Remembrance and Reconciliation

Did you know memorial day began as a time of remembrance and reconciliation to honor soldiers from both sides of the American Civil War? First known as Decoration Day, by the early 20th century it became a time to visit and decorate the graves of family members.

My grandmother guarded every blossom in our yard from plucking before that last weekend in May. Then we I loaded up the car with peonies, roses, lilacs and tulips and drove out to the Rockville Cemetary. We visited old graves of relatives I never knew and the newer one of my paternal grandfather, even though my parents were divorced, in the true spirit of remembrance.

All 4 of my grandparents are buried there now, some of my mother's ashes scattered, all of my aunts and uncles and 3 cousins though I am the first born. My heart feels very full with sweet memories of them and the soft scent of roses, peonies and lilacs

Happy Memorial day Weekend. With all of the usual celebrations I wish you a time of sweet remembrance, reconciliation and spring flowers.

New Breakout Tools

The BREAKOUT STORE is open! It's full of tools to
break out to success, happiness and miracles at
http://mandyevans.com/the-breakout-store

I sorted through hours of material, editing and digitalizing
to give you the best of what I've learned from my life's
work. I put it online and priced everything way low so
everyone can afford it.

What's there?

"Beliefs About Love" Stop sabotaging Cupid with a
fresh look at love.

Peace with the Past" recorded at the Betty Ford Center
reveals deeply personal details of my journey as the daughter
of a violent alcoholic father and how I made peace with my
own past.

"Choosing Happiness" provides a complete overview of
the Option Method and a rare opportunity to listen to actual
real-life Option Dialogues.

The "Breakout to Miracles" video was recorded live at the
amazing Miracles Weekend with Joe Vitale in San Diego.
The entire talk is here along with the standing ovation!
Miracles abound! Learn how to accept yours.

My books, "Emotional Options" and "Travelling Free"
are there too, filled with workshop-tested exercises and
insights, they work like your own work-shop-in-a-book.

If you want to break out from prison you need some tools.
When the prison is of your own making, built with beliefs
that block your happiness and clamp limits on your
success, that old hack saw we see in the movies won't
help at all. Go to The Breakout Store and get some new
ones http://mandyevans.com/the-breakout-store

It is important! Why?

With every false conclusion you come to you fence out a
bit of freedom. Every time you adopt a erroneous belief
about who you are, what you can have and the nature our
world, you rule out countless possibilities. Little by little
as you go through life you confine yourself in a smaller
and space with fewer opportunities. Often the space is
filled with fear, anger, regret, or guilt.

We all do it! But few of us become aware of how our own
belief systems have to shape our lives. Those of us who
share these messages have broken out of solitary
confinement for sure. I think the breakouts are infinite and
love to hear about yours. I'm grateful for your insights
and enouragement.

Please share this with anyone who could use some good
breakout tools.

To your happiness and success!

Love,

Mandy

Comments welcome! Thanks to Bruce Feagle for all sorts of creative and technical help. www.brucefeagle.com

Breakout from Regret

Regret works like swallowing a bit of poison every day.
It destroys your health and well-being. It closes down
your view of life, blocking out opportunities and beauty.
Habitual regret exacts an enormous toll but delivers no
reward.

A man I'll call Tom taught me my first lesson about
regret. He showed how experiences from long ago fire
up a feeling like the replay of a video - only in real life.

If you want to find beliefs that block happiness start
with a strong feeling you do not like having. Identify
the feeling and question it.

That takes courage because when you question an
emotion with an open mind you enter into uncharted
territory. When I work with people neither one of us
knows what we will discover and go through together.
Years of explorations have taught me that the feeling
we are looking at will most likely come alive while
we study it.

The feeling Tom did not like having was rage. We began
asking questions. I did not have the answers, but Tom
did.

What are you feeling rage about?
My childhood.

What about your childhood?
My mother died when I was twelve. I was the oldest of
five kids and my father always wanted me to take care
of them. His idea of taking care was being in charge of
them. They resented it. They hated me.

What about that leads to rage?
I felt like I only had two choices, disappoint my dad or
make my brothers and sisters hate me.

What about that involves rage?
Tom's body trembled with anger. He spoke through
clenched teeth and began to cry.

Because I'll never know! I'll never know who I would be
if I'd just been free to be a kid. I'll never know.

What about not knowing who you would be if your childhood
had been different leads to rage?

