I know what I want. This doesn’t feel right. I want to be peaceful. I want to create the life my heart says is good, and pure and clear, and oh so right for me. Listen to your heart, listen to my heart.

I CAN SAY THIS! I will say it nicely . . . keep myself together. No one else lives in this body so I just need to be clear with myself and be kind.

Wow, that was easier than I thought it would be. He seemed to appreciate what I said. I did put it out there without blame, shame or forcing anything. What a surprise when he kissed me on the cheek. Guess he really appreciated what I said. Guess I’ll be seeing him again. Wow.

http://pashacoach.com/

We also feel our history, our personal history, often and in many ways.

Growing up had two chapters. The first chapter was abundant. Dad was a successful lawyer in his own practice. We had a five bedroom, three story brick house on two lots in Allen Park, MI. We had everything, very often new clothes, lots of food, dinners out, and many vacations. Year by year, time went on . . . then, life changed.

I was awake at night to hear Dad’s abuse of Mom. His deep booming voice minimizing her natural goddessness. And then a thump and a quiet sobbing. Shocked and deeply sad, I had a decision to make. As a 12yr old child, did I allow this intel to minimize me, after all, this was my mother and father!  Or did I wait, use time to see how it turned out, keeping my thoughts to myself.   I chose the latter, like most 12yr olds in the 1960s.

Mom and Dad were divorced in less than a year. We moved from that house, plenty big for eight, into a house too small for the six of us. Now we had one pair of sneakers, one pair of boots, minimally just what we needed. Consequently we had to keep our clothes clean and ready to wear again, day after day.

The most profound change was with dinner. Pre-divorce we were required to be on-time, face and hands washed and seated at 6pm. We heard a passage from the Bible and learned a new word weekly from the dictionary. Dad would quiz us through the week to correctly pronounce, spell and recite the weekly word. We had to share what happened to us and how we felt about it. And we had to be excused before we left the table.

Post-divorce dinners only happened when someone complained they were starting to get hungry. Hand washing was only when my sister and I thought our younger brothers’ hands were “too gross.” What was served was often over- cooked from a slow-cooker Mom started before she went to work. Or it was something I could devise from little bits of left-overs and flavors hidden deep in the fridge and cupboards. Again, I chose to experience this as early training for my future career as a fine dining chef or as “the gourmet chef” in our big Italian family. What happened that day and our feelings about it were now left unsaid at dinner, to built up stress. Instead, we would talked it out in private one-on-one. Sometimes the tension got very heated, depths-of-our-soul types of emotions.

Pre-divorce and post-divorce both had positive and negative aspects and life lessons. Far beyond simply being fed, communal dinners nourish in a total feeling way. It does this in many forms, often indescribable. As long as people have face-to-face contact, and especially if they’re tightly linked by an emotional bond.

It’s a tradition worthy of preserving, resurrecting, or creating new, now.

Start from where you are.

From my heart, let me express to you how much choice you have every way, everyday. As a kid, and still today, I use my imagination to keep growing, keep flowing along. Very little needs to be ingested, it’s up to you. 

Today I want to focus on what stops you from growing? I have an idea all of you have a number of reasons and I know I can dissipate each one of them for you. For example, other people’s opinions, busy schedules, pressures at work, focus on kids, abuse at home, chronic illness, low self-esteem, too little of this or that, too much of this or that. I invite you to comment below on your block(s) to growth.

All of them could fit under the label of opinion. Funny thing about opinions, they are often flimsy and 99.9% of the time they do not apply. I come from a family of lawyers. With that line of thinking around my young impressionable mind, I learned a very important concept. Everything that comes out of a person’s mouth is an opinion. I say AN opinion and not THEIR opinion because opinions can change when more facts are taken into consideration. Only a recognized judge (we imagined them while we were kids) could judge which opinion applied and only in certain cases. See what I mean by flimsy? Let’s have fun for a moment and assign YOU as the judge of you. What do you say?

With you as the judge of what happens to you, what happens to your feelings. Would you still have your blocks to growth, when YOU ARE THE JUDGE., the boss of you, as the Italians say. “I’m the boss of me!”

Bold as it may be, let me suggest . . . YOU be the judge of you.

I say if it feels good and brings lasting peace to you, its right and its leading to Your Personal Legend. You are led directly to your purpose in life. Many people are there and they know it. They can feel it. The rest of us can become aware of our purpose in life by using these tools, I-C-A-I, Imagination, Creativity, Awareness and Intuition.

For fun, put the title of JUDGE in front of your name. Like this, Judge Pasha, Judge Tommy, Judge Jack, Judge Kathy, Judge Judy! There was a time when my son was a little boy and he was angry, feeling something was unfair. With great assertion he said to me, “I’m gonna tell Judge Judy!” Today he is a self-assured, self-directed professional with a great family life.

You can take your life into your own hands.