It Takes Courage to Say “How Easy Can It Be?”

I notice people talking about how hard everything is. Life, work, relationships, parenthood, growing up, letting go - you get the idea. We have programmed ourselves, and not in a positive way in most regards. Life is not supposed to be a struggle, we make it that way. It takes courage to say, “How easy can it be?”

Not making enough money? Set a goal of what you want to make - an end result. Perhaps you want to make $5,000, $10,00 or $15,000 or more a month. Pick an amount realistic to you, but stretch yourself a bit. Then say ” I don’t know the details of how this will happen, I may not know the way to make this happen, but I hand the details over to _________.   Who do you trust in as a higher power, your source, a guardian angel? Use whatever you are familiar and comfortable with, or just the strength you know is inside of you.

Say the amount, hand it over and then say “How easy can it be?” Say it all day, feel it. There is an abundance of money on this planet, plenty of rich people. They have money, so can you. How easy can it be? Be a magnet for what you choose, because only you get to choose what comes into your life. Get used to knowing things are easy - not difficult. Reprogram your hard wiring.

You can use this statement for relationships, a job, health, joy, peace, financial freedom or any need you have. There is an abundance of all of these things everywhere, so it is available to everyone. Change your attitude with courage of conviction.

There is so much going on in the world right now that frightens people. You will see old dark systems crumble beneath the feet of those who have been living off the backs of the people. The lies we have been told will unfold faster than we can keep up. The world of finance, business, economics, technology, energy and global interaction will all change as new systems rise to take the place greed and corruption.

As these changes occur, we need to change what is in us as well. Look deep into old patterns. Anything unforgiven, anger, judgment of yourself and those around you, what is not working in your life and how you created it. How do you approach each day? Usually the same old tired way. Wake up and say this day will be different - “How easy can it be?” Change your self talk, feelings and actions to reflect these new miracles that are waiting to come into your life.

Will your try it? Just give it a chance. It takes courage to say “How easy can it be?” But, you know what? I know you can do it.

Debra Oakland @ Living in Courage Online

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Marilyn Monroe, Vanity Fair & Courage

I was reading the October Vanity Fair with Marilyn Monroe on the cover.  I was struck by a quote from Arthur Miller in his observation about Marilyn, which representes some of the courage and innocence she lived by:

“She always sees things as though for the first time.”

How wonderful to use this gift of seeing everything for the first time.  We are very jaded, bored and judgemental of the world around us.  If we used Marilyn’s method, we would walk around in wonder, enjoying life to the fullest.  Finding qualities in others that are positive is something we should look for and add to our emotional, physical and spiritual toolbelt for living a fuller, happier life.

Marilyn had many tragedies in her life, but let us learn from one of her great gifts - the wonder of seeing the world anew.  If we could see beauty where no beauty seemed to be, our lives would be much richer for it. I have a feeling Marilyn lived in courage in her own way, as each of us do.

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Courage & Grace

You wake up in the morning, feeling great and ready to take on the world.  Your are positive that your day will be wonderful and then ka-boom, you get pulled out of the happy place and into feelings that make you not so happy. We need to stop ourselves from getting pulled out and going into the human reactor mode. To be a human reactor is constantly reacting to a world of effects that seem to make us smaller and take us out of our power.  We are not here to react, we are here to create, to generate, to build. Not to react and not to take from this world.  In this way we will change the way the world has lived for thousands of years.

What supports us?  Grace & Courage. If you live from the outside in, you are constantly reacting to the stimuli outside that makes you less.  Living from the inside out will make you more, a power to reckon with, making change to build, to create the life you dream of. Spiritual or positive self talk (give it whatever name you want), helps you to build your inner center into a powerful place that you can live your life out of.  

Let’s talk about grace, which gives us the courage to take one mighty step after another.  Welcome grace into your life and all your experiences.  Wear it, be it, smell it, taste it, see it, live it. Grace will reveal love to you and lift you above the turmoil of the world and all that seems difficult.  Have you ever really thought about this word.  Now might be a good time.  Grace opens the way to wisdom and illumination to guide you in your choices and decisions. We have Will (a force, a power) inside each of us that drives every quality, giving us passion, which unfolds into our creative expression.  Grace can take everything that opposes the joy of life and transform it.

