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Today is my birthday and I got a nice bag as a gift from someone who means the world to me. I cannot say I was totally surprised because I did say I would have liked a new bag but actually receiving it was still quite the experience. It may seem strange to you but I never get presents for my birthday. I think the last time someone gave me a gift and said ‘happy birthday’ was over twenty years ago.

I did as I have seen people do when accepting a gift; smiled, exchanged a hug, said thank you, and took it. I placed it on my bed and stared at the package as if it was going to explode at any minute. It felt strange. I felt strange. It dawned on me that I really had not learned the art of acceptance.

I asked myself, how will I be able to welcome the blessings of the Universe, the abundance that it offers when I have not learned to receive good things when they appear in my reality?

How many of us are guilty of this?

We give with our hearts but we cannot accept anything in return; we feel undeserving.
We feel that we should not benefit from anything that comes easy to us. If there is no fight nor struggle, then an announcement of something good happening must be fake news.
We look the gift horse in the mouth, we count its teeth and examine its tongue before we can begin to believe that the Universe always has our backs.

Practise asking for, expecting, and accepting.

We are deserving of its gifts.
We are worthy of its love.

It’s already done.

I passed just in time to see a bus driver getting a ticket from a police officer. He must have committed some traffic violations that deemed it necessary and Mr. Bus Man was not happy about it. It was not even 7 am and the officer was always on her beat, with a ticket book and pen ready to catch persons who dare contravene the law. I myself, just a few weeks ago had gotten a ticket for not having my driver’s license with me while driving so in my head I was commiserating with the driver. Getting tickets is annoying and the fees can add up quickly if one does not pay them one time.

Observing this exchange got me to thinking. How many tickets do we rack up daily for committing some offense against ourselves?

We rack up our ticket count when we are not thankful and gracious for what we have.

We deserve a ticket when we walk around with a lack mentality, when the Universe abounds with blessings for us but we are not open to receiving them.

We definitely ought to be ticketed when we think less of ourselves, when we fall short and still kick ourselves in the process.

A ticket is justified when we refuse to love ourselves as much as we love others, when loving ourselves first is key to being able to give love to someone else.

And if you are like me, you earn a ticket every time you do not guard your energy from energy vampires and hate mongers who constantly spew negative vibes, tainting your spirit and lowering your own vibrations.

One, two, three, four, five tickets as easy as that.

Stop increasing the coffers of ungratefulness, self-abuse, jealousy, and lack. We did not come here to spend our spiritual currency on these things.

We came to love, to give, to receive, to experience, and to love just a little bit more.

Pay up your past tickets and vow, “no more.”

A friend of mine asked me to borrow some money and I said no. This was phenomenal for me because I never say no, especially to him. I am a yes person, always trying to find ways to turn a no into a yes just to make someone happy or moreover, to get them to like me or to keep on liking me. And of course, it has not been working out for me at all so when I was able to tell my friend no, with a power and conviction that came from inside of me, I knew that I was healed. I had gotten over whatever past life trauma that turned me into a yes person in this lifetime, I had become valuable to myself, I had begun to love the me that I am.

There are some who would resonate with this message and others not so much so because they never have a problem saying no. For them, no is on speed dial and they can press that button without blinking; they have press one for no and press two for no.

But for those like me, we understand that the struggle is real. We give in and say yes when we know that no is the better choice of word for us. We allow our personal spaces to be invaded and our boundaries crossed. We cultivate a ‘just say yes’ mentality, accepting that as part of us but still feeling weak and angry whenever we say yes but mean no.

So when the weak among us do the shadow work, finding and eradicating that part that makes feeling less than our best selves our default position, you can then understand when I used the term ‘phenomenal’ to describe that two-letter word ‘no’.

And so, as often said by that TV evangelist, I encourage you to “say it like you mean it”
“No”.
Say it loud and long, “Nooooooooo.”
Say it from the deepest part of you, “Noooo.”

My! Saying NO feels great.

