Debra Landwehr Engle's Blog, page 3

Does “living in the moment” matter?

On Sunday, I had the pleasure of speaking at Unity Church of Joplin and presenting a workshop there. It was a day of generous hospitality, beautiful music and a terrific potluck—a hard-to-beat combination.

During the workshop, a participant asked an excellent question. She’s been advised to live in the moment, but being recently widowed, she’s not sure what that means.

Is she supposed to forget all the years of her marriage?


Is she supposed to throw away the photos and mementoes and simply live for today?

I loved the question because it’s one I’ve pondered, too. Does remembering the past mean we’re not in the moment?

And what about planning for the future? Are we supposed to give up our calendars and schedules—and even our dreams of what the future could hold?

Maybe this will help:

Living in the moment doesn’t mean erasing the past or thinking it’s not important. You are the sum and substance of every experience and relationship you’ve had up to this very moment, and all of it matters.

It also doesn’t mean walking blindly into the future or ignoring your dreams and plans.

Living in the moment means that we don’t get stuck in the past or the future. It means we don’t limit ourselves with old beliefs or let guilt and shame rule our decisions.

Living in the moment means being liberated from the baggage that can get in our way. It means looking at those old photos and mementoes and celebrating what they represent, knowing they contribute to but do not limit who you are today.

Living in the moment doesn’t mean throwing all caution to the wind. It means drawing on the stength within you each and every moment to celebrate who you are—and to honor your relationships, build a business, explore your creativity, love your kids or enjoy a beautiful day.

Living in the moment means being present so you can witness the miracles of everyday life without the distractions of fear clouding your view.

Here are three things to bring you into the present moment.

1. Take a deep breath, look around you, and give thanks for everything you see without judgment or beliefs from the past.

2. Sit quietly, feel your heart beating and remember that you deserve to be here, exactly as you are.

3. Ask for your fear-based thoughts to be healed, something like this: “Please heal my fear-based thoughts so I can wipe the slate clean of old guilt and future worry, giving myself the gift of peace and joy in the present moment.”

Have a fear-less week!

Feeling invisible?

I love this quote from comedian Jim Carrey, which was part of a commencement address he gave last spring.

For many years, my greatest fear was to go “out there,” which meant anywhere that I might be seen as who I really am, subjecting myself to ridicule or criticism. I actively worked at being invisible.

If you’ve ever felt that way, it could be for a lot of reasons, such as fear of conflict, success or judgment. Maybe there’s a part of you that doesn’t match your family’s expectations of who you “should” be. Or maybe you think you don’t deserve the joy of being who you are when others around you are feeling stuck.

Whatever the reason, it’s always fear that makes us refract the light from ourselves, creating our own invisibility cloak. So here are four things you can do this week to risk being seen in all your glory:

1. Challenge yourself to speak up in a situation in which you’re typically quiet. If you feel yourself swallowing something you want to say, it’s the perfect opportunity to give voice to the idea or belief that wants to be recognized.

2. Ask someone for something you want, even if your ego mind says you don’t deserve it or it’s not possible.

3. Do something you love that no one would expect you to do—and then tell people about it.

4. Ask for your fear-based thoughts to be healed, something like this: “Please heal my fear-based thoughts so I can express myself in all my glory no matter where I go or who I’m with.”

Have a fear-less week!

What are your hidden talents?

The other day, my husband Bob was responding to an email from the organizers of his upcoming high school reunion. They’d posed a question that he didn’t know how to answer, so he did a very smart thing. He asked his wife:)

“What,” he said, “are my hidden talents?”

Well, it didn’t take more than a second to start listing those for him.

He has a talent for teaching. He has an exceptional ability to explain complicated processes in language anyone can understand. He’s excellent at helping people. He’s great at listening, at solving problems and at fixing things. He truly cares about people. And he can conceptualize a design and then build it.

There are many more, but that was a good start.

Now maybe the reunion organizers were thinking of hidden talents like singing or dancing or playing a harmonica while twirling a hula hoop. But their question made me think about something that’s probably universal.

The person to whom Bob’s talents are hidden is…Bob. He’s blind to abilities that others can clearly see in him. And I’m guessing the same is true for all of us.

That’s what our egos do…they keep us from remembering the best parts of ourselves, which is why our talents get “hidden” in the first place.

So here’s what I’d like you to do this week. Find someone who knows you well, and who will take this question seriously. Then ask that person, “What are my hidden talents?”

Pay attention to what they tell you. Take it to heart. Know that they’re not making false claims or just being nice.

Then, when that person is done, change places and do the same for them.

