The new year has arrived! Another wonderful time to re-commit to living the life we love. To practice loving in general. I have a recommendation that I feel can help you live in a profound state of unconditional love. The love that doesn’t depend on a person or situation.
My good friend, #1 New York Times best-selling author Marci Shimoff, has written a new book, Love for No Reason: 7 Steps to Creating a Life of Unconditional Love. In it, you will learn the best kept secret about love.
I’ve personally known Marci for over 30 years, and she has always been a seeker of happiness and love. She has participated in hundreds of personal development programs, giving her a wealth of knowledge to share and uplift humanity.
Even though Marci has authored seven other New York Times best selling books, more importantly, Marci gave me LOVE.
How? She introduced me to my wonderful husband, whom I have now been married to for 29 years. I usually tell her, that as far as I’m concerned, that was her greatest success!
I’ve read most of the book, and it is sprinkled with scientific research along with heaping dollops of ancient wisdom, powerful exercises and beautiful stories that give us a delicious recipe for creating unconditional love in our lives.
I’m heartily recommending this breakthrough book to everyone, giving it two very enthusiastic thumbs up! Get it TODAY, and you’ll also receive the exclusive Love For No Reason GIft Package as a BONUS.
The bonus includes a powerful recording to remove your blocks to love, audio interviews with famous Love Luminaries, a 5-minute daily love practice, practical ebooks, and much more!
Be sure to look on page 237 for an exercise from ‘yours truly’ that will help you dissolve limiting beliefs and open your heart.
I love the book because it fulfills my life-long dream that each and every one of us, will love ourselves and acknowledge our true worth. Over the years, I have seen so many people struggle with feelings of unworthiness. I think this book will hold your hand and sooth your soul.
As Marci says, “Whatever your experiences of love have been in the past, you can now begin to love at a much higher level than ever before.”
Happy New Year! Buon Anno! May it be filled with love. What is your best kept secret about love?
Lenora's Italy Retreat blog | Lenora's Change Limiting Beliefs Website
Letting Go . . Again
Some years ago, I accompanied my husband on a business trip to The Cayman Islands, which are known for some of the best snorkeling in the world. He decided to teach me to snorkel by having me jump from a low wall into rough water wearing my snorkel gear. I began thrashing and almost drowned the two of us. We made it out of the water alive, and then noticed a group of beginner snorkelers swimming in a barrier reef that looked like a shallow pool.
That’s where I finally learned to breathe through that ridiculously narrow tube. I don’t do well when I am thrown in over my head. I like to wade in with my feet touching the bottom, if needed, at least at first. This makes it easier for me to let go of my fears.
Once I got the hang of it, my husband would wake up in the mornings, startled to see me standing beside his side of the bed with my snorkel gear ready to go. I had surrendered to the ocean.
That’s what I felt like when I was thrown into India last week. I again traveled with my husband for this adventure. This time for ayurvedic health purification treatments.
Even though this was my fourth trip to India, the accommodations were more third world than I expected. My room was without windows and had a broken air conditioner with no one available to fix it. The electricity went out every day at noon for a couple hours without any regard for the 100+ degree temperatures. And did I mention the roaches in my room, including one climbing out of my toothbrush?
I know it sounds strange to many people that I would even go to India for rejuvenation treatments,but it is the home of an ancient health treatment called panchakarma.
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In the same breath, I might add that India is not for wimps, but it is a great place to burn off karma, stretch your boundaries and let go of limiting beliefs. In my clearer moments, I watched preconceived perceptions wash down the drain.
It’s a country of opposites — beggars, poverty, deeply spiritual citizens and holy people in the Himalayan mountains are quite common.
The scene outsidewas interesting — an empty lot filled with trash, that was burned on a daily basis, filling the air with choking smoke. Right next to the lot, was a small country club with a beautiful swimming pool filled with water, but no swimmers. Indian chants were blasting over a loudspeaker in the lovely park on the other side of the trash lot. The clinic is in a nice neighborhood, so there were no beggars on the streets, nor smoke from cow dung burning at night.
Their standards of cleanliness, however, are different than mine. I won’t even go into detail. Each day I would let go of my notions of what I needed to feel comfortable.
In each moment I had to die to my beliefs of cleanliness, of fine customer service, of being in control of my environment.
India was a gift that gave me practice allowing the death of my ego, the surrender of how things SHOULD be. The little deaths we go through when we fail, or find ourselves in deep water outside our comfort zone, create a more open-hearted, compassionate, enriching life.
For me, I find that coming up for air to find solid familiar space under my feet every once in awhile, supports the practice of letting go.
LETTING GO is a fast track to experiencing strength, growth and freedom. When we choose to try something different, we learn to stay flexible.
Grab change by the hand, maybe get a lifejacket, and swim.
What is your ‘India’? How have you learned to let go? I’d love to hear from you.
Lenora's Italy Retreat blog | Lenora's Change Limiting Beliefs Website
Their purpose is for all of us to create a more caring nation, just through the simple act of listening.
Lenora's Italy Retreat blog | Lenora's Change Limiting Beliefs Website
My hiatus from writing on this blog was only due to the fact that I was IN THE HAPPINESS ZONE IN ITALY FOR A MONTH. You can read more about me fulfilling my dream in my Italy Retreat Blog.
Lenora’s Three Ways to Handle Disappointments and Expectations
1.) Look at the things you like. For Italy, I romanticize its values as though it’s a utopia. I don’t complain about the government, nor the high unemployment, or how many people make up answers, or their relaxed work ethic. It’s hard to get anything done there. Because their primary goal is to enjoy life, this makes it difficult to get things done in a hurry.
