The Value of Friendship

When times are good friends abound,

When times are tough friends disappear,

Those who stay are very dear.

It’s a sad fact of life that in tough times we discover the true value of friendship.  Oh, how dreadful to start a blog on such a negative note, yet it’s one that has to be brought to light for it is indeed a sad reality of life.

The saying “People come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime” has been a prolific lesson for me in the last two years as I have experienced this saying in all its forms.   It is indeed painful to realize that those whom you have known for many years, and have consider close friends turn their backs and walk blithely away from a situation you have found yourself to be in.  These are the people who are usually the “takers” of the world.  They know your company and actively seek it out when you are in a position of financial stability.  Without thought to either themselves or you, they take no shame in holding their hand out, often forgetting to graciously thank you for your generosity. 

These friends, made me question my own ability to form a character judgement, the made me question my sense of self worth and created doubt within my own mind that perhaps they were right and I was deserving of what befell me.

These friends are really not friends at all.  They are merely vampires who feast off the wealth of others and have little worth of self not to mention esteem of self.  Do yourself a favour: Hold your head high and walk away, forgiving them for their behaviour and acknowledging the lesson they have brought you, let them go.

Friends should not befriend you for your financial worth.  Friends befriend you for you.  For the beautiful person that you are, for the loving, kind, caring, and wonderful being that you were created to be.  Friends seek your company for how you make them feel as how they make you feel.  They are the ones who can lift you, making you laugh, sharing joy with you, and loving you as you are.  They do not care if you have a million dollars in your bank account or have nothing at all.  They see your soul not the exterior of whom you are.

Friends would never judge you for any action that you may take.  They would tell you their truth yet would support you nonetheless.  Friends are those, who would cry with you and carry your pain just as they would laugh and rejoice with you and share your joys.

Treasure these friends, for they are the earth Angels who are true to you in friendship on this earth plane. Nurture them and return to them the beauty of the friendship you both share. Learn from them and teach them in return.  Hold them dear to your heart and love them as they are for you never know how long they will be in your circle.

Reason, Season, or Lifetime

People come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime.
When you figure out which one it is,
you will know what to do for each person.

When someone is in your life for a REASON,
it is usually to meet a need you have expressed.
They have come to assist you through a difficulty;
to provide you with guidance and support;
to aid you physically, emotionally or spiritually.
They may seem like a godsend, and they are.
They are there for the reason you need them to be.

Then, without any wrongdoing on your part or at an inconvenient time,
this person will say or do something to bring the relationship to an end.
Sometimes they die. Sometimes they walk away.
Sometimes they act up and force you to take a stand.
What we must realize is that our need has been met, our desire fulfilled; their work is done.
The prayer you sent up has been answered and now it is time to move on.

Some people come into your life for a SEASON,
because your turn has come to share, grow or learn.
They bring you an experience of peace or make you laugh.
They may teach you something you have never done.
They usually give you an unbelievable amount of joy.
Believe it. It is real. But only for a season.

LIFETIME relationships teach you lifetime lessons;
things you must build upon in order to have a solid emotional foundation.
Your job is to accept the lesson, love the person,
and put what you have learned to use in all other relationships and areas of your life.
It is said that love is blind but friendship is clairvoyant.

— Unknown

In Love and light

Amanda

Image courtesy of:  http://www.followbrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/64816184_1356498786.jpg

© Amanda C Nicolin 2013

Permission is granted to share this article freely on the condition that the author is credited.

Yeeehaaaa!!! It's Monday

 

 

 

When we set a positive intention, we allow all that is good to flow to us. ~ ACN

It’s Sunday evening and once again, I see many posts on Face Book showing how people are unhappy with the fact that tomorrow is Monday.  The implication of this is that many do not like the fact that Monday is a new week, a time when we start the routine of going to work.  Neither do many like the discipline of doing just that. 

It’s so important to set the intention to having a great week.  Each Monday brings with it the chance to start again, to do things differently, and to have fun at what you’re doing.

In setting the intention, one attracts to oneself all sorts of things. 

We can set negative intentions by saying things like;”oh goodness, I hate Mondays. It means work. It means getting up early to travel in all that traffic etc to go to a job that I hate” or we can set positive intentions by saying something like..” Yea.. Tomorrow is Monday.  It’s going to be a great day. My workload will flow, I will be cheerful and happy in what I do, I will sing in the traffic, I will learn so much.  Yes, thank you! Tomorrow is Monday and I am happy to be starting a new week”

In doing the latter we raise our vibration and in so doing we make it a wonderful experience.  We turn negative into positive, we turn sadness into joy. We open ourselves to meeting new people; new experiences and we turn whatever may have been a bore or a bad experience into a happy, fulfilled experience. 

