Milestone

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At certain times we all encounter milestones along our path.
These milestones can com in many forms ~ sometimes they come as life-changing events, but more often they seem much less significant ~ and only are recognized as the milestone that they are after the fact.

So why is a milestone (and the recognition of it) so important?
According to the dictionary, a milestone, while in earlier days exactly that ~ a stone placed beside the road to mark the distance in miles to a particular place; in our modern use of language it is more often used figuratively, as an action or event that marks a significant change or stage in development.

And in its figurative sense, that makes a milestone a place where some part of our journey through life finds a conclusion, such that a new avenue can emerge... This new avenue may mean that we change directions, start doing different things ~ or it can instigate us doing the same things we have been doing in a different, new manner.
A milestone then can almost feel like an initiation. Like a ‘test’ we have passed that allows us to move on with new and different things.

For that reason it is important for us to recognize the milestones along our path, because they mark the points where we can truly see how far we have come! They are in essence points of celebration, when we pat ourselves on the back, give ourselves a hug, before moving on with other things.

So what are the milestones in our lives?
Of course there is no single answer to that question; our individual milestones are as unique as we are. On the other hand there are milestones that we do seem to share; like passing the final exams of our study, passing the driving test and getting the so desired driving license, buying the first care, landing the first job, starting a relationship ~ or ending one... The list goes on and on.
And then there are those very personal milestones that are unique to us. They may be more along lines of overcoming our fear to speak in public, choosing to start presenting ourselves differently to the world around us ~ complete with the new wardrobe... It can be an achievement that may not at all seem important to anyone else, but that tells us that “We finally did it! Yes!!”

My milestone is that the first 108 posts of this blog are now available as a book!
‘Thinking out loud ~ musings on walking a spiritual path’

I did it! And that really makes me happy!

If you are interested and you are in the Netherlands, you can get in touch with me to obtain a signed copy of the book for €17,50 plus S&H. If you are in the U.S. you can buy the book through Amazon.
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Manifestation

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While on a spiritual path, at some point or other, ‘manifestation’ comes up. It may be in the context of creating things, or manifesting the things we need and desire in our lives. And most of us may have heard the phrase: ‘Be careful what you wish for, you may get it!’

So, starting from the premise that we can actually manifest the things we want in our lives; how can we do so successfully? How can we go about it in a way that we end up with what we envisioned ending up with, rather than bringing things we may not have expected into our lives?

The process of manifestation has a couple of guidelines we need to keep in mind. The first one is that there are no ‘half packages’.
If we work on manifesting a big house and a fancy car ~ chances are they will come with a type of job that allows us to pay for all of that. This may mean that we find ourselves going for additional education in order to qualify for a job like that ~ or, if we already qualify, find ourselves working more hours than we had anticipated. In other words, we really do get the whole package!
The other guideline is that the things that will help our personal growth on average are easier to bring into our lives than the things we desire ‘just for the fun of it’.
And finally, focusing our energy on the positive aspects of the things we want to manifest, will help us moving forward easier and sometimes more quickly than we thought possible!

Personally, that is where I find myself slipping every once in a while...
When I want to change something in my life, or manifest something that is going to work better for me; I find that at least initially I complain about the things that don’t work in my life, rather than on the things that can make my life, or any specific situation in my life, better.

From an energy perspective then, with every complaint I put more energy into the things that aren’t working for me, rather than using my energy for turning the situation around! Consequently, I am not brining into my life that which I envisioned. At best I am manifesting more reasons to complain...

To really get the most out of the process of manifestation, we need to not dwell on a bad situation, but look at the facts of the situation we want to change and identify the things that do work for us; or how we desire the situation to be instead. Then focus our energy on the actual steps we can take to make this happen in our life.

And while I have found the results of manifestation to be surprising sometimes ~ they have always been pleasant surprises!
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Getting paid for who you are...

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David Wood wrote a book: Getting paid for who you are. It is about building an internet business doing something that you are passionate about. It may be something that you were formally educated in, but it can also be something that you learned about ‘along the way’, sometimes out of necessity even...
If you are curious about the book, here is the link: http://www.getpaidforwhoyouare.com/freebook/

That being said, it brings up the big question: what are you passionate about? And how does it tie in with who you really are? With achieving your greatest potential?
Is that what you are passionate about the same thing as your greatest potential? Is your greatest potential the same thing throughout your life? Or does it change ~ can your greatest potential at this point in time be something; and at some other point in time something entirely different?

