It's Love. Not Loss.

Here's a video which explains that sharing the devastating results of our actions has not gotten us very far. It is not the loss of life that inspires us, but the awe and freedom we feel from those very systems we are destroying. Focusing on the positive gives us a genuine sense of hope, something that negative messaging will never be able to do.

I get the feeling that this video focuses on the messaging that non-profits, media, and figure heads are coming out with, but the same message is true on a much deeper and more personal level as well. Projecting love, not negativity, will serve you far greater than judgement and despair ever will.

You catch more flies with honey.

Observing Your Mind - The Power of Thoughts

I recently took my first course with Brahma Kumaris, an international spiritual organization, and learned many an important lesson.

Focused on Raja Yoga (a form of meditation), we first learned about the nature of our thoughts. To practice observing your thoughts, even just for an hour, is a powerful thing. You'll find that they range from great ones, to not so great ones, and we were given guidelines of what types we would be finding. They are:

• Positive (ex. She's so kind!)
• Negative (ex. He looks bad in that picture)
• Wasteful (The chitter chatter)
• Necessary (ex. I need to pick my son up at 8)

Thoughts, like everything else, are energy, and powerful energy at that. Negative and Wasteful thoughts will deplete your energy, Necessary ones will have a fairly neutral effect and Positive ones will magnify the 'good vibes' that you are both receiving, and giving out. The first step to transforming your thought energy into positive, powerful, and well balanced energy is awareness. Bringing your awareness to what is happening in your mind is a significant first step in harnessing your personal power. Personal power goes by different names: confidence, joy, commanding attention, kundalini, etc, but it's all the same thing - it is our life blood as humans, and the more we understand and work with it, the happier and more successful we will be.

Simply put - Be an observer in your life, and watch your life change. Period.

Via Flickr - Martin Sojka

You're Journeying on an Airplane...

Now, look out the window. Know that, although the people below may see a dismal day, the sun is always shining. Always. You just have to know where to look.

Via Flickr - Gexydaf

Have an incredible day!

You're Great

(I love the merge of linear and abstract thinking, and think both put together will lead to happier individuals, and as a byproduct: a changed world)

The more in alignment with yourself you make everything in your life, the happier you will be. By this I mean - follow your passions, any and all of them. Work with them to create a living, a lifestyle, your truest self.

Do what makes you come alive, what makes you feel you have purpose, what you are truly happy doing.

& Believe you are good enough to experience that feeling 24/7.

“If you don’t know what your passion is, realize that one reason for your existence on earth is to find it”  

 -Oprah Winfrey, Queen of the World

Too Late for the Planet?

I get comments from people all the time that basically imply that any education/activism Im doing is fruitless as it is too late. Too late for the planet, too late for our society, and too late in inspiring action.

Although I admit no one really knows what the impacts of our actions will be in the future (even those scientists that tell you they do - they're making educated guesses), I am convinced that we should at the very least try.

Let's put it this way - you put a scrumptious pizza outside to cool down. You get distracted and end up leaving it out there for an hour. Do you sit inside eating rice crackers because you figure it's too late (an animal might have eaten it) or do you take the initiative to go outside and check?

Personally I would check on my pizza, rice crackers are not that tasty. It sucks that I got distracted but maybe I can still enjoy that cheesy, veggie, doughy goodness. (Pizza = planet, I love metaphors, what can I say)

Much Love!

A Realistic Plan on How to Change the World and a Step by Step Lesson on How to Do It

I am going to give you all a realistic plan on how to change the world and also a step by step lesson on how to do it. (And a step by step lesson on how YOU as an individual person can actually change the planet) And Im going to do it in less than 300 words:

We have to decentralize. Huge task, right? It can TOTALLY be done. And it actually can be done quite simply, and fairly quickly. We just need all hands on board to do it. This is where the individual comes in, and this is where we see that one person is actually the only thing that will save us.

What happens is a community decides they want to be more self-reliant and sustainable, and so collectively they act. These communities can range in groups from a dozen to millions. Individuals come together to make dozens, who come together to make hundreds, who come together to make thousands and so on.
These people decide to stop relying on items that come from wasteful, and foreign industries. They start living sustainably, and therefore become largely self-reliant. The community produces their own food, their own clothes and shelter, and oftentimes their own energy (renewable- solar, wind, etc). Therefore, most of of their livelihood comes from a local source, and now, for the most part, they ARE in fact living in a decentralized manner. Maybe some still would consider them to be centralized, but their central power becomes the planet and not a corporation.

And then, this happens, over and over again, all over the world, until there are no more unsustainable communities.

The root of my little theory on how it is totally possible and almost EASY to change the world inherently relies on the idea of collective action. Collective action is when individual people are motived by at least one common value, and then come together as a group to act on it.

So if individuals don’t act, this plan will fail. Individuals need to realize how important they are. And individuals need to feel that one person can make a difference.