Divine Self!

Lifting yourself out of one reality into a lighter, more joyful reality is no simple task. However, it is the life work of all human beings to allow ourselves to continuously evolve to higher levels of authenticity and aliveness.

The list below serves as a powerful reminder that it is within your own command to create new habits that support your ever-expanding capacity for joy, love, and abundance. You have the ability to effect change and live the life of your dreams. Here’s some powerful insights that can help make your journey realistic and rewarding.

1. Confidence comes from trusting your heart, your soul, and your true feelings.

2. Expand.  E x p a n d.  E  x  p  a  n  d. Expand your vision of what is possible. Use your imagination to point you in the right direction, but don’t limit yourself to how you think things should happen. Breathe, relax, and be receptive to good things happening in the best possible way.

3. Using force to reach your goals is an out of date process. Use grace and imagination to create new potentials. And when opportunity knocks, remember to answer the door.

4. Choose will over willpower. Will contains life and joy and what you “want” to be doing. Willpower contains the emotional burden of what you “should” be doing.

5. Setbacks are truly disappointing and disheartening. But they are only setbacks – not reasons to give up.

6. Tell yourself it’s okay to have emotions, even painful ones. Emotions often indicate what is – not what can be. But once you gather up the wisdom from your emotions, tell yourself it’s okay to feel better.

7. Enjoy this present moment. Feeling good involves having a dream, and being actively involved in the creation of your dream, not just having the outcome of the dream.

8. Always keep your word to yourself. That’s how you build trust and confidence to live your most rewarding, fulfilling life.

9. Overnight success? Instant results? Quick change? There’s always the exception, yet as a rule it’s not exactly going to happen that way. There are no secret ingredients to success. The truth is that having what you want takes time, persistent effort, and willingness to experiment, learn, and adjust the plan.

10. Be gentle with yourself. Your life will unfold as it should. You will find your way. It’s in your bones. It’s in your soul. You have so much inside of you that you have yet to discover. Be at peace and know that all is well.

Author Resource: Want to learn more about how to live consciously, love deeply, and laugh often? Come along with Annette Colby and learn the secrets to creating the life you’ve always wanted to live! Subscribe to her blog Divine Self! today.

Life feels good when you take charge of deciding what you want, particularly when you take the steps to accomplish it. This does not mean pushing at goals or whipping yourself into action. On the contrary, it means deciding what you want, becoming excited about the possibility of it becoming reality, and using a combination of heart, imagination, and logic to create motivation for action.

The rewards of creating change are great. As you move through the process of transforming your world, you will uncover lightness and love you did not know you had. You will experience a level of freedom you did not know was possible.

However, there is an often unspoken truth…

Creating lasting and rewarding change involves a journey. “Instant” manifestation, “immediate” success, and “quick” change often occurs after years of self-introspection and much trial and error. For example, the enduring myth of the “overnight” success is as old as the hills. Although there are always a fortunate few that manage to be the exception to the rule, for most people the road to success is long and often arduous.

To find your happiness, your purpose, and to live a different life requires exploring unfamiliar territory. Quite often, newness is frightening and uncomfortable. You open yourself to new challenges. Painful beliefs will surface and make themselves apparent in your thoughts and emotions. You will find yourself facing the need to take risks and make unfamiliar decisions. The entire process of creating a new future is really an adventure in which you invite yourself to discover if you can become more than you currently believe yourself capable of becoming.

If you are struggling with your goals, frustrated by your current inability to overcome your challenges, or unable to create the type of success you often dream about, hang in there, okay?

Overnight success? Not exactly. More like a little everyday. Stay true to your dreams, work your butt off, don’t give up, and you can be an overnight success too!

Author Resource: Want to learn more about how to live consciously, love deeply, and laugh often? Come along with Annette Colby and learn the secrets to creating the life you’ve always wanted to live! Subscribe to her blog Divine Self! today.

If you haven’t seen this before, here’s an olden but golden experiment that’s well worth doing if you’ve got a moment. Here are the instructions:

1. There are 6 students, three black shirts and three white shirts, and two basketballs being tossed back and forth.

2. While watching the video, ignore the team in black. Your task is to accurately count the number of times the basketball is passed between the white shirted students. Not an easy task given the weaving of the basketball players.