All in all it brought up lots of question for me on who I really am...

Not just in terms of strong points and weak points ~ although that is certainly a good way of looking at it ~ but also from the perspective of what my needs and my desires are. My goals in life, and how I hope to achieve them.
Another way of looking at it is to see what things I need to feed me, physically, mentally and spiritually. And are those needs met by the world around me? Am I doing those things that give me all the nourishment I need?
And what do I have to offer the world?

It is now a number of weeks after I have read the book, and where I had hoped to find answers, it seems only more questions are popping up in my head...

So for now, I have taken the easy approach (or so I thought) ~ I have made a list of all the things I am doing; and that I enjoy doing. And while I already knew that I am doing a lot of fairly diverse things, it still surprised me how many things made it to the list ~ and how diverse they are!

It does show from a very practical perspective that we are very unique, multi-faceted beings. As an individual, we are hard to categorize ~ don’t fit in many boxes; if any...

So if we are to get paid for who we are ~ what part of us will we present to the (virtual) world? Will it be practical, or creative? Spiritual? Will we gear what we show the world toward expected revenue? Or toward what we think others will want to see?

Or will we boldly strike out, and show as much of ourselves as we can or dare?
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First impressions

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Usually I don’t care much for reality shows on TV, but lately I have been watching one that is called ‘Style by Jury’. In this show candidates are confronted with the first impression they make on people they meet, and then coached toward presenting themselves to the world differently.
Watching this show, it has occurred to me that it shows humanity from its most superficial side: it really is just the looks that seem to make the difference. The uniformly white smile, the professional make-up, the new (no doubt expensive) hair-do, a new wardrobe, and the help of a coach ~ and voila! After a week is the ‘new’ first impression a totally different experience for the person who by now has received the make-over.

Research suggest that we indeed do form our first impressions mostly on looks ~ and we do it fast to boot! In an average of 10 seconds we decide whether we would like to get further acquainted with this person we just met, or if we would rather not.

Although our first impressions can be wrong; more often they seem to be surprisingly accurate. It makes me think whether we might just look beyond the looks at something entirely different...
That in turn makes me wonder to what extend we are really aware what is happening when we meet somebody new and form our ‘first impression’; and how we do it.

Of course there are things that can be ‘read’ from the way a person dresses, the way they carry themselves, and how they appear to take care of themselves. After all, if a person is interested in taking care of themselves, chances are they may be interested in the well-being of other people. And it always makes us feel good when we meet someone who is truly interested in us. In who we are. In what we hope to achieve...

And then there is the energy package that we are, which is totally independent from our ‘looks’, or the ‘wrapping’.

I know very few people who look at the energy package the person they meet is, and actually are aware of what that package entails. For most of us it doesn’t get a whole lot beyond ‘being comfortable with a person’, or sensing that ‘we don’t seem to have a lot in common’...
And maybe that is all we need to know.

Which brings me to another aspect of the reality show that started me thinking in the first place. Is one week really sufficient to not only change the style of a person, but also change the energy package they are? Is changing the ‘wrapper’ really enough to change the first impressions we make?
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Nice People

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I saw an add on TV the other day in which people were trying to help others, and not only was the help not accepted, those being offered help ran from it. Bottom line in the add: Nice people, what do we do with them? Then it gave a web address to go to in order to find a manual for interacting with ‘nice people’.

It makes me wonder, how did we get to a point where we need a manual to interact with ‘nice people’? I can understand a need for a manual on ‘interaction with others’. But why the manual on what to do with ‘nice people’; what is it about ‘nice people’ that seems to be so scary that we want to run from them? That we rather get lost when we are going some place, than accept the help offered by a ‘nice person’?

A couple of things come to mind.
First, we value our individuality a great deal; gearing our society toward meeting our individual needs. So when someone walks up to us offering help, it may be construed as a sign that we are failing in our individual expression of who we are and where we want to go; as a sign of defeat. Yet it seems to run deeper than that. When someone walks up to us offering to help us, even when we are struggling with what we are doing, a deep seated sense of fear and mistrust makes it almost impossible for us to accept the help offered.

