Do you know the history of Valentine’s Day? On February 14^th, St. Valentine’s Day, there is a history celebrated that goes back to 5^th century Rome commemorating a Bishop named Valentine. While it’s become a religious tradition, it originated in a pagan ritual where young men’s rite of passage was honored by a lottery in which they would draw the names of teenage girls from a box. Far from the Valentine’s Day love we now associate with the holiday.

Through the years, Valentine became the symbol of love, because he secretly married young soldiers against the direct order of the Emperor Claudius who thought that unmarried soldiers performed the best. He was martyred for his disobedience. Today’s celebration shows history repeating itself as young men seek the affection of women by buying flowers, presents and cards as a symbol of their love.

All this is well and good if you have someone in your life who loves you, but there are many who are without this significant, gift-bearing other, for whom Valentine’s Day love presents a painful problem.  It’s for this problem that I offer a loving solution.

Love yourself this Valentine’s Day.

If you like candy, buy yourself a box of your favorites.  If you like flowers, purchase some that are your preference.  And if it’s a gift that you wish you were receiving, get one for yourself.

But that’s only the beginning of your celebration.  This is a perfect opportunity to spend some time figuring our just what is right and good about you.  Try this:

Buy yourself a Self-Love Journal and use it on Valentine’s Day (while you’re munching on candy and smelling the roses) to answer some of these questions about yourself:

1. Do I have a clear idea about reality and am I comfortable about my life?
2. How accepting am I of myself and of others?
3. What is my degree (list a percentage) of being natural and spontaneous?
4. Do I focus on the solution to my problem or only on myself, mainly how I feel?
5. What are my needs for privacy? Do I feel detached or engaged?
6. Am I self-reliant or autonomous? What can I do to unfold more self-sufficiency?
7. What is my level of appreciation for all that is in my life?  Is this my focus or am I focused on what’s problematic?
8. Do I go within myself and have I had transcendent experiences by doing this?
9. Do I identify, have sympathy and am interested in others?
10. Are my relationships with others deep and meaningful?
11. What’s my level of respect for others regardless of race, appearance, income, etc.?
12. Can I discriminate between means and ends? If not, am I willing to find the answer?
13. Is my sense of humor genuine and non-hostile?
14. Am I creative – original and inventive, expressive, perceptive, and spontaneous in everyday life?
15. Am I fully independent of my culture, belonging to it, but not complying with all its demands?

There are many things to love about your Sweet Self, and my strong hope is that you do feel the Valentine’s Day love that you deserve..

Do you know what the core skills are for successful goal creation?  Here are some clues:

• Identifying what you want
• Create action steps for creating it
• Analyze the results you get
• Make a renewed plan based on your results

So if you were doing all that, why might you still not reaching goals on schedule? One of the main reasons folks are not reaching goals is very simple:

They don’t realize how long it takes!

Persistence (or perseverance) is one of the key elements in goal achievement.  And, luckily for us, we were born with the capability to persevere (or persist,) so I’m hoping that since you now know this, you will strongly consider how long it might take for you to achieve your goals this year.

Will you have to change strategies, adjust time frames, turn in a different direction, or even change jobs to achieve your goals?  Yes, of course!  All of those are possibilities, but because you are one heck of a persistent person, you take all those in stride.

Here are some ways to help you to persevere for all the time it may take you to achieve your goals:

1. Ease up on yourself!

Now that you know it’s going to more than likely take more time than you thought, why not give yourself so much time that you’ll surprise yourself and get it finished ahead of time?

Your goals aren’t the be-all, end-all, do-all.  They’re just a target to keep you on the path; to keep you focused on achieving; to be sure you are using all that you are capable of using. Being the fullness of what you presently understand your current self and its level of unfoldment to be is so much easier than slaving away for some arbitrary time line, don’t you think?

