Archive for the ‘Alignment’ Category

How to Create Life Balance Between Dreams and Habits

An Excerpt from Wayne Dyer's Bestselling Book Being In Balance

Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
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How to Create Balance Between Dreams and Habits — reprinted with permission from Being in Balance (2016 reprint) by Dr. Wayne Dyer

An excerpt concerning life balance published with permission from the beautiful, newly reprinted Being in Balance, Hay House, Inc. (2016)

The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird sleeps in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul, a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities…”
— James Allen

One of the huge imbalances in life is the disparity between your daily existence, with its routines and habits, and the dream you have deep within yourself of some extraordinarily satisfying way of living.

In the quote that opens this [article], James Allen poetically explains that the dream is the magical realm out of which newly created life emerges. Buried within you is an unlimited capacity for creation, what Allen calls “a waking angel” that’s anxious to plant seedlings to fulfill your dreams and your destiny.

True imagination is not fanciful daydreaming, it is fire from heaven.”
— Ernest Holmes

I simply couldn’t resist adding the Ernest Holmes quote describing this dynamic imagination as “fire from heaven.”

They’re both appropriate invitations and reminders that Continue Reading

How I Found The Courage To Write My Truth

Do you ever feel tempted to make decisions based on what others expect from you, instead of from your own truth? How did you know it when you were living in alignment with your purpose? Below is an excerpt from Wayne Dyer’s memoir, I Can See Clearly Now, a New York Times bestseller, which he wrote the year before his passing. What feelings and impressions does it bring up within you? Share in the comments below.

It’s the fall of 1987 and I have been on the road a lot these past two years doing both a hardcover and a paperback tour for my parenting book, What Do You Really Want for Your Children?

I feel that my life is taking on an entirely new purpose and direction, though I’m unHow I Found the Courage to Write My Truth able to define precisely what that is.

I receive many requests to speak at church services all across the country, and have been giving a lot of speeches in humanistically-oriented multidenominational churches for the past several years.

It seems that the messages in my books Continue Reading

Becoming One With Spirit

You have probably seen my dear friend, Immaculée Ilibagiza, at one of my speaking events or on one of my public television shows. She spoke at my Divine Love seminar earlier this year and will be joining me for the I Am Light event  January 24th-25th  on Maui and a cruise to the Holy Land in October 2015. This month her book on the saving power of prayer, The Rosary, will be released in paperback. Immaculée is awe-inspiring, and I thought I would share with you this story from my Foreword to her first book, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust:

The very first moment we met, I knew in an absolute flash of insight that Continue Reading

Stairway to Success

Below is an excerpt from my memoir, I Can See Clearly Now:

It is April 1976, and I’m renting a house on Kime Avenue in West Babylon, New York. I’m continuing with my busy private counseling practice, along with my professional teaching duties at St. John’s University. I am also 100 percent determined that I’ll bring the message of Your Erroneous Zones to the world.

I’ve purchased 2,000 copies, which represents approximately one-third of the entire first printing, directly from the publisher. A few blocks from my home I’ve noticed a radio station’s call letters on the building: WBAB. I have no idea what kind of a format this station broadcasts, so I walk over one Friday afternoon and give the receptionist a copy of Your Erroneous Zones. I tell her Continue Reading

The Secret Garden

When I was 10 years old, my mother remarried and she was able to reunite our family for the first time since I was a baby. My slightly older brother Dave and I had lived in foster homes together all those years.  There we were at last, all under the same roof again, my wonderful mother, my not-so-wonderful alcoholic stepfather, my oldest brother, Jim, whom I barely knew, Dave and me. We lived in a tiny duplex that year that I entered the 4th grade at Chester Arthur School. My teacher Mrs. Engel had a rule that if the class was quiet and well-behaved, she would read aloud to us from 2:45 until 3:10 when it was time to go home.  I took it upon myself to be the classroom enforcer and keep the other kids in line because I really wanted to hear that story. (Here’s where I first learned that I could influence people when coming from a positive place.)

Mrs. Engel was reading to us from The Secret Garden. Does anyone remember that classic children’s book? It was written by British author Frances Hodgson Burnett and first published in 1911. I loved being read to and I really loved this story about Continue Reading

It’s No Accident

Looking back over my life, I can see the most amazing patterns emerge. Connections and synchronicities are always there—whether we can spot them in the moment or not. This is a Universe where there are no accidents. Here’s one example:

When I was 27 and working as a counselor in a high school in Michigan, I gave a talk to the parents one night about what I hoped to offer their sons and daughters that school year. The next day a student named Nancy came into my office with a book. Her mother had attended my talk the night before and decided to offer me a bonus volume she had received from the Book-of-the-Month Club. Nancy explained that, based on what I had said in my talk, her mom thought I would like this compendium of great thought—a collection of work by famous philosophers, scholars, and poets. Amazingly, that book changed the course of my life.

It happened that I was scheduled to talk to my new doctoral advisor at Wayne State University that night. Continue Reading

Dancing with God

Everyone knows the experience of “performance anxiety” whether you are a prima ballerina or a job candidate or a student taking a qualifying exam. Life is filled with what we think of as performance challenges.  The key word here is think because it’s really our thinking about these experiences that scares us—not the opportunity to show what we can do.