The fact that this is something so widespread that it is worth making a TV add about, is food for thought.

It tells us a number of things:
We fear and mistrust other people, especially those we don’t know.
We don’t trust an helping hand as a genuine offer.
We feel that an offer like that is meant as an ‘opening bid’ to take advantage of us.
We may not want to be a nice person ourselves and offer help to others.

In other words, we believe that if we accept the offer, bad things are going to happen to us.
Or, at least we may be inconvenienced if someone would request our help...

Unfortunately, there have been cases where that has been true. Where the helping hand offered was nothing more than a scam, a setup to get ‘a foot in the door’ which in some instances has lead to truly horrific outcomes...

On the other hand, there are a lot of really nice people in the world who would really like to help someone who needs it.

The ultimate question then becomes whether we want to let our interaction with other people be dictated by fear and mistrust, or if we will use our common sense and react to the facts of the situation first?
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Polarities revisited

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We often tend to look at polarities in terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
A more realistic perspective may be to see them as two sides of the same coin ~ as two extremes of the same energy.

The most obvious polarities in our world today are likely ‘peace and war’, and ‘love and hate’. And it seems very difficult not to view these in terms of ‘good and bad’, but rather as two sides of the same coin. After all, in newscasts we are bombarded with images that show us, often in all it horrible detail, how bad ‘war’ and ‘hate’ are. Telling us the gruesome stories of those who perished in the midst of it, and of those who survived, bearing the scars of the experience.

It is quite clear, we want to have the ‘good’ side; peace and love ~ and we want to eradicate the ‘bad’ side; war and hate.

The problem this poses is that in order to come to a truly balanced perspective, both polarities are needed. This then indicates that just living in peace and love is as unrealistic, as living in war and hate is gruesome.

The question then becomes what coin we are looking at here, what the base energy of these polarities may be...
When we look at peace and war ~ how about naming its base energy the energy of coexistence?
Even though we would like to coexist peacefully with everybody else on the planet, there will always be those people that we have a conflict of personality with. And there will be those that have belief systems and values that really do not ‘ring true’ to us. Consequently, we may not want to be all that close to those people, we may even ‘badmouth’ them every once in a while (after all, we are only human...). Then bringing the perspectives of those we really like and of those we want no part of together, a point of balance may emerge that is something like ‘civil coexistence’.

From a spiritual perspective, polarities have such importance in this point in time such that we can experience both extremes, both polarities, in order for the point of balance to emerge.
This point of balance then is not meant to be a static place, but more of a place from where both polarities can be viewed and understood, without us moving into either extreme.

It is not unlike a kid standing in the middle of a seesaw. Through manipulating his weight, he can move either side of the seesaw, while he himself stays at an even height in the middle.

And when we learn to do this, not only our lives, but the whole world will become a much more balanced place for us to live in...
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That which we give our energy to, grows.

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On the surface, this may seem like an obvious statement. After all, if we spend more time and energy working, the fruits of our labor will grow. Or so we hope and expect.

However, from a metaphysical perspective, this principle stretches beyond the obvious.

From a metaphysical, or even spiritual standpoint the energy we expend is not only the actual labor we put into a project, it is also our attitude, and maybe most important our focus. So let’s look at that...

For instance, if we are happy with our job because it permits us to pay the bills, but we keep focusing on how the work we do is not very fulfilling ~ eventually the power of our focus will put us in a position where the work becomes less and less fulfilling; or perhaps even gets us to a point where we get fired. Yet, if we are focusing on doing the job at hand to the best of our ability while looking out for an opening into a more fulfilling position, any number of things may happen that make the job more interesting: a raise (sometimes money really does talk), a promotion, a different position, or a totally different job altogether.

Our attitude has a slightly different effect. If it is our attitude that we are happy with our job because it allows us to pay the bills, and we are having a good time with our co-workers, and therefore it is okay to stick it out in this dead end job ~ our attitude prevents us from making promotion, or improving ourselves to the point where we create prospects for ourselves.