3. Click on this link to view the one minute video http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html

4. When you’re done watching, click the back page arrow at the top of your screen to bring you back to read the rest of this article.   

How did you do? Were you able to concentrate? 

• How many times was the basketball passed among the white team?
• Did you see anything else in the video?  

I won’t ruin the video for you, but I will say that whether or not you got the answer correct, there is no “right” or “wrong” to this experiment. The point is gaining personal awareness about yourself as you observe whether or not you saw what was going on in the background? According the original research by  (you can read about it here at http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Simons1999.pdf) there’s a fifty percent chance you saw it, and a fifty percent chance you didn’t. This video demonstrates the benefits of full concentration and the downside.  

Creating New Perceptual Balance

Often, when we’re working through a difficult situation, stuck and unable to move forward on a goal, or experiencing intense emotions, it’s easy to myopically focus on the immediate problem. This same phenomenon of intense fixation on the problem also occurs when we’re worried, stressed, or depressed.

While it’s important to accept the reality of the problem or emotions present and be committed to finding a solution, it’s often harmful to limit your concentration to immediate awfulness of the situation.

Instead, learn to step back often from the thick of things. Doing so allows you to breathe consciously and deeply, and shift your perspective to seeing the bigger picture. Once you are in the larger perspective, you can review, synthesize past experiences and outcomes, pluck the positive from them, and recognize certain patterns. Observe how your actions are unfolding and where they are heading.

Remember that your larger fundamental intention is to create a positive outcome. How does what you are doing and how you are doing it fit into the big picture? Are you focusing attention and action on what is most important to you, and with each step are you becoming more self-assured and self-loving?

To bring yourself back into balance, take several slow deep breaths, allowing your mind and body to relax and calm down. Notice that taking a breath helps ease that anxiety and panic and lifts your spirits. You make great strides towards regaining momentum and forward movement when you bring yourself back into this “now” moment of creative possibility.

Author Resource: Want to learn more about how to live consciously, love deeply, and laugh often? Come along with Annette Colby and learn the secrets to creating the life you’ve always wanted to live! Subscribe to her blog Divine Self! today.

What role does imagination play in your life? How does it relate to the problems you want to solve?

imag•i•na•tion (n) creative ability to confront and deal with a problem; resourcefulness.

Imagination isn’t structured thoughts or a visual picture of what you want. It is an experience of wandering anywhere your heart and soul choose to go. Imagination is a living relationship with what you want. It’s a new potential for a completely new way of experiencing living life, imagined right here in this present moment.

Here’s what Albert Einstein had to say… “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there will ever be to know and understand.”

To create change in your world, imagination is the most important ingredient. If you are having a difficult day, if you are stuck and don’t know what to do next, if you have depression and darkness, it can be so easy to get sucked down into despair and hopelessness.

Don’t struggle to get out. Take a deep breath and activate your imagination. Imagination is your greatest tool and it’s with you right now. Imagination unlocks the creative energy within that adds spark to your life, along with purpose, new direction, and confidence.

At first you may feel foolish playing with your imagination. However, imagination helps you explore grand potentials of what could be. Imagination lifts you out of the tangled tentacles of worried stressful emotions and elevates you above the despair of dead-end situations into the world of possibility. You begin to take control of your own growth process as you imagine yourself already in a new situation, living the type of positive outcome you want to be living.

Imagination involves being at choice, deciding what a better life would feel like to you, and what that life would look like. For example, if you are depressed, imagine yourself living life full of energy, engaged in creative activities that are enjoyable to you. Imagine what that would feel like, and then what that would look like. If you are experiencing financial poverty, imagine yourself having multiple streams of income, enjoying the positive flow of money. Again, how would the experience of abundant flow feel to you, and then what would it look like? If you are dealing with excess body weight, imagine yourself already living your perfect life. How would you feel in your body? What would your relationship with food feel like? What actions would those feelings allow you to choose?

Not all our imagination outcomes turn into reality. But it is the process of imagination that allows new potentials to form and take shape. Those potentials provide insight that more is possible – there is more to life, and to you, than currently meets the eye. Your imagination is how you say that you, and your dreams, are important.

