The Difficult Third Blog: Being brave and soldiering on...

Life is wonderful and equally terrifying. It can throw up all kinds of amazing opportunities and revelations and sh*t storms. It can make you feel blessed to be alive one minute, and then quaking in your boots the next. Of course it's all part of the rich tapestry of life.

The blessing of having big scares is that they force you to look at your life and your values, and I mean REALLY look at what matters to you. Really evaluate what you love, who you need, what matters to you, what you want to keep.

The pain of loss, the fear of potential grief. It's a massive refresh for the system, a shock that reboots you, strangely enough. It can also be a good thing for getting you to course correct; to tweak aspects of your life slightly in order to align closer with your values, and with the life you truly want. In short; an event that messes with your head can be a blessing in disguise.

Distance and perspective are such essential parts of life for growth, yet we tend to overlook them by just not being aware of them, because of how caught up we are in the current drama. We often loathe what's happening to us when it's causing us to feel negative emotions. Hence we resent the experience rather than feel blessed by what it potentially could be teaching us.

Something I've learnt today from the wonderful teacher and life coach Tony Robbins, after watching another of his amazing seminars, is that those of us who have experienced deep spiritual pain and learned tough lessons, are often better equipped to channel that pain and learning into helping others. How wonderful.

So basically: thank goodness for the sh*t we went through! Thank goodness for pain! It makes us all the more compassionate, empathetic and wise. It gives us a purpose and allows us a creative well of experience to work from and use. We are all able to connect through our collective pain and suffering and life lessons, and come through it smiling and more connected to the world.

So the next time you're “going through it” remember to say to yourself 'I am blessed with my problems, they'll make me stronger, more knowing and able to teach others!' It sounds bizarre but it's true. Most success and drive and passion comes from pain, from a desire to either move closer to something or away from something. Let's use our pain for good rather than for bitterness.

Much love always,

Karen xx

When the colours get turned up

When the colours get turned up. Second blog!

Have you ever started on a journey walking somewhere, having been in a particularly precarious mood, and felt as if you were walking through a parallel universe or something equally surreal?

I have this odd and stunning experience every so often; it occurs as often as 'Deja-Vu' I suppose, and is just as unfathomable. I can remember the feel of it more than the specifics, its like everything that is familiar feels suddenly unfamiliar. The pavements, the people, the smells and the sounds. The colours around me are deeper, richer, and I feel inexplicably at peace, alive, and utterly connected with the world. 

I wonder if there's a word for this, and whether it's a normal part of life, or simply yet another symptom of a spiritually aware mind and overactive brain. Am I the only one? Do others experience these 'heightened' episodes?

As I continue on my journey of personal, business and spiritual enlightenment, I realise every day how very possible it is to elevate yourself out of the 'daily grind' and go open a few doors you may not normally have considered opening. The internet of course has made this possible for absolutely anybody, and it constantly blows my mind. 

No longer is enlightenment available only for the elite few who can afford it. Of course libraries are still a wonderful free resource too. Go join one before they all start replacing staff with machines, and books with computers (happening as we speak in my local library). The key is not to mourn and complain about these changes, but to go gobble up as many resources as you can. Accept the changes and make them work to your advantage. Go get!

Want to learn a new language? Be better at relationships? Improve an aspect of your life you don't feel confident in? Learn about something you have absolutely no knowledge of but have always been intrigued by? The resources are all around you, and often free. If you are vaguely techie with a modern phone, there are many free apps out there too, and Audible and Spotify are great for audio resources and podcasts (admittedly I've only recently learned what a podcast is, and oh what a joy its been learning to listen for fun as well as for education).

So get out there, dear friends. Your world is limited only by your own imagination and by your own willingness to try new things. 

Turn up your own colours. Turning up your own colours makes you a brighter person with a whole different vibrational field, and that in turn has positive effects on the world, on everybody you know and meet. On your children.

And don't forget to have fun in the process! Don't let anybody tell you you 'can't' do something. That says more about their own limitations than it does your determination and abilities.

Love Always Dear Friends,
Karen x

Life lessons from a small town! First Blog.

This week's themes are investment and determination 💗

Boy, have I learned some tough lessons this week. Firstly, let's touch upon investment. Now, I'm not referring to investments relating to money, stocks, shares etc, but investments in effort and time. I've learned the hard way (as all the best lessons are learned) that the time and effort you invest in other people should ABSOLUTELY correlate with how much time and effort they are investing in you. This relates to love, friendship and even business. If this were a game of chess, you would not be making ten moves to your opponent's one. And vice versa: their ten moves to your one move equally does not work. This mismatch of energies causes a huge imbalance and in fact makes the whole relationship unequal and buggers everything up, if not short term then indeed in the long term.
  
Some lovely simple lessons in relationship investment my dear friends: match their energy, match their moves, at least on average. If the person you are dating sends you a text, send one back in order to make a date. Don't send fifteen - it makes you look crazy. If you have emailed a query to a company, allow them to respond before you blow up their phone. 

Don't over-invest: it makes you look needy and greedy, and indeed that you are coming from a place of scarcity and fear, which is not a helpful mindset to attract abundance.

By all means, if the returns are shit, reduce your efforts and move on to the next one. A non-response can sometimes tell you all you need to know.

After all, as Louise Hay once taught me: if we all go down to the ocean for some water, do we all have to fight over what's available? Or is there in fact a never-ending supply of ocean? Hmmm, worth thinking about.

Going into situations grasping for dear life from a place of fear is a sure-fire way to lose out. Go into situations from a place of confidence and abundance, sure in yourself that you are high value enough to be deserving of someone's time; you'll be much more likely to come away with what you want. And if you don't get it first time? Meh, there's plenty more opportunities and plenty more of what you want out there, just waiting to fall into your grasp.   

The second lesson I learned this week is absolutely, no matter how much you are struggling with a goal or task, to NOT give up on that thing. If you get stuck, use your resources - read books, search on Youtube, or God forbid, ask people around you who know more about it than you do. (I wonder why we as humans generally find it so hard to be open about our weaknesses or ask others for help? Weirdly it seems to be considered as a weakness, yet my studies of some of the most successful people in the world, no matter what skill they excel in, have become masters in learning from those better than them. Basically, in accepting that you are NOT the best, it gives you massive scope to grow and to BECOME better, if not the best. Trust me when I say I have struggled with the basic technologies to the point where I regularly develop temporary tourettes and end up screaming in frustration at whatever inanimate object is 'failing' me at that precise moment. Tears often ensue. Which makes the act of 'not giving up' all the more delicious and worthwhile when you finally DO succeed at the task. Well done you! 

So to summarise: DON'T over-invest when you're not getting the returns, and NEVER give up on your dreams. Hope is what keeps us glowing, and pulls us through the mire.

Love always,
Karen x