A Special Gift for YOU!

Happy Holidays and may your New Year be filled with love, joy and many blessings.

Thank you for the opportunities to serve and help you and the fulfillment you have brought into my life through our relationship.

For the new year the newsletter will be quarterly rather than monthly. I am grateful for the changes in my life and no longer have the time to write articles monthly. Thank you for all your feedback and support. I have enjoyed writing the articles and hearing the differences they have made in your life and that many of you have forwarded the newsletter to your friends. Thank you for sharing. I look forward to serving you.

And here's my special gift to you:

Now you can give the gift of health and healing this holiday season.

Give someone you love a session at Fulfilled Living Wellness Center for the holidays. One can receive their first visit which includes a comprehensive history, exam and their first Network Chiropractic and Intuitive and Energy Healing session or an Animal Communication and Healing session.

I look forward to serving and helping those your love.

Love,

Lisa

Have you ever met someone who has changed the course of your life and deepened you as a human being? For me Thich Nhat Hanh is one of those people. His impact continues to ripple through me forever altering my life. Yes, this monk through the humble simplicity of his being and by witnessing his actions and his teachings has shown me the path of love.


Love often has felt vague and empty to me, like ways one should be, mere words. Nothing in all my learning as truly settled in. Being with Thich Nhat Hanh I felt love embodied, flowing through his words, his being and his actions in ways that awe struck and moved me. He felt like a mountain solid with unwavering integrity and presence and vast and clear like the open, blue sky. The balance, groundedness, presence and love he is is forever etched in my being and will beneficially direct my life.


His ability to love and embrace all human beings and situations is the exalted expression of love. It touched me so deeply to be with him. I sat riveted hearing his responses to people and the stories he shared. What struck me powerfully was his loving, unbiased receptivity to horrific experiences people had committed. He would receive and hear another calmly, without reaction and respond with practical, heartfelt insight and wisdom. At times I found myself in tears, moved by the depth of his compassion and ability to love.


You know that quick that happens automatically to most of us where we judge, categorize and energetically either reject or like something or someone? How beautiful, spacious and refreshing it is to experience this automatic response not operating in Thich Nhat Hanh. His openness engenders trust and safety. His presence creates a whole other atmosphere and reality where love flourishes. I drank that in deeply and found myself feeling nurtured, healed, restored, opened and inspired by who he is.


I pray to be that open hearted and to truly know and live the reality that we are all one, that one persons suffering is our own. I know life is a mirror and to shut down to another's pain is to shut down to and fear my own. What I witnessed in Thich Nhat Hanh was an intimacy and presence with each person and the true ability to hear from love, compassion and equanimity, rather than taking on someone's suffering or being a martyr. I experienced in him that there is never anything to reject or avoid. He lives the knowing that we are all connected. I am eternally grateful to have seen this wisdom in action and have been shown another ground to live from.


Being around Thich Nhat Hanh allowed painful places in me and stuck perspectives to release that I didn’t even know I was holding onto. I felt such relief and forgiven for mistakes and poor judgments I had made in my life. Nothing more needed to be said or explained. His depth and ability to understand another and compassionately see the roots of one's circumstances is freedom.


As I was sitting right in front of him for an hour and a half receiving his teachings and imbibing his presence, many times he looked directly into my eyes. For one of the first times in my life I felt what love was. I felt a wall of fear around my heart and a protection in my body release that I have felt throughout my life when relating to people. I felt loved for simply being, no reason, no attraction, desire, agenda or need. The depth! So rare and what a treasure. I experienced the delight and pure bliss of simply being love with another. Something I will never forget and has profoundly impacted my being forever informing the way I see and live.


We have been taught whether we are conscious of it or not to love for reasons. I invite you to love simply for the sake of love. It is so freeing, fulfilling and our true nature. I feel more confidence in moving from courage, trust, groundedness and presence no matter the circumstances for Thich Nhat Hanh showed
me that possibility.


I have a profound respect for Thich Nhat Hanh, for who he is and what he has actualized. I realize, for me, he is a living, breathing example of what I value, love and aspire to become. For all of us there are people like this who can make this kind of difference in our lives. They are on our path no matter our interests, values and passions. I invite you, if you do not have someone like that in your life, to open to it. It is catalytic and profoundly transformational. We truly are not alone.


Again, here are the websites to hear and download Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings for free: http://tnhaudio.org/ and http:/pvom.org/.


Thank you for your time and attention, many blessings this holiday season for you and your loved ones.



Love,

Lisa

Thich Nhat Hanh

I went on a five day mindfulness retreat in Southern California with Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. It was life-changing and an honor to be in his presence and receive his teachings. It has opened me, touched me deeply and brought about transformation and awakening.

His presence is profound, it allows and dissolves all inside of us that is not real or significant. He emanates peace, depth, tranquility and so much more. He is a true walking, talking, breathing example of how to live and be peace without pretense or shutting down to what is around us or inside us. He embraces everything. His love, compassion and understanding is like an ocean of endless waves with no boundaries or borders. It was amazing to feel how rooted he is in the present moment and stable and unshakable like a mountain.

This trip was a heart calling come true. I look forward to sharing what I learned, the insights and his teachings with you next month.

In the mean time, here are two sites where you can receive many complimentary teachings. They are http://pvom.org/ and http://tnhaudio.org/.