One of the greatest gifts that you already have is your imagination. It will take you to grand places and it will align your desires with love. Your imagination will allow new potentials to form about how you want to live your days on Earth, about how much joy you want to have, and how much abundance. Each day make the effort to not focus so intently on the lack of what you most want, but on imagining the potential of, “I can have what I want.”

Author Resource: Want to learn more about how to live consciously, love deeply, and laugh often? Come along with Annette Colby and learn the secrets to creating the life you’ve always wanted to live! Subscribe to her blog Divine Self! today.

You have a creative spirit inside of you. It wants to shine, express itself, and make your life an amazing experience. Can you feel it wanting to get out? Creative energy adds spark to your life, along with purpose, and new direction. You feel “alive” when you look inside and discover new ways of breaking out of old habits. Creative energy is how your passion comes out, along with your true love of life. Indeed, inviting more of your creative spirit into your life is a powerful act of self-love.

Your creative spirit is your infinite capacity to search for – and find – imaginative solutions for your challenges and your life. Instead of going about things in the same old tried and true ways, creativity gets you into considering fresh approaches and new ways of doing things. Tapping into your creative intelligence, you feel renewed passion for living returning as you explore creative potentials for manifesting desired outcomes.

Even if you have not been accustomed to listening to your creative spirit, or acting in creative ways, you already have this amazing ability within you! Here’s why creativity matters – and how to bring more of it back into your everyday world.

1. Pay Attention

Creative insight is your higher perspective and guidance. Since it is your higher self, the god within you, creativity holds your best interests for generating a fulfilling and meaningful life. To get your inspiration flowing, first make a decision to allow your creative spirit to get involved in your life. Then pay attention to the many different ways your creative mind communicates with you. You may hear actual words, see a clear image, or have a deep inner knowingness. Your creative spirit may communicate with you in the form of hunches, insights, Aha! moments, a feeling, a sixth sense, or various types of body sensations. You may also experience creative insight by noticing synchronicities. Begin paying attention and your creativity will rise exponentially!

2. Embrace Quietness

Creative inspiration is initially often a quiet, gentle nudge. It generally does not shout loud enough to be heard over your stress, upset, frustration, anger, or judgment. Spending some quiet contemplative time each day is good way to strengthen your creative ability. Simply sit in a quiet place every day for about 1 to 20 minutes. There are no hard and fast rules about how to sit, how long to sit, or what specific steps to take. Simply take a deep breath, and ask, “What is it I need to know about this situation?” or, “What will move me one step closer to a more fulfilling and meaningful life.” Then be willing to trust that yourself and open to receiving the quiet guidance of your own creative spirit.

3. Open to New Possibilities

Try this experiment. When something is troubling you, just sit with it. Don’t do anything to logically fix or solve the problem. Instead, just sit, place your intention on allowing the best possible outcome, and breathe. See if you can step away from the negative thoughts circling with frenzy within your head. Allow your creative self to offer new insights and potential solutions to your situation. Your job is to stop fretting and stressing with the problem, and instead place your focus on being open to amazing new possibilities.

4. Ask Positive Outcome Questions

“What can I do to move forward into my desired outcome?” “What is the best step for the level of energy I have right now?” “What action will allow me to feel full, satisfied, and more confident?” One of the best ways to get your creative juices flowing is by asking these types of forward moving, outcome focused, searching questions. Ask questions that lead you forward into positive solutions. Ask clearly formed questions that allow clear answers. For example, instead of asking, “Why me? What have I done wrong to deserve this?” you might ask, “What is the next step I could take that would bring a positive outcome to this situation?”

5. Be Open to New Ideas

Creativity is by its very definition inventive and full of new possibilities. It can bring you down paths you hadn’t considered before. This means that you won’t know ahead of time if a creative solution will work. Be aware that your logical self won’t want to experiment with new ideas because logic desires safety and assurance of success. Your creative spirit is different because it is willing to risk failure to gain knowledge and wisdom through direct experience.

6. Trust Your Creative Insights

Once you get a creative idea, write it down, make a note of it, and decide to take action. Most creative inspirations do not involve any immediate drastic life changing actions. Instead, creative insights are typically one small, comfortable step in the direction of your desired outcome. They allow you to open up to feeling more joy, more confident, more fulfilled, on a day-to-day basis. Decide to allow your creative self to play a bigger role in your life. If you have a sense to take a left turn instead of a right turn, follow through and go left. If you are grocery shopping and the broccoli somehow calls to you instead of the carrots you had intended to purchase, buy the broccoli. You don’t need to logically question “why” you turned left or bought broccoli. Your goal is to create a bond of trust between your logical self and your creative self.

