I know you want to help someone to change. They aren’t going to. Now what?

Change & Transitions, Family, Love & Partnerships9 Comments

How can you make someone change? You can’t. Honestly, you can’t. But there is something you can do.

You know that feeling when someone you love keeps telling you to act different, be different? Spend your money differently, show up at work differently, show up in bed differently? You know how annoying that is? How you just want to smack them?

You wonder where they get off thinking that not only do they get total control over their own life, but now they think they get control over yours too? No way buddy. You get your life, I get mine.

Well they think this same way about you, so if you won’t change for them, they’re not going to change for you either. 

Now what? 

There’s actually a way to make some movement on this.

8 investments that changed me as a woman

Entrepreneurs, Family, Wealth11 Comments

I’m jumping on a trend here before it gets too big. It’s just so good that I can’t pass it up! It’s the “8 Investments That Changed Me as a Woman” post.

The idea is to put down the 8 things you’ve done, bought, or allowed yourself to have that have massively upleveled your life. (And yes, it’s “for women,” but you fellows may resonate to this list too!)

The list is materialistic because it’s about things we acquire. But it’s also a huge lesson in receiving.

As someone who practices Flowdreaming, I’m always thinking about what I want to manifest/make/create/have/be/do next. So this concept fits right in.

Here are my Top Eight.

 

1. Retreats for My Own Personal Joy, Creativity, and Wellness

It took me forever to allow myself to go on spiritual or creative holidays. I had so much resistance to it. For one, my husband would be upset that I didn’t invite him. For another thing, how can I justify spending the cash on myself like that, when I have no idea if there will be any “return on investment” for it?

I used to be so ridiculous about this. Sure, I’d take a regular vacation and not worry  about “ justifying” it. But if I wanted to go off and do art for a week, or meditate for a weekend? Uh uh, that had to become a work expense or I’d find some other way to make it “ok.”

No more. Now I take one to two pure “me” trips each year. I choose things that I want to do or learn. I don’t invite anyone to go with me if I want to just be inside myself for the week. I’m not beholden to making anyone else happy when I gift myself these treasure weeks.

And you know what? These weeks infallibly end up cracking me open like a coconut. The point of these trips is to see what gets opened, exposed, or grown in me. I want to experience something that I don’t already know about myself.

These weeks accelerate my inner journey, which in the end, makes me far richer and more productive in my life. My well rarely goes dry as a result.

Junior high, getting intimate, and Daddy Longlegs…yeah, it’s all here.

Change & Transitions, Family, Health & Wellness8 Comments

It’s 5 a.m. and I’m sitting here writing you. I’m up because the pain in my hips woke me. It’s pain from the chemo drugs.

Funny things happen this early in a suburban house. There’s a newborn daddy longlegs spider running across my keyboard (fresh hatch of the day?).

My cats lay on my desk looking at me, mystified. Why is the human up?

I try to text my friends, but no one texts back. (What’s wrong with them? Don’t they know I’m up?!)

And this morning’s crop of email is not especially interesting. I unsubscribe from much of it.

I flash back to 12 years ago, when I was also typically up by about 4:30 a.m. to work on writing my first book.

Back then I was hugely pregnant with my daughter. I was also tired and aching, and I had to be at my 9 to 5 job by 7 a.m. on-the-dot each morning.

Now here I am about to take that baby from 12 years ago to her first day of junior high three hours from now.

We stayed up in bed last night going through her classes, her schedule, which friends were in her classes, and importantly (but devastatingly), which “hot guys” were not.

And it got me thinking how life is a continuous craving of new experiences.

A pool party and a fire-balled car…my Saturday night

Change & Transitions, Family, Health & Wellness, Luck9 Comments

Last night, my husband’s car caught fire and blew up in the street. It was parked in front of our house.
 
Around his car were twenty other parked cars owned by the parents of most the kids in my daughter’s 6th grade class.
 
What the heck happened?

The backstory:

Our daughter Lexi is in Cotillion.
 
In San Diego, at least, Cotillion is a Madmen-style 1950s-1960s last-ditch attempt to teach our kids wedding dances and manners before they head into middle school.
 
