Are you living your best life?

I care less about your perfect feng shui in your home than I do about you living your best life.  On your own terms.

I didn’t start doing this because I was endowed with supernatural powers, wisdom or anything else.  I didn’t take a business class and decide to turn a passion into a business.  I didn’t even know it would be my career, which is why the blog  was designed in ways that aren’t the greatest (new design coming VERY soon, at last!).

It’s all because I want you to live your best life. I want everyone to be cause instead of effect.

I’m not a “success guru” or spiritual leader and this isn’t about following my sermonizing.  It’s about you, your voice and your life.  And deciding that you are making this happen.  Not anyone else.  Just you.

What if you could be CAUSE instead of EFFECT? What if life was easier and more creative every day instead of a fight against or a fight for things?

Decide that your life is yours to make and go get it.  Right now. 

I lived my life wishing people who I loved dearly would live their best lives, or even dare to try.  I spend my days at 6, 7, 8, 12 years old with such clear memories of begging my Mom to do what would make her happy.  By 16, I’d be screaming in tears to get her vile boyfriend ( a man who thought that threating to beat us was funny)  out of the house and praying that she’d walk away.  I saw what happened all around me, with my mom being only one small example of what happened when you decided to you were the EFFECT of life and not the CAUSE.

Everyone was the effect.

As soon as I found myself as an adult needing to make choices and be responsible for the choices I made, I found myself the effect of life rather than the cause of it, too.   “I can’t afford to… I can’t take the time… I can’t just leave… I have no time… I have to rush… I don’t have the ability… I have to wait until the time is right… I don’t have the luxury…”

My life sucked.  When I was broke, my life sucked. Surrounded by wealth, my life sucked.  In places and spaces that people dream of seeing and experiencing, my life sucked.  In incredible outward success my life sucked.

I came last, I had no say, I didn’t want to rock the boat, I was to be seen and not heard. And on and on.

I was the effect. I was not the cause.

When I hit the absolute bottom of my life I found incredible joy, so rich and so deep that I almost romanticized a six month recovery where I could barely walk, eat or stay awake after an insane illness as the most glorious moments of my life.

You don’t have to wait for a collapse to make new choices.

I thought I did need to destroy myself to rebuild everything.  There was too much clutter, too many toxic people, too much guilt, too many problems.  I got really into the “phoenix rising from the ashes” idea that I’d have to torch my life to have a fresh start.

It’s really impossible to live this way- destroying yourself until you deserve a new start—  but I see it all the time.

You are so burned out that you decide to work even harder. 

You are so tapped out emotionally that you decide to dig deeper into the toxic mess.

You are so scared of real success that you self-sabotage and blame.  

You’re used to sacrifice so you martyr yourself for other people or your work or anything else and say that there’s no other way.

On and on, we slowly torch or totally incinerate ourselves in the flames of no soul, no love, no creativity, no joy and no cause over life.

What is the point of this?!

If you’re asking yourself what’s happening astrologically or looking for the cosmic reason why things are where you are, you’re not alone. It’s a road that leads to a funny place, the same place that the roads lead that prescribes one single method to be superhuman or radically productive or bouncing off the walls with frenetic energy masked as enthusiasm.  It’s all a road of EFFECT.

Don’t go down that road to nowhere.

Don’t treat your life like it’s not in your hands and that anyone and everyone knows better than you.

Your life is in your hands.  You make it.  You can change it.

If you’re burned out, fed up, disgusted, overwhelmed you really can make a very decisive switch.

Not a change that requires 10 gurus and a pile of books and instruction manuals. Your best life isn’t in a self-help book.  Lots of cool ideas are in books, lots of wisdom, lots of stuff.

It’s not going to give you the what to do.

Make a change that is about you. 

Less force. It’s everything.  When I’m trying really hard to force things I am lost.  If it’s a lifestyle, it’s a dead end.  Yes, you might have to do a whole lot of work to get to where you need to be, but not trying to tear down walls and stubbornly insist that one way is the only way.

Stop hiding.  It creates problems.  It is it’s own sabotage.  I know because I used to love hiding in my work.  Then, things happened.  Big things. When my blog totally broke (and I thought it was beyond repair) I heard myself telling the tech team “This is my life!” … and at that moment, I stopped and said, “What the hell am I saying? A blog is my life?”  When I gave up on the idea that anything was my life, and that things could only go one way, the tides turned. Things got fixed easily.  So did my actual life, and what mattered most.  My life is not a blog!  Your life is not your work, or anything else you’ve immersed yourself in because the rest of life seems uncertain.

True voice.  It’s deep.  How true is your voice? How OK are you with the agreements, compromises and ways you express yourself? If you’re not coming alive, your voice can be more you. Get rid of the distorted ideas and stories and gloss and be your own self.  Free speech is a luxury afforded to not all of us yet in daily life, and we who have seized it are gifted to use it to make life better.

Decide to be cause.  Not effect.  Not worried.  Not stuck.  Not in a hole of demise.  Cause. Cause isn’t angry or spun out.  It your creative power.  We think muses are involved.  Or talents.  Or luxury.  Cause is a choice.

Not caring about the rest. Of anything.  Of how pretty things look right now. Of how much longer until it’s perfect.  Of anyting else.

Space.  It makes it all possible.  Clear space to live.  Clear space to breathe.  Clear space in your days to do nothing.

Clutter makes you the effect.  Clear it and you are cause.

One of the biggest reasons clutter doesn’t get cleared is that suddenly, there are no excuses and no stops.  Suddenly you are responsible and you might fail or worse, you might succeed and have no idea what yo do next.  Suddenly you aren’t exhausted, unhappy and settling.

The real change isn’t just possible, it’s your life.

xoxo

Dana