David and Michelle
Session 5
Session 5
Michelle:
Welcome to our wrap up session for our book. Let's just take a moment to be present, to open up and invite in Divine Mother, Divine Father, Lord God, however you might phrase it.
Guide us, to lead us, to show us; anoint this project, anoint ourselves in this moment in time. Bless all that will hear or read or be touched by this message in some way. We're so truly grateful for this opportunity to come together and explore things; open up new opportunities for people to tap into ways of living a life that they love even more. May you be able to take these insights, these tools, these actions, these gifts, these skills to apply it to your own life, to realize that you can create, we all can create, amazing transformational results in less time and with less effort than we thought possible.
Allow all of us to use our minds, our energies in ways that first and foremost feel good: ways that light you up, expand who you are, that align you to living the truth of why you're on this planet. Today Lord God, just work through David and I in a way that's even more profound and magical and in ways that it resonates with the people who will benefit from this time we've spent together. We're so truly grateful. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
That feels complete for you or anything you'd like to add?
David:
Amen. I added things all through out.
Remember To Be Intentional One of the things that I’d like to start with is just a reminder to people to start with intention. So many of us run from day to day with our to do lists and what's going on that we forget to have an intention beyond accomplishing the list of things: Call this person, fill out this form, pay this bill, get groceries. Often, we're running around on the very surface level of life, and even though we’re attending to things that matter, we're not doing it with any intention about what our experiences will be or whether we enjoy the day or not. I'm going to suggest that we flip that around, that our first priority is to love today, enjoy the blessing of being on earth, enjoy the colors, enjoy the relationships that you have. The other stuff is secondary: I have these errands, it would be great if they got done too. But if we can start asking when we get up in the morning, “What do I want to experience today? Who do I want to be today?” we can make that a key component of what we're doing. Once we set that, we have some ability to determine of all of the thousands of things that we could do today and what's on my to-do list. We can set priorities, we can determine if we’re being true to our self and fulfilling our higher purpose.
We have an ability to determine, to discriminate, what we want to do once we have a clear intention. Otherwise, people get on Facebook and four hours go by and they still aren't sure what they’re doing. Why? What are we doing? I'm not saying not to do that, but I’m saying if you're going on Facebook, make sure you know what you're doing and then when you're done doing what you're doing, get off.
What Lights You Up?
Michelle:
I'm not a huge Facebook person, or social media person, but I’ve realized I can get so sucked in. I have that little Alexa thing on my desk I'll tell it to set a timer for 10 minutes, just in case I go unconscious with it. Then there's something that goes off to say, “what are you doing? Come back.” I love what you're saying, my favorite question is “Am I'm filtering the world through what lights me up?” That alone helps you have a great day, and then often at the end of the day I'll do a check in. Rewinding the great moments of the day is my favorite way to go to sleep because we don't really remember the whole day, but we remember the moments that I like to call magical: the ones that lit me up, the ones that helped create a day that was very welded.
That’s what we encourage for everyone, to not just hope to survive the days. We want them really tuning in and consciously determine that today is going to be a day well-lived. When today's a day well-lived, and tomorrow's a day well-lived, and then you’re stringing together multiple days well-lived, you have a week well-lived. A few of those is a month well-lived, and you keep going from there. You get to the end of the year and you realize you are always going to live this way.
I notice people get like down on themselves towards the end of a year, they feel like yet another year went by that wasn't what they wanted or expected it to be. Here's the thing: they didn't lose a whole year, they lost days. If we start with just today, asking how to make today a day well-lived, there's a very good possibility that not only do you consciously live today better, you'll do the same for tomorrow. The action is to start with questions and to start with just today.
To Do List: Magical Moments
David:
And you start by putting it on your to-do list: I would like three magical moments today. I would like five magical moments a week. After you've done that for a few days, put 10 magical moments on your list, or to laugh 15 times a day. Just start putting the experiences that you want to have that day on your to-do list and ask for them. We can do it silently when we first get up in the morning, or after our meditation, or at night before you go to bed. End with, “Thank you for a great day. Tomorrow I would like these things.” Start keeping track, start noticing at the end of the day, how did that work? Start taking responsibility, even if you start small; you don't have to start with “I need today to be a day well-lived” and then stress yourself out. Just start with, “Hey, I just realized there's all these statistics about how kids laugh 18 billion times an hour and adults laugh twice a year.” Whatever it is, I don't remember what the actual figures are. Michelle:
Hundreds a day versus like eight or 10 for an adult. Seriously.
David:
Start with, “I want to laugh way more. I want to laugh 15 times, I want to laugh 12, I want to smile inside. I want to feel the sun on my face.” Just start with whatever is good to start with.
Give Yourself a Break
Michelle:
Can I tell a little story to bring that to life? About 20 years ago, I was really consciously wanting to be happier, wanting to be at peace. This is when I worked in corporate America, and there were very few days I got outside because most days I would work through lunch or go downstairs to the corporate cafeteria. When I really looked at my days, I realized I wanted to get out, I wanted to breathe in fresh air. I started with about a mile, mile and a half or so from the corporate office that I worked at. There was a little pond with ducks, and one day I thought, “I'm going to bring a few slices of bread with me and I'm going to go to this pond at lunch.” That alone just brightened my day, as simple as that. I wound up for months and months beyond that, doing it multiple times a week, just getting out. I got to the point where I would recognize certain ducks like, “Oh you're the one who always snags all the bread.” It was like this whole little world that no one knew about but me, and it brought so much joy. Whatever those small things are, maybe it's just getting out, going for a walk around your block in between all the busy-ness and the calls; any small thing that just allows you to feel like you just did something you really enjoyed.
