This
week
I Choose…
The Gifts
As I’m working toward getting myself and my circumstances to where and
how I want them to be before New Year’s Day, I (of course) am finding myself challenged,
pretty much by my own habitual choices, which continue to show themselves to me
in ways that feel frustrating, to say the least. However, that is one of the
Gifts that I am focusing on right now.
It can feel really difficult to actually see the pattern
that we’re living, because we don’t live on the outside of those patterns, do
we? No, we live within them. So for them to be “showing
themselves to me,” that has to mean that I’m beginning to shift myself to a
place from which I can see them, right? This is a good thing!
It’s also really uncomfortable.
Which brings me to another Gift that I see that I’ve given to myself
lately: The willingness to allow myself to BE uncomfortable. Without that
particular willingness, I wouldn’t be able to actually change anything!
Something that I learned a long time ago is this: No matter what my
conditions are, I ALWAYS have far more to be grateful for than I do to complain
about as I live my life within those conditions. Whether I choose to see (and
be responsible for) that, or not, is completely up to me.
My first book, Choose Your Universe, was inspired by a quote from Albert Einstein. He said, “The most
important question we could ever ask ourselves is this: Is the Universe friendly?”
I was introduced to this idea in 1999 and it was a
life-changer for me! At that time, I was not experiencing a friendly Universe.
In fact, it felt to me like the Universe that I was living in actually hated
me. It felt that way right up until I began applying the question, “Is my
Universe friendly?” in the midst of everything I was experiencing. What I
learned during that time was that if I wanted to see and experience a friendly
Universe, then I had to choose to see and experience a
friendly Universe, no matter what not-friendliness appeared to be
happening to me and around me.
As I started deliberately applying this idea in the
life I was living—and what I was experiencing at that time was ugly, and it was
painful—I found that, even in the midst of all of that painful ugliness, when I
began deliberately looking for my Friendly Universe (in other words, The
Gifts), I started finding and experiencing my Friendly Universe!
Our answer to that one simple question, “Do I live in
a friendly Universe?” (whether we’re answering it consciously or
not-consciously) is what determines how we experience our own personal
“Universe.”
And that’s what this particular “I Choose” is about.
What’s going on in your life right now? You get to choose what your own personal
Universe feels like to you. And one way to do that is to look for every single
Gift you can find in whatever you’re living right now.
Right
now I happen to be dealing with some things that feel frustrating to me. But I
know from experience that there ARE some wonderful Gifts that exist in this
situation. My work is to look for them with the intention of finding them. And
that IS the work that I’m doing at this time.
I
invite you to join me. What are you struggling with right now? And if you were
to look for the Gifts that are an
inherent part of whatever you’re living, what would you see?
The
statement I have been using is this:
I Choose… The Gifts
As I work toward the goals that
I have set for myself, I know that in those things that frustrate me the most,
or that appear to be stopping me from achieving my goals, are the most valuable
Gifts for me to look for, find, and actively cultivate.
Join me if you choose to. Try this for yourself, just
as an experiment (that’s how I began all those years ago), and watch as your
Universe shifts right around you. Have fun with it.
And, of course, over the next couple of weeks, may
you thoroughly enjoy whatever holiday traditions that you value the most.
Much, much love to you all,
Rev. Sandi Daly
Have an awesome day if you choose to!
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