“The best place to find a helping hand is at the end of your own arm.”

~Swedish Proverb

When you fly on a commercial airplane, the flight attendant instructs you in the case of a sudden loss of cabin air pressure to put your oxygen mask on first before helping others.  Why is this an important rule for ensuring survival?  Because if you run out of oxygen, you can not help anyone else with their oxygen mask.

We can apply the oxygen mask metaphor to everyday life. On the physical dimension we can become overwhelmed, tired, bored, or frustrated by our day to day world. There are many demands and expectations to which we surrender ourselves and sometimes we lose sight of who we are. We distance ourselves from taking care of our mind, body and soul.

On a metaphysical level, we live in times where there are major shifts underway as ascension is happening and we find ourselves living or having the majority of our experiences in the third dimension as fifth dimension characteristics reveal themselves. This can cause agitation, a feeling of loss or confusion and even physical symptoms. In this state we may feel that things are not as they appear and we may find ourselves trying to hold on to what has been, but know we need to let go. This can put many in a state of gasping for air.

But we can not contribute our gifts, talents, compassion or creativity, love or intelligence—in short our destiny to the world—if we are gasping for air ourselves. It is difficult if not impossible to help others if we do not first help ourselves. We need to first experience helping ourselves and taking care of ourselves. We can only know how to help others when we have had the experiences of helping ourselves. 

Our ability to help others and the world around us—our helping power—is a reflection of our knowledge, attitude and talent or skill. In order to help others, we need to invest in increasing our helping power and impact. And this starts with taking care of yourself on the dimensions of mind, body and soul.

I realize that for many this may seem selfish. But this reaction is rooted in the lower vibrations of judgement or expectation of the third dimension. If we think about the oxygen mask metaphor, if we do not put on our masks first we will be deprived of oxygen, become unconscious and not be able to contribute to help others or to make that difference. There can be detrimental consequences.

If we allow ourselves to understand ourselves, to reflect, gain clarity, to practice gratitude, to rest and to be well both physically and mentally, we will have the ability to truly help others. If you allow yourself to have experiences that foster your knowledge, talents and attitude and to improve your overall well-being, you improve your ability to help others.

Also, we need to be cognizant of the difference between empathy (to care about others and understand their feelings) and sympathy (actually helping others). This may sound counter-intuitive, but if you are seeking to make change you need to first focus on evolving yourself. Only when you are equipped to help by nurturing yourself will you find your contributions more meaningful and fulfilling. With this, I encourage all to put on your oxygen masks first.

At a recent conference I was at, a speaker spoke about how he did not want his daughter to be defined as a consumer, and for her not to think of herself as a consumer. “She is a creator, not a consumer,” he said.

This struck me, initially thinking how we unconsciously accept labels imposed upon us by today’s institutions and paradigms, by our family and friends and even ourselves. Then I thought that we are all indeed creators so why do we let others define us, and more so why do we use the defined or existing categories of identity to define ourselves. Maybe because it’s easier, more comfortable or familiar, but when we do this we lose our ability to create who we are.

Ask yourself this question. “Who are you?”

By human nature and by ingrained habit, we might respond with our job title or “what we do for a living,” our heritage or culture, our sex, our relationship status, our astrological sign, our religion, where we live or where we “came from” as in the history of where we were born, grew up and where we now live. If we contemplate the question more, we might respond with our hobbies or values and beliefs.

For some, we may not define ourselves alone. We may define ourselves attached to someone else or something else.  We all have many identities and they are all contextual. How you portray or even define yourself in person with an intimate circle of friends or family, vs in a work environment or on social media will be different. Our various identities are significant, varied and multi-faceted—even multi-dimensional. They reflect us from our endless myriad of experiences.  

The challenge comes in when we unconsciously (and consciously) identify ourselves by definitions that are external to us, and by the generality of these definitions. Mother, wife, student, senior citizen, entrepreneur, retired, employed, end user, consumer, etc.  Our identity is more than the generalized identify of the groups we are part of, what we do or what stage of our life we are in. Our identity is more than the duality of emotions or characteristics we experience today.