The sad thing, in doing the negative thing, is that we draw to us bad experiences.  We draw to us the manager who is never satisfied, the client who is harassed and angry, and the people who are rude and who have no compassion.  We also, become so engrained in this dreadful habit that it becomes a part of us.  Even sadder, it ripples down to those around us, our children, our partners, our friends and colleagues so that now, not only are we doing the negative attracting this but everyone around us is doing it too. 

Set your intention for the day ahead in a positive enlightening way and be in gratitude that it will be so.  Let it ripple to those around you. Remind yourself throughout the day that it is a good day.  Should you encounter a negative person or circumstance, stand back and breathe, smile, dig deep and haul the joy from the pit of your stomach and raise your vibration.  If you continue to find this difficult to do, play some happy music, something that will automatically raise your vibration. Think happy thoughts. 

I love that saying...’if you can’t make it fake it’.  Faking it long enough will allow it to become a part of your being; pretty soon, you won’t be faking it but doing it automatically. 

On Monday, be daring, take a chance; smile at a stranger, sing as you walk along, laugh, be joyous, be love.

Go on do it!  I dare you!  Have a fantabulous Monday; Have a stupendously fantabulous week.

In love and light,

Amanda

Image courtesy of: http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll38/jojomart_01/happy-monday-3.gif

© Amanda C Nicolin 2013

Permission is granted to share this article freely on the condition that the author is credited.

Learning Through Adversity

When times are tough and you feel down, look upward, take a deep breath and breathe in the serenity of your Divine. You are sent only the lessons that you are ready to learn. You are supported in all ways by the Universe. ~ ACN

 This has certainly been so true for me in the last year.  It has taken much courage and plenty of smacks to bring me to a place of understanding of this very lesson.  Despite all that I have learned in this incarnation, I found myself floundering, becoming agitated and angry and sadly to say, doing the “poor old me” behaviour. My faith had wavered and I felt myself falling deep into the dark pit of despair.  Really quite ridiculous I must say...

Despite the hand I have been dealt with, I finally took the time to step back and look at what I have learned from this experience. 

I would not have been able to do this, had I not followed my inner guidance and taken those deep breaths, looking upward and hearing what I was guided to hear. 

I have learned in this last year that life is at times tough. Yet my reaction to it was my own choice.  I could, of course, have chosen to breathe and look upward, but stubborn little me, as most are, needed to be whacked on the head several times before I “got” it.   

As this latest part of my journey unfolded, I did what most of us do... I reacted with negativity, asking why me?  What have I done to deserve this?  “It’s so not fair”, were the type of comments that emerged from my lips.  On some level, I experienced a sense of knowing that my behaviour was not in sync with what I believed.  It’s really quite amazing how many of us, including myself, step back into what we were when our backs are against the wall.  

I am privileged to say that having done that, I finally got myself together and commenced with an attitude of “this is a lesson” and that “everything was as it should be at that time”.  I learned that we are never given what we are not ready to learn, that lessons come to us through circumstances and people only when we are really ready to live through the experience.   I learned to take each day at a time, one at a time and discovered by doing this that I was able to breathe through whatever the day brought to me.  I learned to look into the issue and discover what it was that I was learning from that particular experience.  Once I achieved this, I was able to work with the issue and then in gratitude for the service it had been to me, let it go and be in peace with it.

Through this, I learned that I deserve compassion, love and peace; that I am compassion, love and peace. 

I also learned that despite what our heads are telling us, that we are never alone.  There are a host of Celestial Beings that stay with us, guiding us, comforting us, giving us strength and courage. They are the ones who send us signs, in the form of messages we may read on Face Book, or in the lyrics of songs or in the writings of others.  They guide us to see, that we are not alone, that others out there are in the same or similar positions to ourselves and often they show us that what we believe to be the direst circumstances are not. Should we but just take the time to look around us, we will find that there are many who experience far more difficult lives that we could ever imagine; those who endure lives in war torn countries, who live with starvation each day and know no other way of life but to live as such.  There are those, who are torn by family violence, who are so affected by their life circumstances.  There are many such examples; we have only to open a tabloid and read it or turn on the television and watch the news broadcast to know that we are alone in facing adversity in our lives. 

 Then of course, there are the earth Angels, who come in the guise of our true friends and family.    These are the ones who encourage us.  They become our ears and shoulders and spend hours of their valuable time allowing us to pour our woes out to them.  They are also the ones, who when necessary, kick our little butts.  Painful as this may seem, it is often necessary as we dive deeper and deeper into the pit of despair that surrounds us when we are in dire straits. 

The greatest of all was the knowledge and acceptance that our Divine is always with us and in our times of distress it is He that extends His hand, carrying us as we come to terms with the experience. 