7. Strengthen Your Creative Spirit

All of us have had the experience of failing to listen to, or follow through, with our creative spirit. We know when that happens we often feel heavy, disappointed, and realize we “should” have listened. It’s easy to get mad and be critical of ourselves for not paying better attention.

However, if you truly want to increase the amount of creative guidance in your life, then a failed opportunity is the perfect time to strengthen your overall desire. For instance, if you “heard” your creative intuition, but failed to follow your creative ideas, hunches and gut feelings, talk to your creative side. Tell it that it did a fine job of providing useful information. Let it know that yes, it would have been wise to follow through with the creative suggestions or actions, but this time you choose not to. However, let your creative self know that you’re in a process of developing trust, and that this experience showed you something important. Let your creativity know that you appreciate the input even though you might not always listen.

Creativity is your urge to play with life, to see what is possible, to create your most fulfilling and meaningful life, and enjoy all that is good and beautiful. Utilize these seven suggestions to awaken and sharpen your creative spirit and you will be surprised at how often it will give you a short cut to the life and outcomes you want.

Create a beautiful day!

Author Resource: Want to learn more about how to live consciously, love deeply, and laugh often? Come along with Annette Colby and learn the secrets to creating the life you’ve always wanted to live! Subscribe to her blog Divine Self! today.

Every morning is a magical new opportunity to create a meaningful day. No matter what you had going on the day before, when you went to bed at night, you essentially hit the “reboot” button. In the morning, you are back to your original settings. It’s up to you now to set the direction for your day.

No matter how busy you day is, you have at least one minute to consciously greet your new day. Before you turn on the lights, before you hit the shower running, take a minute to breathe and welcome your divinity back into your body. As your consciousness gently drifts back into your human form, you can look around and say hello to your world. Yes! This is another majestic day to indulge your senses, and another magnificent opportunity to expand your joy. Best of all, its another day to deliberately create a meaningful life.

What if your life isn’t going so well lately, or you’re depressed, or even grieving? Then it’s especially important to begin your mornings with sacred time to quietly reenter the world. Breathing invites your spirit back into your body, which allows you receive love when you most need it. Breathing, you bring compassion into yourself even as you hurt. Even in the darkest of all experiences, you can breathe into yourself kindness and empathy.

Breathe Yourself Awake

In the mornings, I wake up needing to breathe deeply. My spirit seems to have been far off, doing its own important work while my human body rested and repaired. But in the morning, it’s time to call myself back home. While breathing, I’m delighted to see my husband alive and lying next to me. I smile at the kitties who are expectantly waiting for breakfast. I breathe and invite the beauty of the trees and flowers outside my windows to fill my senses.

While breathing, I ask myself, “What do I really, really, really want today? What activities and experiences are most important to me? Is it time to add more play into my life, focus more on my priorities, or create better balance?” I breathe and “feel” for the answer.

Gee, how cool is that? Another day to create a meaningful life. Another day to take responsibility for choosing my experiences. What a blessing! I can place my attention on something specific and then allow myself to be open to the wonderful surprises that will come my way. Of course, the day doesn’t always flow as I anticipate it might. But once I breathe and invite my spirit to guide my actions, the day flows magically well.

Soo… how do you start your mornings??

Create a beautiful day!

Author Resource: Want to learn more about how to live consciously, love deeply, and laugh often? Come along with Annette Colby and learn the secrets to creating the life you’ve always wanted to live! Subscribe to her blog Divine Self! today.

There are tough times, terrible times even, in life. If you are sad, you are sad. No magic formula will take away what has happened to you, or make your life an uneventful journey. There really isn’t a fast track to happiness. But despite the reality of life and the complexity of overcoming your own obstacles, you also owe it to yourself to find your reason for living. You have to find the sense of your life.

No one will give you a purpose in life – you have to create one for yourself.

Finding your purpose in life begins with a decision to wake up every morning, saying to yourself, “Here I am again. Another opportunity to create something. Another chance to smile and enjoy my life.”