A way out of the “I’m scared” thought pattern is offered in A Course in Miracles. I have a special love for this weighty tome that tells us there are only two emotions we can experience: love and fear. Anything that is love cannot be fear, and anything that is fear cannot be love. If we can find our way to stay in a space of love, then fear is an impossibility.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous refrain from his first inaugural address, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” was crafted from Thoreau’s observation that “nothing is so much to be feared as fear.” These Tao men had it right—there really is nothing to be afraid of. We have no need to fear and we can accomplish anything for the simple reason that we are never alone. The presence of our all-loving Source banishes fear.

When you face a “performance” that might provoke the “I’m scared” response, choose love and approach your opportunity as a chance to dance with God. It’s more fun than Dancing with the Stars! Bring your highest Self to the occasion, your loving, serving, giving, joyful self, and be prepared to show the world what your God-aligned Self has to offer.

Blessed Are the Cheerful!

In terms of outward appearances there is something noticeable about people who have reached a high level of spiritual awareness. They seem to be in a constant state of bliss. In my own life I know that my state of cheerfulness is a reliable gauge of my level of spiritual enlightenment at that moment.  The more cheerful, happy, contented, and satisfied I am feeling, the more aware I am of my deep connection to Spirit.

Ask yourself this key question, “How do I feel most of the time?” If your answer is that you feel anxious, anguished, hurt, depressed, frustrated, and so on, then you have a spiritual disconnect. This could mean you have allowed your personal energy field to become contaminated by the debilitating forces of low energy around you.

When you are spiritually connected, you are not looking for occasions to be offended and you are not judging and labeling others. You are in a state of grace in which you know you are connected to God and thus free from the effects of anyone or anything external to yourself. Continue Reading

An Airport Parable

In 1982 I went to Greece to run in the footsteps of Pheidippides, the original marathoner who ran the twenty-six-plus miles from Marathon to Athens in 490 B.C. to carry news of the Greek victory over the Persians. I was part of a big group of runners who were gathered at JFK Airport when we learned that our plane’s departure would be delayed by seven hours. The place became one gigantic collection of grumblers, complainers, and agitated people who now had to decide what to do for the next seven hours.

Amid this chaos was a little old Greek lady, perhaps in her eighties, all dressed in black, who proceeded to take a seat and close her eyes with a smile on her face as if she were meditating. I walked around the Olympic Airline terminal for two hours and then wandered back to the departure area and there sat the little old Greek lady, as peaceful as could be, still in the same position.

I then took a cab to a movie nearby and returned to the airport three hours later, Continue Reading

Your Superior Power

When Carl Jung was asked in an interview if he believed in God, he said: “I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something stronger than myself, something that people call God.”1 To be consciously merged into that perfect union with God is a feeling that’s difficult to explain, but ego definitely takes a backseat. You know that you’re allowing yourself to be guided by a force that’s bigger than you are, and if you so choose, you can stay infinitely connected to it.

Here’s Thoreau in 1851 remembering what this connection felt like to him in his boyhood: “There comes into my mind such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion, and [I] have nought to do with it. I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers. This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself. I speak as a witness on the stand, and tell what I have perceived.”

I too perceive that I am being dealt with by superior powers. Continue Reading

Are You Present?

Have you noticed how often we use up the present moments of our lives, the very precious currency of life, consumed with a longing to be someplace else, doing something else? Or we waste present moments feeling guilty about the past or apprehensive about the future. Slipping away from the present happens because we are living our lives with an attitude of depreciation rather than appreciation. We can ease this dilemma by learning to pay attention to what’s going on in the inner world of our thoughts.

A great hallmark of mental wellness is the ability to be in the present moment, fully and with no thoughts of being elsewhere. Henry David Thoreau said: “He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past.” I would add, “In anticipating the future as well.” There definitely is a past, but not now. And there definitely is a future, but not now.

Our present moment is a mystery that we are part of. Here and now is where all the wonder of life lies hidden. And make no mistake about it, Continue Reading

Grab That Broom

“There should be less talk….Take a broom and clean someone’s house. That says enough.”

–Mother Teresa

 

Mother Teresa, the diminutive spiritual giant who worked daily in the streets of Calcutta, seeing “Jesus Christ in all of his distressing disguises,” as she put it, offers us some profound wisdom in her briefly spoken advice. “There should be less talk,” there should be more action on your part. The old aphorism, “I hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do, I understand,” applies not only to what you want to learn, but also to how you wish to be treated. Behavior is the most effective way to communicate with others. When you find yourself embroiled in the futility of words, stop and remind yourself of the great wisdom of Mother Teresa’s suggestion. Ask yourself, “What can I do here?” By all means, talk it out, but eventually you must take the broom and clean the house of another if you are truly going to be of help. Your words, while important, risk being forgotten if they are not followed by action.

People of action, those who make a difference in life, those whom we most admire, all seem to know the truth of the ancient wisdom, “What you do speaks so loud, I can’t hear what you say.” Be a doer. And in the process you will do more to teach others and to bring fulfillment into your own life than all the words in the dictionary could ever convey.