It’s Complicated

… but it shouldn’t be.

Relationships aren’t complicated, we complicate them. If I had a dime for every client who told me that their relationship was “complicated,” I would be a billionaire. Why so complicated? Well for starters, we always stay for the wrong reasons…

How do you know if a relationship is really right for you? You first need to be brutally honest with yourself and in doing so, you will be honest with your partner. Honesty is simple, but we hide from it. We don’t always want the answers that it yields.

If you are telling yourself you are in a “complicated relationship,” you need to answer these two honest questions about your relationship:

1. Are you getting what YOU truly need/want?
2. Are you giving your partner what THEY truly need/want?

Be honest with yourself, it is not just about what you are getting/receiving but what you are giving to your partner that is just as important. Relationships work both ways. If you definitively answer NO to either one or both questions, then all bets off. The relationship you are in, is not working for either of you (at the moment). It is important to realize that you can love someone but still not be right for them and vice-versa. It only becomes complicated when we choose to stay and force our expectations on them.

Don’t try and change people, don’t resent them for not being what you need them to be. Let people be who they are and if who they are doesn’t work for you, then love them enough to let them go.  Let them find the person that is best for them.

Staying for the wrong reasons never yields you the outcome you desire. It only frustrates the situation. Know yourself, know your heart, know your dreams and know your partner, then you can make the most mature decision for both of you.

Sometimes you need to lose to win. Don’t strangle-hold your relationship until it becomes what you want. You only end up killing it. If you give it a little space and allow each partner to heal, you may just find that you get either a better version of that relationship after it heals or you get a better relationship with someone else. Either way, you win by losing what did not work.

All relationships require some degree of work, but at the end of the day, a relationship either works or it doesn’t… but it should never-ever be “complicated.”

This Too Shall Pass

.. it always does.

Nothing ever stays the same. It can’t. Our universe is in a constant state of flux. We evolve, the environment evolves and the planet evolves – even our solar system and thousands of others are constantly evolving. With all this evolution, nothing can stay the same – and thank God for that.

In this world, we live in a continual state of “maya” – the sanskrit term for “illusion.” We walk this earth, day-in and day-out living out a state of illusion. Nothing that we are experiencing is actually real – although it seems very real for obvious reasons. You have to live “in this world”, but maya teaches us that we should not be “of this world.” We should never get caught up in the daily dramas of life. Buying into your drama makes it very real for you (in fact, more real then it needs to be). 

If you can remember that at the end of the day, all is just an illusion and that life is not about winning or losing but how you play the game, then it is easier to not attach to your perceived hardships. When you are going through a hard time, it is critical to remember that “this too shall pass.” Nothing in your life has power over you unless you give it. Giving into your pain, your conflicts, your suffering, your dashed hopes and dreams only brings you to one place – down. Don’t attach to your perceived hardships, let them simply “pass through you.” If you do not attach (or identify) with them they will not be yours and they will not linger and haunt you.

Life is too short to keep trying to get back up. If you don’t allow yourself to continually spiral downward, the path back up to the top will be much easier. If you are unhappy about anything going on in your life right now, stick around – the sun always has to come back out again after the rain. Remember this too shall pass.

Stop Thinking You Have All The Answers

… trust me you don’t.

If life was as easy as that, no one would ever have to come to this huge earthly classroom of learning. If we had all the answers to every challenge, what would be the point of going through that challenge?

Sometimes we get stuck on a page – the content is boring, we can’t get through the chapter, we have read the same passage over and over again, logic would dictate that we need to read on if change is ever going to be found. When we learn to turn the page and push beyond the boredom of that page, we bring new insights to the table, we breathe a fresh outcome into our situation. 

Certainty narrows and uncertainty broadens. When you stop thinking that you have all the answers, you free up the energy to bring you new solutions you have never even dreamed of. Don’t keep yourself trapped in your same habitual patterns. When you learn to think outside the box, new situations, new people and certainly new outcomes become more readily available. When you think you know all the answers and have seen it all and done it all, you lock yourself down in a repetitive pattern that is very dense and heavy. When you learn to abandon your “trusted remedies” life has a way of opening up in amazing and very suprising ways. Let go and surrender is the name of the game – the game that will undoubtedly yield you the greatest results.

Controlling your every move, and going through life with blinders on is akin to sleepwalking your way through it. Why bother? The point of life is to leverage every rich experience and to grow from that experience. We do not grow by repeating the same calculated strategies. Live your life with as much color and zest as you can muster. Stop thinking you have all the answers, you might just learn something new. Remember certainty narrows, uncertainty broadens. It is when you think you have all the answers that is just the time to abandon ship and learn to swim!

Bad Things Happen to Good People

… and they happen everyday.

Does it seem as if you are always getting the “short end of the stick?” Does it seem that the harder you work, the more you are tortured? If you are feeling this way, it is important to see that, yes, bad things do happen to good people. But more often than not, they happen for a specific reason – to bring you to a better place. 

You can spend your life lamenting situations and feeling bad for yourself as if you are being unfairly punished, but what does that afford you? It only spirals you downward in a negative frenzy where you continue to attract more “bad things” into your life.