Lenora's Italy Retreat blog | Lenora's Change Limiting Beliefs Website
Every Thursday I post a quote or thought for all of us to ponder. Today’s quote is:
The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance. — Nathaniel Braden
Wouldn’t it be refreshing if we could somehow not focus on whether something SHOULD or SHOULD NOT be happening to us?
I think making the choice to accept what is and release what was is a spiritual practice. However, it involves all aspects of our lives–intellectual, emotional, and physical. It looks like this…instead of shrinking away from what is occurring in this day and each day, we learn to embrace it.
In her book, Broken Open, Elizabeth Lesser, described spiritual teacher and world renowned speaker/author, Ram Dass searching for words while recovering from a stroke. “I began to fill in the blanks for him. After one such awkward exchange, he turned to me, and out popped one of his one-liners: “I speak more slowly now. Now people finish my sentences and answer their own questions.”
Elizabeth did the same, finished his sentences in response to her questions about his stroke and its aftermath. In doing so, she answered most of the questions herself.
Ram Dass began to see his stroke as ‘fierce grace.’ He said, “For me to see the stroke as grace required a perceptual shift. It was a shift from taking the point of view of the Ego to taking the point of view of the Soul…..What changed from the stroke was my attachment to the Ego. The stroke was unbearable to the Ego, and so it pushed me into the Soul level…faith and love are stonrger than any changes, stronger than aging and, I am very sure, stronger than death.”
How have you successfully dealt with change, especially the fierce grace kind?
PHOTO: Octopus at the Mote Marine Lab, Sarasota, Florida
Lenora's Italy Retreat blog | Lenora's Change Limiting Beliefs Website
Every Thursday I post a quote or thought for all of us to ponder. Today’s quote is from humanitarian, Lynn Twist, pictured on the right with me in Fairfield, Iowa.
“When a tree falls in Brazil, there is less oxygen in Ohio.”
Lynn is the bestselling author of The Soul of Money and co-founder of the Pachamama Alliance. I had the privilege of taking a long walk with Lynn and my visiting friend and New York Times best selling author, Marci Shimoff, on the walking trails along the lake in my hometown of Fairfield, Iowa. Lynn was visiting our town because she was receiving the Mayor Malloy’s humanitarian award. I found Lynn to be the most genuine down-to-earth yet global thinker I’ve ever met.
Lynn has spent more than three decades working in positions of leadership with many global initiaves including: ending world hunger, protecting the woldks rainforests, empowering indigenous peoples, inproving health, economic, and political conditions for women and children, and advancing the scientific understanding of human consciousness.
She has had many teachers in her life. In addition to being trained by Mother Theresa, some of Lynn’s great teachers are the people she meets in third world countries. For instance, she traveled to Ethiopia during the 1984 famine that killed 1 million people. (more…)
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Thoughtful Thursday: Every Thursday I post a quote or thought for all of us to ponder.
Worry is a state of mind based on fear –Napoleon Hill
3 Steps to Take to Be Worry Free:
1.) Just do the highest action possible. I’ve inherited the worry gene from one of my Italian grandmothers. But just because we’re born with a tendency doesn’t mean we have to keep it. I’ve spent my adult life changing that genetic code by changing my thoughts/beliefs. The shift in beliefs in turn change my DNA or happiness set point. I try to follow the advise from my friend, Jonas who says. “If anything bad is going to happen, it’s going to happen without me aiding and abetting it with my attention.”
2.) Stay in the moment. Don’t try to control every little thing and everything a person says or does. Try planning less. Create more flexibility in our lives when we allow more spontaneity to find a place.
3.) Co-operate with the inevitable. Accept more. As Dale Carnegie said, “If you know a circumstance is beyond your power to change or revise, say to yourself: ‘It is so; it cannot be otherwise.’
Put a ‘stop-less’ order on your worries. Decide just how much anxiety a thing may be worth–and refuse to give it anymore.”
It takes small shifts. Do you have steps to share that help you to be worry free?
Lenora's Italy Retreat blog | Lenora's Change Limiting Beliefs Website
Beliefs sure do affect all of us in every aspect of our lives. Judgements made or insinuated are insidious. America is supposed to be a melting pot. After all, our forefathers came to America with the intention of practicing religious freedom. I am always amazed that so many Americans are still prejudiced. Why are they? I think because of fear. Fear of change. Fear of losing control. When we have a vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, speaking to a crowd, and allowing them to shout out about Senator Obama, “kill him” “, “off with his head”, and then NOT speak up. WE each must stand up and stop this. She is not necessarily responsible for what they might say, but she is responsible to stop cries of hate. In my opinion, she is stoking anger and division. Each of us has a responsibility to create more acceptance of differences. HOW? Voting will be one way to speak our minds. Are you registered? Vote for what you stand for, without tearing down the other candidates. It is a practice to choose what we want, not focus on hate.
David Gergen of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, CNN commentator, and in my opinion a deep-thinking fair man, who has been a presidential advisor to Republicans and Democrats, from Richard Nixon to the present, has expressed his concern. He recently said “there is this free-floating sort of whipping around anger that could lead to some violence.”
In this global financial crisis, our focus must be on what we want, not on what we fear. Our beliefs blind us and sometimes make us do crazy things. When Barack Obama spoke in Ohio yesterday, he encouraged the crowd to reject panic and division, and instead focus on resolve and steady leadership. Of course, I know all the candidates are criticizing each other, but there is a line that Palin has crossed, in allowing hate threats. I want to acknowledge John McCain for defending Obama, one time, when a woman said Barack was an Arab and she did not trust him. McCain said “No, he’s a decent family man and citizen.” But that raises the question, does McCain believe all Arabs are not decent?
Lenora's Italy Retreat blog | Lenora's Change Limiting Beliefs Website
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