I was first in line to use the ATM this morning and was quite pleased with myself. As I searched for my card, a young man came up behind me. He was grumbling and fretting about having deposited a check a few days ago and not seeing the credit on his account. It was his weekly wage and he needed the money. He was giving off quite a bit of negative energy and I was sure he was planning something murderous in his head if he went to check again and there were no funds.
I slipped through the door of the kiosk and quickly completed my transaction then turned and held the door for him to enter. As he approached, very quietly I said to the guy, “go to the machine with a positive vibration, believe and expect your money to be there.” He laughed out loud when he heard what I said. I saw a change come over his face and his energy shifted to the positive. I knew then and there his money would be in that machine waiting for him.
So many times we allow negative feelings to ruin things for us. This young man did not know whether his money was going to be available or not but he had already psyched himself up for the worse. Why not the opposite? Why not put the positive instead of the negative thought in our minds? I mean, think about it, which do you think will grow and manifest? Of course, it will be the one that was planted.

I am not saying that negative thoughts will never come. We are living a challenging 3-D experience, many of us, so we have grown to expect moments of doubt, fear, uncertainty to come upon us. There is no escaping these human emotions. But the key lies in what we think, what we say to ourselves, and what we do when they appear. We get to decide to either water, tend and allow them to grow or uproot them, and plant positive thoughts instead.

And I say if there is nothing positive that can be thought of in a given situation, then think nothing at all.

I came out of my meditation session today with the realization that this was it. It was time for the Big Leap and I was full of trepidation. I was not ready to take the next step but Spirit was nudging me along. I literally shrugged and pushed back against the energy that was coaxing me forward. But deep down inside I knew there was no more fighting it.

Have there ever been times in your life when you feel the pull towards something or the push away from something and your initial reaction is one of resistance?

You know what you ought to do but you are busy ought- notting your way through the process until you are dragged by Universal forces, kicking and screaming to the inevitable. At this point, it can get really rough and ends with being brought to your knees and made to understand that even though there is free will, doing what is best for you is always the best thing to do.

I have decided to act now that it is just a gentle prod. I cannot take the alternative.

What about you?
Are you going to act on the nudge or do you prefer to wait for the dropkick to the chest, getting a few broken ribs and a cracked sternum in the process?

I say go with the nudge and save on the bandages.

Our subconscious mind is extremely powerful, much more than we realize. It records and stores information and sends it back to the conscious mind when needed for processing and action. It is said that once an idea is conceived and executed in the mind, then the hardest part of the job is complete. Making it a reality, something that can be detected with the five senses becomes as easy as Sunday morning.

Creative persons understand the service the subconscious mind provides in assisting them with their work, be it a piece of art, a poem, a dance, or even a blog post. Once you open up to the power of the subconscious, creativity becomes like a turned-on tap, pouring ideas into your head faster than you can put them together in the physical. Another part of us that is an ally in the creative process is our intuition. Though there are some who refer to the subconscious mind and intuitive mind as one and the same, whether it is so or not, it matters little, they are all tools to help us to create.

I have never considered myself a creative person. I can neither sing nor dance. When young, I did some short story writing in school, a mandatory part of the English syllabus. I have always written poetry whenever I got a broken heart which means there are quite a few proses, now carpeting the path taking me through life.

Today I paint and produce daily blog posts stemming from my being connected to the greater part of who I am. I would have never been able to be successful at these new undertakings had I not engaged the power of my subconscious mind, my intuitive mind, the places through which ideas come, through meditation and being.

Tap in and get turned on
To do,
To design,
To generate,
To originate.

And most importantly to share what you create with others.

Have you, like me been looking for love in all the wrong places? Spending time, effort, and money chasing that elusive shadow? Looking for that feeling that we figured was going to make us whole and complete? Not finding, or finding it for a short time and then losing it again because it was not what we thought it ought to be? Looking for something that all the time was right under our noses?

I have been guilty of all of the above searching. I looked for love to replace the love I never got from my father. I looked for love to make me feel like a woman. I even looked for love to make me feel worthy of existing. And each time I failed to find it. You know why? It was because I was looking for something outside of me. All the love that I needed was within me all along, there for the offering, begging me to take it and I could not see it.

