!!! The Launch of Think or Sink was highly successful. Thanks to all who participated!
Imagine if greatness was trying to emerge...
Imagine
if the answer was right in front of you...
Imagine
if you already had everything you need...
...What
would be possible?
Gina Mollicone Long | The Blog
10 November 2009
42 THINGS - from my new book - THINK OR SINK
A quick list of 42 things that will make a difference in your quality of life. Taken from my book, Think or Sink which launches in January 2010. Visit www.GinaML.com/think for more details and to get an amazing offer if you pre-order the book. Tell your friends!
FALLING DOWN - AN OPPORTUNITY TO GET BACK UP Last night, my daughter had her first hockey practice ever. She have never ever played hockey and she is 8. The only league that we can play in is a mixed league with boys because we ski on the weekends in the winter so she has to play in league that plays weeknights. When she got on the ice she faltered, looked and me and said "I think I should have practiced before coming here". To make matters worse, some of these boys had clearly been playing hockey for years as they skated circles around her. I swear to you that she fell down with that stick in her hand 1000 times and got back up 1001 times. She never faltered in getting back up. Some of the parents were making comments about how bad they felt for her. I sat there in awe of her. At the end of it she told me that she "loved hockey". Then, one of the coaches found us in the parking lot and gave her the game puck because he said that he has never seen such determination in his hockey life. I was breathless and honoured to know her. Enjoy this video with a similar message.
STOP APOLOGIZING I have recently taken note of how many times in my life, I apologize for who I am or what I want. I find myself changing who I am so that others can feel more comfortable around me. Or, more importantly, less UNcomfortable. I mute certain aspects of myself so that it won't be too much for the people around me, so that they can better manage having me in their life. I distill my deepest desires because their attainment might mean hurting someoneelse's feelings. Instead, I sacrifice myself. I change, I morph so as to keep their love, to meet their conditions.
The cost is high. The cost is me.
I repeatedly send my true self back to the deepest darkest depths of who I am, banished because the world can't handle her. Or so I think. Maybe I can't handle her. Maybe her power scares me too much. Maybe I'm the one who can't stand in her light. Perhaps the paradox is that fully embracing who I really am is what scares me more than anything.
This dynamic is alive and well in most men and women today. For women, we are afraid of our power so we give it up willingly and then blame them for taking it away. We complain that they are holding us back when the reality is that they cannot take our real power, they cannot take our real spirit unless we let them. And we have. We have given it up because it's easier to blame them then to take responsibility for not living up to our truest highest potential. The true power of feminity is transformation. It is alchemy. We are the metaphorical chalices whereby all of the energy of the world can be transformed into love. We are literally built to receive and to create in our very own bodies. you don't need to look far to see this truth. But doing this work means being true to who we really are which is far more powerful then we give ourselves credit for.
For men, they are afraid of their true selves; their true masculinity because it has been so vilified in our society that they are literally afraid of themselves. They believe that masculinity is equivalent to violence. This couldn't be farther from the truth. True masculinity is about presence, not violence. It is about strength and focus.
When the true masculine powers of strength and focus support the true feminine powers of transformation and love then we will finally have the tools we need to heal the planet; to heal ourselves. We need each one of us to remember who we really are. We need to stop apologizing for this truth. We need to take a stand for our brilliance. Each one of us. One at a time.
"i beg you... to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. and the point is, to live everything. live the questions now. perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer..."
You already have all the resources you need. How many times have you heard that comment? This is not a new idea nor it is a simple one to grasp but it is true. And, if you make it a principle by which you live then you will unlock more power and happiness than you can even imagine. In my books, I write about a concept called Be-Do-Have. This is also not a new concept nor is it something that I made up. However, it is the profound distinction that means the difference between having power in your life versus being at the mercy of your circumstances. Let’s do a quick review.
Our modern culture actually has the paradigm backwards as Have-Do-Be. For example, many people believe that they have to HAVE money so they can DO what they want in order to finally BE happy. But, that flow is impossible and here’s why. According to Einstein, the entire universe is energy and what we consider to be “matter” or solid is simply energy whose vibration has been so lowered to be perceptible by our five senses. In that respect, what you consider to be real and solid is merely energy is a solid form. At the end of the day, it’s just energy. It’s all energy.