The responsibility you hold for yourself is to listen to the quietest of voices and do the right thing. This “right” thing isn’t in a rule or a commandment, and it’s not written in any book. It’s inside of yourself. It evolves as you recognize your truth, dream new possibilities, and then allow yourself opportunity to act on ideas and values important to you. In your heart of hearts you know that you want to leave this world better then how you found it. It’s up to you to breathe the air, smell the smells, hear the beautiful sounds of earth, and decide that you life is important to you.

Author Resource: Want to learn more about how to live consciously, love deeply, and laugh often? Come along with Annette Colby and learn the secrets to creating the life you’ve always wanted to live! Subscribe to her blog Divine Self! today.

Have you seen the motivational plaque that reads, “Life is a do-it-yourself project. Get excited about it!”

I love that expression because it reminds me that it’s up to me to make each day special. That doesn’t mean that each moment of every day is going to be wonderfully smooth, uneventful, and happy. But it does mean that it is up to me to take action each day to make sure I’m excited about being in a body and about being alive.

If you’re not as excited about your life as you want to be, take comfort in knowing that increasing the joy in your is something that you can actually take control of. Becoming inspired, energized, and fully engaged in your life is definitely possible! Gaining excitement isn’t so much about working to “fix” yourself as it is learning new skills of acceptance, emotional flow, and focusing your efforts on activities that have personal meaning.

There are numerous actions that support your ability to achieve a higher level of excitement about your own life. Below are several powerful places to begin:

1. Stop the Drama

Excitement about your life emerges as you gain a deeper capacity to accept things as they are right now. Often times when things get rough, it is easy to fall into the worry trap, worrying about the issue, picking at the problem, and conjuring up the worst-case scenario. Intense focus on the problem accelerates negative emotions and stirs up even more chaos.

Acceptance of the situation allows you to stop flailing about and see the situation in a new light. Life is an ever-changing flow of moving, breathing, suffering, and hoping. It includes sorrows and dreams, and the mystery of things actually working out for the best. You’re not having a particular challenge because you are bad, wrong, or being punished. Instead, you can look at the situation and bring compassion to yourself. Discover if there is something to gain from the experience. Often, a difficult challenge also has within it a transformative power that can assist you in creating a more fully developed life.

2. Emotional Flow

Obviously, life is not about the absence of emotions. Therefore, allowing yourself to be excited about being alive involves an understanding that joy and sorrow are not a mutually exclusive proposition. Both are possible, and both can occur simultaneously. With this new definition of wholeness, your life journey is no longer about attempting to abolish difficult emotions, but learning new strategies to recognize, accept, and allow emotional flow.

Emotions have energy, and big emotions have big energy. A key to emotional flow requires learning to accept emotions as they occur while also attaining the ability to stand back and let the emotional energy move on through. I will be the first to admit this is tricky business. It’s so easy to wan to resist uncomfortable emotions, suppress them, or get all tangled up in them. Mastering emotional flow means doing what we least want to do – accept emotions, stand behind a short wall, breathe, and let them flow.

3. Breathe

Conscious breathing is a vital ingredient in the recipe of an exciting life. Breath instantly lifts your spirits and clears your mind of negative thoughts and tension. Breath keeps energy moving. In addition, breath is the choice you make to be alive, to be you, and to be connected to your wisdom. Decide to breathe consciously throughout the day. Several times each hour take several deep, fulfilling breaths, that invigorates you body and rids your body of accumulated heaviness.

4. Practice Optimism

Optimism feels more excited about being alive! If you are not currently an optimistic person, don’t worry – optimism can be learned. After all if the glass is half-empty, then it’s also already half-full. You can teach yourself to see the other side, despite the little setbacks, small adversities, disappointments, frustrations, and letdowns in your everyday experiences. Here are several optimistic thoughts to practice:

• Things didn’t go well today, but there’s a lot to be learned from this experience.
• Somehow everything is going to work out for the best.  
• There is a future, and you will get through this emotion, situation, or experience.
• Be a friend to yourself when you need it most.
• When life is especially difficult, remember that life happens even to ‘good’ people.
• Understand that you are part of something bigger.

