Change Our Agreements

The most important agreements are the ones you made with yourself. In these agreements are the ones you made with yourself. In these agreements you tell yourself who you are, what you feel, what you believe, and how to behave. The result is, what you call your personality. In these agreements you say, "This is what I am. This is what I believe. I can do certain things, and some things I cannot do. This is reality, that is fantasy; that is possible, that is impossible."...

If you want to live a life of joy and fulfillment, you have to find the courage to break those agreements that are fear-based and claim your personal power. The agreements that come from fear require us to expend a lot of energy, but the agreements that come from love help us to conserve energy and even gain extra energy...

Each of us is born with a certain amount of personal power that we rebuild every day after we rest. Unfortunately, we spend all our personal power first to create all these agreements and then to keep these agreements. Our personal power is dissipated by all the agreements we have created, and the result is that we feel powerless. We have just enough power to survive each day...

If we can see it is our agreements which rule our life, and we don't like the dream of our life, we need to change the agreements...

There are four very powerful agreements that will help us break those agreements that come from fear and deplete our energy...

Each time you break an agreement, all the power you used to create it returns to you. If you adopt these four new agreements, they will create enough personal power for you to change the entire system of your old agreements...

If you can begin to live your life with these agreements, the transformation in your life will be amazing...

Instead of living a dream of hell, you will be creating a new dream --- your personal dream of heaven.

Taken from The Four Agreements : A Toltec Wisdom Book by Don Miguel Ruiz

This really hit home today. I am in a situation where I am allowing myself to be treated with less than respect by someone close to me. This is all being driven by fear.......fear of financial insecurity, abandonment and acceptance. All the very things that the 9th step promises assure me I will no longer have if I place my trust in my Higher Power and do the right things. So now that I have actually said that out loud I guess it is time to take some action. All my words are empty if I don't take the action to change things in my life. That said, it is not so easy. All I can do is pray for guidance and take one step and the rest will fall into place.....that's the plan anyway. No matter what the outcome is I have to have faith that everything will be alright, it will be just as my Higher Power intends it to be and I will be given the strength to get through it one day at a time. God Willing.....

The Twelve Rewards of Sobriety

THE TWELVE REWARDS OF SOBRIETY

o Faith instead of despair.
o Courage instead of fear.
o Hope instead of desperation.
o Peace of mind instead of confusion.
o Real friendships instead of loneliness.
o Self-respect instead of self-contempt.
o Self-confidence instead of helplessness.
o A clean conscious instead of a sense of guilt.
o The respect of others instead of their pity and contempt.
o A clean pattern of living instead of a hopeless existence.
o The love and understanding of our families instead of their doubts and fears.
o The freedom of a happy life instead of the bondage of an alcoholic obsession.

The rewards of sobriety are unimaginable. I never would have believed life could be this good. One of my favorites is the true friendships. I have met some incredible people, all because I made a decision to put the drink down.

Transforming Negative Energy

First we acknowledge that we harbor negative feelings. Instead of ignoring them, we become willing to take them into our inner being and accept them....

we call up our courage to respond in a different manner. We put the focus on ourselves and our feelings instead of the outside forces that have hurt us. We are creating a buffer zone that keeps us from acting out in a damaging way to the perpetrator, or retreating into fantasies and revenge.

The writer Malachy McCourt said, "Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die."

We take responsibility for handling our feelings and move on to the next step of transforming the energy We have been harmed once by the harm-doer;

We don't have to victimize ourselves by being held in thrall to our emotions.

When we have been the victims of harm, we isolate ourselves. We tend to curl up into a little ball of self-pity and separate ourselves from others.......there are many people who suffer as we suffer. We reach out to take them and to take in their feelings and send out healing to them. We reunite with the human race.

We are not depleting our energy, because it returns to us a hundred-fold.

Transforming the negative energy within ourselves paves the way to forgive the victimizer.

Taken from Heart of Forgiveness by Madeline Ko-I Bastis

This hit me very powerfully, especially since this past week has been a lesson in holding on to negative energy until it harmed me and those around me that I love the most. Just ackowledging my feelings is a huge step for me. I am spending time now just sitting with my feelings and ackowledging that they exist. I am slowly feeling so much better since I have made the choice to leave my place of isolation and join the human race.

Heart Centered Life

how I'd like to live--heart centered

Guidelines for a heart centered life

When you love yourself and treat yourself kindly, caring for others comes naturally.

Listen to the sublest inklings from inside yourself. The heart communicates thru nudges, not shouts.

Celebrate your heart traits. Courage, kindness, patience and love all flow from your center.

Give of yourself from a place of genuine love, rather than obligation. Generousity toward others is intrinsic to the heart.

author--Victoria Moran