Category: Power of the Positive

~ Overcoming fear and worry can be
accomplished by living a day at a time or even a moment at a time. Your
worries will be cut down to nothing. ~
                            Dr Robert Anthony

~ True success is overcoming the fear of being unsuccessful. ~
                            Paul Seeney

Hi There!
Seems like forever since I made my last blog post ;-(  I hope you all are enjoying the summer so far and getting outside and lots of sunshine and fresh air.
Last night I was looking thru my bookshelf for something, and came across the book "Simple Abundance". I haven’t picked that book up in a loooooooong time (It was something I read daily while in college and when I first started working. I guess in one of the many times I moved, I must have lost track of it). Anyway- this quote is the first thing I saw when I opened the book, and I felt I should share it with you all…..

"If you trust life and learn to embrace it and try not to control
everything, then life can be more wondrous than you thought it would
be."

— Sarah Ban Breathnach

Have a safe and happy holiday weekend!
Much Light and Love
Sister Bridget

"Inches make Champions"

I came across this wonderful quote this morning and it made me think of all the beloved Spellmaker clients and their cases. These profound words were spoken by football coach Vince Lombardi.
Under Vincent Lombardi’s direction, the Green Bay Packers
collected six division titles, five NFL championships, two Super Bowls,
and record of 98-30-4. Lombardi knew a lot about winning. Progress is progress, even if it is just a few inches at a time. Success in any endeavor can be built inch by inch. Very few wins in anything in life are by a landslide."Inches make Champions" just rings so true for me, and I think for many of you as well. I know it can be difficult going thru processing and ups and downs and whatnot with your HD’s. But keep your eye on the goal line, and take every inch of progress you make as a blessing. So, maybe once in a while maybe there is a fumble and you lose a little ground…. its the overall momentum towards your goal that will get you across that goal line!

Light and Love,

Sister Bridget

Hey there!

I know in magick we often talk about things in threes. But here are some awe inspiring words about the power of the number four. This is a speech by Tom Hanks given to the graduating class of Vasser in 2005. There are some really incredible concepts here, and what really spoke to me was the section about being called to serve. Those words totally hit home for me. I know sometimes it seems the world is soooo big, and that we are only one small teeny tiny part of all this beingness, but I do believe that one person can make a difference. The whole pebble in the pond thing, ya know? Anyhow, I hope you find this speech as inspiring as I have. Thanks for reading. Have a great week everyone! Light and Love, Sister Bridget

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The Power of Four — by Tom Hanks

Not long ago I was reading about the problem of gridlock on the freeways of Southern California–the traffic jams which cripple the city, stranding millions and laying waste to time, energy, and the environment. Gridlock is as serious and as impenetrable a problem as any we face, a dilemma without cure, without solution, like everything else in the world, it seems.

Some smart folks concocted a computer simulation of gridlock to determine how many cars should be taken off the road to turn a completely jammed and stilled highway into a free-flowing one. How many cars must be removed from that commute until a twenty-mile drive takes twenty-five minutes instead of two hours? The results were startling.

Four cars needed to be removed from that virtually stuck highway to free up that simulated commute… four cars out of each one hundred. Four cars per one hundred cars, four autos out of every one hundred autos, forty cars from each thousand, four hundred out of ten thousand. Four cars out of one hundred are not that many. Two cars out of every fifty–one driver out of twenty-five drivers.

Now, if this simulation is correct, it is the most dramatic definition in earthly science and human nature of how a simple choice will make a jaw-dropping difference to our world. Call it the Power of Four. One commuter in your neighborhood could put the rush back into rush hour. So, if merely four people out of a hundred can make gridlock go away by choosing not to use their car, imagine the other changes that can be wrought just by four of us–four of you–out of a hundred.

Take a hundred musicians in a depressed port city in Northern England, choose John, Paul, George, and Ringo and you have "Hey Jude". Take a hundred computer geeks in Redmond, Washington, send 96 of them home and the remainder is called Microsoft.