Though I've seen this look many times it always moves me deeply.
Tom's rage slowly dissolved. After a quiet moment he moved
into a sort of soft bewilderment. That's the space of creativity
where the way it was is gone and the new way can come
into being.

He smiled and said simply, I don't know. I don't feel it now.
I guess none of us knows who we would be if things had
been different.

That was a beginning of many explorations for Tom and
for me.

I began to notice the power of regret in the lives of my
students, my friends and myself. For some of us it lingered
as sadness, for others an abiding sense of shame, for many
the default feeling was anger or even rage.

What belief held these feelings in place? What kept them
alive so long?

Since we each create a unique belief system as we go through
life I found many beliefs. There was one belief though, that
everyone held that fed the feelings of regret: If that regrettable
thing or circumstance had not happened, I'd be me, with
my life, only it would be better.

The kinds of better differ; I'd be more confident, successful,
stronger, more beautiful, have more money, be unashamed,
fearless, lovable.

That belief, I would be me, with my life, only better, is not true!
You can't change one puzzle piece in real life and come up with the
same picture only prettier. The whole thing changes. Your life would
be completely different. We have no idea what it would be like. How do you
regret a complete unknown?

Instead of wondering what caused things to happen, Bruce Di
Marsico (founder of the Option Method) liked to ponder, I
wonder what this will be for? I like to ask, what would I like
this to be for, what do I want to come from this?

If there is something you regret you may want to ask those two
questions too. I'd love to hear what you find. Post comments at

Wishing you happiness, success and freedom from regret!

Love,
Mandy

Vision and Action

“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without a vision is a nightmare.”

This anonymous “tweet” packs more wisdom about how to create your life than I learned in my first 30 years. For most of them I bounced off the walls of disaster. I reacted and recoiled. The only purposeful moves I made were toward isolated, specific goals I created in an unconscious prison of limiting beliefs. Beliefs about what I could have. Who I could be. How I must feel.

Beyond stories of saints and madmen, I had no idea what a vision was. It never occurred to me to consider what kind of life I wanted to create much less a game plan with action.

My daydreams played out fleeting moments, mostly half conscious fantasies that came to me unbidden.

Since I began to work with them so long, long ago I have learned a lot about how to break out from limiting beliefs that block happiness and keep people stuck in anger, fear, resentment, guilt and other painful emotions. It has been thrilling to witness courageous seekers strip away beliefs that block success, to see them flourish and thrive.

When you see for yourself, with certainty, that something you have believed for a long time is simply not true you move through confusion into a more open field. It’s the one the Persian poet, Rumi, talks about when he says, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”

It is a wonderful open space filled with possibilities for your creativity to mold into unique form and experience. Few people go there after childhood. We cling instead to illusions of certainty like our ideas of right doing, believing that (even false) certainty provides security.

I know a lot about how to get to that open field. I’m just beginning to learn how to combine vision and action to harness the vast power of conscious creation available there.

I can almost feel the boundaries between me and infinite possibilities. Though I perceive only a tiny glimpse of what is possible for one human to create in real life on planet earth it is more than I ever imagined for much of my life.

The time we spend together in that field of possibilities reminds me of the less known lines of the Rumi poem:

“When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase, each other
Doesn’t make any sense.”

Cheering us on to great visions and inspired action!
With love,
Mandy

Breakout to Love

Do you greet the approach of Valentine's day
with joy? Or dread? Or something in between?

With a whole day dedicated to celebrating
love most of us focus on romantic love. What
to give or get? On what it means if we don't
have a sweetheart. Or didn't get a rose or a
dozen roses. It can all be very stressful, even
heartbreaking if you hold limiting beliefs about
love.

There's an easy fix; celebrate all kinds of love.

I love Valentine's day and sending Valentines.
So I'm sending one to you with a very long stemmed
rose from my patio!

Wishing you an open heart overflowing with all
kinds of love, like the love I feel for you
right now.

And brotherly love, sisterly, fatherly, motherly,
grandmotherly, co-workerly, son and daughterly,
we-are-all-one love, spiritual love, sexy love,
happy love, grieving love, caring love, generous
love, curious, wondering, friendly, blessing,
compassionate, grateful, forgiving, and romantic
love.

All kinds of love!

Happy Valentine's Day!

With love,
Mandy

http://www.mandyevans.com/

Break Out from this Futile Fight

Don't fight reality, use it.

Reality changes all of the time. We can fight it, deny it, complain about it or use it. I recommend using it. Especially since reality does not give a fig about what we think of it. It just is.