Action Step
David:
The action step here is that for the next month, every day, make sure you do one thing that brightens your day. Maybe it's just noticing the leaves changing colors or the flowers blooming, I know so many people who live near the ocean and don’t pay any attention to it. I also know people who get up every day and go, “Oh my God, thank you that I'm right near the ocean.” Go to your favorite restaurant, even if it's a little out of your price range, just once in a while, treat yourself to it for fun, to make yourself feel special. Watch a movie or show that makes you laugh, call a friend you haven't talked to in a while or who makes you feel good about yourself. Talk to a relative, send a card to somebody, send a card to yourself. Just start picking some small things to do, take less than five minutes a day to get started. Ask yourself, “What will I do that will make me smile? What will brighten my day or make today feel special?” Do one of those things every single day, and then notice it at the end of the day: “oh yeah, I got to do that.”
Or say something nice to somebody. There's so many things that you can do that will make you glow inside. So just start doing one a day. And if you're enjoying it, start doing two. But just the action step is just get started with something very simple and then let it grow.
Michelle:
Let it grow. That's it. That simple.
David:
After a year of this, you shouldn’t be doing one thing a day, you should be doing dozens every day. It should be starting to dominate your life, and then you will notice many other aspects of your life start moving in to support this more until it starts to dominate your life. Start small but start.
Life Changing, World Transforming
Michelle:
This will change your way of being. We all have conditioned ways of being, habits, patterns that have formed. Someone who primarily is unhappy or lives in a depressed state needs to know that’s a trained behavior; they’ve let days and weeks and months in those lower energies accumulate. This is a simple, easy way to start bringing in more of the feel-good energies and the way that you do want to feel. The highlight of my day used to be going to a duck pond, and as I really started creating a life and being more of the person that I wanted to be, I went on to months and months later leave that corporate job, start my own business, and do more of what was in alignment with myself.
Through the years, that created a new group of friends, a new community, and I married the man of my dreams. It grows into you getting to be the person that you love being around because you've found ways to enjoy you and your life. The more that you become that happy person for you and love yourself, the more world transforms around you. David:
Get started, let it grow and then let it snowball and become an avalanche. Have a wonderful life for yourself. It’s that simple. Just start and then navigate it and enjoy.
I know you wanted to talk more about compassion, and I know we really want to bring home this idea of these different areas of life that we talked about in the beginning. I mentioned the Vedic ones, so Dharma and Karma and whatever those were, and I know you mentioned a bunch so I want to bring out something.
Limbs, Not Steps
Patanjali is the author of the Yoga Sutras, which is where yoga comes from, and the sidhi program, all of these different things about superpowers and meditation. He lists what are the eight limbs of basically growing to a fuller life, but for centuries it was mistranslated or misunderstood as the eight steps. There are actually seven of them, and it’s basically things like being nice, telling the truth, being non-violent. The last one is transcending, which you and I talked about before, that's the eighth one. But because of the way that he listed them, people thought that you had to go through all these sequences. One of the things Maharishi brought out is that no matter how much you never tell a lie, behave nonviolently and live up all these other virtues, the seven virtues will not get you to the transcendent. But if you stop looking at it as steps and you start looking at it as limbs of your life, then transcending — Samadhi — helps you grow in a way that allows these others to fall into place automatically. I mentioned this because as we're moving into more joy, and more intention and purpose with our life, we may find that at different times relationships or job and career or health may dominate. But we find that if we're centering on ourselves, compassionate and loving towards ourselves and loving what we do, then it’s as if they’re limbs and all of them move along together. It may still be that one area is more dominant at a particular time, but we don't have to focus on it. We don't have to say, “Once I get there with career, then I'll start thinking about health”. We don't have to do it that way, we can just start moving them all together.
Woke
Michelle:
It's interesting you brought up Samadhi. I own a float tank, and the name of the tank is “Samadhi”. It really is about that transcending it all to let go. There's a new buzzwoword, “woke” as in, “Are you woke?” and it’s really referring to these levels of being present to it all without it emotionally pulling you down. You can be present to somebody's emotional upset and still stay connected and grounded in love or in compassion. You can have scenarios like all the politics and it’s not like you have your head buried in the sand, but you don't need to get emotionally wrapped up in it either. It’s the same thing if you have a health crisis going on and the medical report didn't come back in a way that gave you a great prognosis of the future, but you can stay connected to the present moment, to that God or Divine Mother or spirit or whatever term you like. You can find that peace that's within you through the storm; it’s like you become the eye of the storm through the different experiences.
The purpose of us sharing this is ways for you to tap into that, ways that you can be very practical so that matter what it is that you have going on, there's such a benefit to stay present versus getting collapsed into the stories and project fears onto the future of what it is that you don't want. Remember the “What if up” game? We're going to play the “what if up” game: what if this turns out to be the greatest blessing of my life? What if this is here to lead me into my divine path? What if I meet somebody who has all the solutions or resources that I've been looking for? That energy is so much better than imagining worst case scenarios; what we want is to empower you with solutions to keep moving forward versus collapsing into the victim energies. One, they certainly don't benefit you and two, there are better ways to handle everything.
Get Clear
David:
That’s a really good point, and I think I'm going to say this a different way: Are you responding to what is being presented to you in a way that empowers you? Ennobles you? Makes you happy? We talked a little bit about this in terms of bringing love to every situation; What we want to do, and the action step that we ended with, was to love yourself and how you’re responding because if you don't love what's going on in that moment, then for a lot of us there are things that need to be cleared. Maybe it's something that happened as a child, or something in some past life for those who accept that, but there's something that needs to be cleared to allow us to respond in a way that uplifts us.
The “Too Much Good” Problem
I remember talking to somebody about an event, and we were all talking about too many people showing up at an event. Where are we going to put them? What are we going to do with their cars? I loved one of the guys there, he said, “Yeah, let's have that problem. Let's have the problem.” We want to keep that thought, let’s have the problem that something spectacular is going to come out of it rather than worrying about something else. If that's not your go-to response, if you have trouble going there at all, it could be that you have some block and we’re going to recommend clearing that block. I know you do things with your programs, I have a whole bunch of things with my programs. There are YouTube videos that can help you. If you know what the problem is, you can type that in the search engine: How can I center myself? How can I…whatever the case is. There are dozens at all price points, dozens of things that can help you clear out whatever it is.