The kids suffer through instructions and dances in hot stuffy suits and scratchy dresses and pantyhose at a very classy racetrack ballroom.
 
I offered to host a little swim party after the kids’ first lesson to help break the ice, since few 6th grade boys relish wearing ties and dancing with girls. I asked all the parents to come too, to help us get to know each other.
 
So the kids are having a great time cannon-balling in the pool, my husband is mixing margaritas faster than the parents can gulp them, and the front and back doors to our house are wide open with parents and kids spilling from front-yard to back.
 
At around 10 pm, one dad says, “What’s that?” and points out the front door.
 
My god, that’s a fireball in the street.
 
That’s my husband’s car.

“No, I refuse to change you. And damn! … That makes me so happy!”

Change & Transitions, Family, Jobs & Work, Love & Partnerships8 Comments

 

What is it that makes us think we can change people? How many times have you found yourself wishing that your romantic partner would do something you wanted, or not do something, or somehow meet your needs by changing somehow? How often have you wished the same about a parent, or sibling, or child? “If they’d just do this, or give me that, or stop doing this…”

A cardinal rule of Flowdreaming is that you are a magnificently powerful being…but your power extends only to YOU and YOUR OWN LIFE. Anyone else…well they’re also incredibly powerful…in their own life.

As long as you stick with manifesting for yourself, you’re going to prosper. Once you start trying to change someone else, you’re going to hit walls. Why?

5 tips for using Flow to increase the intimacy in your relationships

Family, Love & PartnershipsLeave a comment

Here are a few Flow-inspired tips to infuse all your relationships with more love and less conflict. While we can’t change other people, per se, we CAN change the energy that surrounds our relationship and our interactions within them. And of course, that starts within ourselves. So, these five tips will help you cultivate good, loving, open energy within yourself. As they say…change begins within.

1. Break out the honesty.
Very often the source of our frustrations is our fear that our loved one will not accept how we feel or what we need in a situation. Honesty needs to be purposefully developed and cultured. It often doesn’t just happen by itself, especially if we grew up in homes where honesty wasn’t the norm. When we expect that what we need and feel won’t be honored, we either clam up or stuff down our needs. If the idea of being honest and open sends shivers of fear up your spine, then you know you REALLY need this tip: Create a list of relationship issues with various loved ones that you want be more open about, and work your way up by starting with the easiest first. In your Flow, pre-act scenarios where you are open and honest, and feel the relief and acceptance when you do so. This opens the energies to allowing honesty into your relationships in a safe, comfortable way.

Your ideas: Lead … or gold?

Entrepreneurs, Family, Jobs & Work, Passion & Purpose, ResistanceLeave a comment

I suffer from the “great idea” syndrome. In other words, I’m always thinking of what I think are good ideas. Then I (often) fruitlessly try to get other people to go along with them. What I’ve had to learn over the years is this: 1) not everyone will see the value in what I offer, 2) if I feel strongly about my idea, then I’m probably going to have to make headway on it myself and quit waiting for other people to help me, and 3) if it genuinely is a great idea, then my Flow will likewise scoop me up and help smooth the way for its implementation.

Let’s start with #1. For many years, I’ve been in a position where I’ve offered some excellent business ideas to someone.

Some people are just not going to like you

Family, Jobs & Work, ResistanceLeave a comment

Some people don’t like you. And, they’ll never like you. And you can’t make them like you. And there is nothing you can do about it.

I took a yoga class this evening with a new teacher. We spent an entire hour doing what felt like a variation of the same standing pose, and the teacher was full of criticism. My butt was too high, my shoulders were drooping, and my feet were not wide enough apart. When I inadvertently stretched in between poses to unkink my aching arms, she scolded me, “We are not doing that stretch right now.”

Twenty minutes into the class, I wanted to leave. And twenty minutes later, I found myself thinking what an awful teacher she was, and how her rigid yoga philosophy was so unlike my own. Twenty minutes after that, I thought, “What is my Flow doing bringing me here?” and so I spent the rest of class thinking about the way I really disliked this teacher, while around her the other students were happily chirping that this was the best class in town, since you really got to learn each yoga pose so well.

Not long ago, I made the decision to finally begin teaching workshops in person.