Take the Power of Four and apply it to any and every area of your concern. Politics: Four votes swung from one hundred into another hundred is the difference between gaining control and losing clout. Culture: 2 ticket buyers out of fifty can make a small, odd film profitable. Economics: by boycotting a product 1 consumer out of 25 can move that product to the back of the shelf, and eventually off it altogether.

Four out of 100 is miniscule and yet can be the great lever of the Tipping Point. The Power of Four is the difference between helplessness and help. H-E-L-P: a four-letter word like some others with many meanings.

The graduating class of 2005 can claim, with perhaps more credibility than any other class in history, that during its four years of college the world went crazy. In the fall of 2001, our planet earth and the United States of America were different sorts of places–in tone, in tolerance, in peace and war, in ideas and in ideals–than they are on this spring day in 2005. These past years have been extraordinary in the express rate of change, well beyond the usual standards of culture, well above the personal watermarks you have stamped as college students. As college graduates, you now live in a brand new world, with new versions of political upheaval, global pandemic, world war and religious polarization, the likes of which have rarely visited our planet all at once–and thank God for that.

Today’s main purpose is to celebrate your entering into society, but the fact is you have all been very much steeped in it already- Poughkeepsie being the proxy and microcosm of the whole wide world. None of you were untouched by the events in September of your freshman year, none unaffected by the ideological movements of local and geo-politics since. All of you have been staring your individual fate and our collective future right in the eye for the last four years. The common stereotype would have you today, cap in the air, parchment in hand, asking yourself "what do I do now?" You, the class of 2005, have already had many, many moments during your time at Vassar when you asked yourself that question. You might have added the word ‘Hell’, or some such four-letter word to the phrase: "What the HELL do I do now?" In which case, today might not be all that different from other days on campus– except your parents are here and they might take you out for better food.

On Commencement Day, speechmakers are expected to offer advice–as though you need any, as though anything said today could aid your making sense of our one-damn-thing-after-another world. Things are too confused, too loud, and too dangerous to make ‘advice’ an option. You need to hear something much more relevant on this day. You need to hear the most important message thus far in the third millennium. You need to hear a maxim so simple, so clear and evocative that no one could misconstrue its meaning or miss its weighty issue.

So, here goes. It’s not a statement, but a request. Not a bit of advice, but a plea. It is, in fact, a single four-letter word, a verb and a noun which takes into account the reality of your four years at Vassar as well as the demands of the next four decades you spend beyond this campus.

It’s a message, once made familiar by the Beatles–those Northern English lads who embodied The Power of Four.

Help. HELP. HEEEELLLLLLPP!

We need help. Your help. You must help. Please help. Please provide Help. Please be willing to help. Help… and you will make a huge impact in the life of the street, the town, the country, and our planet. If only one out of four of each one hundred of you choose to help on any given day, in any given cause– incredible things will happen in the world you live in.

Help publicly. Help privately. Help in your actions by recycling and conserving and protecting, but help also in your attitude. Help make sense where sense has gone missing. Help bring reason and respect to discourse and debate. Help science to solve and faith to soothe. Help law bring justice, until justice is commonplace. Help and you will abolish apathy– the void that is so quickly filled by ignorance and evil.

Life outside of college is just like life in it: one nutty thing after another, some of them horrible, but all interspersed with enough beauty and goodness to keep you going. That’s your job, to keep going. Your duty is to help– without ceasing. The art you create can glorify it. The science you pursue can prove its value. The law you practice can pass on its benefits. The faith you embrace will make it the earthly manifestation of your God.

Here at Vassar whatever your discipline, whatever your passion you have already experienced the exhausting reality that there is always something going on and there is always something to do. And most assuredly you have sensed how effective and empowering it can be when more than four out of one hundred make the same choice to help.

You will always be able to help.

So do it. Make peace where it is precious. Help plant trees. Help embrace diversity and celebrate differences. Help stop gridlock.

In other words, help solve every problem we face – every single one of them–with the Power of Four out of a hundred. Help and we will save the world. If we don’t help–it won’t get done.

Congratulations. Good luck. Thank you.