Everything is Alright
You can always do prayers; we've given certain techniques throughout the book here. But the first thing is to realize that if you can't go where you would like to go, remove the block that's presenting it. One of the things that a lot of us experience is we come to a “T” in the road and we've turned right so many times that we can’t turn left even if we want to. A block has occurred; something that prevents us from seeing the left turn or we just can't bring ourselves to do it. What we want to do is clear the blocks so that we can turn right or left, open up to the possibilities that we can choose our response as opposed to one that’s been programmed into us by someone who may not necessarily be a well-wisher for us. It can be TV shows or movies or commercials or upbringing or something that was handed down from generations, although a lot of that stuff is being cleared on the planet right now. Sometimes we yell when we don't want to yell, sometimes we get upset when we don't need to get upset.
A friend of mine I went to school with many years ago was a very powerful buy easygoing person. She said her father taught her this one thing: everything is alright, unless it's good. When things were good, they were good, but the worst they ever got was alright. When things came along that weren’t so wonderful, her go-to response was, “Well, it's alright”. It’s a great baseline to start from, because something may not be what you want, but it’s alright.
What Do You Get From Your Response?
Michelle:
Anger used to be my go to, when I didn’t have the response I wanted I had a pattern of getting angry. I didn’t feel like could just stop it, and I felt like I had worked on it. We both hear that from people a lot, I’m sure, that they’ve worked on something and it’s still an issue. I remember asking myself, “What do I get from this anger?” This might sound so strange, but I started to realize that in many ways anger felt productive and proactive. It felt like I was dealing with stuff and I got something done, I felt like I had a lot of significance because people would know I was not a pushover. Oddly enough, there was even safety linked to it; there were several things that happened in my childhood and when I got angry, I stopped the dysfunction. I stopped the abuse, and so my brain had linked up to think, “Well maybe you don't like feeling angry, but you get so many payoffs.” I know now that ego makes up a benefit for going into these low energies. It's not from truths as we've said with the capital “T”, but there's these payoffs, these driving energies. When I asked myself what I got from being so angry, I realized it was giving me significance and I felt smart, I felt like I was getting stuff handled. The big moment came when I began to ask what would happen if I channeled all that into living in my light. Allowing me to stay present to the emotional upset and not yell and scream is a much better strategy all around for me, for them, for my health and my wellbeing, for the relationships. I used to say stuff that I would definitely regret later on and when I understood what I wanted to get from the anger and I gave myself the gifts of it, I found better strategies. That’s what caused me to shift permanently, the pausing before I react. I can feel smart and safe and show up without getting angry. I gave myself everything that my ego was wanting, but I now get it from what I call spirit solutions. I don't put my ego in charge anymore, I put my spirit in charge and spirit always has a better strategy. You get to have everything that you want from spirit and that's how you really create the win-win. The Payoff
David:
When I was a kid, one of the things that they taught us was to count to 10 or get out of that environment. Leave, then think about how you want to respond. Anger may give you a short-term payoff, but the long term payoff is horrible, including the physiological damage that it does to your system, what your body endures when you’re angry. There’s that old expression that you can capture more bees with honey than you can with vinegar, and I don't know why we want to capture bees, but the point is that in my experience I tend to be very nice and I tend to try to make people feel good about themselves. It's something my dad taught me way back when I was young.
When I would go into restaurants and I deal with the hostess or the waiters, I was very supportive of them and very kind to them. As a result, they gave me bigger portions because they liked me. Had I gone in and yelled, I wouldn't have trusted the food that they served. Being kind and loving has much bigger payoffs than being somebody who gets mad; it’s not that we do things for the return, but kind people tend to have a lot of well-wishers. It’s never a bad thing to have a lot of people who wish you well as you're navigating life. You never know who can help you. And to be honest, just people well-wishing you and putting that energy and that love into the world on your behalf can really smooth things over whether you know it or not.
Action Step
If you're somebody who does have anger issues, or you withdraw or don't allow yourself to be present in the moment during particular situations, the first thing to do is take a step back from that situation and begin to navigate inside. “What is it that would make me comfortable here?” “Do I have a block that needs to be cleared?” “Do I need to empower something?” Next is a prayer technique, and as always we start by calling on the divine in the name that warms our hearts. I'm going to use “Beloved” today:
“Beloved one, Dear one. We call upon Thee and we ask Thee to not let me be the block. Don't let me stop my good from coming to me. Let me receive all the blessings that You would like me to have, that you'd like to give to me. Just let me receive and don't let me be the block. Clear out whatever it is within me that needs to be cleared so that I can receive this. Clear whatever it is within me that's making me respond in a way that I don't like; please fix it so I can respond in a way that honors You, honors me, honors everyone involved.” Those are two quick little things that we can do. Since we talked about this last time, I've been really catching myself with quiet little grumbles that I hadn’t even realized I’d been doing, and saying to myself, “Oh, why am I saying that? Let's clear that I don't need to do that anymore.” It’s not even how I interact with the environment, but it's how I interact with myself. Some of the exercises that we talked about last time have been popping up and helping me say, “Yeah, I'm getting a little grumpy about this.” Or I spilled something and realize I’m frowning; I don't need to frown. I don't need to go anywhere near that. I can laugh about it, I can do something else. It’s starting to catch more and more of these little glimpses of moments that are not miraculous but could be.