I guarantee you’ll learn something about yourself. You’ll feel great. The rest of the day may feel a little lighter.

You might even want to sing a song, play the harmonica or twirl a hula hoop.

Most of all, enjoy sharing the question and bringing those “hidden” talents into the light. With less fear and more love, together we can do miracles.

Are you ready to let go of worry and stress?

Starting May 28, you can take part in a new series of five teleclasses, all designed to bring out the gifts in your life.

We’re going to talk about healing your fear-based thoughts in four of the most important areas: Relationships, career, finances and health.

This is a chance to ask questions and learn from the stories of other folks on the call. In fact, your questions will be at the heart of the calls, so each discussion will be practical and specific to your life.

You can find all the details and register here. I really encourage you to check it out because you deserve to enjoy the gifts of life. And if fear is standing in the way, the time to address it is now.

Have a fear-less week!

Happy graduation

This is for all those people who will be receiving their diplomas in the next few weeks:

Dear graduate,

You have the power to make your life anything you want it to be.

This may seem daunting and terrifying and exciting all at the same time. Let me assure you, it is the greatest gift you can receive.

You’ve gone through years of schooling. You’ve been trained in countless subjects. You’ve taken endless tests. You’ve written and debated and defended and modeled and competed.

Now you’re graduating, and the learning has only just begun.

With the help of a higher power, you have the ability to create anything. Just like the schools you’ve attended, this world provides classrooms, laboratories, stages and playgrounds everywhere you look.

From day to day, you may be the student, or you may be the teacher. But every moment will give you a choice: live from fear, or live from love.

The more you live from fear, the more difficult life will be.

The more you live from love, the more joyous and
peaceful life will be.

It sounds simplistic, but it’s true.

You’re going to have 70,000 thoughts a day, or 25,550,000 a year. Over the next 50 years, that means a mind-boggling 1,277,500,000 thoughts. Well over a billion.

And in every moment, it’s your choice. Will you use those thoughts to create, inspire, care, succeed and expand good in this world? Or will you use them to resist, destruct, isolate, criticize and wonder why life never works out the way you want it to?

This is not about judging yourself for any thoughts you have. But it IS about training your mind—starting now, no matter where you’ve been or what your past—to heal fear that keeps you stuck, and nourish love that will move you forward.

Your thoughts will determine the quality of your life and what you contribute while you’re here. With the proper use of your thoughts, you can get up in the morning feeling excited and go to bed at night feeling satisfied and fulfilled.

You can be kind and generous, knowing that you get to experience the best of life in every moment, every single day.

So celebrate the achievement of your graduation. And, at the same time, celebrate the start of a whole new world that YOU will create. It’s easy, really. Just start with this:

“Please heal my fear-based thoughts so I will always be guided by the power of Love,

allowing my life to be used for the highest good.”

Congratulations, and happy graduation. May you always remember one simple truth:

You are amazing.

Getting a good start to the day

Several years ago, I attended a conference for A Course in Miracles. One of the presenters said something that has stayed with me ever since.

When we get up in the morning, she said, we take a lot of time to shower, do our hair, brush our teeth, apply makeup and pick out what to wear. Only when we make sure we look “right” do we walk out the door.

But how much time do we give every morning to making our thoughts right? How much effort do we put into arriving at what A Course in Miracles calls “right-mindedness”—a place of peace that comes from love rather than fear?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a pretty good hair day but a not-so-great attitude. Or I’ve left the house carrying my purse and To Do list, but no gratitude or peace.

The great thing is, getting to a place of right-mindedness doesn’t have to be hard or time-consuming.

This week, when you wake up, when you’re brushing your teeth and/or as you walk out the door, ask for your fear-based thoughts to be healed.

Here are some possibilities:

Please heal my fear-based thoughts so I can fully experience the gifts of this day.

Please heal my fear-based thoughts about my schedule so I can be relaxed and present as the day unfolds.

Please heal my fear-based thoughts so I can experience abundance today.

Please heal my fear-based thoughts so I can see the beauty all around me.

Please heal my fear-based thoughts so I can give and receive kindness and compassion through the day.

Enjoy your “right-mindedness,” and have a fear-less week!

The best strategies

I’ve been thinking about how we probably all think too much:)

It’s not just that we have a lot of thoughts going through our heads (the average is about 70,000 per day). It’s that we’re trying so hard to be strategic and successful and productive. It can be exhausting.

As I was thinking about this, these words floated into my mind…

The best business strategy is joy.

Hmm. How about…

The best parenting strategy is love.

     The best friendship strategy is kindness.

     The best financial strategy is generosity.

     The best health strategy is acceptance.