However, many get drawn and stuck in self-definition or identity that is not created by them. They tie their identities to false expectations, assumptions, desires created by capitalism, institutional paradigms of degrees, test scores, performance reviews, investments, social media likes and followers, etc. They unwittingly misplace their identity in the hands of others—not questioning, and worse filling a self-fulfilling prophecy created by external forces and others.

When we do this we limit ourselves and struggle with simply being us.  We can fall into the trap of wanting and purchasing things we do not need or even like. We strive to meet goals that are not truly ours. We doubt ourselves when we compare ourselves to others or do not “live up” to the expectations of others. We let a score or a rating determine our future. We let a characteristic that someone gave us in some season of our life dictate our behaviors and close our minds.

As creators, we have the ability to create and define ourselves—and what is even more amazing is that the creation and definition of yourself can (and will) change. Everyday you have the ability to create you. So I ask, why bog this down with labels and definitions that others have bestowed upon you? Define your self.

“If we can respect the divine within us, if we can treat it with dignity, then we can respect others around us.”

~ Vishwas Chavan

I have often touched upon self-appreciation and self-love as we explored the constant state of change and the mind, body and soul connection. This in the context of appreciating, loving and accepting you for who you are and all that you are. Self love is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself and is fundamental to living well. Self love is a state of appreciation for oneself that grows from experiences and actions that support our physical, emotional and spiritual growth.

Going hand-in-hand with self-love is self-respect. When we think of respect we often do so not in the context of ourselves but more so in the context of who is respecting (or disrespecting) us and who we respect.  Overall, respect can be defined as a sense of personal value that you attach to someone or someone may attach to you. Self-respect is the personal value you attach to you.

Just like self-love, self-respect grows by our actions or experiences that mature and hopefully evolve us. When we think, speak and act in ways that expand self-respect in us, we have compassion for ourselves and move to a state where we nurture our mind, body and soul. More so, we understand our core values and beliefs and do not compromise them.

Respecting yourself is a major piece in loving who you are. Each of us are magical beings and deserve to be respected and loved because we are unique. A common definition of respect as a verb is “to show regard or consideration for.” In thinking about self-respect, ask yourself if you are showing regard and consideration for yourself and those around you with your thoughts, words and actions. 

Self-respect is something you should automatically give yourself—regardless of what image you see in the mirror or the thoughts running through your head. You need to know and believe that you deserve the respect given to you and show respect for yourself through your actions.

The longest relationship you will ever have in your life is the relationship you have with yourself.  It is up to you to develop and nurture the strength and connection you have with yourself through self-respect and self-love. Only you can define your value. It is not, and never will be, found or defined by someone or something else.

Without first learning how to appreciate and respect ourselves, we will never be able to appreciate and respect the other people and things in our lives. Without self-respect, self-love and investing to find peace with ourselves and cultivating a deep understanding of ourselves, we can fall into the trap of being in a continuous cycle of trying to find acceptance, validation and respect from outside.

The more you respect yourself, the more you will be able to love yourself. As you can imagine, there are many things in life that can distract you from or hinder self-respect. There can be outside influences that interfere with treating yourself honorably. These include the low-vibration energies of comparing yourself to others, envy, fear, judgement and others that are often fueled by life events and situations.

But these life events and situations are simply experiences and you own how you choose to react. If you build a strong foundation of self-love and self-respect you will not react out of fear, envy, judgement, etc. You will be grounded in the value of you and your beliefs.

In short, if you do not respect yourself then you will not take care of yourself, and you will choose to let people treat you badly. With self-respect, you recognize and know your worth and others cannot negatively influence your opinion of yourself. As we have heard many times in many ways, you must love and respect yourself before anyone else can or will.

Every once in a while it feels like life throws us a curve ball or puts up a road block that makes us question what we are doing and why we are doing it, and to have that more immediate reaction of “why bother” or “I just wasted time and energy.” You know that feeling (and some may say it out loud) of “well, that’s hours of my life that I wasted” or “can’t get back.”