Remember life doesn’t happen to you, it happens for you. Life happens for you to learn. The wisest amongst us learn that we are not being victimized, but that there is a lesson here and once we grasp the lesson, the sun begins to come out again.

It’s not that bad things happen to good people, it is that good people know how to respond to bad things and subsequently know how to turn those situations around for the better.

Ultimately, it is not what happens to you in life, but how you react to what is happening to you. If a bad thing is happening to you, instead of falling into a victim pattern, choose to see the lesson. Know that you deserve better and are worthy of it – trust in that. That is all that is required of you. Know that goodness is always rewarded because good is its own reward. You cannot control what happens but again, you can control the way you react to it. Good people are conscious, they know how to “change their luck.” It is the nature of duality and karma – everything has its own equal and opposite affect.  When you learn to turn around the bad situations, you will inherently bring about the opposite – the good situations. 

Fake it Till You Make it

Stop thinking you are not ready. Stop putting off your tomorrows. Learn to redefine success.

Nobody ever thinks they are ready to embark on something new. In your mind, you will never have enough money to have your first child or move into that big new home or buy your beach house or get married or change your career. You will always tell yourself that something is first needed before you can make that move. This is your ego’s way of keeping you safe from a perceived failure. For most of us, we would prefer to never try, then to try and fail. The ego is clever, it comes fully equipped with defense mechanisms to protect it from looking foolish or “less than perfect.” This shows up as procrastination measures and procrastination ultimately marks the difference between surviving and thriving.

Adhering to the ego keeps you small and keeps you from becoming great. Most great opportunities in life force us to grow and move beyond our comfort zones. Feeling comfortable is a sign to you that you have conquered and achieved. Feeling discomfort is a sign to you that you need to persevere and challenge yourself. The choice is always yours. Life never happens to you - it happens for you. The secret is in believing in yourself.  Even if you think you do not have what it takes, you keep moving forward. Fake it ’til you make it – then it will be yours. By taking on the challenge with an air of certainty and belief in yourself, you will always earn that which you are seeking.

Make a Life, Not Just a Living

Life is too short to NOT love what you do. Period.

But we do it anyway. We plug away unhappily doing things day-in and day-out. We sit at our desks idly pushing paper and responding to emails. We work hard to clear off our desk but not as hard at asking ourselves if we actually enjoy the life we have created for ourselves. We keep plugging away at our unhappiness and telling ourselves that “one day it will be better.” Newsflash… it never gets better until you do something about it. If you stay contented in the position you have put yourself in, then that is what you continue to receive. In essence, you are telling the universe, “oh, don’t worry about me, I do not need change. I am content here. All is good.”

Life is meant to be LIVED. Truly lived and experienced and ENJOYED. There is no waiting for one day to magically appear. There is no waiting to live. The living is now. Why waste precious moments doing anything that you do not love? Why not find what you love and focus on that? Why tell yourself that you can’t do that and make up a whole host of reasons why you are not qualified?

Life is in the living. It happens every day in every moment. While you are sitting back waiting to be happy, remember right now IS your life. If you are not happy in the now, CHANGE THINGS. Don’t wait for a magic miracle in the future. The miracle is happening now.

Givers and Takers

If you want to save the world, start by saving yourself.

Personal boundaries are critical in life. And most of us have never learned the art of protecting ourselves. And what’s worse, we have been wrongly programmed to think that if we give, give and give to others, it will flow back to us. Let’s clear this up… of course what we give comes back to us, but only up to a point. There has to be a self-protecting measure in place that does not allow you to give beyond your comfort level. This is the key and where most problems begin. If you give and give and fully deplete yourself, it actually has the opposite effect – you end up losing in the end.

There is a simple relationship between the givers and the takers. The givers will always be giving and the takers will always take. Why you may ask? Because these patterns (life lessons) are ingrained in us and are set-up very early in life. The givers’ lesson is to learn to give to themselves and the takers’ lesson is to learn to be less selfish and more selfless. These are basic life lessons and they play out over and over again until we learn the lesson and find the balance in our personal relationships. For example, if you are a giver and are exhausted and broken and yet still running around trying to make everyone else happy, you will continually be met with takers who are lined up to keep taking from you. You get handed lesson after lesson and if you choose to accept those lessons, the lesson continues. Once you put your foot down and say “no, I need to focus on me right now,” the lesson stops.

As a giver, it is critical that he/she learn to love themselves and start to set boundaries in all relationships. Givers need to realize that they are not supposed to save the world but save themselves so they have more to contribute successfully without running themselves ragged. A taker will always take if it is on offer. Givers who are exhausted with nothing to show for their giving will fall apart and become very resentful (rightfully so), but whose fault is it really? No one forced them to give anything to anyone. If it isn’t serving you, JUST SAY NO. That energy is much better suited being given to yourself so you have more to give to those you love.

You cannot save anyone from themselves nor are you supposed to. If you want to save the world, start by saving yourself. Give to you, so you have much more to give in all aspects of your life.