10 Steps to Overcome Adversity

1. Intentionally decide to seek for deeper, clearer understanding. Seeking means the unbridled devotion of our whole attention to discerning the details and depths of any issue we need clarification. In your search for clarity you will be faced with the biggest obstacle, which is fear. This emotion is useful in keeping us from taking unnecessary risks that might endanger us. The world is filled with fear because it serves the purpose and agenda of those in control.

2. Open your mind and heart to see the unexpected, a new level of insight or understanding about what you seek. Assume that your current understanding is distorted, incomplete or that you can know more — that there is always more to know about what you seek to understand. Understand that you are a product of all the influences of your past environment going back to the womb. Your beliefs are now acting as filters that keep you from seeing through your own eyes. You are looking at yourself, others and life in general through the beliefs of very judgmental and intolerant people who think they are the only ones who are right. In order to gain greater freedom and clarity you will need to once again look through the eyes of a child. A child does not have all the years of flawed beliefs that keep one from feeling and following one’s instincts.

3. Become still in mind and body. Watch, wait, become prayerful, contemplative, and receptive, humbly ready to shiver in the draft of an open mind.
This is a skill that must be cultivated, by doing so, you will learn to be a silent witness without judgment of yourself others and life in general. This will give you objectivity and allow you to see other choices for your life you may need to consider. You are neither your thoughts nor your feelings these are just aspects of your being and they do not have to define nor determine who you are or what you become.

4. Assume that there is always a higher wisdom, which you can access and grasp. To presume otherwise is to be presumptuous in a small way. If you are to be presumptuous, do it liberally and open yourself to larger anticipations and discoveries.
Mankind has thousands of years of recorded history of pain and suffering. Feed your mind and spirit by studying others who have been down a similar path and learn from them. Search for a good self-help book. Develop the mindset of a seeker of wisdom by seeking out wise persons. Pray and have faith that God has not abandoned you, he may be leading you towards your destiny if you let him guide you. Take inventory and see just how far you have come.

5. Ask a specific question or request specific light to be shed on exactly what you need. The more specific and intense the focus, the greater will be your opening to receive.
One of the most powerful forces known to man lies within you, your unconscious mind; it is your loyal servant. If you ask it specific questions it can search for specific answers. You do get what you ask for so be very careful what you ask for. If you ask it why am I in this condition it may say because you got yourself into it, but if you ask it what would it take for me to overcome this adversity it will now have something to work on. Have faith that the mind will work even when you are asleep or doing other conscious tasks.

6. Believe that it is possible to receive wisdom, guidance and even truth in relation to the issue you are wrestling with. Seek and ask, believing with an undivided mind that it is possible for you to have breakthrough thoughts, no matter what you happen to be feeling at the time.
This may require you to have faith in God or a power that is greater than you. The simple fact that you are alive is a miracle since the odds of you being born are astronomical. You were born with innate talents and resources so start to appreciate and to love yourself. Once you do this you can accept the love from others and from that higher source of power that wants you to find the truths you are seeking to be a whole human being.

7. Wait for as long as it takes. Wisdom, clarity and resolution come more and more as we dedicate ourselves in an ongoing way to the process of discovery.
As one famous minister says, “God’s delays are not necessarily God’s denials”. Before you can find clarity, you must overcome your fear. Once you do this, things will look different to you, you will be able to see hidden agendas, but don’t let this clarity blind you. With greater clarity comes power but don’t become intoxicated with power but develop power over power so you can use your inner power in a benevolent way.

8. Burn with desire to know more truth, more deeply. Allow your deepest desire to know to be kindled into a blazing laser search, scanning everywhere for anything that reveals itself as coming into focus to complete the puzzle of your understanding.
Truth will reveal itself in some places you would least expect. So, use your awareness to dig and to mine nuggets of life guiding truths. Create your own inner test for what constitutes truth for you. Listen to your whole being find that inner alignment and resonance to something that feels right to you. Seek out people and situations that create those feelings that nourish your spirit.

9. Find more truth and do not assume that you have “arrived” at perfectly complete understanding. Continue the exciting discovery of getting to know each answer’s deeper and more lovely meanings and applications.
Ten years from now you will think and feel different about your own present truth. This is due to many factors. Understand that truth is relative to time, your own stage of your journey, and to circumstances in your life. Avoid anyone that tells you they have the only truth. There are many paths and many truths being a free willed human being you have the delight of discovery. As Albert Einstein said, ” Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal (flawed) hopes and wishes where we face it as free beings, admiring asking and observing. There we enter the realm of art and science.

10. Be grateful and don’t give up! Thank “Heavens” you get to be here at all, to ask, to seek, to find, and to be nearer to the Spirit of Truth that can prove itself more and more to be oh so true! Don’t give up on your search process, and never stay stuck at one of the above levels. Enjoy the freedom and the journey to be all of you without the constant judgmental criticisms of people that can only see in others their own flaws and weaknesses and who have no hope of being happy and well-adjusted free human beings. To err is human, to forgive is divine, seek your own divines.

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Shoo or I’ll hit myself

Every morning I’m greeted by an anomaly, a Northern Cardinal bird that is hell bent on protecting his territory from himself. Day after day he is there to fight himself when he sees his reflection in a vehicle mirror. You might feel sorry for him and think, “Poor little bird he doesn’t know any better.”

Enter Harry a former co-worker that had a victim complex. Every day as he set out to do his job, he was a disagreement waiting to happen. He had all the traits of good employee save one, being cordial and treating his coworkers as clients. Eventually, it was too much, and he was fired.

Every day we brush with the Harrys of the world who live to pick a bone or a fight with others. Or maybe at times, we have acted like a Harry. They are the Cardinals fighting a futile cause that wastes energy and time. Since I knew some of Harry’s past, there may have been a direct link to his failed dream. Harry was a former educator who held an important position in a school in from Latin America. Like most immigrants, he took any job he could get, and he settled down. Ironically, he was always educating his coworkers on their infractions of not following protocol.
This job was his territory, so he thought. He would defend his actions in being rude to others as just getting others to adhere to company policy. In essence, he took it upon himself to be the policy police. His position was one that he interacted with all the operations people regularly. I never got on his bad side because I found it easier just to do what was expected.

The bird cannot change his actions. Every day he fights himself until he’s exhausted. That intrusive bird was always staring back at him always wins. If you are channeling your inner Harry, give yourself a break. Conceive a new reality of how your life could be. Believe it with all your heart that you can make it happen. Work hard to achieve it. The first takes boldness, the second faith, and the third grit.