I like those strategies because they’re not based on figuring anything out. They’re attitudes and approaches, and they can guide us no matter how complicated things seem to get.

At their core, they’re simply expressions of who we are. In fact, they’re different facets of the same diamond.

If you feel like you’re spending a lot of time trying to find the right solution to things in your life, try this:

Please heal my fear-based thoughts about being strategic so I can respond to life out of a celebration of who I am. 

Have a fear-less week!

Pi, pounds and prayer

Did you celebrate Pi Day over the weekend? Saturday was 3-14-15, the first five digits of pi. Along with people all over the world, we celebrated the only way we knew how: by having a slice of something luscious and decadent on a flaky crust.

Our pie was coconut cream—the kind with lots of sticky, gooey filling and a pile of whipped cream on top. When I was done, I wanted to lick my plate (okay, I didn’t just want to). It wasn’t until after, when I put the plate in the dishwasher, that I remembered: Oh, yeah, I’ve been meaning to lose a few pounds.

Oops.

Honestly, just about everyone I know wants to say goodbye to a few—or more—pounds, especially when the season of weddings, graduations, school reunions and beach vacations is on its way.

There are lots of reasons for carrying around extra weight (and coconut cream pie is just one of them). But underneath them all is our own personal library of fear-based thoughts.

I know—and I’m guessing you do, too—that our weight is associated with everything we want: success, feeling good about ourselves, living with purpose, feeling alive, finding intimacy, being confident, achieving what we want and letting go of what doesn’t serve us anymore.

Extra weight gets in the way of intimacy and success. It wraps us in a bubble that keep us stuck—sometimes even immobile. And it can play with our health. So it’s perfectly logical to let that weight go, right?

Well, not really. Not when our egos get involved.

Our egos see that bubble as protection. They see extra weight as keeping us safe from taking a risk and finding joy. Insane, yes, but that’s the nature of the ego.

So…let’s do something different and radical. Let’s ask for our fear-based thoughts to be healed so our underlying emotional choices can be addressed by a power that’s way stronger than our egos.

Instead of asking…

“Dear God, please help me lose weight”…

…let’s ask something like this…

“Please heal my fear-based thoughts about my self worth and my own personal power so I can reach and maintain a healthy weight and live out my purpose with joy. ”

Let’s ask for support from a higher power to do away with our ego thoughts so we can see the truth of ourselves as beautiful and worthy and whole. So we won’t look to a piece of coconut cream pie to be our comfort and salvation.

Instead of feeding our egos, let’s nourish our souls.

Will it work overnight? As always, this prayer is not a quick fix or a magic bullet. But this I know for sure:

When you ask for your fear-based thoughts to be healed, that prayer is answered. And as you continue to ask and build your spiritual strength, you will see a change in yourself and how you view yourself and the world.

And that can lead to making different choices about food and exercise.

When I put my pie plate in the dishwasher Saturday, I realized it’s time: Ask, receive, make it simple. It doesn’t have to be that hard. It’s not about not having coconut cream pie. It’s about wanting to be the best expression of who I am, without fear or extra pounds standing in my way.

Is it time for you?

Join me. Ask for your fear-based thoughts to be healed, then keep asking, and take note of what happens. Don’t forget to leave your comments. I’d love to hear from you!

What if…

Not long ago, at one of our women’s workshops, I learned something surprising about one of the participants: She doesn’t think she’s beautiful. In fact, she still hears the voice of a classmate on the playground almost 50 years ago telling her that she was ugly.

All these years, that voice has told her, “Your hair is too red. Your ears are too big.” This has colored every relationship she’s had since.

Her story made a big impression on me for a couple of reasons. First, she is truly beautiful, and I can only imagine how adorable she must have been as a child.

Second, I have my own memories of voices on the playground fifty years ago calling me “Land-weird,” a variation on my maiden name. I can remember how many years it took me to stop listening to those taunts and remember a voice from a higher power in me that loved me just as I am.

When I came home from the workshop, I thought about the messages we remember from long ago that shape our whole life, and I thought, “This is what I want to do. I want to go to every person who has ever carried the sting of childhood barbs with them into adulthood and take their hands in mine, look them in the eyes and say, ‘Remember that child on the playground who teased you? This is what she wants to say to you now.’”

And then I would say something like this:

You know those things I said to you when we were five years old? They were a lie. I said them because I was jealous of you. Our teacher liked you, and it seemed like your parents loved you. And I didn’t feel very liked or loved, so I took it out on you.

            I could have taken it out on Julie or Connie or Stephen or Craig or any other child in our class. But I was most jealous of you, so you became my target.