The outcome of each experience is the realisation that we have emerged from it a stronger and wiser soul; that we are able to continue forth with compassion and love, carrying no baggage or bitterness into our futures.  It is the knowledge that we are strong and resilient, that we are worthy of greatness and are capable of achieving whatever it is that we want to achieve.  There is nothing that can hold us back. No experience, no matter how tough it was, can break us unless we choose to allow it to do so.

Ultimately the choice to view the experience as a positive step in your journey or as canyon so deep that we see only the negatives of it is our own. 

Make choices that are good for you, that will bring you to the next level on your journey.  Lift your spirit daily by playing happy music, or watching happy enlightening programmes, or reading uplifting books.  Be in service to those around you.  Motivate yourself daily by reading quotes and applying those that have meaning to you.  Be in gratitude for that which you already have.  All these will support you in staying in a positive state of mind which will allow you to achieve the ultimate outcome; the lesson you have come to learn. 

In love and light,

Amanda

Image courtesy of: http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs13/f/2007/005/a/c/Adversity_by_Wolfwoodster.jpg

© Amanda C Nicolin 2012

Permission is granted to share this article freely on the condition that the author is credited.

Self-Love: Your Gift to You

To graciously accept all aspects of self is to truly love the being that you are ~ ACN

Oh Wow! What a statement! To graciously accept all aspects of self is to truly love the being that you are.

I doubt that there are very many amongst us that can honestly say they love and accept every single little thing about ourselves. We criticise and complain about so much about ourselves. Our hair is too straight or too curly, our eyes are not blue or green enough, we are overweight or far too thin, we are too short or too tall, our skin is not what we want it to be and so on and so forth. We judge and criticise ourselves constantly. Sadly, it does not stop with judgement of the physical. We continue to judge and criticise our personalities, our beings, our souls. How sad is that.

Why do we do this? Why can we just not simply accept what and who we are?

We are programmed from birth, from our very beginnings to listen to the words of others. We listen first to the words of our parents, sometimes gentle loving ones and others harsh critical ones. For some reason we buy into the harsh ones, listening to them and believing them to be true. Not many of us believe the loving words spoken to us yet we take the negative ones on as if it they are our own personal cross to carry and then subsequently structure our lives and how we live them by them.

We buy into the “you are stupid, or you are useless, you are ugly or fat” etc that are spoken by others to us. Eventually we reach a place within ourselves where we believe ourselves to be worthless and undeserving of anything beautiful and good in our lives. What a tragedy and injustice to our souls.

Our bodies constantly change throughout our lives, never the staying the same. We have the joy of living in a baby body, the adventures of living in a toddler’s body, the fun of living in a child’s body, the discovery of living in a teen’s body and so on. Yet as our bodies grow and change we develop the propensity of hoarding negative inflictions about it and subsequently our mindset changes to include these negative inflictions building them into our lives and becoming them as we journey through this life.

Yet in all this there is good news. You can CHANGE the way you think and appreciate, accept and love, yes LOVE, your body, mind and soul for the beautiful creation that it is.

Now I am sure that some of you are sitting there thinking to yourselves; what rot, how can I change this body without a trip to the good old cosmetic surgeon? You can. You do not need the services of those skilled in the art of cosmetically changing a person’s body. Sure you can if you want to and can afford to and certainly you will change the outer appearance of your body. Yet at the end of the day, unless you change the way you think, and see your inner beauty, you will make one consecutive trip after the next to you dear surgeon for even more work on the most beautiful creation that is your body.

Whatever your body is, it was chosen by your higher self to house your soul, to aid you on your life journey. Take the time to celebrate it. Nourish it with good, wholesome food, exercise it and keep it as healthy as you possibly can. Pamper it and love it for what it is. Most important of all, accept and love it for what it is for it is an awesome creation made in the image of your Divine.

Let go of the “baggage” that you chose to carry in your rucksack for it does not serve you. The proclivity of your soul requires that you acknowledge the being that you are. Celebrate this facet of your being also. In accepting each facet of your being, acknowledging those negative issues that have affected you, honouring them for being of service to you and coming to a place of peace for and with them you will see that you are indeed a creation of beauty and wonderment. Yes, you are an awesome, amazing creation of your Divine, filled with love of self and others. All you have to do it find that love within you. Yes, it is there, just waiting for you to open the door and let it flow over you, through you and then ripple out to the world around you.

May you be blessed throughout your journey of self-discovery, acceptance and love of you! You are indeed worthy and deserving in finding that which resides within your being; Divine Love.

In love and light,

Amanda

Image courtesy of: http://www.create-a-life-you-love.com/images/onthebeachfree.jpg

© Amanda C Nicolin 2012

Permission is granted to share this article freely on the condition that the author is credited.