What is your relationship with your home, environment, creativity, work and employment, friends, and family? How does grace act when you don’t limit it?  I suggest you try living in courage and grace.  This experiment and experience my surprise you.  Where do you live the center of your life from?  This is a big question.   When we take ourselves off of automatic pilot and start answering the bigger questions with honesty, then we become expanded, conscious, and powerful.  Live in Courage and choose Grace.

Debra Oakland @ Living in Courage Online

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Courageous Rules To Live By

Do you have the courage to follow these rules? They can change your life. They are not easy.  We walk around on automatic pilot most of the time.  Habit is powerful, change is not always easy, but essential to living the life you dream of.  It won’t just happen unless you put some effort into changing habits that don’t lead you forward in a positive way.  These are simple courageous rules to live life by.  I love simple, don’t you?

Watch your thoughts; they lead to attitudes.
Watch your attitudes; they lead to words.
Watch your words; they lead to actions.
Watch your actions; they lead to habits.
Watch your habits; they form your character.
Watch your character; it determines your destiny.

Author Unknown

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Enjoy Courage Today & Everyday

Happy September from Living in Courage.  I love this article by Vernon Howard.  Every day we have another  choice to make powerful decisions about the direction we choose our life to move into.  So go out there, gather your courage, strength and resolve to live a powerful life.

Now You Can Enjoy Yourself Every Day

People are often puzzled by the idea of making life more enjoyable by changing their viewpoints. Let’s examine it:

Suppose you are not feeling well one day, yet you accompany some friends on a leisurely drive through the beautiful countryside. Someone calls your attention to a lovely lake, but because of your illness, you cannot give it your attention or interest. Someone else remarks about a magnificent mountain in the distance, but you hardly hear him. You pass one lovely scene after another, yet they have no meaning to you. Because your illness has taken all your energy, you have none to spare in enjoying yourself. It is the same to your mind as if these natural beauties didn’t exist at all. In your present ill state, they have neither existence nor attraction.

But the next day you recover. You feel fine. There is no inward attention to anything; you are outward bound once more. So again you go on a drive; you visit the very same places. But now, everything is completely different. You enjoy the lovely lake and magnificent mountain. You respond to them. You enjoy yourself.

How come? It was the very same scenery both times. But on the second trip you were different. You saw everything in an entirely new way. You had the inner freedom to see and appreciate your outer world. Like magic, your changed mental viewpoint changed the world for you.

It is difficult for people to grasp that the very same principle holds true elsewhere in life. Yet it is absolutely so. When we are inwardly ill at ease we do not really see things as they are; we see them as we are. And there is a world of difference - an actual world of difference - in the two viewpoints.

As we elevate our mental view points we also elevate our world. How is this accomplished? Enjoyment results from discard, not from acquisition. Discard of what? Of the very things we really want to lose - our acquired negative attitudes.

Enjoyment of life is not the presence of something outside ourselves; it is the absence of something within ourselves. Gloom is a state of inner blockage of your True Self; enjoyment is its release. Just as a balloon rises to greater heights by discarding weights, so do we ascend as we toss out negativities.

Vernon Howard
From Psycho-Pictography

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Use Courage and Wisdom to Live a Happier Life

It is through experience that knowledge becomes wisdom.  Wisdom is a great gift.  When used properly, wisdom can assist us to live a life of peace.  What do you search and strive for in your life?  For each one of us it appears in different forms.  Hopefully at some point we become wise enough to see the walls we have built around ourselves that limit us.  Allowing ourselves to release and let go of all that does not work in our life any longer takes courage and inner strength.  These walls of resistance are sometimes invisible even to our own eyes.  It is so easy to look at someone else’s life and see why things are not working out for them.  Yet when we look at ourselves, we often miss what limits us.  I know I want to be a happy little miracle maker.  How about you?  I think we all feel that way.  Some serious contemplation and examination may be necessary (when you are ready) to make profound shifts in your life.  There are millions of books on the subject of living a better, happier, healthier life.  Why then is the world not filled with happy, healthy, successful, peaceful, fulfilled people?  It is sometimes even hard to find people that are filled with true joy.

Our world seems to have sped up at a pace no one can keep up with.  Everyone is busy, busy, busy.  No time is the mantra everyone hears from each other.  People want and need more time just to get through the day and accomplish tasks, just to keep up.