Fear-Based Awareness Has To Go
Michelle:
I was actually playing with this today, I wrote it on a card: “Today I'm resolved to see, speak and feel only the good.” Then I realized because I'm not doing it on an ongoing, consistent basis there were these blocks, and I don't always speak towards the good or what's great as a defense mechanism. I'm wanting to look after myself and there's not always good going around, so I feel like I need to know what's happening, what's going on, or maybe what is it this person want from me? We have those kinds of defense mechanisms that we are filtering the world through, and we want to start looking at that because we need to know if we are being fear-based versus speaking towards what it is that we want. We want awareness, but pure awareness and not based in fear.
Ask For More
There’s another pattern that believe most of us have, this wanting to be smart, wanting to be right, and looking for what's wrong, what's not working. Why do we look for what’s wrong or not working? To fix it, to be right, to be smart, to catch it before it gets worse. We want to flip that to say, “This is what's working and I want more of that.” We want to energize those things, supercharge them, put systems and strategies in place to create more of that because that will move you forward with a lot more ease than putting all the attention on the problem. The third pattern I think most of us have is insisting that if we let go of things, it means we don’t care, don't matter to myself. But the thing is, when you're looking for what's great and what's working, energizing that and speaking towards what it is you want to create, it's the easiest way to feel the safest. It's the best way to be smart, the best way to energize and create more of what you want. That is really what allows you to take care of yourself, to matter more to yourself, like the well-wishers. Think about the person who's wanting the best for others and wanting to create the win-wins, wanting and allowing and speaking towards other people's gifts, talents, strengths. It creates a community where we all work together to bring out the best in each other. The takeaway is to be aware of and realize what it is we get from being negative or speaking against what we want, or being fearful or uptight. As soon as you realize what you're getting and that there's a better strategy from spirit, you’ll see a big turnaround.
Everyone Is Doing Their Best
David:
We talked about this before, expecting the best, and cultivating the attitude that everyone is doing their best, and that inconvenience is not suffering. Inconvenience is simply inconvenient; maybe it takes an extra minute or two to get somewhere or you have to change the way you’re going to do something.
If somebody cuts us off in traffic, we can make that personal. We can have feelings of, “Who do they think they are?” and get upset like my older sister did. She felt it was her job to swear profoundly and honk her horn at people, and I can understand why she felt that. But if we adopt the idea that everyone is doing the best they can, then we can just trust that people are doing the best they can. Maybe they didn't see you, maybe they're bleeding and they're on the way to the hospital, maybe their wife is having a baby. There are so many justifications, and what we want to do is reach the point where we don't even bother to play the justification game. We just aren’t affected. We don't need to have an emotional response about this.
Limiting Beliefs
There are two common belief patterns that I think really don't serve people well. One is, “You're getting it wrong, and I need to teach you how to get it right.” and the other one is, “You did it wrong, therefore you have to be punished.” This belief that somehow, we've been touched from on high and it's our job to correct or punish the people who get things wrong is simply not true. In the Scriptures it’s very true that the ultimate judge is not us, but it's the Lord and we should all be trying to help each other. “Help thy neighbor” is a really big thing. Let’s say we go to the grocery store and the cashier rings up the item twice. It's not our job to scold them, just be friendly. They're doing the best they can, they’re working with equipment that doesn’t always work like it should. We can be loving in that situation, say, “Hey, by the way, that rang up twice.” My God, how many times does this happen? There's an estimate, I don't want to go there. But the point is that they're not doing it to be malicious. If we allow that thought that everybody is there for us, then how we respond is very different than what you were talking about with the fear-based thinking. If I think everybody's out to get me, I respond very differently than if I think everybody is for me.
There Are No Others There’s one master, I can't remember his name, but somebody asked him how we should treat others and his response was, “There are no others.” I love that idea, because from that higher state of consciousness it's true that everyone is nothing different than that pure awareness, my own unbounded Self, and therefore I should treat everyone as dear to me as my own self. This happens automatically when we get to these higher states of consciousness that we've talked about before.
They Are Not Out To Get You It’s not our job to fix other people, but it is our job to be helpful to other people. If somebody is doing something over and over again that seems to not be supportive of who they're trying to be, we can show them a better way in kindness and love. We do it by first asking if they want help, saying, “Oh my God, it looks like you're struggling with that. Can I help you?” because that's something that's very positive and not judgmental. That's one action step that we can do.
The other one is to cultivate so much compassion for others that when someone cuts us off or hangs up on us, calls us at the inappropriate time or something, it doesn’t even cross our mind to think that they’re doing something to me. They're not out to get me. We don't even have to shrug about it. We don't even have to justify it. We just go, “yeah, I hope they're having a better day than it looks like they are”.
Let Me Show You A Different Way
Michelle:
The way I've set it up is that it's a cry for love when someone is acting in a way that is unattractive and unappealing. The instinct might be wanting to yell at them, scream at them, police them if you will. Instead, you can have the presence about you that says, “Oh my gosh, what is that person going through?” I bet you most parents can relate when their child is having a tantrum. They're frustrated, they can't get the little round peg in the square hole, and it's never going to work because it's a round peg trying to go into a square hole. You don’t get mad at your child; you’re going to realize they’re frustrated and love them. If we're grounded in love, we can show compassion. We talked about this with my son, when he’s frustrated my response is, “Come here baby, let mommy hug you, let mommy hold you. Let's get present here.” Let me show you a different way. Once we’re present again, we can try again. We can say, “Here let's pick up the round peg for the round hole. Look, it works!” and you celebrate it. We're here to show people role models of what it's like to live a life with more love, more joy, more peace, more health, more abundance.
Be The Light
I have said this through the years, and I'm going on my 20th year of coaching, that no one's ever come to me and said, “Michelle help me to feel bad. I want to feel stressed and overwhelmed.” We’re not wired for those emotions; we're not wired to feel bad. We're wired to feel good, so as long as we can get one person with presence to stay in this love energy, this compassion energy, then you have the ability to transform one person, a room, or honestly a whole nation or the world.