In other words, it is our focus and/or attitude that dictates which part of our job grows.
The same thing is true for our lives. If we are going some place with an attitude that we are going to have fun, chances are we will! And that part of our lives we focus on, expands.

What this means is that we are in control whether the positive aspects of life expand.

It does require however, that we are willing to take an honest look at ourselves. At our attitudes. At where we put our focus, as sometimes what we do is not straightforward and far from obvious ~ and can have us convinced that we are making things better, while we are not making a whole lot of progress...
If we really want to take control, we need to focus on the things that do work in our lives, in our jobs, and allow those to expand. We need to adjust our attitudes to set ourselves up for positive experiences! And expect good things to start happening...
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What we want versus what we need

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The things we want at any given point in our lives, may be quite different from what we really need.

We may want a roomy or even big house, with a nice garden, two cats (or maybe three), and a Spyker C8 Aileron sports car. And in order to be able to afford all of that, we get ourselves the big job with the big salary ~ that takes a lot of our time and may put us in high stress situations.

On the other hand what we need may be more time to spend alone, or with friends and family.

The funny thing is that this is not necessarily an ‘either, or’ thing.
Even though it seems that if we want more time to spend on other things than work, we need to adapt our life style accordingly ~ small house, small patio, and a bicycle ~ if the ‘high end life style’ really is something that we came into this world for to experience, it ceases being a ‘want’ or desire. The Universe may very well look at it as a true need that we have, and help us accordingly.

So how do we know whether something we desire to have is just something we want, or something we need? In the eyes of the Universe that is...

I have found that the easiest way to determine this is through trial and error.
If there is something I desire to have in my life, I start taking steps toward that goal. When this goes easily and consistently produces results that are better than I would have expected ~ chances are my desire coincides with a need I have on my spiritual path. On the other hand, if I seem to run into roadblocks every step of the way, my desire maybe more of a ‘want’ than a ‘need’. And I would probably be doing well re-evaluating what I really want to get out of life, and adapt things like life style to match my goals.

Luckily, in the energy of this point in time, it becomes obvious quite quickly whether something is working for me, or not so much so...
It is almost like the Universe is waiting for us to ask for ‘the right thing’ ~ that which corresponds with a need we may have on our spiritual path through life ~ and as soon as we (finally) do, jumps at the chance to give us just that!

This makes the time it takes us to bring something into our lives a good indication whether it is something we want or desire, or if it is something we need.

It is up to us to be willing to set our goals, and take the steps toward our goals. And, maybe the most difficult thing ~ to re-evaluate those goals that do not seem to be supported by the Universe.
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There is help around the corner

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Where this is true for our guides and etheric teachers, for nature even, this is also true in a far more practical way. When we have a need while we are walking our path, help may be offered through very physical, although unexpected sources.

In a sense it may be a slightly different approach, but nevertheless still according to the saying: When the student is ready, the teacher appears. When we have a need, and then I mean something we really need to continue on our individual life path, the Universe will find a way to meet our need.

This may happen through actually meeting someone that can help us right there and then. But it can also happen because we open an email we may not even have intended opening, and finding that the answer to our need is presented right there... Like a doorway that is appearing right in front of us, and the Universe saying, well, here it is ~ go do your thing with it...

At that point, one of two things can happen:
We can recognize this as the information, the chance, the help we have been searching for, and at least be curious enough to walk through the door that we are presented with to see what is on the other side.
Or we can be sceptical, and dismiss it as just the next unwanted email in our inbox in a row ~ as spam even ~ and hit the ‘delete’ button and be done with it.

And that’s the thing.
If we accept that the Universe will help us in letting our path through life be a productive one, then it is up to us to expect the unexpected. To be open to whichever way the Universe will bring that which we need at that very moment to us. Even when we may not see how exactly this is going to work for us, or where it is going to lead us ~ it may be something that we will accept as part of our lives, or just something that is there to decide that we want no part or parcel of this at all...

Often the help to make up our own minds can be the most valuable. So seeing how something is what we definitely do not want in our lives, can be just as useful as the suggestion someone gives us that gets us out of our impasse, and back on track again.

Whichever way we look at it, when we really need it, help is just around the corner.
And it is our decision whether to jump at the chance, or to let it go by.
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