2. Double your time frame

We’ve led up to this one:  you aren’t giving yourself enough time which creates stress and a sense of failure.  So give yourself double the time you think, or heck, triple the time! With a sense of ease, who knows what kind of strategies might come up in your imagination?

3. Focus on Enjoyment

I believe that the quickest way to earn future rewards is to be sure you are enjoying each one of your right-now moments. And if your mind just said “nah nah,” I challenge you to spend one week focused on enjoyment. You might be pleasantly surprised to discover goal achievement while you’re having fun! Instead of focusing on not reaching goals, you’ll be enjoying goal success.

“To make an end is to make a beginning.” ~ T. S. Elliott

When you understand that life is one of the most luscious learning experiences, that all you experience comes from how you think, that you can improve the level of what you think about and improve this experience, at this point you become relaxed, in a harmonious state, peaceful about your life and happy with everything because of your conscious recognition about what is really happening. This is something controlling personalities need to learn.

Without this understanding, you live a life with much fear, hard work, and the struggle to gain security, harmony, and well-being through living in the box of control.  You will work hard to maintain this control.  You will exercise this control over the money you earn, the relationships in your life, the status you find acceptable, or, you may find this understanding through your inner world using mental practice and discipline.

Some people are control freaks, and rigidly control “things external” to themselves because they don’t understand their thought governs all they experience. Control freaks might appear wealthy and healthy and happy, but I know they live in constant fear of losing control.

Real understanders (described in the first paragraph) isn’t obsessed with control because they know that through persistence, they’ll get whatever they think about to the point of the absolute conviction they already have it.  They exercise “control” over themselves and they have no fear of losing control.

Controlling personalities expend tremendous time, energy and peace of mind striving hard to stay invested in keeping control over all their stuff – to keep all those plates spinning and not crashing to the ground because they think their peace, freedom and success stem from these controllable things.

There is a new world of possibility outside this box of control, if we could train ourselves to see it. Krishnamurti wrote about the box of control:

Let us for a moment, imaginatively at least, look over the world from a point of view which will reveal the inner workings and the outer workings of man, his creations and his battles; and if you can do that imaginatively for a moment, what do you see spread before you?

You see man imprisoned by innumerable walls, walls of religion, of social, political and national limitations, walls created by his own ambitions, aspirations, fears, hopes, security, prejudices, hate and love. Within these barriers and prisons he is held, limited by the coloured maps of national boundaries, racial antagonisms, class struggles and cultural group distinctions. You see man throughout the world imprisoned, enclosed by the limitations, the walls of his own creation. Through these walls and through these enclosures he is trying to express what he feels and what he thinks, and within these he functions with joy and with sorrow.

So you see man throughout the world as a prisoner, imprisoned within the walls of his own creation, within the walls of his own making; and through these enclosures, through these walls of environment, through the limitation of his ideas, ambitions and aspirations – through these he is trying to function, sometimes successfully, and sometimes with hideous struggle.

And the man who succeeds in making himself comfortable in the prison we call successful, whereas the man who succumbs in the prison we call a failure. But both success and failure are within the walls of the prison.
To someone thinking inside of the control box, actual freedom looks a lot like being out of control and it scares them. When you begin to explore the freedom of the understander instead of this being-in-control stance, you learn to adhere to life’s rules and the fear dissolves.

Letting go of our old way is frightening.  Richard Bach wrote about letting go in his wonderful book “Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah.” Just read Chapter One here, and you’ll see what I mean.

My wish for you is that you become an understander; that you discover life’s laws so that you can escape what other controlling personalities cannot, and enter into greater health, wealth,  success and harmony. Christmas is a time that exemplifies this bettered condition, and one of the Great Teachers around whom Christmas is celebrated has left us plenty of proverbs, parables and examples of how to enjoy life as it was intended.

‘I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.’ ~ Terry Pratchett

In Hawaii, he found himself the only driver among his friends with a valid driver’s license. They all planned to watch the sunrise in a spot where the lava from the local volcano poured into the ocean spewing up huge pillars of steam.

