Forget unfair and luck, integrity is what counts.

‘By living from integrity, you align yourself with the way the Universe works. When you live out of integrity you get unreliable results. You might think the world is unfair and picks on you, which it does not.’ (WomenLikeMe on Integrity) The unfair, random acts we think we receive from the Universe are generated by our own randomness around being in and out-of-integrity. Ouch. Being in- and out-of integrity guides our doing.

Sitting and enjoying the sun while being fully in integrity. John is getting the drinks

It ultimately  determines whether we end up working with the laws of the Universe and getting wholesome results or working against the laws and achieving randomness.
So what is this integrity that is so important to have the Universe effectively and pro-actively on our side and us being a reliable partner it can work with?

No matter what I have been told, I am NOT selfish, I AM base camp.

Growing up I always heard, ‘Don’t get too big for your boots, young lady’! ‘No, you are NOT the center of the Universe and you do not put yourself first. Don’t be selfish.’ And like everybody else, I too was constantly told what I could and could not do and nowhere was there any talk about ME looking after ME and finding out what I wanted. It actually was all about staying small and being told NOT to deviate from the behaviors I had been taught.

Now I am wised up, I demand breakfast in bed, wherever we are.

And I took all of it on board.

Sure why wouldn’t I have? It was dished out mostly by people who honestly loved me, so why would I not believe it.

But life is never that simple, is it?
A lot of what I’ve taken on board during my life is now showing up as extra ballast that is sinking the ‘ME’ in me.

My daughter, my heart and that little voice of mine.

My corporate daughter wants a dose of her Mom. She asked me to come visit her for a long weekend and then gave me an extensive list of what home cooked meals she wanted me to bring along. However after placing her food order she did stress that it was not all about filling up her empty freezer. I didn’t have to bring anything with me; just seeing me was really what she wanted. Oh, how that made my heart melt.

Another special time together, Halong Bay, Vietnam.

Just hearing ”Mom, I want to see you” made my heart leap up in the air and I immediately started to dream up what fun we could have.
Special mother/daughter times are so precious.

Exciting and tough; this learning to play a totally different game.

. I have been hard on myself. I honestly could not figure out why it took so much effort to come to grips with this new way of living. After all, it seemed to be such a no brainer; replace a fear filled, limited life with a joyful life that I would absolutely adore. However I omitted to realize the vast scale of this turnaround that I am asking of myself, my mind and my heart.

Learning a new skill in a new game, walking besides the rice paddies and yes I did slip.

I got to see that it does not serve me to underestimate how big the change is when you choose to live from love instead of fear.
I never knew how big this step was.
It is huge to change this complex life coming from force and overwhelm into a simple life in which I peacefully come from love.
My biggest fear was that simple meant boring and that I would lose out on exciting things.
Now simple carries a different meaning and stands for having an extraordinary life operating from love, knowing there is always enough and being proud of who I am.

The unknown got to me; what is next with our Garden of Eden?

. I am good most days, I really am. Most of the time I peacefully accept that there is an invisible bigger plan and that all I have to do is trust. It will all work out so long as I am doing my bit by being love in action. And then WHAMOO, out of the blue comes my mind, like a screaming banshee to shatter all this peace. Like it did this week.

Waiting for the next miracle.

For 2 whole days this screaming banshee of a mind would NOT shut up and its voice successfully jolted me out of my peaceful state.
What was the cause of this entire racket?
It suddenly realized that our time here in this glorious Garden of Eden might be coming to an end. The lease ends in September and we have no plans as to what to do next. Not yet anyway.
So all hell broke lose; my mind became totally consumed by the want to have a linear plan about what’s next.
It just wouldn’t stop.
It called me all sort of names; stupid, ignorant, a dreamer and it brought up every weak point that it could possibly find.
Most of all it completely went to town about miracles; it sure had a lot of negative things to say about that.

This tantrum took me completely by surprise, although I do know that the mind tends to do this when it feels insecure. All it seeks is reassurance that all is well and that I CAN perform miracles. Knowing this didn’t make it any less annoying though.
In the past this would have resulted in a number of weeks of upset, nagging John about what we were going to do. I now, thankfully have ammunition to overcome this mind attack on miracles and put it to bed, pronto!

How I dare to ignore the recession.

. I am sick of the world’s boom and bust way of operating and these stupid recessions. All this agony caused by selfish grabbing based only on ‘What’s in it for Me and forget about what happens to anybody else’. I am totally over accepting it as normal and over how it endangers my two daughters’ future.

Let's go for life and dare to live; like this sailing I did in the Southern Ocean on a replica of an ancient Pilot Cutter.

Just look at how this recession paralyzes everybody with fear and look at what it is also doing to us as a whole.
We have become fearful at work AND slaves to the money for goodness sake. Our personal greatness and indigenous power is constrained by our preoccupations with meager survival issues. Surely we can do better than that!