This is a great article about core beliefs and using morning intentions and affirmations to help change your life! Hope you find it as wonderful as I did! Light and Love, Sister Bridget

Belief Systems, Attitude and Change by Jan Engels Smith

I, like many, spent several years in therapy. I had varying degrees of success, but I still viewed my childhood as something that wounded me terribly. I spent much of my adult life healing.

I was in a workshop, one day, and we were asked to come up with a happy memory from our childhood and to hold it in our minds as we continued with the exercise. I searched and searched for a happy memory. If an event presented itself with even an inkling of happiness, it proceeded to run itself out in my mind to a disastrously unhappy conclusion. I had no purely happy memory. I, of course, felt like I was the only person in the whole group who could not get a happy memory, which magnified my unworthiness issues. It was awful. I realized that instead of healing in my years of therapy, I had learned to understand what had happened at an intellectual and behavioral level, but I was still feeling much pain. I had a hole in my soul, and my spirit felt fragmented. As time went on, my spiritual life developed more, and I was introduced to extremely different philosophies from those I had been raised with. New awareness filled my being. I started to understand that I had choice in this earth-walk, and that the experiences I had as a child were ones I had chosen in order to develop my soul and myself.

I began to review my life from the perspective of choice. I had the choice to view my life’s experiences with judgments of blame and remorse, or to view them as opportunities for growth. Eventually I saw the bigger picture of my life’s experiences. This "eagle vision," as I was later taught to call it, is the ability to see personal experiences distantly but holistically.

What was my soul working on in this lifetime? What were the patterns? What was I continually recreating in my life at a subconscious level that allowed me the opportunity to choose a higher level of being? Was my soul evolving in a good way, or was I stuck in my own predetermined drama? Bitterness, victimization, anger, and grudges are all choices that trap the soul and prevent it from growing. They inhibit the soul like a jail inhibits freedom. Understanding this, I consciously chose to see my entire childhood differently and to view my life as experiences that promoted the choice for my soul to evolve into a higher state of being.

Years later, I found myself in a group setting again. This time, we were asked to write a story about an event in our childhood. I know that the intention of this assignment was to process again the events that had led us all to counseling. But this time I had a totally different perspective.

I wrote a story about a great fishing trip we had taken as a family and how much fun we had, how my family had such a spirit of adventure, and how many fabulous opportunities I had as a child. It was amazing what poured out of me. I had such a profound realization. I knew that my past had not changed, but my perspective on it had. The American psychologist William James once observed, "People can alter their lives by altering their attitudes." Those unhappy negative experiences, which I had dwelled on for so many years, took on the new flavor of being opportunities to learn how to love myself and others, how to claim my own worthiness, how to step away from the judgments of what others had done to me, and how to be thankful for the success in developing my own soul.

This was a huge step forward in my own development. It was not the writing assignment that caused this shift in focus, but it brought it to my awareness. In the time between the two workshops, I had chosen to change my belief system. I had adopted a philosophy that created healing. With this shift in my perception, I was able to internalize at an intellectual, emotional, behavioral, and spiritual level. My life has been extremely different ever since.

Another powerful example of attitude occurred when I was working with a client. I greeted my client as he arrived for his appointment, and realized immediately that he had a severe problem. His head was down, and his arms dangled at his sides. He was completely slumped over, and his eyes were closed. When I asked what was wrong, I received no answer. He came through the door, slowly, very slowly, dragging his feet and holding on to the railing with extreme effort and difficulty. It took him fifteen minutes to get in the door and to the chair in my office where he finally collapsed.

Eyes still closed, slumped in the chair to almost a fetal position, chin resting on his chest. He sat exhausted from the effort of entering my office. I was being shown, quite literally, how terrible he felt-the fatigue, the pain, the exhaustion of movement, the weariness of being alive. I watched him with concern. After a few moments of sitting in silence and listening to his arduous breathing, I asked a few questions but got a barely audible response, "I can’t, it is too hard."

I finally asked my client to say the words, "I can" for one minute. I said with authority, "Begin."

He started mumbling the words, slowly repeating the phrase as directed. After about 25 seconds, he opened his eyes and his body started to move. His shoulders came up, he straightened his back, his head came up, and he actually looked at me. His voice was now stronger and clearer. At the end of the minute, his entire attitude, disposition, and posture had changed. It was amazing.