5. Choose Joy

A starting point to allow a deeper connection to excitement about your own life is to make a conscious decision that you are tired of “working” on your life and “working” on your problems. Decide you want to feel good right now. Then, get busy making simple choices that allow you to feel good about yourself today. For example:

• Appreciate the love and beauty already in your life.
• Always keep your word to yourself.
• Value your own efforts.
• Instead of focusing on problems, envision solutions.
• Practice self-supportive thoughts.
• Lighten up and don’t take yourself so seriously.
• Schedule time every day for relaxation.
• Learn to breathe consciously and deeply.

6. Follow Your Bliss

Over twenty years ago the great American mystic Joseph Campbell told us that the secret of life was to “Follow Your Bliss.” Turns out, he was right. Follow your instincts and choose actions that make you happy – both now and in the long-run. For example, if you’re feeling low and you choose sugary sweet comfort foods to lift your spirits, you may feel good now, but you won’t be feeling so good a little while from now. Following your bliss means looking inside and choosing an action or activity that allows you to feel more alive. Alive with no regrets or undesirable consequences. Choose to spend your time and energy on activities that create a fuller, richer life for yourself.

Excitement is something we choose. It’s something we set forth as a possibility, and then look for ways to making it happen. This is your life. Is today the day you purposefully get excited about exploring, discovering, and creating?

Author Resource: Want to learn more about how to live consciously, love deeply, and laugh often? Come along with Annette Colby and learn the secrets to creating the life you’ve always wanted to live! Subscribe to her blog Divine Self! today.

Have you ever gotten lost in the thick of things, focusing too much on a specific problem and missing the big picture? If so, then you understand the expression, “Not being able to see the forest for the trees.” You find yourself spending virtually all your time solving problems, overly concerned with detail and unable to see the whole situation.

The problem with this kind of focus is that it leaves little time for creative thinking. Once you solve one problem, there is another one right behind it. So you get caught up in problem-solving decisions which can move you away from specific difficulties but does little to move you forward into the life you actually want to live.

Luckily, there is another way.

If you are finding yourself in a constant battle with your challenges and losing all perspective of why you wanted your goal in the first place, take a breather to regain a more balanced perspective. Step out from the tangle of trees, and broaden your viewpoint to see the entire forest. Once your overall goal is back in focus, it’s easier to connect the essence of your dreams to reality. This means remembering that the larger fundamental nature of your goal was to create a better life for yourself. How does what you are doing and how you are doing it fit into the big picture?

One key to achieving success is to keep your overall focus on the big picture and the central goals while discovering creative, confidence building ways to resolving the day-to-day issues. By remembering your big picture, you can think through the potential short-term and long-term impact of your actions. Before taking action, ask yourself if the action is kind and nurturing to yourself, while also moving you forward into your desired life.

It’s easy to keep your eye on the big picture once you know how. Here’s a list of 10 ways to keep your vision focused on what you most want:

1.  Construct your overall goal in a picture collage by creating a vision board.
2. Make a movie in your mind of the life you want to live. See yourself living your life, enjoying your life. Play your movie over and over throughout the day.
3. Spend two minutes in the morning breathing and reviewing your goal before you head out into your everyday routine.
4. Every morning write down your big picture goal at the top of your to-do list.
5. Make your first to-do item one specific action step related to your goal.
6. Buy a digital recorder and record your goal or dream in your own voice. Listen to your goal several times each day.
7. Before going to bed, meditate on your values, goals, and aspirations
8. Use your imagination to “live” your dream. Close your eyes, relax, and feel yourself already breathing, feeling, and experiencing the life you want to be living.
9. Carry a small token or object in your pocket that is symbolic of your dream. Whenever you lose focus or get discouraged, reach into our pocket and allow your token to inspire you once again.  
10. When things get stressful, take a walk. Movement can release stress, which in turn helps you get centered on what’s important.

It’s easy to get lost in the details and lose focus of the beauty of your dreams and goals.  If you’re struggling with too many details, you can take steps to balance your focus. By picking one of these tips above and taking action, you can regain focus on your big picture and give your actions direction and purpose.

Author Resource: Want to learn more about how to live consciously, love deeply, and laugh often? Come along with Annette Colby and learn the secrets to creating the life you’ve always wanted to live! Subscribe to her blog Divine Self! today.