            Those things I said on the playground had nothing to do with you. Let me say that again. They had nothing to do with you. I don’t even remember the things I said, because they were never true. I made them up. They were just a lie. They were my lie, trying to make myself feel better.

             I apologize for the effect they had on you. That was never my intention. I had no idea how they would shape your life. I just wanted them to pierce your heart for a moment. I wanted to see you flinch just for a second, so that for that second I could feel better. I never did. It never helped.

             I was a little kid, and I was scared, and I made up a lie that somehow got tangled up around you. Please forgive me. And if you start to blame yourself somehow for believing my lie and making it part of your life, I hope you’ll forgive yourself. You were scared, too. But neither one of us needs to be scared anymore.

I would hope that these words would help the insecurity and self-doubt fade away, because those beliefs, those doubts—that darkness—would be brought to light.

What if we could all experience this? I know that forgiving someone for playground insults feels a lot different from forgiving them for abusing or betraying or injuring you in all the countless ways our human egos are capable of. But what if the person who hurt you showed up at your door one day and said…

“I am so terribly, terribly sorry. I know I hurt you, and I’m not trying to excuse what I did. I just want you to know that my actions came from my own fear, and that even though I tangled you up in this, it had nothing to do with you. You didn’t cause it. It was never about you or your value as a human being. It was simply the lie of my own fear. Can you forgive me?”

Here I am, being naïve and optimistic again. But I think this would change things. I think it would set us free. It would help us all remember who we really are as children of God and expressions of divine love. We would remember the voice of love rather than the voice of fear.

Without the five-year-old voices sitting on our shoulder, taunting us and creating a barrier between us and love, we could relax into the arms of Spirit, remembering that we’ve always been whole, complete and beautiful, exactly as we are.

A new holiday wish list

At our A Course in Miracles class the other night, we read a paragraph that refers to “stores where people buy an endless list of things they do not need.” That sentence jumped out at me for a couple of reasons.

First, because it’s one of the most concrete sentences in the Course‘s mind-bending 31 chapters.

And second, because we’re in the holiday season, when a lot of us have been spending a fair amount of time in those stores.

The Course makes the point that the things we buy not only aren’t going to make us happy—they’re actually robbing us of true joy. No matter how delighted I might be to get a juicer with lots of attachments, or how much fun my husband Bob would have with a night-vision camera to see what’s really going on with the critters on our front porch while we’re asleep, those things are just distractions.

What will make us happy, the Course says, is to remember the sanity and safety of Spirit within us. That true peace is always available, the Course says, even though we forget.

So, I’m thinking…what if I made out a different kind of holiday wish list—one that has no mention of a juicer?

It seemed like it would be time well spent, so here’s what I put together. What would be on your list?

1. Peace of mind. Remembering to ask for my fear-based thoughts to be healed in every moment so I can experience love instead.

2. Remembrance of the light within myself and everyone on the planet. Meeting myself and others with acceptance rather than judgment.

3. Remembering that we are never alone. We have divine guidance and help available 24/7…we just have to ask.

4. Healing of the fear-based thoughts in myself and others that create attack, violence, racism, hatred, and attachment to old hurts. Seeing every moment as an opportunity for forgiveness rather than fear.

5. An expanded capacity to be compassionate and warm-hearted. I defer to the Dalai Lama on this one. “We need to encourage an understanding that inner peace comes from relying on human values like love, compassion, tolerance, and honesty” he writes, “and that peace in the world relies on individuals finding inner peace.”

I have to say, making out that list alone feels like joy. And in a season of gift-giving, just think of what a gift your holiday list will be to you, your family, and the world.

Happy holidays!

 

 

Celebrating The Only Little Prayer You Need

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost a month since the release party for The Only Little Prayer You Need!

The energy of that party still amazes me. Thanks to all the volunteers and guests, it was one of the most joyful events I’ve ever been part of, and it was a fitting way to literally launch this powerful prayer out into the world.

I chose the location—Living History Farms in Des Moines, Iowa—for a couple of reasons. First, that’s where my husband and I met 14 years ago, so it’s a place with great personal memories and significance.

Also, it represents the fact that, here in Iowa, we plant seeds in rich soil, then harvest crops that nourish the rest of the world. That’s exactly what the launch party did for the prayer—rooted it in the soil of this supportive community and started it growing so it can nurture people around the globe.

Thankfully, videographer Rodger Routh captured some of the flavor of the event, along with comments from several readers. As you watch his video, I think you’ll feel the enthusiasm, excitement, and gratitude embedded in it.

Less fear, more love…truly, together, we can do miracles.