The more you can raise your awareness to live into these moments of being who you want to be regardless of how other people are showing up, regardless of what the outer world circumstances are, then the more impact you have. We get to be in charge of the way we're showing up, and we can look at it as being a light in a dark room. We use that scenario often because it's more impactful for you to be a light in a dark room versus a light amongst many lights. Of course, we’re not saying we can’t be around other lights, but sometimes we need to realize, “I've been put here to be a light in a dark room, and I'm not going to lose my light. I'm not going to lose my love, my joy, my peace, my connection to source energy.” It’s incredible how great that will make you feel when you look back at it at the end of the day and you were able to stay present to whatever was going on without the knee jerk reactive energy that probably your old self would've had.
Tie Your Shoe
David:
Agreed, and something that can help us make the adjustments that we're suggesting to is quite frankly, don't take anything too seriously. One of my favorite expressions is “we must take very seriously not taking ourselves too seriously”, which was from Maharishi. Something else he said is “the only thing worth taking seriously in life is joy of life”. I like these because they're immensely practical. We get all bent out of shape about things that we think are important, when in fact they're not that important, they just happen to be being presented today. A lot of them end up being the equivalent of your shoelace being untied. Tie your shoe, it’s not an “end-of-the-world” thing.
We're here to experience. That's what our role, our purpose of existence is: to have the experiences, and to choose the experiences we want to have. It's literally that if we go into the movie theater and we don't like this movie —we thought it was a comedy and it turns out to be a horror movie — we can leave, we can change the channel. Just like that.
It’s Just Pickles
What we're trying to do, Michelle and I, is to empower everyone in whatever is going on in your life. If this is not the theater you want to be in, if this is not the channel you want to be watching, we're giving you action steps. The first thing to recognize is you can change it regardless of how long it's been going on. The second thing is to take the first step of changing it, which is nothing more than the intention to change it. Be patient with yourself and don't take anything too seriously. I've seen people have major meltdowns because they dropped a jar in the kitchen; sure, it broke and things went all over the place, but it was a jar of pickles, and there are more jars of pickles in the world. Or, you could just go without pickles right now. You have the tools to clean it up: you have the dustpan, you have the mop. It's not worth having to take Valium to calm down.
A lot of this stuff in the world and the planet that seems to be so huge? We can just not take it seriously. I know some people’s immediate reaction will be to ask, “What about life and death, David?” One of the things that we're really trying to encourage is for you to really be aware of the wholeness and the expanse and the totality and the range of creation. Great News, It’s Your Choice I'm somebody who has taken very seriously helping heal this world, and I've worked on it, round the clock, my whole life. When I start wondering or hoping I'm doing a good job, I get reminded that no matter how good you do there are going to be other planets and other solar systems that are more ahead or less ahead, and this is the theater that I chose to come to. I chose to be a light in a dark place, so enjoy it, and then having done that, maybe next time I’ll just hang out in a light place with lots of other light people and play volleyball on the beach all day. We've been shown the examples, there are so many things that we’ve been taught to take way too seriously. We talked about capital “T” truths, we talked about longevity, about how long this influence is going to be. So many things have a much smaller impact than what we’ve believed they had, and so much of what we complain about, particularly here in the West, really is just inconvenience or minor annoyance. If somebody is caught in a traffic jam and majorly freaking out, unless they have PTSD, they are just annoyed and were somehow trained to get mad and go crazy about it. But it’s a choice; you can also just enjoy the few extra minutes to listen to music. It’s always your choice: who do you want to be and what do you want to experience in that situation?
Focus On The Victory Michelle:
The experience will take on the meaning that you give it. There is honestly nothing on this planet that has to be a big deal. It could be a huge financial challenge, like companies going bankrupt or you just lost your biggest client. It can be a health issue, I know multiple people in stage four cancer, and you could say this is such a big deal, but if you can look at it as though it’s here to bless you then you’re looking for the gifts of what's coming out of this. A couple of people that I know that are really, you could say “challenged” with health scenarios right now, health opportunities as we actually like to call them, and they're so focused on the victory. They are so focused on the victory. That’s worth repeating. I worked with somebody many years ago who helped people work through it after they were diagnosed with cancer. She said, universally, that the people who survive, especially in stage three and stage four cancers, are those who didn't turn to ash once they were given the diagnosis because they looked for the solution. Those were her exact words.
They looked at it as a wake-up call to live a different life, a wakeup call to live a healthy life. They got focused on the solution, on the direction that they wanted to go. She said universally, every single person who became overwhelmed by it, focused on it, let it become everything that they were doing, died within the timeframe the doctor gave them. It's like they said, “Oh my God, I have this and the doctor's only giving me a few months to live”, and they've allowed that story to play again and again in their mind until it physically played out. The people who outlived the doctor’s prognosis are the ones who said, “Okay doctor, that's your opinion. That's your point of view, but that’s not my experience.” They literally did an about-face and they went in the direction that they wanted to go to. They filled their mind with the solutions and strategies and the resources of people who had healed from it, and they went on to heal.
Take Back Your Power
We're here to say that no matter what is showing up in your life physically, mentally, emotionally, relationship challenges; you got what's going on, there's no doubt about it. We're not denying that. But it's here to bless you. It's here to wake you up, to help you step into more of who it is that you're being called to be on this planet. There are people who have healed, moved past, transformed their life from that same exact place that you are. If you don't get stuck there, you can do the same thing. David:
Yes, again it’s asking, “who do I want to be?” “What do I want to experience it?” People need to take back their power. We created a little divine meme thing about it, and it’s another simple thing people can do, they can say, “I now take back any and all power I have knowingly or unknowingly given to anyone, anywhere.” “I now take back any and all power I have knowingly or unknowingly given to anyone and anywhere.” Here’s the thing: in that situation where they go to the doctor and the doctor says, “You're going to die”, they accept that and give away their power when they start thinking, “I guess I'll have to die now because you told me to.” Michelle:
And they do.