It is, for the most part, a normal human reaction. Be it time and energy invested in a relationship, job, project, etc., when something happens that feels like It halts progress, changes how we feel, what we do or how we do it, we tend to initially feel betrayed—after all, we were hoping and believing that the experiences we were having were going to result in something, deliver us a next step up the proverbial ladder of success, or get us connected to new people or places that would serve some purpose for our purpose.

I am a firm believer in experiences and that there is no such thing as time or energy wasted. From every experience we learn, grow, evolve and progress. But sometimes we get a bit off center about the experience. As we embrace that any given path we are on—with persons we encounter, situations or challenges we navigate, hurdles we overcome and emotions we feel—will deliver something tangible and an outcome that will get us to the “next level,” open a door to a new opportunity or fulfill us. 

And when after investing time and energy on this path, a wrench gets thrown in, we can sometimes think of ourselves as a fool. But the only foolish thing was losing sight—even for a few moments—that it is not about the end game or getting to the next level. It is not about a deliverable for the hope or expectation we held. It is simply about the experience—nothing more and nothing less.

In a way, all roads lead to nothing if you are thinking in a liner fashion and that the road will lead you somewhere, with somewhere defined as a destination or end point. Think about it this way. There are no destinations or end points.  There is a flow of interactions, events, emotions and feelings that are all part of your experiences.

Life really is a collection of endless and timeless experiences—essentially a continuous string of them. When we start to overlay expectations on our experiences or desire an experience to result in something tangible with some time line attached to it, this is where we can start to feel a bit betrayed or deflated and think that the Universe is working against us. Sometimes we put too much emphasis on what our purpose in life is. Our purpose is to experience and through those individual experiences we are part of the Universal whole.

There is no “end” in life because your life is not about fulfilling any fixed agenda. Your life is energy experiencing itself. Your life energy—as in all energy—never stops. It flows. When you remove the mind-set of thinking of your life as a project plan with milestones and key deliverables, and simply let the process of your life unfold you will be able to be more in the moment and appreciate your experiences for creating the every evolving you. All you encounter, all the people you meet on your path and all you feel are there for a reason—with that reason being for you to just experience.

“You are everything that is, your thoughts, your life, your dreams come true. You are everything you choose to be. You are as unlimited as the endless universe.”

~ Shad Helmstetter

In many of the posts that I have written I talk about such things as the current physical world in which we live, multiple dimensions and ascension. I have also shared thoughts on intention, living consciously and the power of choice.  As humans mostly having our experiences in the third dimension, although we are becoming enlightened and are ascending, we tend to still view our lives as a collection or a series of linear experiences.

We define what has happened as memories, what is happening now as real or in real time and what will happen as the unknown or an aspiration. What I would like to explore with you is the concept of the here and now and that there is an array of parallel experiences for you here and now, and that this is where intent and choice come into play.

To help you think about this, think about your experiences from the vantage point of the multitude of radio or satellite stations to which you have access. As you are driving you may search the stations to find something to listen to—be it music, the news or a talk show. You choose to listen to a station and may stay with it for awhile or it may bore you or it may not be of interest to you and you turn the dial. But you know at any given moment that there are multiple broadcasts (choices) going on at the very same time.

At any given moment, there are an unimaginable number of things going on in the world at the same time—sports events, concerts, meetings, classes, dinners, shopping, work, etc. You, as a being mostly experiencing your life in the linear third dimension, experience where you may be or what you are doing, but you know that there are over seven billion people (world population) having their experiences right where they are as well. 

A way of looking at this is that there are alternate realities that exist parallel to our own and we are all co-existing with other realities. This affords us free will or choice, and practicing this choice consciously with intention creates your reality. What you do, how you do it and where you do it are all choices made completely by you, and it creates your here and now.

In creating your reality you can have anything you choose. But note, there is an element of consistency that is needed over a period of time. There is a factor that allows us to alter or change our minds before we get what we ask for or want to create. There are many of you who may question why what you think or say you want to create has not yet been realized. You need to take a hard look at the consistency of your intent and actions.