Complaining about, fearing and railing against reality it only raises blood pressure and increases tension. It limits creativity.

But you can change reality! Especially your own. You can lose weight, gain financial success, get out of debt, become more loving, move to another town or country, get married, get divorced – well you get the picture.

Helping to change someone else’s reality (like sharing resources or sound advice) is more of a challenge but often worth the effort. Since it is almost impossible to alter someone else’s reality without their cooperation I suggest skipping that endeavor all together!

Here’s an example of how to use reality. A flurry of inflation warnings made financial news today. Some of us will worry and complain others will take advantage of this new reality.

We can bemoan the price of coffee or buy coffee stocks. You can open an online brokerage account for as little as $500. There is even an EFT (electronically traded fund) just for coffee, symbol BAL. Not recommending, just sayin’.

If interest rates go up, the price of bonds will go down. Sell bonds? Redouble efforts to pay off credit cards? Buy real estate, as in “buy low, sell high?”

That is just one example of how to break out from a futile fight against reality.

Here are some others:
• Stop complaining about what is and invest some energy in what you want to attract or move toward.

• If your friends take advantage of you, put your foot down and say no and/or find some thoughtful new friends.

• If someone betrays your trust, instead of trying to make him be more loyal factor in that information when you interact next time.

• If you do not like where you live, move!

• If your boss is a total pain find a better a way to communicate with her or start look for another job.

• If you want more love in your life, be more loving. Just sitting quietly to send love and blessings to people you care about changes you and the energy you share with others.

• Denying reality does not delay it or make it go away. Denial is not a river in Egypt.

The most important, powerful change you can make is your own limiting beliefs. When you regularly uncover and break out from beliefs you hold that block success and happiness you step into a whole new world. Your view of reality opens up. You can see amazing possibilities that used to be obscured by self-defeating beliefs.

Reality rocks! Use it well.

Please share this with anyone who might benefit.

Cheering you on to success and happiness with love,
Mandy

Author of:
“Travelling Free: How to Recover from the Past by Changing Your Beliefs”
“Emotional Options: A Handbook for Happiness”
Available at www.mandyevans.com

What to Do in 2011?

Here it comes, 2011! And how are we going to know what to do?

Advice pours in from ever-expanding sources. Google, Facebook, Twitter and life coaches have joined Fox News, CNN, the print pundits, gurus, clergy, therapists, teachers, spouses, friends and family in a great cacophony of do-this-don’t-do-that’s.

I get a fair amount of requests for such advice myself – a bit more than I can handle sometimes. It keeps me thinking about this:

Each of our lives is so unique, so very precious. No one on this planet has ever walked your path or ever will again. No one but you has learned everything you know or rises to meet the same new challenge you face. What a wonder you are!
I’m reviewing the lessons that enrich my life. They may add strength, love and beauty to yours.

You are the authority on your life. No matter who tells you what, you have to decide what advice to follow, who is wise and who seems foolish to you. There is no escaping it, in the matter of your life, it is up to you!

Desire marks the path. I spent last week with my family. Our newest member, Emery is a small 5 month old bundle of happiness and desire. Watching her bright eyes as she reaches and rolls over for the next delight to crinkle, crunch, bang or chew on reminds me of the simple strength of this inner sense of guidance. It may be all we need to lead us through life, if we only dare to follow it.

My son, Barnaby says I gave him some good advice about my favorite form of desire when he was in high school, “You told me if I follow my intense curiosity, I’ll always be alright.” He’s a happy entrepreneur, founder and CEO of http://www.foodista.com/; it seems to work.

Happiness is the ultimate goal. Never hold your happiness hostage to be ransomed for love, money, success or stuff. As supercoach Michael Neill says, “Happiness leads to success a lot more often than success leads to happiness.” You can have your happiness cake and still devour your fill of material gains and mighty triumphs.

As each new year approaches, I write an “I Welcome List” of what I want to bring into my life. This year I’m focusing on who I want to be and how I want to experience the precious days of this miracle – being alive and capable of learning, teaching, loving, laughing and being happy.

Please share your comments, thoughts and knowing what you welcome in 2011 here. I'm pretty sure sharing helps make it real.

Cheering you on with happiness and love,
Mandy

“Emotional Options: A Handbook for Happiness”
"Travelling Free: How to Recover from the Past”
are available at http://tinyurl.com/ordermandysbooks