We then talked about what had created his burden of depression. It was fear-his fear of the future and of not being able to handle the changes and the challenges confronting him. His fear monopolized his thoughts, literally crippling him with fatigue. He had been saying, "I can’t, I can’t, I can’t," and those words were destroying his life.

This simple experiment to change the negative thought and the words he was saying to himself, changed his entire energy. My client literally transformed in front of my eyes. His life situation was still physically the same, but his attitude toward it was different. We continued the session with a new hope.

Granted, this did not solve his problems, but it confronted the "I can’t" attitude, which was destroying his life. He had been physically displaying the manifestation of his thoughts. I had a choice either to enable his woe, comforting his obvious distress, or remind him of his other choice. The task was not mine, but his. He had to experience firsthand the power of his thoughts and how he could be in control. His physical condition was in direct response to what he had been saying to himself.          Thoughts will either support you or destroy you. Try the following experiment with yourself:

Every morning when you wake up start saying,"I can"

Jan promotes self-healing, empowerment, better communities, a healthier world and conducts workshops for shamanism and journeying. Jan’s a Licensed Counselor and shamanic practitioner. She’s done over two thousand soul retrievals. She is the founder of LightSong School of Shamanic Studies, a Chemical Dependency Specialist, and Marriage and Family Therapist. She is also a water pourer for sweat lodge, a minister, a Reiki Master.

Hey,

If this somehow got by you, please go check out this post on Mambo Sam’s Blog! It fits right in with our card of the week !

Light and Love

Sister Bridget

This article is all about the saying you frequently hear Spellmaker staff saying….that "the only way out is through". Sometimes, when we are faced with unpleasantness, processing, the dark night of the soul, we just want to throw up our hands and give up, when the very thing we need to do is just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Hopefully, this article will help shed some light on why we need to do this 😉 Light and Love, Sister Bridget

Facing Fears by T. Dorsey

What value is there in facing your fears?  What is there to gain in reliving painful experiences?  Does it change anything to acknowledge you have been hurt?

The point of facing your fears is that it allows you to eventually move through it.  But before you move through it, you have to acknowledge the pain.  You have to allow yourself to feel what you are feeling.  You have to allow yourself to feel all the emotions that come up for you as you face your fears. No matter what those feelings may be. Usually there are a myriad of emotions to deal with when you confront your fears, especially if you have avoided dealing with them for years. You may have feelings of anger, resentment, frustration, helplessness, vulnerability and rage.  It may be helpful to remember this phrase,

“ If it is coming up, then it is on its way out.”

So how do you begin to face your fears?  You do it by to telling your story.  Write it out.  Chronicle exactly what happened. At first you may think you are unable to recall all the details, especially if it happened a long time ago.  However, as you write, you may recall memories long forgotten.  It is also important to describe how you feel or felt about what happened.  Describe in detail what emotions come up for you. Once you allow yourself to feel what you are feeling, you can get to the other side. 

The story I had to tell to face my fears was about my dad.  After he passed away I came to realize that I still struggled with facets of our relationship.  Initially, I really did not see the point in relieving all the ways my dad disappointed me. He was dead now.  What was the point?  What could be the benefit in reliving those painful memories?  Despite these objections, I began to write my story.

I recounted the countless times my dad did not show through, as promised.  It was a hard story to tell even to myself.  At times I wept uncontrollably.  At other times my rage was so intense it was palatable.  It was incredible to me how many different emotions I felt and how real they all were, as if the events I was retelling had just happened moments ago instead of over a decade ago. 

What was the point in that painful exercise?  I did indeed move through those feelings and came out on the other side. 

On that other side I had some new insights. One insight I discovered was how stuffing those feelings about my dad, over time, impacted my personality, my choices and my relationships.  By retelling that story I also gained an entirely new perspective on that painful experience.  Eventually, after allowing myself to feel all those emotions I had been stuffing for so many years, I began to feel lighter like a weight had been lifted.