They had to leave at 3 am to get there, but his exhaustion from traveling made him begin to fall asleep behind the wheel of the car. Suddenly, the car shuddered and he and his passengers were jolted to their  senses as he quickly pulled off to the side of the road.

“What the heck was that?” he asked.

“Don’t worry, mate,” said one of the back seaters.  ”It was just a turtle.”

“I ran over a turtle?” he exclaimed.

“Not a turtle turtle, you dope – a road turtle!”

They got back on the road wide-awake now with a car accident having been prevented by a Road Turtle. These devices are raised pavement markers and go by lots of other names: Botts Dots, Road Studs, Cat’s Eyes and another wake-up device serving the same wake up service are rumble strips or sleeper lines.

We all have negative, insecure and uncomfortable feelings that we entertain in our minds that serve the same purpose there that Road Turtles serve on the highway: our negative feelings make us feel uncomfortable. These negative feelings are a waving red flag to us that our thinking has slipped of the path of what is right and good, and that we are about to create something we do not want if we keep it up.

Mind Turtle = Uncomfortable Feelings

Our minds unerringly send out the perfect signal for what we need in any situation, and these mind turtle / uncomfortable feelings are a key signal.  You can train yourself to look for them. Here is a list of ways that they might appear:

• Shame
• Embarrassment
• Criticism
• Indignation
• Resentment
• Nervousness
• Self-pity
• Panic
• Full blown fear
• Doubt

A Mind Turtle in the road is a clue to immediately self-correct. So are those uncomfortable feelings. They just mean “Find yourself something better to replace this discomfort” and once you do, your world brightens immediately.

I feel uncomfortable because I’m insecure about who I am. ~ Trent Reznor

Ami Chen Mills-Naim teaches about thought and about human consciousness. She explains that your thinking is like a cup of hot water.  Whatever kind of teabag you put into that water, the water becomes like the tea bag. So like our own minds:  if you are entertaining thoughts of worry, frustration, rage, animosity and jealousy, that is what “tea” you are brewing, and that “tea” will bubble out into your life as precisely what you’re entertaining. Now if, on the other hand, your teabag contains love, generosity, kindness, then that’s the kind of “tea” you’re brewing and that’s what your life experiences will be.

Notice that your consciousness doesn’t have a maitre d’ at the door, only admitting those ideas previously approved of.  No, if you don’t use any form of discrimination, any old tea bag can get in, and then the cycle of thinking cranks out the results automatically. Your consciousness does not judge: it acts.

And human consciousness is universal:  if you run something through it, it jumps into action. There isn’t much time to say “No, not that! I want a do-over.” Your consciousness is a very powerful Creator, and whatever any one of you puts in there, you get those life experiences.

Now by noticing those two qualities of consciousness, you can easily tell what kind of “tea” you are running through your consciousness by looking at what’s going on in your life, since your life experiences are the result of what you’ve been thinking!  If you have health, wealth, success and harmony to a greater degree than not, those are the kinds of thoughts you’ve been thinking.

But if you have worry, misery, pain, poverty, anger, frustration, and lack of hope, then those are the kinds of thoughts you’ve been thinking.

You might think at this point “Oh no, I don’t want to know this!” But trust me, it’s so much better to assume full ownership of your life than not to. It’s just no fun being lead by the nose because you aren’t aware your thoughts are creating your life, than to create the life you want.

What Kind of Tea Do You Prefer?

You can easily go into your kitchen and choose a teabag from among the selection you’ve  purchased.  It’s just this easy to choose the kind of thought you want to think.  You look forward to enjoying the tea you’ve chosen, and you can just as easily anticipate the enjoyment from thinking the kind of thoughts you’d prefer as well.

No one becomes an expert without practice, so once you decide to become more mindful about the thoughts you’re running through your mind, it takes practice to stay on track. Make a list of general categories of thoughts, like this: loving, kind, inspiring, strong, forward moving. You make your own list and keep in mind that “what you’re going to think is what you’re going to get.”

