Summer greetings to you from beautiful Boulder, Colorado, where I have the good fortune to be house-sitting for two months now. Since it is hot as blazes in Sedona right now, this is a very wonderful turn of events to be here, and I hope your summer is going well, too.
My topic for this blog post is Dare to Do It/Dare to be Seen. Have you been hiding your Light under a barrel? If so, why? You would not be here if you didn’t have a divine purpose. All of us have much more to share than we may realize. As Marianne Williamson wrote in her book A Return to Love, “…your playing small doesn’t serve the world.”
Service – That does seem to be what it’s all about. As the Dalai Lama puts it, “Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.”
Are there any dreams in your heart that you have not made the time to act on, or put your attention on achieving? There is still time! I’m friends on Facebook with many wonderful people from around the country. People share a lot there, including when they feel down and discouraged. I’m sure we have all experienced those feelings, from time to time. What I’ve observed is that usually the Universe presents some opportunity to help another …often someone who feels at an even lower point than we do! Focusing on what we may do for others, however large or small of a gesture that may be at the time, is an age-old way of helping ourselves feel better.
WRITE YOUR BOOK! For many of us, a level of true satisfaction has come from finally “getting that story out of us” and down on paper. Writing a book, memoir, life story, or fiction tale is on many people’s “Bucket List.” Having gone through this labor of love myself, with the writing, revising, editing and publishing of Falling Over Reno: The True Story of the Skyjacker’s Wife, I can report it was all worth it. A lot of work? Yes! But the inner rewards of “daring to be seen” (finally) by sharing all that I went through at the tender age of 22, have been great. Daring to write what happened to you, can be like turning a key in a lock, opening a door to a part of yourself that has been demanding attention, and one of the biggest gifts of “freedom” that you can give yourself.
If we keep feelings, experiences and our inner voice muffled, that can be a fertile ground for disease, actually. We ignore the subtle hints and tugs that our Author Within is giving us, for far too long, in many cases. There is never a “perfect time” to sit down and write that book, but it will not write itself! I urge you to check out the possibilities, one of which is attending a Write Your Best Seller in a Weekend Retreat with my writing mentor, the “Book Whisperer,” Tom Bird. His website is tombird.com. This method made it so easy to “get my book out of me” in just 3.5 days. It was amazing. Then, of course, I had a couple of months of revision work to do, including that I finally had to read through my Ex’s letters from prison and decide which ones should go in the book. I had not opened that notebook of letters for some 42 years, so that part was quite an emotional experience but part of the journey to provide thorough data about those events, for my readers.
I am very pleased to share what one reader (D. D.) recently wrote after she read my book (this is my latest 5-star review on Amazon.com): I don’t know how to say Wow and thanks! I just finished your book and I was completely moved into revelations of my own! Your story has helped me understand my own journey of the life that I have led, not of the life that I was “supposed” to live. I don’t really know how to say thank you for writing your own story…it seems to me that this is just the course your life took. And now, it is touching my life. You wrote that part of your journey was to touch others along the way. Well, I’m not much of a book reader because my upbringing trained me to be busy “doing” all the time. Reading your book gave me some final acceptance that there may not have to be a “normal” life and that in learning to live the life you’ve lived in love and acceptance of who you are, in the here and now, is what it is truly all about…as the hokey pokey line goes: ‘that’s what it’s all about!’
Thank you all so much for buying and reading my first book (I am working on my second book this summer), and telling your friends about it. A special thanks to all of you who have taken the time to give me a 5-star review on Amazon, as that means so very much to us authors. If you have not yet done that, I would appreciate it so much! Many thanks.
