Love For The Holidays

Gathering around the table with family and friends is a wonderful tradition we share each year. I love it because it gives us pause, and allows us to focus our attention on all we have to be grateful for. For most of us, we are very blessed and have abundance of celebration and people to share it with at this time of year. But this is not the case for everyone. Recently my friend Robin Rice found within her momma’s heart a calling to share her abundance of love with a particular community. The LGBTQ community has many members who have a difficult time at the holiday season. They are often separated from family, some are homeless, many feel misunderstood and often they look to the holidays with heavy hearts. This year Robin created a spectacular opportunity to offer hearts of love to this particular community through a unique approach with a website, Your Holiday Mom (www.YourHolidayMom.com).

Everyday from November 22 through January 1st messages of love, appreciation, delight and care are posted for the children, teens and young adults of this community. No one should feel alone or unloved EVER, but especially during the holiday season. What better way to put a smile upon a face, to add cheer to someone’s heart or to ease someone’s pain than the love of a mother? Mother’s love heals, it bolsters, it radiates and it understands.

I strongly suggest you visit the website, your heart will respond much like The Grinch’s and grow three sizes in one day! If you like what you hear and see, please post it through your social media sources. If you know a member of the LGBTQ community, please share it with them as well. Our lives are far too short to not offer as much love as we can within our communities. We don’t need to know where it lands or how it impacts whomever it touches. We can trust, if it is of love, it will be right, it will be good and it will be beautiful.

I wish you the happiest of holidays and many blessings ~ Lisa

© COPYRIGHT 2012 Lisa Meade

Survival Tactics

Maybe it is the rebel in me or perhaps it is just my way of surviving. I am not sure if it even matters, all I know is that it works for me. When this time of year rolls in and the world around me becomes chaotically busy and frenzied… I slow down. When peoples’ daily agenda pads fill up with more and more commitments and obligations, mine gets more and more white space. Living simply during this time of the year allows me to find my way. I know that over-stimulation is not good for me. I shut down. I am the one person in my family who avoids the Mall like the plague. I don not enjoy it, come home with a screaming headache and feel like I need to reprogram myself after a shopping trip spent there. Too much noise, too many people, too many distractions…ahhhhhh!

So the same is true for me with my days and nights during this time of the year. I have to create white space for me to be able to enjoy my holiday time and the things that really matter. I make a point of letting go of things that are not necessary. I delegate to my family responsibilities that I do not need to hold all by myself. This is not the time to play Super Woman!

When I make the effort to live simply, (how sad that it needs to be an effort), everyone benefits. I am a happier person, a better-organized person, I am able to have fun, live large, celebrate and relax. I also have the time then to honor my body and eat healthy and get out side for long hikes and walks. Simple living suits me well. I know I glow and ripple out positive energy when I embrace this. Sometimes it takes me a while to remember all this and I find myself stepping into that beckoning pool of frenzied holiday activity, only to quickly pull myself out, wrap up in a blanket of peace and comfort and move on.

How do you survive the holiday season?

Blessings ~ Lisa

©COPYRIGHT 2012 Lisa Meade

Small Steps of Honor

How often do you reflect on what you have to offer to others? For many the act of self-appreciation, putting value on your strengths and offering these up to others is a hard place to become comfortable in. Yet, each of us has been gifted by the Universe, by Spirit, by your Higher Power with a purpose in this lifetime. One purpose does not compare to another and one is not more valuable for we cannot measure or judge what is of more need to those around us. Once we can appreciate this fact we begin to look at our self-worth differently. We begin to recognize that our most effective way of honoring Source is through the understanding of our strengths, our gifts and our talents and sharing them with others or bringing them to our actions daily.

As we move into our comfort of this fact we begin to find grace and ease as we embrace the life designed specifically for us, not trying to duplicate that of another. We appreciate our individual learning style, our unique blessings we have to share, and our special relationship with life; our life, filled with our own powerful experiences, lessons and possibilities.

“Taking the first vulnerable steps into our own experience, no matter how small or hidden at the beginning, opens us to a more generous life, where what we have to give figures as largely as what we receive. We stop trying to draw infinitely from a finite world and begin to learn how little is necessary to live a life that honors the soul of the world” states David Whyte from The Heart Aroused: Poetry & the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America.

Finding fulfillment of body, mind and soul evolves from our opening ourselves up to this fact. We learn that the simple ways are often the richest. We see that less really is more. We understand that our personal path need not be measured by anyone else’s and we are at peace with this as we walk a path of honor.

Blessings ~ Lisa

©COPYRIGHT 2012 Lisa Meade

The Power of Dreams

“Dreams won't always take you on a straight path to destiny but they're usually related to what your soul wants for you. They'll force you to ask yourself the hard questions, they'll kick your ass and more importantly, they'll turn you on.”― Kelly Cutrone, If You Have to Cry, Go Outside: And Other Things Your Mother Never Told You

What do your dreams hold for you? Do you wake up in the night wondering the connection in your dream time and your wake time? What is the meaning, what is the message? What is your soul whispering to you? What is it asking you to discover?

Do you carry your dreams into the sunlight, held within your heart waiting for the moment you breathe life into them? Do they get you all juiced up with the possibilities, the choices, the unfolding magic brought into reality?

Dreams offer us the many chances to look deeper into our being, to check in with our soul and visit the lessons unfolding. Asking those tough questions and sitting with the truth in the answers gives us openings to move, transform or release what is not serving us or even is tying us down. Sometimes those truth filled answers mean we must wait for the unfolding lesson, to take pause and let go of the need to control and just BE with our truth and allow our soul to heal, to expand, to connect or whatever else it leads us to do.

But these answers also can inspire us and get us turned on to the life meant for us to live fully. These answers bring us energy to move mountains, to create ripples, to whisper longings, and to discover the mysteries. You soul celebrates these moments as the dream now takes you to places you thought you could only visit in your dreams and now they are your reality! Magic!

I will forever look to my dreams for my questions, my lessons and my inspirations. I will face the hard questions and seek and uncover the inner truth. I will explore the unknown lands of my shadow, face the inner monsters, celebrate my greatness without shame and give of myself as I am called. Without my dreams, life would be very vanilla and I enjoy the abundant flavors I can dig into!

Blessings ~ Lisa

©COPYRIGHT 2012 Lisa Meade