It is time to take the journey back to self, back to love.  Living in the past will only complicate your life and do nothing to build a better brighter future for yourself and your family.  The future does not exist yet.  The moment you are in right now creates your next moments, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years.  This is so simple, that we just don’t get it.  The few who do live happy lives.  How do you feel right now?  Think about this, because it is all that exits.  Imagine a tightrope.  You are standing on the tightrope, which represents NOW.  On one side is the past and the other is the future.  Do you notice there is nothing there? Absolutely nothing.  The past is gone as soon as the moment passes.  The only thing that keeps it alive is your mind or a memory, that’s it.  Imagine the things people could let go of if the past is released into the nothingness that it is.

Embrace the NOW moment.  What do you want?  In the fullness of this moment happening NOW, you get to decide.  Your moments gain momentum and appear in the physical for you to experience.  So, if you get to choose, wouldn’t you want something wonderful in your life?  Every moment you stay peaceful, joyful, productive and take action towards your dreams, you take a step closer to the life you want to live. I want this life for myself and work towards it daily.  Old patterns and habits are exactly that - old, and keep us stuck in a continual rut.  I want out and am climbing that ladder one step at a time, one day at a time by practicing the art of living in the NOW moment.  The more you can stay present, miracles do start happening.  The phone rings, connections are made, people supply you with information or bring you something you needed (without having to ask.) Synchronicity is happening all around you.  Oops! then we forget and go back to old patterns and get old results.

Remember to pull yourself back to NOW as often as you can, until it becomes a great new habit that will reshape your life.  I did not say it would be easy in the beginning.  Just get your foot in the door, use courage, and please trust that things will shift for you when you let go of the judgments and move into joy.  What I wish and dream of for myself, I wish for and dream of for everyone everywhere.  I send you love and support in your best life lived in the courage each of you represent to me.

Debra Oakland @ Living in Courage Online

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Courage For Today

Use Courage today.  When you think of a nice thing to do for someone today, don’t think it over, just do it.

When you admire something a person has said or done, perhaps something that you see as courageous, speak up and say you admire or appreciate them.  It will make your day and the other persons much richer.

Bring kind thoughts to life.  Put them into action by expressing how you feel.  People need to be appreciated and given a pat on the back now and then.

Be interested in others, their families and life pursuits.

Part of courage is keeping an open mind.  This is a great way to learn and step out of the boxes we sometimes place around ourselves.

Gossip is something to discourage, along with negativity, as they are destructive to you and others.

Send your friends to Living in Courage Online to visit often.  I love your comments and appreciate you visiting me here.

Debra Oakland @ Living in Courage Online

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Feel Your Joy by Andy Dooley

Feel your love, feel your joy.

Be the change you want to see.

Celebrate today, and feel your power now!

It’s always more FUN to give than receive!

Andy Dooley

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Are You Happy?

What makes one person happy and not another?  Many years ago the Sociology Department at Duke University did a study on “Peace of Mind”.  After studying hundreds of people, both happy and unhappy, nine factors were found to contribute to emotional and mental stability.

l.  The absence of suspicion and resentment.  Holding a grudge was the major factor in unhappiness

2.  Living in the present and the future. Much unhappiness stems from an unwholesome preoccupation with past mistakes and failures.

3.  Not wasting time and energy fighting conditions you cannot change.

4.  Cooperating with life, instead of trying to either demolish it or run away from it.

5.  Forcing yourself to be outgoing with others-instead of retreating within-during times of emotional  stress.

6.  Refusing to pity yourself or seek self-justification in easy alibis that make you appear “noble” to yourself   and others.

7.  Cultivating the old-fashioned virtues of love, honor, loyalty, thrift.  ( We add courage to the list at Living in  Courage.)

8.  Not putting too much pressure on yourself.  When there is a wide gap between the standards you set for yourself and your actual achievement, unhappiness if inevitable.  If you cannot improve your performance, try lowering the demand instead.

9.  Finding something bigger than yourself in which to believe. Self–centered, egotistical, materialistic people score lowest of all in any test measured for happiness.

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Gratitude @ Living In Courage

Gratitude is such a big part of our receiving. This wonderful quote reminded me that when we do our own personal gardening of the soul by pulling weeds of negativity and planting seeds of positivity, we become charming gardeners.  Have a wonderful week and I am grateful to you who visit me here at Living in Courage.

“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”

Marcel Proust

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