David:
They do. What we want you to do is to take back your power. Just take it back. Take back your power, start claiming your own life, and start claiming responsibility for what you choose to do and what you want to experience. I do want to point out, because it's true, that no matter how good you are, you're going to die. Everybody's going to die. But again, you don't have to take it too seriously. It depends on how you handle it, but it's going from one room to another for those who understand that we're on a longer path of evolution.
Read It For Yourself
I encourage people to look into the stories of people who have written about after death experiences. Dying to Be Me by Anita Morjani or Embraced by The Light by Betty Eadie are two that come to mind, there are so many books now. There is research about kids who remember their previous life in ridiculous detail; they can go over and point to the people in the next town over or they can point to houses and they know the combination to the safe. I mean ridiculous details of things. Interestingly enough, in the three or four hundreds, and in 300 A.D., reincarnation was removed from the Catholic Church. It was actually part of the original understanding of what Christ was teaching.
What Is Serious?
Again, what is serious? What's worth getting bent out of shape about? I really want to reiterate that you and I are not naive people. We're not saying we've been leading blessed lives and we're la-te-da and everything always works out. I lost my son to cancer, okay? But I'm also saying that doesn't have to be something that defines who I am, at least it doesn't need to be the story that I live. It is an event, but it doesn't have to be the story that I choose to make my big story for the rest of my life. As you said, it could be a great blessing. Huge blessings came when he first got cancer, and again the second time he got cancer, and when he finally passed away even more blessings came to our family. A lot of information and a lot of good came out of it. Yes, I miss him. But that doesn't mean it’s the first thing I say to people when I meet them, in fact, I have very dear friends that I've known for decades who don't know because it's never come up as part of our relationship.
It's not something I want to sit around and commiserate or feel bad about. It happened, along with so many other things in my life, both positive and negative. And this is who I want to be: I want to be the guy who gets to be a light to other people. Sitting around feeling sorry for myself, that's not my choice this time. But I do want to add that if that is someone’s choice, then really enjoy it.
Your job is to enjoy yourself. So if you're going to be the person who complains and grumbles and is the pest, really just enjoy the heck out of it while you're doing it.
Beyond The Grief
Michelle:
Yeah, that's really good. Most people I think know it deep in their souls when they've lost a child or a spouse or a parent or a friend that they want you to be happy. I recently lost a friend who died at 40. In your brain you can say, “My gosh”, but when you get beyond the initial grief and emotional reactions, I think there is a deep knowing, “They want you to be happy.” Can you feel that? The person who passed on doesn't want you to suffer for them, doesn't want you to hold on to that as what defines your life or for you to be held back in any way. If you can allow yourself to know that they'd want you to live your best life to honor them, to honor the relationship and who they were, then you can keep from getting stuck in that grief.
We Want What’s Best For Each Other I do believe most people know that kind of deep down inside, but it's a powerful reminder that we want what's best for each other. The reason that we want that goes back to what we talked about earlier, that we are wired to feel good. We said this before, but we’re giving you full permission to feel good. You can work at anything: work at finding these strategies to free yourself, to feel good, to live in the present moment, to raise your levels of consciousness and awareness, to live in the capital “T” truth that we talk about. It’s a different quality of life and your life works better because of it.
Your energy and your vibration is literally emanating out to the universe, and your success is other people's success. Your beingness is more important than what you’re doing. That's one of the quotes I've created through the years that I believe is a foundational principle: “Who am I being? How am I showing up?” Not, “Oh my God, I have to get this done.” That's secondary. Who you are being is first and foremost, and when we understand that being, this trumps doingness, the quality of your life changes because you want to feel good.
David:
We’ve talked before about how the greatest accomplishment of a Saint is the life that they live, not necessarily the miracles they perform. It's the fact that they embodied this 24/7 for years, that's how they were showing up.
This Is Inappropriate
I do want to tell another story, because I really want bring home that we're in the world and we know what's going on. When I was 16 or 17, one of my dearest friends committed suicide. So, we know what grief is, and we know it's appropriate to feel grief and then it's appropriate to stop feeling grief. We need to be aware of what's appropriate and how things work for us. As I said, he was one of my best friends, but I went with the flow. We had grief, there was a big funeral, we got a few days off school because we were all just in grief and in shock.
My sister was part of it because he had also been her boyfriend, and whether it was her Italian upbringing or past trauma or whatever, she just really leaned into it. She started using it as an excuse for all kinds of inappropriate behavior, and she made it her story. She made it her life. Whenever she met somebody, within minutes she was telling them, “Oh my boyfriend committed suicide.” This was in the 60’s, and there was some army jacket or air force jacket or something that he had. Somehow, she got ahold of it and she lived in it for years, literally, for years. I think she washed it periodically. She started seeing psychiatric social workers, and at one point she went in to talk to this particular woman for the first time. She walks in wearing that jacket just drops her whole story, “My boyfriend committed suicide and therefore I cannot cope with the world,” and she went through this whole big introductory thing with this woman. The woman said, “Okay. Got that. When did he commit suicide?” At that moment, my sister took a pause and said, “Four years ago”. Without the woman even saying anything, my sister realized the absurdity of milking this 24/7 for four years and in a flash, she realized how inappropriate it was.
Move On
Whatever we've been going through, whatever the story is, whoever did us wrong when we were three, or five, or seven, or 18 or 22 or whatever, move on people. Seriously. Maybe it was some mistake. Give them the benefit of the doubt, send love to them. Call on the divine in the name that warms your heart and say, “May everyone involved in this situation forgive and be forgiven. May we all move on to a better life for ourselves. Thank you, God. And so it is.” These little intentions are a huge thing. Michelle:
Yes, when you realize you haven't been living you have to do something about it. I'm sure your sister in that moment was thinking, “I've been milking this. I haven't been living my life and this is crazy.” We can hold on to the past thinking that it means we're honoring them, but we’re not. It's not honoring them, they don't want that, there's no one who wants you to be miserable and living in the past. Life is designed to live in the present moment with positive anticipation of what's to come. The Bible says we're meant to go from glory to glory, we're meant to live a victorious life. We're meant to get better each year. We've got to start embracing that.