What happened next was really unexpected.  I found that I had transformed into a higher version of myself, a more authentic version of who I really am.  This new insight even made me feel grateful for that painful experience because I liked who I grew to be because of it.

Facing your fears enables you to rid yourself of buried emotions.  By coming to face-to-face with what you are afraid of, you are able to free yourself.  You also offer yourself an opportunity to grow from the experience.  In the end, you may discover you like YOU not in spite of what happened to you but because of what happened to you.

T. Dorsey is an author, performing and teaching artist who uses stories, poetry and songs to inspire and heal others. After many years in corporate America working as a training consultant, she followed her heart and stepped out on faith. 

Consciously Choosing A Positive Attitude by Wendy Betterini

Do you consciously choose your attitude each day? If you’re like most people, probably not. Most of us tend to let our circumstances choose our attitude for us. We’re in a good mood as long as we get up on time, the kids cooperate and get to school on time, the car starts without a problem, we don’t encounter any traffic jams on the way to work, the boss doesn’t yell, our workload is manageable, etc. This system can work fine as long as everything runs smoothly in our lives.

But that’s not always the case, is it? Situations don’t always adhere to our expectations. Accidents happen. Delays happen. Spouses and bosses can be difficult to please. Vehicles break down. Kids may resist our efforts to keep the schedule running smoothly. What happens to our attitude then? If we don’t make the effort to consciously choose a positive attitude, we run the risk of developing a negative one at random.

How would our lives change if we consciously chose a positive attitude each day? For starters, we’d feel much happier about our lives. We’d feel more motivated about pursuing our dreams because we’d believe in the possibilities for making them a reality. We’d be able to enjoy the time spent with our friends and families more, because we’d want to share our joy with others. We’d feel strong and empowered in our ability to do anything we set our minds to. We’d be able to overcome challenges with ease because we’d have a strong belief in our own skills and abilities. We’d be able to love deeply and completely without fear of rejection or betrayal. We would pause to enjoy the smaller, more precious moments in life, without feeling pressured to do more, be more, or prove our worthiness.

Wow, it sounds awesome, doesn’t it? Is it really possible to feel that way all the time? Yes, but probably not in the way you’re imagining it. Just because we choose a positive attitude doesn’t mean that our lives will transform into smoothly-flowing works of art and stay that way forever. Choosing a positive attitude is a process. We don’t just choose it once and expect everything to be perfect from that moment on. We will still experience setbacks, delays, accidents, frustrations, arguments, fatigue, and fear. The secret is how we choose to react to these experiences. Do we want to let them ruin our day, or do we choose to pick ourselves up and look hopefully to the future again? We do have the power to choose.

You may be asking what the point of a positive attitude is. If we’ll still experience negative circumstances, why bother with choosing a positive attitude? Ah, that’s the true beauty of the creative process. What we choose to focus on the most, we create in our lives.

By choosing a positive attitude each day, we are actually attracting more positive experiences, and reducing the likelihood of negative experiences. You may have noticed that each experience often determines the quality of the next experience, causing a chain reaction in our lives. If one little thing goes wrong, it can throw off our plans for the rest of the day. In this context, it’s easy to see how a positive attitude would be powerful. Rather than allowing one little thing to ruin our day, we would be able to shrug it off and continue on without a hitch.

Over time, this resiliency begins to strengthen and empower us, which will show through in our demeanor. We begin attracting people and experiences that more closely match our attitude, and our lives eventually transform into more positive, fulfilling expressions of joy.

And it all begins with a little thing called attitude! Again, this is a process, so go easy on yourself if you’re trying to adopt a more positive attitude. Simply focus on developing a stronger awareness of your attitude moment to moment in your daily experiences, and begin choosing a more positive one more often. It takes time to realize the full benefits of this type of mindset, but it is time well-spent.

Before you know it, you’ll be one of those people you used to admire for their tenacity and strength, and your life will transform in amazing ways.

Wendy Betterini is a freelance writer who strives to motivate, uplift, and inspire you to make your dreams a reality. Visit her website, http://www.WingsForTheHeart.com for more positive thoughts to help you on your journey.