We spend a lot of time looking for love outside ourselves. We search the highway and the byway, the hills, and the gutters, hoping that this thing called love would one-day peek-a-boo us so we can grab it, put it into a bag and ride off into the sunset with it.

The love we are looking for is within all of us. Self-love. I am not speaking of selfish love, but a genuine love and respect for oneself, so powerful that we would never do anything that is not in our best interest.

We will not engage in self-destructive behavior because we love ourselves too much.
We will refuse to partake in activities that don’t make us feel good.
We will leave friends and families that sap our energy, lowering our vibrations and causing us to feel negative emotions.

We would have put a new value on ourselves, one that neither money, nor power, nor prestige, nor sex can buy.
We would have found true love,

Self-love.

We came into this life with two things in our arsenal, free will, and a moral compass. These are all the tools we need to guide our experiences on the earth plane. Before coming here, we knew what we planned to accomplish, what lessons we wanted to learn, or what contributions we hoped to make towards the development of humankind but once our soul entered a physical body and was born, free will takes charge. We forget the details of our soul contract and as a result, we navigate our way through life, hoping that at the end of it all, we would have achieved our earthly objectives.

And it is not easy. The dualities of living on Planet Earth makes life hard. The ups and downs, ins and outs sometimes cause us to get caught up on the wrong side of rightness.

This is where our moral compass gets turned on. Innate in all of us is a sense of right and wrong and we get to decide whether to use this tool or pull our free will card and happily do as we please without concern for our fellow man or even for ourselves.

At the end of the day, we get to choose.
We can choose love over hate,
Happiness over despair,
Pleasure over pain,
Right over wrong,

But choose we must.

Have you ever had the experience of just being busy with life when something causes you to pause, look and yourself and your eyes get all misty for no reason that you can seriously put your finger on; the brightening of eyes, not coming from grief or sorrow but from a deep sense of wellbeing and a joy unspeakable? unspeakable because you cannot explain it?

I felt that way this morning as I was getting ready for work. I was in the mirror engaging in my daily challenge of coaxing my left eyebrow to look like the right when I felt this wellspring of emotion coursing through me, starting from my gut and moving through my body, culminating in the manifestation of tears. I found joy in the sameness, nothing on the outside of me had changed but there was this feeling of wellness, dare I call it bliss, that came over me.

We all have moments like these. Joy in the in spite ofs.
Our family is the same,
Our house, our job, our lover is the same.
But there is something about that sameness that brings with it a deep sense of happiness.

I am not even sure if happiness is the right word, it feels deeper that than.
It feels like a bubbling well of knowingness and acceptance of what is.
Do you see why I wrote in my earlier words of ‘joy unspeakable’? I can hardly describe it.

Each of us can have this experience, every day, several times a day.

It is inside us, waiting to be invited to express itself.

Let it out,
Let it flow,
Let it encompass us,
Let it be.

For many of us, it is difficult to forgive others for wrongs they might have done to us and it is even more difficult for us to forgive ourselves for wrongs that we do to us. Forgiving is part of living. We are all spirits in a strange place engaging in the strange experience of life on earth so mistakes will be made, we will hurt people and people will hurt us.

I have difficulty in forgiving persons, especially those I hold close when they do things that hurt and betray me. I am working on it but it is proving to be not the easiest task to complete. And even though I have grown to understand through meditation and seeking that things happen the way they do because I had engaged in soul contracts with these persons and we had a prior agreement before we came into this physical plane, it is still a strenuous undertaking.

Someone once told me that forgiveness was for the one forgiving, not for the forgiven and he was absolutely correct. The act of forgiving creates space within us. Space that we can fill with positive vibrations, with love, with peace, with happiness. Is this not a better option? Or do we prefer the hate and bitterness mixed in with anger and hurt?

If we look at practicing forgiveness as being for us and not the other person, it demonstrates the love and care we have for ourselves.
It shows that we understand the karmic ties to persons and events.
That we have a clear knowing that our visit here is to live and grow and love and experience.
That to forgive is to forget into forever.

Forgive. Forget. Forever.