Fresh Tea Often

Just as you wouldn’t drink an old, cold cup of tea, refreshen your mind frequently by doing an assessment of what you’ve been thinking; throw out the “old tea” and pour yourself a fresh cup – begin again to renew your intention to think those thoughts that will get you precisely what you want in your life. Self-help techniques help you to expand your human consciousness and shine a light on the magnificence within. Shine on!

“Whenever our life is stirred by truth, it expresses energy and comes to be filled, as it were, with a creative ardor. This consciousness of the creative urge is evidence of the force of truth on our mind.” ~ R. Tagore

We have all asked those critically important questions about why we are here and what we need to accomplish.  But in looking back, perhaps you might consider the following:

Be healthily self-centered – centered on your one and only Self, thinking about yourself – and love that Self for all it’s worth because you know that is the only Self you’ve got and it’s one unique Self in all of the universe.  Absorb as many of the qualities of that Self as you can and cherish them, while you foster new growth and unfoldment of many more virtues and abilities from within that one and only, unique Self.

If you are thinking about yourself as the pivot point around which all of your life revolved, you’d recognize how great you were, how interesting, how unforgettable.  You’d see your own brilliance with great gratitude.  You’d know yourself better than anyone else ever could.  You’d see every day as a chance to become better at everything than you were in the past.  You’d know that humility is truth and you’d be confident enough in your own abilities to be humble about them.  People would say about you “Well, there’s only one Maria (you can put your name here, too.)

You wouldn’t complain about things being hard; you’d work to become better so that the hard spots would become so tiny they’d fade away into nothingness.  You wouldn’t let anyone unseat you from your position because you’d be so confident in your Being, that you’d be unbeatable.  You’d never stop doing good and being generous, because you know this kind of activity generates more good for you and for all others.  You don’t need anyone else to tell you that you’re good or wonderful; you know it in the depth of your own heart feelings.  You’d share what you understand with those who could benefit from the information and you’d share it in such a manner that they’d never know you knew more than they do. You’d earn the right to do – to be – all that you want to do and be.

You are the sum total of all of your experiences; all the people you’d met, spoken with, and listened to; all of the hundreds of books you’ve read and TV shows and movies you’ve watched.  You stand in the fullness of your being – creating yourself – in front of all others to listen and to learn from them and to share what you understand with them.

People love busy doers.  We cheer on the football players who are running and charging.  We adulate the teachers who are busy teaching and sharing.  We admire the mothers when they are hugging their babies.  Be a busy doer, and be the best at your task as you can be.

People will always take pot shots at you.  I think one of the reasons we put people on a pedestal is to get a better aim when taking pot shots.  Learn to duck and shrug.  If you are out there being and doing, and know that if someone is throwing rocks, you’re probably doing it right.

Be courageous enough to be honest.  Admit when you’ve made a mistake and apologize.  Give as much value as you can in the work you do. Share your understanding and make a difference. Act now as though you were the ultimate person you hope to become.  You are One Unique One and you never need to apologize for that. Do something that stimulates you each day and work towards creating yourself as YOU want to be.

“What if you went to the nth degree to prove to yourself that you’re the person you want to be? But you found that it’s completely different from the person that you are, and you found yourself in a place that consistently refuted the facts as you sensed them?” ~ William Hurt

• Disappointments

• Expectations

• Plans

• Wishes

• Blockages

• Satisfactions

This list doesn’t begin to cover everything, but it does serve as an example.

Out of all of the events of our lives and out of all the organizing and classifying we do mentally with these events in order to process and retrieve information, surely it’s apparent that some of this vast abundance has to be let go in the process of setting priorities.

Some folks call this “Let go of the small stuff!” Or some call it “Drop off what’s unimportant!”

If you had to keep track of absolutely everything, you’d suffer from serious overload. The way it looks to me is that you could consciously choose to set aside the things that don’t serve you well, and only retain those that do serve you well.

Let’s take disappointments in life, for example. If you kept track of all that went wrong, all of the expectations that did not happen, all the plans that circumstances prevented, all your wishes and dreams that just didn’t get fulfilled, you’d soon be in a deep dark place filled with despair! Why? Because your thinking causes the next round of experiences! If you are thinking about disappointments, you’ll create more disappointment. It’s that simple, but it sometimes goes unobserved until it is pointed out.

We would create all manner of moods and attitudes around those disappointments in life, like a sense of hardship; like adrenalin rushes; like anger at being interrupted. These moods and attitudes plus the disappointments themselves won’t serve us well at all.

I am recommending that you make a firm decision to let the small stuff in your life go. It’s just not important enough to warrant your attention! Once you drop them off, you can return to a stronger sense of peace and be able to focus your energy and your efforts on the things that are truly important – those things you have in the Big Bucket called My Big Dreams.

Those small things are like mosquitoes pecking away at your ankles. They are irritating and they appear to take away our control, but they are there for a good reason: so that you can say “No, not this!” and truly exercise the control that you were given at birth.

You are a conscious, mental being, and your mind controls your destiny. You can spend your life fussing over the small stuff, or you can cast it aside and address those more complex challenges that, if you handled them, would really make you feel powerful!

And just like facing down fears, you will discover that those things that seemed most fearful or most monumental aren’t so fearful or difficult at all! And you will truly love the peace of mind you’ll get when you begin setting priorities in life.

If you keep your promise, you will be seen as one who has integrity. And if you don’t keep your commitments (many parents disappoint their children like this) you will develop the aura of one who can’t be trusted.  It takes a full awareness each time you say “I will….(fill in the blanks.)”  I think it’s not wise to simply say something without intentionally meaning to actually follow through and do what you said you would do.

It is even more insidious if we have sublimated decisions that we have made – that we have allowed to become buried inside our minds.  For example, if your parent disappointed you, you may have decided to never be trusting with those who say they love you.  You may have long forgotten the incident itself, but you might be unconsciously living out your earlier decision and ruining your current relationships!

It’s difficult to consciously, visually see what decisions we may have made at a younger age that are having a negative effect now.  One of the ways I get by this kind of thing is to ask myself frequently ”How old was I when I made that decision?”  I’m often surprised at the young age that comes up as an answer to that question!  So I then ask myself “Do you think you might come to a different decision now that you have more information? What might that new decision be?”  This is an effective way to clear up old decisions that no longer serve you well.

Consider this when you next say “I will…..”   Do you mean it, or are you just sloughing someone off? Would you like to be seen as one whose word is his bond, one who will honor a commitment? Or do you not care that when you don’t keep them, you will be viewed as someone whose word cannot be trusted?

Integrity and commitment go hand in hand.  If you have an old habit of not keeping your commitments, would you like to ask yourself what specific fears or doubts have kept that habit in place?  Would you like to see if you can step out of that old rut into a fresh, new path and actually Be the Change?

Gently ask yourself for permission to change, because unless you do, you are holding yourself back from experiencing the greatness of what is good in this life. You can go to those with whom you did not keep your promise and ask for their forgiveness. You can even ask for their help to remind you about the new habit you are trying to form.

You are as good as your word.  Make a commitment to let that be your motivation going forward.  I wish you great success.
“Don’t make excuses – make good.”  ~ Elbert Hubbard

You will always know when you are off the path. Because “good” is your norm, if you choose something that leads you in a direction that is different than what is good, you have an internal monitor – kind of like a GPS device – that tells you that you are off the track. That device inside you is called your conscience and the message your conscience sends when you are off the track is a feeling of discomfort.

We’ve all made mistakes and bad choices. It’s a natural part of our learning process. Our less-than-good feelings (that uncomfortableness I mentioned above) like uneasiness, unhappiness, unsureness – are all red flags that try to get our attention and beg us to be making better choices so we can feel comfortable again. It’s nice that each of us has an internal monitor so we don’t have to depend on our parents, older adults, our teachers or the police or military to monitor us. We can do it ourselves.

It’s not necessary to feel guilty, to punish ourselves, to think we are stupid or foolish. No, all we have to do is see that we are uncomfortable, and resolve to ‘right it’ as soon as we humanly can in order to forgive ourselves our mistake and get back to comfort quickly. Just because we might have heard “you’re bad” when we were children; just because those words created tapes that play repeatedly in our heads, we can put a stop to it by simply saying to ourselves: “Stop. That’s not true. I’m good.”

The labels “good” and “bad” were thrown at us during our childhood as a form of control. If you were “good,” you received parental approval. It was withheld if you behaved “badly.” I’d like to think that many of our parents did not know (because their parents did not know) that the world is predominantly good; that each of the individuals in the world were predominantly good; that if “good” was fostered and praised, we would naturally unfold more good choices. Fewer bad choices might have been made if our parents had that perspective.

We have it now. If you can approach your own life and the lives of your children from an “it’s all good” perspective, you will grow more love, more peace, more universal good and you will become part of that kernel of individuals who, by their very thoughts, are bringing peace to the middle east. A big part of being an adult lies in correcting the mistakes of our childhood. We learn what wasn’t accurate and we put something accurate in its place. This allows us to be individually responsible for our own lives and our own, individual freedom.

You are a magnificent human being. You are here because you have a right to be here, to be alive, to be free, to learn from your mistakes, and to explore new ways of making decisions. If you have a habit in place of categorizing yourself good or bad, that’s too small a way to think going forward. Instead, KNOW that you are good, that you are goodness itself intrinsically; know that it is your own goodness that wants to unfold your dreams, to pat you on the back for your accomplishments and your successes. Know that you are entirely capable of making better choices that will unfold more good for you, that will keep you fresh, interested and involved. Your higher self craves this unfoldment for more good and it’s already inside you, waiting for you to say “Yes” to it, so get out of your own way and say “Yes!”

“When it snows, you have two choices: shovel or make snow angels” ~ Anonymous

“There are always two choices. Two paths to take. One is easy. And its only reward is that it’s easy.” ~ Some Say Anonymous; Some Say Harry S. Truman

What would happen, though, if you had been taught from your earliest days to only compete with yourself – your own last victory?  Every single one of us wants to know inside that we are capable of achieving our next victory, that we can accomplish one more good thing if we stretch ourselves a bit.  This is how we grew from our infant stage to the adult stage.

Our earlier accomplishments became the foundation upon which we grew.  And interestingly enough, it’s our own sense of achievement that holds the carrot that makes us run in front of our own face. We really don’t look for others to award and applaud us.  We look inward to our own dear Self to award and applaud us.  We are the one who knows just how far we stretched ourselves the last time, and we are the one who knows best just what it took to stretch some more, so who best to reward us?

Many in the world would label this kind of competition “improvement.”  I would call it “unfoldment.” I believe each of us was born with all that we would become intrinsically wrapped up inside of us just waiting to be unfolded.  It is this infinity of possibilities that knocks on the door of our hearts and souls and says “Let’s try this!” and we are off and running.  Our motivations, our stretching, are internal and individual. Your sense of what may look to others like competitiveness is simply your desire to unfold more of yourself – you only compete with yourself.

Your inner score keeper knows when and if you are capable of more, and he/she may be a very demanding voice.  You alone know when it’s time to do more, to stretch more, to achieve more.  You alone know what our inner vision of success is.  You alone know when to exercise patience and when to strive forward again.  You know when the energy level is perfect. You know that we are not here to serve the desires of anyone but ourselves, so you only compete with yourself if you want to remain balanced, satisfied and at peace.

“A man’s reach must exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?” ~ Robert Browning