It very well could be that you are still in a “buffer zone” where you are unconsciously figuring out what you really want to create or what your human self thinks it wants is not really aligned with your higher Self or purpose. It is very important to be careful and conscious on what you want to create as your reality, especially if what you want to manifest has not been seriously and well thought out or visualized. As the old adage goes, be careful of what you ask for.

As we are co-existing with other realities, there are lines or veils between realities and we exclude non-relevant realities from our consciousness. As we are evolving from the third dimension in which we experience life fueled by such lower frequencies as fear, anger, uncertainty, jealousy, etc., in the construct of duality and in a linear modality to the fourth (the gateway dimension) to a fifth dimension, there is a thinning between dimensional realities. In this state, time will no longer be experienced in a linear manner and these lines will slowly fade.

In such a time, it is important to first understand this is happening and also to choose wisely among your realities, deeply considering what non-chosen reality you leave behind as you advance toward your chosen reality and direct your own destiny. Creating your here and now requires that you take responsibility for your choices and for you to realize what you choose is going to be what you manifest.

How more often then not that we drift uneasy into our night’s sleep with way too many thoughts running through our minds. We play over encounters from the day and the little (or big) dramas. We put more things on the next day’s “to-do” list that we did not get done. We think about times past, what we missed, wish we did or where we would like to be. And we put ourselves fully in yesterday or the next day thinking about what we have to do or sometimes dreading some where we have to be. First of all—not a good way to fall into sleep, but more so this sets us up so that within the first few seconds of our mornings our minds kick into high gear carrying over the thoughts from the night before, and we may actually start to fear the day.

You know that feeling—you wake up and your body feels a bit heavy, your head is fuzzy and you push yourself to get yourself in motion. Within the first very few precious moments of your new day, you have lost the joy of jumping into the day. You pre-loaded the day with expectations, doubt, uncertainty and fear.

This is really no way to start each new day, and we need to flip this mindset.  Think how amazing it is to wake up and feel excited about the day ahead and being in a state of mind where you embrace and look forward to the new experiences that await you.  Think how empowering it is to step into your day with confidence and strength. Think about how gratifying it is to be in the actual moments of your day.

Overall our lives in this physical dimension are a collection or succession of continuous single, unique days. The lives we chose to live in this dimension are determined by how we choose to spend each day. 

With many things going on in life it can be challenging to feel charged for the day ahead—but the more I practice getting in this mind set that the more I realize it is about intention and putting in some effort. It’s not always easy to keep the loud noise from vibrating in my head, to turn down the volume and clear my mind. It takes practice to ease into your evening or night, to quiet yourself, as well as to stop your mind from going into overdrive within the first few minutes after you wake up. Deep conscious breathing and still or active meditation does help.

I think sometimes of the times in my life where days came and went and I was functioning in an over scripted routine—letting worry, frustration, anxiety and fear drive me–where I was rushing just to sit in traffic. Rushing to get the morning work out in. Running from meeting to meeting. Eating lunch at my desk for weeks if not months on end. Rushing to be places as if it would be the end of the world if I was late a few minutes.

Jumping ahead in my thoughts so much that I was not really listening and hearing people. This current physical life is a bit too short to be going through each of my new days like this. So—I stopped. Over the past few years I have worked to change by mindset—and focus on each day as a gift and to embrace my days for the potential they hold. I have made the decision not to start each day from a point of fear, worry or expectation.

Do I always get it “right.” Well, of course not. But in being fortunate to get another day, I hit the reset button. And I have to say over a few years, I have made lasting changes for the better—and I don’t lose sight that I will make the most of each day in the context of that day—rain or shine, crazy busy or slow, red lights and green lights and everything in between.

“When times are tough is matters not that we forget we are infinite beings. What matters most is how quickly we remember.”

~ Gail Lynne Goodwin

All too often in the midst of challenging situations, difficult times or when we are at a crossroads in a season of our lives we lose sight that we are indeed infinite beings, and we wrap ourselves up in worry, fear and doubt. We inject into our thoughts and actions criticism, judgement, blame and jealousy. And we may start to overthink things, think that everything matters and we get emotionally paralyzed.

