself if you
are honestly willing to suspend every judgment, every condemnation,
every necessity to make the world go "your way". Today's
affirmation allows you to pose the question simply and directly.
Repeat the affirmation, and then wait for the answer to arise from
within. Record your answer and any subsequent questions, doubts or
concerns it may to mind in your Blessing Way Journal. There are no
right or wrong answers to this question or to any of the questions
posed in the Blessing Way Challenge. The purpose of this exercise,
as well as all others is simply to make
you more aware of where you are in your own thinking processes, so
please do not fret. Just answer the question as honestly as you can
and record the answer and any other thoughts it might bring to mind.

Today's affirmation:

"What if I am willing to bless my world, no matter what I see?"

Today's quote:

"The key to the success of blessing is that it acknowledges
everything from the one who hurts, to the one who is hurting."


-- Gregg Braden



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