You Will Face Things
David and I are saying you will have scenarios. A loved one may pass on, someone may run into health opportunities or have financial scenarios to deal with or relationship challenges. Life happens. Trust me, I've had a lot of life scenarios. I've been divorced, I've been through bankruptcy, I've had multiple miscarriages. They don't define me. I'm only pulling them as examples. I don't live as if those are even in the forefront of my mind. I've moved so beyond those things because I've seen the blessings of being massively upside down with money and then realizing that in the worst of it all, I could still focus on the abundance and focus on the gratitude. Even when creditors were calling, some of the hardest times in my life, when I shifted my perception I could say, “This isn't even that bad.” I had so much more to be grateful for than to be upset about, and because I focused so much on finding the blessings. We’ve said that before, this is here to bless me. The financial problems and even the health challenges I've had in the past were here to bless me. I asked myself, “Okay, what do I want? I want to focus on the abundance.” Great. I did that, and turned it around in less than a year and made more money than I had ever made. The health opportunities are a wakeup call to live a different quality of life and take care of yourself at a different level; I turned that around and got healthier than ever.
Even some of the really awful relationship challenges were blessings. Working through that and getting healthy led me to writing about my dream guy. His qualities, who he is and what he's about, and I started focusing on what I wanted to create. Months later I found him and went on to marry him, and now have a beautiful baby who will be nine years old in a couple of days.
Stuff is Going To Happen!
Stuff is going to happen to you, there is no doubt about it. Life happens. There's a season to mourn and to grieve, there's no doubt about it. There's emotional upset sometimes, but for a short period of time, days instead of years. Some people hold it down to hours or days or a few weeks or months, but if you're starting to cross into years, you're holding on to something and you're milking it for the wrong reasons. You’ve got to get focused on where you're going and what it is that you want to create because there's a world out there that offers you everything that you want. You've just got to show up and start speaking towards that, visualizing it and being what you want, and you're going to move forward in that direction.
May I Take Your Order?
David:
I keep picturing someone in the restaurant of life, and there's a waiter willing to take your order for whatever you want. If you want some old stale fries and a hamburger that's been on the floor, that's your choice. If you make that choice, I'm going to tell you to enjoy it. I'm also going to tell you that everything you can imagine is on the menu. Everything is on the menu. Make the orders be your happiness, not what you think will make you happy. You can have everything that you want, everything that you want, but that doesn't necessarily mean you need a mansion or to be famous. It doesn't necessarily mean you need a Bentley and a chauffeur, or an Aston Martin. What you want to think about is how you want to feel when you get what you want, and then that's what you can have. It may not be all at once, but you can move in the right direction. Moving confidently, knowingly, trustingly, in the direction that you want to go has a huge impact on the day-to-day moments of your life. When you know you're going the right way, if a boulder falls in front of you, it's not a boulder. You’re able to say, “I'm going the right way. I just need to go around this.” Or climb over it, sometimes climbing over it is fun.
Faith and Expectancy
Michelle:
Two of the biggest energies you can live in are faith and positive expectancy, believing for what it is you want. When you think of a restaurant, the menu doesn’t limit what you can have. The menu is for everything in the world: to meet the person or people that you want to meet, to travel, to go to experience what you want, to live where you want, to surround yourself with everything that you want, to be the person that you want, to accomplish what it is that is deep inside your heart. Faith is the belief in that, faith is literally seeing and remembering the future and knowing that this is yours, you're meant to have it. It’s a mental attitudes that conceives of the future and conceives of that vision so fully that anything against it, speaking against it, is impossible because you know that you know that you know it's going to happen. Positive expectancy says, “Okay, where's it coming from? What's going to happen to allow this to all come together in a great way?” It’s actually easier to think big than it is to think small. There are these things on the planet called smart goals, and I'm here to tell you they're not very smart. They want you to calculate everything and figure it out. But the greatest leaders on this planet, I guarantee you, they didn't know the “how”. They had what's deep inside of their hearts, those heart desires that in my language lit them up. It was a calling, they were meant to do it, and they raised their hand and said, “Yes. Yes, that's for me. Yes, it's on the menu.”
You expect to be led to it, you expect to be guided, you expect the right people and the resources to show up so it's fate that whatever's been put inside of your heart is a “yes”. I like to say, “It’s been stamped ‘yes’”, followed by the positive expectancy even if you don't know the when, the where, or the how. You know the what, and you know the why, and when you have that and allow it to unfold, it absolutely will. My belief is that everything you've ever wanted is circulating all around you, you've just got to say yes and raise your hand and know that once you do, it's yours to be. I’m not saying you won't hit some obstacles. Are you going to go down the road and see some boulders in your way? Absolutely. You'll probably hit some boulders and detours and turnarounds, but you keep going. Once you keep going, success truly is inevitable.
Is What You Want What YOU Want?
David:
I want to clarify one thing, which is to make sure what you want is what you want, not what you think society expects of you or what someone else wants for you. The truth is, while there are some people who move from a lesser state of income, for example, to a huge amount of income, you don't have to become one of the top 1% of 1% to have the life you want.
There was a study on a group of students who were graduating high school, and the point of the study was basically to keep track of what happened to those people over 20 years. Every few years the people conducting the survey would get in contact with them, ask a few questions. When they were leaving high school, a large percentage said, “I'm going to go get rich.” Some said they were going to get married, and there were some other kind of common answers. Of those who said they were going to get rich, a lot of them did end up on Wall Street or in some kind of investment job, but within 10 years they had all left that job and were immensely more happy when they were no longer chasing money.