Taking that assumption then, let’s talk about the flow of energy. Energy flows thoughtsàfeelingsàactionsàresults. Everything that has even been made, invented, discovered or created in our world had its genesis as a thought. Everything we consider to be real had its origins in our minds first as an idea. Then, this idea was made more powerful with the addition of our feelings. This combination of thoughts and feelings prompted us to take action or behave in a certain way and these behaviours are what finally led to the result. If you look carefully at this flow you will notice one important distinction: it flows Be (thoughts/feelings) à Do (actions/behaviours) à Have (results). It actually flows Be-Do-Have which means that if you are looking for something in the physical world to make you feel a certain way then that is as crazy as expecting water to flow uphill all by itself.
When I was a child, my parents went through a divorce. Up until the time that I became aware of their problems I didn’t have a care in the world. Then, one day, the rug literally got pulled out from underneath me. As in any divorce, at some point, one of the people has to actually leave the house and the family has to split. In my case, it was my Dad. I can still remember that day like it was yesterday. I didn’t realize how pivotal that day was until today. What I realized was that I had actually anchored my feelings of peace and safety and security to my father such that the day he walked out the door so did my feelings. Since that time, I have not really been able to feel safe because at some unconscious level, I believed that he caused me to feel safe when the reality is simply that I had not cultivated the resources necessary to cause it for myself. In fact, his leaving was the only event impactful enough to motivate me to spend over 20 years learning that lesson. His leaving is the only thing powerful enough to force me to find those resources within myself. In that respect, his leaving was one of the greatest gifts he could have given me as a father, the ability to discover who I really am.
As long as you remain unconscious to the fact that you’ve anchored the feeling to the person, place, thing or event then you will always be dependent on getting it through the anchor. In reality, your experience of peace, love or joy came from within you and then got anchored to something in your experience. It never has and never will come from the outside. You already have everything you need inside yourself but you have to stop looking to the outside to find something on the inside. A good friend once told me a parable that illustrates this point.
The Gods were noticing that mankind was quite a powerful and resourceful creature and they were observing that it was only matter of time before mankind knew all the secrets of the Gods. A meeting was held to discuss where they would hide their most treasured wisdom such that mankind would not discover it. A suggestion was made to hide it on the top of the tallest mountain but they decided that eventually someone would be strong enough and smart enough to find it there. Then, they thought they could hide in the depths of the deepest ocean. But again, they realized that mankind would eventually be smart enough and creative enough to discover it there as well. A long silence ensued. Then, the Gods had an idea, a brilliantly simply idea. They would hide their deepest wisdom in the one place they were sure that mankind would never look. They would hide it inside each individual themselves.
It’s a big paradigm shift to take responsibility for giving yourself what you need. Believe me when I tell you that I have learned this lesson the hard way many times over. However, I can tell you this. When I live inside the paradigm that "I already have everything that I need" even if it doesn’t look like it on the outside then the resources always surface. Always, without exception. They may not surface gracefully or eloquently but they always surface and I always grow. The experiences that really test my faith in that paradigm always turn out to be the ones that uncover the most beautiful aspects of me. In that respect, the toughest circumstances, the biggest challenges, the most painful memories are the very events that contain the greatest gifts. But you have to be willing to look inside for what you need. The answer is right in front of you. In fact, the answer is you.
THE GREAT DYNAMIC In order to be who we really are, we must be congruent with who we really are. I know that statement sounds redundant but it illustrates the point that the answers that we seek are often right in front of us. My recent experiences in life have lead to a place of contemplation of the balance of masculine and feminine energy. Clearly, I am a woman and that inherently means that the core of who I am is feminine. However, I realized that who I was Being and projecting into the world was definitely masculine. This incongruency between who I was Being on the outside and who I am on the inside has been the very thing holding me back from my best self. When I discovered this, everything shifted. I have come to realize that the presence of the feminine calls forth the most powerful masculine. Without the presence of the feminine then the masculine is left without a balancing point. This leads to burnout both on the physical plane as well as the metaphysical plane. Instead of being suppressed by someone or something on the outside, I have actually done the suppression myself from the inside. Ironically, in denying my feminine energy because I believed it to be less powerful and less useful than my masculine energy I have actually been the source of my own suppression. This insight has flipped everything on its head. Consider in your own life where you are incongruent between who you are on the outside versus who you really are on the inside. The answer might be where you least expect it - on the inside.
