First Sunday Morning Coffee of 2016

Here we are! Together in a New Year. It’s so new you can still smell it’s freshness, taste it’s possibilities, see the whole vista of potential, hear it calling to you, feel that excitement at the beginning of a new adventure.

I have no resolutions or plans for this year other than HEARING and TRUSTING my inner knowing, my connection to the Divine. I spent a lot of time last year listening, but not really hearing and trusting what I was hearing. In fact, many of the lessons I learned last year were how NOT to do something. Those are things you need to learn (think Thomas Edison and his thousands of failed light bulbs), but it’s not my preferred method of learning. It’s not nearly fun enough.

Speaking of fun, I’ve been popping in and out of this online end-of-the-year retreat hosted (or would that be hostess-ed?) by Amber Kuileimailani Bonnici entitled Woman Unleashed. Yeah, it’s a girls pajama party thing and I’m loving it. Amber is phenomenal. Her guests are phenomenal as well.  Very empowering. Very fun! Here’s Amber’s Link if you want to explore this further: Woman Unleashed Online Retreat. You’ve got until January 31st to experience this retreat treat. I encourage you to check it out.

Here’s an Ah-Ha that I’ve re-remembered:

The memory was sparked as I was listening to Rhonda Britten, one of Amber’s guests. Rhonda is the author Fearless Living. She’s got an Emmy award, too. I saw it in the background of the video.

(Just an aside…do you do this? Sometimes, I like to not look at the speaker and check out their surroundings, their color choices, their stuff. Like: was that Emmy deliberately placed so the viewer could see it? Or is it just part of her stuff and she likes it and is proud of it? And sometimes I won’t be listening to the speaker at all and will have to replay that particular moment because I’ll be checking out their clothes and their gestures and the way they move their mouths, their expressions, the way they animate themselves.)

Okay…back to my Ah-Ha. I’d finished checking out Rhonda’s habitat and was once again tuning into what she was saying. She was talking about how our lives moved forward in a wave of ups and downs. She used the terms contractions and expansions. I like to think of it as in breaths and out breaths.

In breath and out breath.

That was the trigger to said Ah-Ha.

We are breathing our lives! Breathing our stories. Inhale and there’s a pause and exhale and there’s an expansion.

When you take a deep breath, when you inhale, you’re taking in oxygen and feeding all your cells. You’re inspired. Then you exhale, expelling it all out. On the exhale, you do your sit up, your push up, your kick. On the exhale, you make your move. On the exhale, you Ki-ai for more power.

The inhale, the inspiration, allows your body to be a container for the exhale, for the action.

Rhonda said it more succinctly. She said you have to expand your energy to be able to become the container for what you want. Meaning, you have to learn to be what you’re aspiring to become. Most people lose all the money they win in the lottery because they’ve not expanded their idea of themselves as millionaires. They’re still thinking of themselves as people in need of lots of money.

Little inch worms we: contracting so we can expand. Inhaling so we can exhale.

Have a great week, peeps, in this new, fresh landscape of a year.

I leave you with Mr. Al’s and my New Year’s celebration. We lit Japanese lanterns (biodegradable of course.) I love watching them drift off into the atmosphere. We stopped when the wind started to blow and the second time one blew into a tree. Maybe we’ll try again, soon. We’ve got plenty of them. I was over enthusiastic with my purchasing.