Nothing changes, but your own perspective yet everything can change in your experience.

One of life’s hardest demands is facing challenges when they arise.

Giving face time to those people and places and things that only make you want to run the other way screaming, yet there you stand, tall and with a smile. If you are able to look fear and hatred square in the face and feel peace in yourself, this is all that matters.

Two very important pieces to realize when being faced by the lions of life are this:

First, whatever you feel inside will not in that moment change what is in front of you.

So, let’s take a second to visualize a scenario two ways. Picture yourself in the situation you most fear. Now picture the scene, the people, the lighting, the smells. Now visualize your inner landscape. Surely, it is tight, restricted, mind jumbled or racing, muscles tight, breathing short and shallow. Imagine your thoughts. Are they negative, foreboding, fear based? Now remember that and stop.

Try scenario two—same external situation, but the only thing that changes is your inner landscape. Purposely change the breathing to deep. Purposely think a positive thought. Genuinely access a place in yourself where you take one moment and freeze whatever is around you, accessing inner peace—truly—just for one moment. One breath, allow yourself to relax. Now, see if you can make it two breaths, work your way up eventually to any amount of inner peace. Anywhere, any time.

Nothing changes, but your own perspective yet everything can change in your experience. Because now instead of the fear, you feel peace.

Second, whatever you feel and do in that moment will change what happens next.

Negativity is a weed that grows rapidly when fed and shrinks like a violet when given no attention. Your world on the outside reflects who you are internally. It is never too late to change.

I will not react from the heat of the emotion in my soul. When I feel the fires burning, I will allow them to burn for as long as needed as it is only nature running its course. But I will not allow those fires to reach up from my heart and take over my mouth. I will not give the anger life.

When I am ready, I will respond from the coolness of my mind, when the waters have calmed and when and only when I am able to allow the sacredness that is speech, to be pleasant, fair and truly reflective of character will I cast words into the world.

 

Fire, fire burning bright, everlasting as starry night

Dark yet sprinkled with beauty, near and far, ever reaching, always seeking

No one can put you out

Not one can put you down

But you may only burn on the ground

Because without trees of thought and branches of reaction there is nowhere you can go

Spread far, spread wide, toss an toil in your glorious might

Mull me over in reflection over many day and night

But do not grow

Because I know

Without permission of the will

Without the winds of action continuing

Without the sins of traction and surrendering what is peaceful and still

You can toss the brambles and dried grasses up and down this hill

Only until

You run out of energy and I will not give any of mine

I’m sorry, old friend, I won’t lend a hand

We will meet again time after time

My teacher you are, you come from afar yet closer than any could be

You are me

You are a part of me

A part, I allow, as it would be silly to say a part of my very being, my clearly seeing could even

Be something of nothing

But sit still you will after you toil and till through your rambling will

And by you I mean me, and by me I mean we

As we were, peacefully, we will continue, we will be

Olivia has turned an eclectic mix of her B.A. degree in Communications, Master degree in Education, and single motherhood of bouncing-off-the-wall Irish twins ( born 10 1/2 months apart) into becoming an avid consumer of mindfulness, yoga and meditation. As a writer she has created an assortment of theoretical pixie sticks, glamour, glitz and wittiness, sitting, thinking, drinking in humanity, freely producing reflective poetry and musings on the absurdly obvious, yet deeply hidden gems of life, motherhood and child development.

 

Like the mindful life on Facebook.

 

 

Assistant Ed: Josie Huang/Ed: Kate Bartolotta