Sometimes, the life-giving downpour will snap a limb on its way to releasing spring. And once the storm has vanished, the flowers come alive and open. And sometimes, a boy drawn by their wild color will find the broken limb among the flowers and bring it home to secretly carve a walking stick for his bent and smiling grandfather who is as crooked as the fallen limb.

From outside the story, this seems a sweet happenstance. But when it’s our turn to be the snapped limb, then God seems merciless and life has no meaning. And this is true, in part, the way when we close our eyes, the world of light is lost and gone—as long as we refuse or forget how to open our eyes and see again. As real and painful as tragedy is, it is always as close to miracle as the opening of an eye or a heart or a mind. It’s as challenging as it is true that the only way through tragedy is to open up and let the lost world of light in again.

Times of change and craziness really bring a lot of clarity sometimes, and one of the things I wanted to share with you guys that I’m becoming super, super clear on, especially with everything that’s going on, is this: unless we deliberately make a change, we are going to start repeating all of our old patterns, or at least try to repeat a lot of the patterns from before COVID, even if that means repeating the worst of our suffering cycles.
Here’s what I mean…

The Effects of Repeating Patterns

The other day, I went out to a restaurant to eat with my kids. It’s been a long time of social distancing and we wanted to enjoy some time out for a bit. However, as I was eating at the restaurant, I noticed something as I was eating food I hadn’t been eating for the last few months. I kept having to blow my nose because there was something in the food that I have a sensitivity to. I’d been far more careful and was choosing better foods before, but as life started going back to “normal,” I made some exceptions for myself. And it didn’t feel good.

I've Been Thinking...

I woke up Wednesday morning feeling down. I mean, really down.

The presidential debate, which was anything but presidential, knocked me back. It was hard to watch. It was maddening, frustrating, irritating, depressing, and downright unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like it (and I’ve seen a lot).

Friday morning, I found myself simply staring at the tree in my backyard. I always look to my tree for strength and inspiration. I look to it to reassure me that despite whatever is going on in my world or the world at large, it’s going to be OK.

The news that the president has Covid-19 knocked me back too, but unfortunately it didn’t surprise me. I wish I could say that I didn’t see this coming, but it’s one of the few things this year I actually did see coming. I mean, if people can get Covid from being in large, unmasked crowds, from not wearing masks, and from going about their business as usual, well, then why wouldn’t the president and his entourage get it? Why would they be the exception?

I’m so honored to have received such a reaction to my new venture “My Soul Community” which launches in just 10 days! So many people have already emailed me, asking all sorts of questions, so they can prepare for this 12-month journey. I believe it’s important to prepare, and also to record your journey, so as part of the resources that will be included in My Soul Community, I’ve made sure there’s a Journal to download free, so everyone can keep their own private journal.

As part of your preparation, it’s also important to get in touch with your soul-self and one of the ways to enhance your spiritual awareness is to become more psychically aware. So, to master your psychic abilities, you should try and practice your skills every day so you can look forward to your special time with yourself and your Soul.

The evolution of higher mammals, including chimps, cetaceans and humans, brought forth a new level of awareness called “self-consciousness,” or, simply, the conscious mind. The newer conscious mind is an important evolutionary advance. The earlier, subconscious mind is our “autopilot”; the conscious mind is our manual control. For example, if a ball comes near your eye, the slower conscious mind may not have time to be aware of the threatening projectile. Yet the subconscious mind, which processes ~20,000,000 environmental stimuli per second vs. 40 environmental stimuli interpreted by the conscious mind in the same second, will cause the eye to blink. [Norretranders 1998] The subconscious mind, one of the most powerful information processors known, specifically observes both the surrounding world and the body’s internal awareness, reads the environmental cues and immediately engages previously acquired (learned) behaviors—all without the help, supervision or even awareness of the conscious mind.

The two minds make a dynamic duo. Operating together, the conscious mind can use its resources to focus on some specific point, such as the party you are going to tomorrow night. Simultaneously, your subconscious mind can be safely pushing the lawn mower around and successfully not cutting off your foot or running over the cat— even though you are not consciously paying attention to mowing the lawn.

If you were to ask someone like Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah Winfrey, or Elon Musk why they have managed to create such incredible success in life, they would probably credit their achievements to one thing: their ability to FOCUS. 

Today I’d like to teach you some of the best tips for focusing that I’ve learned from the highly focused and successful people I’ve met and worked with, so you can put their methods to work in your life – and achieve your goals much faster and much more efficiently. 

We Are Prone to Distractions

Being able to focus on the task in front of you and get it done, no matter what is happening around you, is like a modern-day superpower. Most of us aren’t able to do this.

We lose countless hours of aimlessly surfing on social media. We check our phone hundreds of times a day and allow ourselves to get pulled into online conversations that take us away from the more important things we should be doing.

We spend our evenings and weekends bingeing on the latest popular HBO or Netflix series, and then we wonder why we haven’t gotten any closer to accomplishing our goals! 

Face it: we all experience lack of focus from time to time.

Worry is a waste of time.

It changes nothing.

Most of the things you are worrying about now, you won’t remember in a few years.

Stop focusing on the small stuff that you won’t even remember a week from now, and certainly not on your death bed.

Life gives you no refunds for the time you spent worrying.

What you focus on expands, so focus on what is truly important and meaningful to you. Decide to constantly feed what is beautiful about yourself and your life rather than what isn’t.

The quality of your life will be determined by the quality of your attention. And this is your choice.

By trying to furiously control life, you often end up controlled by it.

Upheaval is one of the ways in which transformation can be facilitated. As you may have noticed, there’s a lot of that going on right now in the world and in our personal lives also.

The untruths or the structures that we have in place that are not providing us with well-being or are holding us back are coming to the surface.

What this means is that if we have buttons to be pushed, someone or something will be coming along to push them. Another term for this is called being triggered. It is up to us to let the discrepancies go and allow ourselves to heal.

It’s a human tendency to blame the button pusher, saying something like; “That person really pushes my buttons!” This attitude basically justifies the buttons, or the karma, or the personal demons so that they stay intact. The period of life that were entering and now will not allow us to keep our demons. It is a new chapter of clarity in the next level of awareness where these things have no place.

I received a late-night text from one of my clients. Yolanda has worked with me off and on for several years. I have watched her navigate a divorce, step into a new career, and tackle some other major life circumstances. She did all this while being in a spiritual upheaval. Yolanda was not interested in exploring her spiritual beliefs and intuitive powers until now.

For years, she had been seeing certain number sequences on her clock – 1:11, 4:56, or 2:22. It became so distracting that she covered up her digital clock. Her formal education is in science; this held her back from exploring beliefs like life after death, angels, and other metaphysical thoughts.

Yolanda’s late-night text contained an article written about number sequences and angel messages. She wanted to know what I thought about the article. My client was finally ready to expand her beliefs and receive direct messages from the universe. I quickly pulled together a list of 10 daily practices to improve her intuitive thinking and decision-making: