What's Your Super Power?

I'm getting packed and ready to go to India, which means I've been writing a lot and making videos in advance for my book club, to make sure they're uploaded before I leave. I hope I will be able to continue to make videos and upload pictures to this blog once I get there but I honestly don't know what the internet will be like so I've been busy preparing.

Creating the videos for the Napoleon Hill's A Year of Growing Rich has been very rewarding. It has forced me to step out of my comfort zone, yet again, and teach what I most desire to learn. 

Each chapter has within it hidden gems of information that I'm surprised to find as I dig and read and dig some more. It's one thing to read a book, it's another to read it with the intention of sharing it with others. 

It took me a week to finally make the video for the chapter "Hopefulness". I understood it intellectually but I've never put it into practice in my life with fervor and zeal. After I began reading and studying these two simple pages Mr. Hill wrote on "Hopefulness" all of the difficult situations and people from my past started showing up in my life and my emotions, needless to say, were a mess. 

Then, teachers began to appear in the form of books, audio CDs, email newsletters and youtube videos. I dove head first into Abraham Hick's teachings on the Law of Attraction, Eckhart Tolle's book The Power of Now and Dr. Bruce Lipton's recordings that came to my email inbox every day. They were all saying the same thing but with different words, essentially, YOU (and only you) are in control of your emotions- no matter what the outer circumstances are. They even went one step further to say, YOU are attracting life's events to you through the law of attraction whether you are aware of it or not. Dr. Bruce Lipton really helped me to finally understand the power of the mind and the part it plays in creating the life I'm living. He gave the example of harmonic resonance, our emotions are like the frequency that we are emitting and the energetic universe then delivers to us, people, places, situations and things that are in energetic resonance with us. This explains why and how we are creating this life we are experiencing. Napoleon Hill nailed it when he titled his best selling book, "THINK and Grow Rich".

Mr. Hill says that "Hope is the raw material with which you build success." First we must dream of a better tomorrow, then we must live it. By living with hope we are moving our attention from what is to what could be and then we can begin to attract what we desire into our lives. 

However, as I've recently learned and understood very clearly, we can't allow people, situations or events to dictate our inner emotional state. Since reading Napoleon Hill's A Year Of Growing Rich, I've become aware that I've lived too much of my life dependent on outer circumstances to make me feel a certain way. Someone says or does something nice, I feel good. Someone insults or betrays me, I feel bad. This is no way to live life- especially if you're interested in creating a life of peace, love and success. No one has the power to affect the way you feel unless you give them permission to do so.

Osho says it this way, "You feel good, you feel bad, and these feeling are bubbling from your own unconsciousness, from your own pas. Nobody is responsible except you. Nobody can make you angry, and no body can make you happy."

Practice feeling good no matter the outer circumstance and you will begin to create the life of your dreams-  THIS is your superpower. YOU have the power to give your imagination free rein to create HOPE and live the life you desire.

Dear God, how should I live my life?

www.teacherjenniferan.com

"Dear God, how should I live my life?" This was the question I woke up with from a dream I had two nights ago. I wrote down my dream, as I do every morning and, like always, it revealed itself on paper in reverse. I remember the last thing that happened before I woke up, then as I begin to write I remember the previous thing that happened and the thing before that and so on. 

I don't completely understand dreams, why we have them, why we dream about one thing or another but I do have a tattoo on my left arm that is a quote from A Course in Miracles that reads, "The dreamer of the dream is not awake, but does not know she sleeps" which is the only thing about dreams that I know for sure. 

Dreams fascinate me because they speak in symbols and the world of a dream is all coming from within my own mind but still there are things within the dream I recognize as "myself" and things that are "outside of me". When I wake up and record the dream I am able to see how I reacted to a specific situation and question what I really would have done if I had been "awake" or at least "lucid" or "aware" within the dream that I AM the Dreamer and creating it all within my own mind.

In this dream I was tired, I couldn't tell if I was on drugs or just really tired, but I was backing up and saw a truck behind me; I couldn't get my foot to the break fast enough to stop it before hitting the truck. I wasn't going very fast but it still got him pretty good. I chose to drive away without getting out to talk to the man in the truck. Later on I met up with some people for pizza and I picked up the napkin on the table and there were centipedes crawling all over the table. The other people I was with didn't seem bothered by them at all, in fact, they picked one up and started taking pictures with it. 

To dream of a centipede represents beliefs or situations that you feel are unpleasant that you'll do anything to avoid them. It may also reflect feelings about enemies that annoy you or putting up with people you really don't like. Feeling bothered by someone or something that is imposing itself on  you. 

Negatively, it may also reflect a fear or annoyance of never getting to discuss something you like ever again. Fearing conditions that are completely out of touch with your wishes. Fearing permanent choices that are out of your control.

Since this dream I've made it priority to ask, "Dear God, how should I live my life?" 

There are things I've done in the past I wish I hadn't, but the present moment is all I have, now. And I have the choice, now, to ask for guidance. A Course in Miracles shares a prayer that asks, "What would you have me do? Where would you have me go? What would you have me say? And to whom?" 

Breathing helps to wake up to this present moment, to think clearly and to ask, "Dear God, how should I live my life?" Once you've asked, listen for the answer and live your truth, so years down the road you won't have to wish you had. The point I want to make is this; You can loose yourself in the dream of life and react to the physical world as if you are not actually the dreamer, the One creating it all, or you can return to this moment, through the breath and the body, to remember you are more than what you see with your physical eyes. 

You have the choice, now, to choose a new vibrational frequency through your thoughts and the emotions you are feeling- regardless of the physical situation you find yourself in; you are the creator of the life you are living. 

If this one simple idea is digested, understood and applied in the present moment, we truly can be conscious creators instead of victims in our lives. 

...just five more minutes

Death has been on my mind a lot lately. I woke up the morning of my first laughter yoga class in Michigan this summer thinking about dying. My alarm clock went off at 5:00am and I just wanted "five more minutes" but I got up anyway. I thought, "What if this is what happens when you're on your death bed- you want more time- just five more minutes- but don't have it?"  What will I do with the five minutes I've been given today while I'm still alive? Will I sleep through them or will I be grateful for these five minutes and live in them fully? Can I fully I appreciate their value now before they're gone?

That evening at Laughter Yoga class we were doing a "value" laughter exercise to practice laughing together in difficult times of life. The first man said, "driving" and the next woman said, "when people die"... I wasn't expecting her response and this wasn't a "stressful situation" we had practiced responding to in class during the teacher certification course I took; so I want to take a moment now to share an interesting experience and talk about how laughter yoga can go hand in hand with the topic of death.

There are some things in life that "just aren't funny" but they are a part of life anyway. We will all experience difficult times in life and we will all experience loss, the question isn't if but when. How can we learn to deal with these situations in a positive way? Can we turn these stumbling blocks into stepping stones in our lives?  

I had so much respect for this lady, she came to a Laughter Yoga class in the middle of her hurt and sadness, she was willing to laugh during a time of great pain in her life. This takes courage, it is not easy. 

When you are going through a hard time, like a death or a loss, you can still use laughter medicine. For example, you can send loving laughter up to the energy of the person, they're still with us but in a different form; Einstein said, "Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only change form". We can send them joy on their journey with our laughter, remembering the joy they've given and the joy we will bring with us because they were here. 

We can come together to celebrate life and hold each other in the energy of love and understanding during laughter yoga sessions. We're going through this human experience together, we're not alone. 
You're not alone.

Find a Laughter Yoga session near you at: http://www.laughteryoga.org/english/club/find_club 

Live Now

Ever wake up in the morning with the alarm and wish for "just a little more time"? Don't let this be how you feel at the end of your life; live in the moment you've been given Now.

Take a deep breath in and feel in this moment. 

How to connect to health and happiness

Your emotions affect the chemicals released in your body and so do your thoughts. The body is a visual representation of the internal state of your mind. Pain can be your messenger, if you allow it to be, pain forces you into the present moment and asks you to wake up and take responsibility for your mind.

"The Creator gave us the complete, unchallengeable right of prerogative over one thing, and only one thing- our own mind." Napoleon Hill (Week 2) A Year of Growing Rich

If we (humanity) can begin to see physical illness as a message to be heeded rather than a battle to be won, we can once again become friends with the body and learn to listen to the language it speaks. In this way we live in harmony with Mother Earth and with ourselves. 

I have had the desire to begin a book club for years but I travel so much my lifestyle doesn't allow me the luxury of creating this practice in a physical location. Recently, I came up with the idea to create a learning platform virtually and a book club online. I've had this idea for a week now and have been moving in the direction of it's creation but since I first decided a rash showed up on my throat. I had no 'real' explanation for why it was there but it was red and irritated. The throat is home of the fifth chakra, this energy center governs communication and personal expression. As long as I can remember, seers and teachers have told me to open my fifth chakra because it's closed. I should wear blue, eat blue (the color of the chakra) express myself, sing, speak- I do try, but all of those things are especially difficult for me. 

Yesterday I uploaded my first video and the moment it had been shared online the rash on my neck was gone. The body doesn't speak in words but in symbols. When you learn to listen and understand, you can heal your mind, open your heart to life, and health in the physical body will soon follow.

Anita Moorjani explains it best in her book 'Dying To Be Me' - it's a great book and an easy read! Dr. Wayne Dyer highly recommends it too. 

This Moment Awareness...

Everything can change in a moment, it will, it must, there is only this moment. One of these moments...

Someone will walk into your life and when they leave they will have changed you for the better. These coincidences and chance encounters, the ones that have no rhythm or rhyme, come as they will, even if you don't understand them, give thanks; in case there is someone listening to your prayers. Just in case.

That moment will come when you know and feel deep inside that  you're not alone. You do exist. It's all going to be okay.

As unsure of yourself as you are, there's someone out there that's worth it. It'll be better than you could have imagined before. You're going to make it. It's going to be ok.

"Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable." -Mary Oliver