Some words of wisdom—it matters not. All what you get hyper-focused on, run through your head hundreds of times trying to play out every possible scenario, all the “what if’s” and all the worry and the “mistakes” or “mis-judgements” you think you may make—matter not.

As I talked about in the past, there are no such things as mistakes. We are all complete and have the information and knowledge we need built right inside our Selves. We experience, and those experiences open the channels through which knowledge and knowing can flow. When we think and function as if everything matters, we block those channels.

So often we worry about what people think about us or what they may say. We put too much emphasis on what we may think of as “mistakes” we made. We live in other’s expectations, comparing ourselves to others or in the state of judgement. 

In this physical existence, we live in a world of demands, places to be, things to do, and often in a world of arbitrary or self-imposed deadlines. We allow ourselves to get pulled into other peoples dramas, urgencies and sometimes “busy work”. If we are not living consciously or in a state of self awareness, we can get lost in this maze—and start to worry, live in doubt and anxiety and lose ourselves.

I ask that you take a breath, ground yourself and reflect on the concept of it matters not.

Think of “it matters not” not as a synonym for lack of, or without judgement, but for acceptance. It matters not allows you the freedom of your expression of yourself with no limitations—and not concerning yourself with the choices or the expressions of others. It is not not caring. It is about being true to yourself and not being threatened by difference.

For example, it matters not that you may have friends or family that have a different philosophy or way of thinking. It matters not that your experiences are different from others. What is important is not to incorporate the expression of being threatened or being fearful by difference into your existence.

Remember you are an infinite being, and as an infinite being you create every experience in your life. When you believe that everything you think, say or do matters and worry; anxiety and fear accompanies what you think, say or do, you are giving away your power to lower vibrations of self blame and judgement. Through your thoughts you are choosing your reality, and if you are not pleased with your reality, take some time to reflect on your thoughts and your emotions.

Today, let go of “it matters” and move to a state of self acceptance, knowing that you can change your current state of reality and realize clarity and peace.

“There are no mistakes, no coincidence. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.”

~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

The common, and unfortunately accepted, definition of the word mistake is an error in action, calculation, opinion, or judgment caused by poor reasoning, carelessness or insufficient knowledge.

The words in the definition wrap the concept of mistake in other types of thoughts and actions such as opinion, judgement and lack of knowledge that leave us not feeling very good about the whole thing or ourselves. So much so that there has been and continues to be advice or encouragement imparted by many to let us know that it is OK to make mistakes as long as we learn from them, and that everyone makes mistakes. But overall, it all carries a negative connotation and can even have us put more pressure on ourselves or think less of ourselves.

We need to break out of this mindset—the mindset that mistakes exist and the action of judging ourselves by what or how we “do” when we think or someone else thinks we messed up, we failed or did something “wrong.”  We need to stop heeding the advice that mistakes are how you learn—and that carry this unspoken warning of “but make sure it doesn’t happen again.” This breeds fear, imposed by yourself; and living your life and approaching all you do in this state is unhealthy and is not what the Universe meant for you. You need to flip the paradigm and stop thinking in duality—mistake or accuracy, mistake or correctness. 

Everyday we are growing, evolving and ascending. Everyday there are opportunities to build more awareness and understanding. This happens through our experiences and how we flow through these experiences. It is not about making course corrections in your life to try to get it back on track so you can reach your final destination. First, you are on track, and more importantly, there isn’t a final destination. There are many destinations—places to be for sometimes a short stay and sometimes for a longer stay. Along your life, embracing and accepting them all is fundamental.

In your experiences there are things you do or don’t do—all in the context of a moment or even seasons of your life.  All is as it is to be—and nothing is a mistake. All experiences move us forward, even in the moments when it may not feel that way. And if you are experiencing repeats or similar situations, feelings and emotions it is not that you are repeating what you may define as mistakes, there are however some things in your life that you need to experience until you get from them what you need to know to be able to move on.

So I ask that you drop the thought and word mistake from your vocabulary. The word mistake can be toxic. Have faith that everything you go through grows you—and nothing you have done, do or will do will ever be a mistake.