Marianne Williamson keeps stressing too, this is NOT us, this is not how we are meant to be living. We are powerful co-creators, capable of living magnificent lives; with a partner like God we don’t have to be restricted by fear or smallness, playing a game of just surviving.
With the mighty God in tow or with God leading the way, we should be in for the ride of our life and not on this piddly little path we are presently on.

How mother and daughter manage the fear driven corporate world.

. My daughter is entering a world that is new to her; the corporate world and boy is she learning. It moves me deeply to witness her innocence and total bewilderment at it all. It rocks me to my core, to see her discover the levels of incongruency and manipulation that exist, to see through her innocent eyes just how ugly and inhumane the world of work has become.

The precarious bridge between the two different worlds, one driven by fear and the other coming from love.

I am very grateful that my beautiful, generous, bright eyed and bushy tailed daughter is turning to me for guidance to make sense of this new world.

I am grateful that recently I’ve gotten a real sense of knowing just how different the world can be, so I do feel I have something of value to offer her and to guide her with.
And I am forever grateful for the movie ‘The Secret’ and the wide spread popularity of the Law of Attraction.
These new concepts and explanations on living have totally intrigued my daughter. They also gave us an aligned way of looking at what is happening to her at present and they provide insight into how she can deal with it all in a very different way.
She knows that if she is not careful she will end up living like most people in the finance world; wealthy but fearful and with a huge loss of inner self worth.

Jesus would be proud of me, I can do miracles too.

. I often wonder if we are all children of God. If Jesus is one, then I am one too. Then . . . if he can do miracles I can too, right? Well let’s see if I have? I grew up in concrete-ville; no garden, only apartment buildings. And I hated it. I remember vividly that as a child I often drooled over gardens. I did that from a very young age and haven’t stopped since.

If eating flowers is not a miracle, what is?

When I was 9 years old my walk to school took me through a more affluent area where the houses had gardens. There was one particular garden that stood out from the rest so I always stopped by to take a good look at it. I had to stand on my tippy toes so I could peek over the hedge and when I had, there it was my beautiful garden!
It had a white house with a straw roof and a lawn sprawling all the way to the waters edge.
If I close my eyes now I can still see it. Surrounding the grass was this band of color, a whole border full of blazing flowers.
In those moments I entered a magical place; I just stood there dreaming until I snapped out of it and then I had to run to catch up with the others.

Babies and the crucial part love plays in learning.

. Fire walking, abseiling, why do we do it? Is daily living not scary enough for us? For me, life mostly scares the living daylights out of me. You should see me when I have to do something that is really out of my comfort zone, such as believing that owning my own business will work out. However I can see how I can be tempted to do  firewalking instead and leave real life be.

Ann-Marie with delightful Molly.

That is why I love children, I simply adore them, because they teach me so much and Molly has shown me the answer to the above question.
I love being with Ann-Marie’s little 18 month old daughter.
She is absolutely delightful.

She looks at me with total abandonment of good manners.
She openly stares and I love it.
I just stare back and I am me.
She just sits there and she is she.

My mind is screwing up my life.

. We all know about protective parents. The ones who walk you to school with a hat on when nobody else is wearing one. The ones who won’t let you go on holidays with your friends; the ones who won’t let you live. They can ruin a lot, those protective parents and it seems they certainly don’t encourage you in anything you love to do.

This protective parent could not stifle this loving heart.

It is all about them; these parents who love to interfere and who therefore make it tough for you to show up and get on with what you would love to do with your life.
Lucky for me my parents were not over protective at all but to my shock horror I have found out that I did have an over protective presence in my life that was as dominating to my Heart as over protective parents are to their children.

And that presence was . . . MY MIND.

Rusty is gone and left a heritage about love.

. Rusty, our cat died this weekend. She was the sweetest yet most verbal cat I’ve ever come across. Because she had so much to say, she played a big role in our life. She was very wise, our little cat. She took life as it presented itself, she showed us how to relax and be peaceful; but above all else she knew a lot about love.

Rusty, a balm for wounded hearts.

That was very clever of her because if you don’t have love, no matter what else there is, it will never be enough.
This makes having a wounded heart a serious matter indeed.
To never feel satisfied, to never feel you have received enough because your wounded heart is not up to dealing with love, is a nasty life sentence in my book.
Isn’t it true that above all else we want love?
Isn’t it love that colors our world, what makes it beautiful, what has us to whistle while we work, what unearths our brilliance, our talents and our beauty?
Isn’t it love that has us live a life WE choose and has us pursue all we possibly can?

How I found my dream, my purpose.

. Follow your heart, create your dreams, go for it, you can do it! Such a great message, such a wonderful promise. These messages should get me excited, shouldn’t they? They should have me racing off into the direction of my dreams, shouldn’t they?

Making a heart on Bethells beach while my heart sings.

Did they and was I on my way?

No, I did NOT race off and no, I was NOT excited! 
Even when I got as far as the start line, I had no idea what direction to race off into.

I hate to admit it, but for most of my life I couldn’t find my dream, my purpose in life and I could NOT race off powerfully mowing down every obstacle on the way.