Do What You Love, Love What You Do
Since we're talking about true alignment and wanting what you truly want, what is most interesting is that there were three people who said, “I just want to have fun. I just want to be happy”, and those three people were all multi-millionaires. One of them really liked surfing, so he did it every day, and in the process, he developed a wetsuit. At the end of the 20-year study, he had a huge multinational surfing company and he still went surfing every day. The two other people who were multimillionaires had similar stories; there was something that they loved doing, and they did it. By following what was true in their hearts, they ended up generating huge amounts of money. Be true to yourself.
The Answer Will Come If You Ask For It
Michelle:
Some people don’t know, they say, “What is it? What is it that's really true in my heart?” They honestly don't know, and I what I tell them to say is, “God, it's not my will, but Your Will be done. Allow me to be led, to be guided, to be shown my true calling. What is part of what I'm really meant to do?” Truthfully, God's Will for your life is what you want. The answer is whatever it is you genuinely want to do, without the comparisons to your neighbors or how you were raised.
For a long time, what I thought I wanted filled the void of what I didn't have as a child. Filling a void is very different than my divine purpose. An even better way to ask is to say, “What is Your Will Lord God? You know the language for my life, what is that?” Rest into that, relax into that, be still and listen because an answer might pop up that you weren't conscious of but soon as you hear it, it fits like a warm sweater. It's the feeling that say, “Oh my gosh, that feels so good.” and you realize that is what you want.
David:
I also want to point out that everybody doesn't have to be notorious or rich and famous; it's not everybody's job to have a huge impact. We don't all have to save the world. I will guarantee that whatever your purpose is, it includes you enjoying your life. I'm going to say, “What lights you up?” because that is important, but I also want to point out that for a lot of us, actually for most of us, it doesn't have to be anything that we would call “special”.
Down Deep, What Is It?
Recently I bought a car, and the guy who was in the finance office was one of the most delightful people I've met. I meet a lot of delightful people, but he was lovely. He used to be in acting or some sort of public profession years ago, but he's been doing this for nine years and he says he wakes up singing, he sings all day long while he's working, and then he goes home. He has a very full life and he's really enjoying himself. Money's not an issue, he's just the finance guy in a car dealership.
I really want to point this out because a lot of times when you ask somebody what they want to do, the answer is, “Well, I don't know.” Most people just want to have a job they enjoy, and it could be the checkout clerk at the grocery store if that’s where you’re happy. You could be the librarian, you could be a teacher, you could be in the military, you could be a policeman. We don't have to say, “Oh, I need to be Einstein. Oh, I need to be a Gandhi.” Again, what is it within you? A lot of us are here to have a good life, and a good life will fulfill everything we want: living a comfortable life, being with people that we love, being happy most of the time, living in gratitude for our day-to-day life. We don't all have to go out and become famous, we don't all have to change the world. Most of us have been given the opportunity to have a wonderful life. We're at the cosmic, I call it a restaurant, maybe we’ll call it a boutique. There’s somebody standing there with a order form saying, “Just tell us what you want, and we can help you get that.”
Have A Good Life
The most important key to having a good life is to make sure it's truly what you, in your heart, want. Not what commercials or TV shows, or friends or family, or generational things have imposed upon you. What is the life you would like to have? I've known people who were regionally famous public speakers and said, “All I want is to have a quiet life at home with the kids.” But they have stepped up to something else now, so they moved and did that for 20 years. And when the kids were grown and gone, they've gone back out into the world of public speaking again. But “modest” is all relative. I really want to encourage people: have a good life. Have a life that you're happy with, a life that you're proud of. You don’t have to be super rich, super famous, super influential. You could be the guy who sells cars, the guy in the bank, somebody who works in a grocery store. I guarantee you that there are people all over the world in those roles who are someone’s favorite person, the ones that we all want to be around. They’re lights because they are living a life they enjoy, and that makes people want to be around them. Michelle:
It's beautiful, and that’s what this is about: a handful of things to stay focused on and to bring into your daily experience. To live a life that you love and be the person you are called to be, deep inside of your heart. That’s our wish for you. David:
When we're asked what we did with our life, I honestly believe saying, “I thoroughly enjoyed Thy creation” is a wonderful answer.
Michelle:
Yeah, and I've had moments where if it were to end, it's still been a good life. And to an extent, I feel like I have barely even started at the same time. It can be both.
David:
There are people who like the wild rides, but there are those who don’t, and it's all good. It's all good for everybody. Michelle:
You’ve just got to find those moments, like the movie they made years ago, The Bucket List. One of the things on the characters list was to kiss the most beautiful girl in the world, and it turned out to be his granddaughter. He got to connect with her and see her and kiss her and it was so beautiful, I remember being choked up. One of my dear friends just had twin girls a couple weeks ago and it was magical sitting there with her. We were each holding a baby and I asked what her favorite part had been, and she said, “This. Just drinking in a baby sleeping on you is magical.” We're getting a new puppy in a couple of days, and these are the moments of life that you want to be present for and to enjoy.
Dream Up A Good One
David:
Thank you for that. What final points do you feel that the divine would like you to convey? Michelle:
It’s a quote from Albert Einstein, and it has shaped my life for decades since I first heard it. It simply says there are only two ways to live life: one is as though nothing is a miracle, and the other is as though everything is a miracle. There are miracles all around us. Look for the miracles, look for the beauty. Look for what's good, look for what you like. Look for what you love and speak to that. Focus on that, feel that, because you're meant to feel good. The better you feel, the better your life works. Dream up a good one. Dream up one that you really love and go out there and live it. David:
Here's what I'm going to end with: Life is here to enjoy. Look for the joy in it, allow the adventure to be joyful.
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