Path of the Butterfly

Indeed.  Another brilliant burning question from Danielle LaPorte.

Oftentimes we sit, surrounded by our self help books, digging deep into our core for an understanding of either ourselves, our past or both.  We can spend years in therapy discovering our shadow selves and aspects of who we are that we did not even know existed.  Hours and years of uncovering patterns and behaviours, and then it happens…

Light dawns clear and bright, like a blazing sunrise.  That moment when we truly understand why we do the things we do/did.  The life lessons become clear and we see ourselves in a completely different light.  We finally understand the source of our crap.  The moment of epiphany when all of our hard work suddenly pays off.  It is a time for celebration!  A time to cast aside all of the books that have become a part of our existence, to walk out of the therapists office, head held high!  Our new understanding of ourselves and the past has just opened the door to a new future.  We walk through the door excitedly and look out into the looming horizon… and….now what?  Continue reading →

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(Written for Danielle LaPorte’s Burning Question Series)

As we move throughout life we will receive advice from many.  Some of it, although well meaning, will not necessarily “fit” with our life and direction, and some of it we take graciously, follow it and then over time it disappears.

However, every once in awhile we will receive a piece of advice that makes the dusty light bulb go off, and forever changes the way we look at life and how we live it.  That happened one to day to me about 7 years back.

I was going through a big change in my life, both outer and inner, so I was in a phase where I was reading voraciously anything that could help me figure myself out.  One rainy day, as I was curled up in bed with a cup of tea and reading one of these life changing books I came across of paragraph that forever changed the way I choose to live:

“When faced with a decision, fast forward to when you are 80 years old, and look back at this moment.  Will you regret the decision or will you be all the happier for it?”

Although this has been said a million times and in a million different ways throughout time, at that particular moment it hit me.  The importance of each decision, and how it fits into the bigger picture.   At the end of the day the only person that is with me every single moment of my journey is myself.  Every decision I make impacts my life and how I live it.  What I learn, what I experience and how I grow.   When I am 80 will I have any regrets or will I be happy with the experience?  That is the path to a fulfilled life.

I never forgot that.  Since that day that has been the foundation stone of any decision I make.  It is my promise to myself to live a full and happy life.  And I can honestly say my life has changed for the better because of it.

No regrets. 

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I was pondering this latest question from Danielle LaPorte’s series throughout the day today.  This one made me dig deep.  Deep into caverns within myself that I didn’t necessarily want to go into.  But dig I did.

The boat she is talking about here is the boat that has carried you to a certain place in your life.  Whether it be career, love, location, etc.  My problem was that I have so many boats I could potentially burn I was danger of having the world’s biggest harbour bonfire.  And what a show that would be!

Should I choose my career boat?  I have changed career so many times I wouldn’t even know where to begin with that…

Should I choose my love boat?  (hee, and I did watch that as a child…).  No, I could write a whole book on that boat alone…

And then I knew.  I knew what boat I needed to go up in flames, be laid to rest in the vast ocean that she had traveled.  The boat that led me to me.

At one point in my past, right before I was about to make a decision that would lead me on a path away from myself and who I essentially was, a good friend of mine pulled some tarot cards.  (She is very adept at it).  Needless to say the cards laid it all out on the line and depicted the road that was about to cage me in.   But what I remember even more distinctly is the last card that came out.  This was describing the outcome, and there was a large Viking type boat, worthy of Odin himself.

A beautiful wooden masterpiece, sails at full mast, blowing in the wind.  And it was sailing away.  Sailing away from what I was about to choose, and taking me back to myself. Continue reading →

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As we move through life there are things that,although at one time

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyspicturesurl/4802776742/

or other made sense to us and played an important role in how we functioned, later on just make no sense to us.  Things that we used to believe in that with time, experience and our own evolution or soul growth, become moot.

This week Danielle LaPorte has a great Burning Question:  What is one dumb thing that you used to believe in?

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An Unchangeable Future.  One path only.  Now that I look back on it I have to laugh at myself.  But at one time I used to believe that we all had only one path to follow in this lifetime.  It would lead us to the big fantastic future that we had set out for ourselves before coming onto this planet.  Any veering off of that and we would be wasting our life.  If I came across someone who could see my future ( myself included), I would hang onto that vision believing that specific future was it.  The big banana.  Continue reading →

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