Enjoy! He is a true blessing and gem in our world at a much needed time.

Love,
Lisa

Forgiveness

Are there places in your physical, mental and emotional bodies where you feel stuck, that are repetitious and hard to get past? There are those places in me and I would like to share my experience with you.

For the last ten years in my meditation, I have connected with this place on the right side of my body where I have felt intense physical pain, mental and emotional anguish, hurt, anger, sadness, numbness, isolation and loneliness. In being present with this part of me, I have seen many events in my life associated with this place. With time, I have felt peace and acceptance with the causes of my pain. I have been able to experience settling within the "storm" of voices, emotions and bodily sensations. I have learned to rest in the experience and allow the physical, mental and emotional pain to naturally release. What I have discovered is the myriad of energies of this pattern are actually love.

Over the last 10 years or so of consciously working with this pattern, I have healed in many ways. I have received healing as well as help from friends, gaining understanding and perspectives that have helped me experience some temporary relief. In forgiving myself and others for the events that caused my discomfort and pain, I have felt progress. Many times I have experienced life beyond its limitations. However, the pattern would return like a set point and foundation which I unconsciously saw life from. I now know I can live, engage, be happy and successful even while in pain.

This morning in meditation I had the most astonishing experience. I began my meditation feeling stuck on the right side of my body, once again, experiencing the familiar emotions and associated mental states. The day before I had a profound breakthrough in this terrain, so, as we always do, I wondered why I was experiencing this pattern again so vividly. After about 30 minutes of being intimate and present with this experience, at times asking questions about it and feeling impatient, I felt this breath of forgiveness pass through the right side of my body and the emotions that were held there. It was like a refreshing breeze coming out of nowhere. It allowed me to let go of the pain I was holding onto. Tears flowed and I was shown in that instant all the mental and emotional positioning, based on past experiences, I had been living my life from. Despite all my healing, I had never met this place within my body, mind or emotions with forgiveness.

What was then revealed to me was that I was more committed to understanding this pattern, its origin, living within its confines and healing from it, than I was to letting it go and moving on. I was shown that I was committed to seeing life through that pattern’s lens. Without blame or anger toward myself, I felt a sense of relief in this realization and experienced a new sense of openness and readiness to truly let it go and make a fresh start. Who knows how this will affect the physical, mental and emotional pain, but I sense I will have more resiliency, agility and freedom.

I know life is a journey and with each step we learn, grow and open. This journey has taught me so many precious, life-changing lessons that have enriched and expanded me as a human being. I continue to learn of the power of attachment and realize the internal suffering is no longer from the actual events, but from the "I" created from the experiences. The act of forgiveness dissolves mental fabrications and boundaries of me and you or right or wrong and brings us into contact with the emptiness of all experiences. Forgiveness truly releases attachments and habits opening us to the spaciousness and vastness of consciousness we all are.

I give thanks to this experience for it continues to offer me the opportunity to ripen into a kinder, more loving, more open, sensitive, compassionate and forgiving person. I have learned the fruits of perseverance, faith, trust, humility, acceptance, patience and invaluable truths about life, love and happiness.

May you let the sweet warmth of forgiveness into all those places that need love, so you can take your next step toward a brighter future.

Sincerely,
Lisa

Is Life Truly Difficult?

In my experience what is happening in our life is one reality and our relationship with it is another "story". The difference between how we perceive and relate to events, people, situations, and circumstances and what is actually happening is what makes our lives difficult.

In being honest with ourselves and examining our experiences, we realize how we place our own perspectives onto life, which reveals our belief systems, not what is truly happening. This creates dissonance that we feel as internal resistance, communicating to us that we are not in harmony with life.

Imagine for a moment that all experiences are neutral. From that view point you can begin to see more clearly what beliefs and conditioning you hold around certain events, people, emotions and situations. If you find yourself blaming life for your challenges and tribulations or feel unable to assimilate or process life circumstances, you are in resistance. When you realize this, you awaken to the power of choice. You can choose to have a relationship of ease, flow, acceptance and grace with life, instead of resisting what is.

Your real power lies in choosing your perceptions wisely, by analyzing clearly your association and your relationship to whatever is occurring. Utilizing your focus and concentration like a sword helps bring light, truth, acceptance and well-being to whatever is happening, rather than being unconscious and repeating old patterns of thought that create harm and suffering.

No doubt in your lifetime you will experience many things that seem beyond your control. In many cases you will not have the capacity to change what is occurring. In those moments, I invite you to acknowledge your habitual perceptions and be fluid with them. Open to life and what is happening rather than resisting it with your thoughts and emotions. Resistance manifests as pain and suffering, a clear signal from your internal guidance system signaling you to change your approach. Remember you have the ability to accept and choose a new relationship with what is happening.

I am not encouraging you to be in denial, nor do I expect you to be without emotions. I am encouraging you to be clear how your misguided perspectives create suffering and resistance and generate feelings where you are you no longer in sync nor present with what is happening. You are, instead, in an artificial world made of old conceptions placed onto your life circumstances. This suffering is needless, and it is well within your power to control and alleviate it by eliminating the habits of thought that make your relationship with life difficult.

I feel it is all of our greatest challenge to be at one and at ease with what is happening in our life whether we like it or not. We usually kick and scream mentally and emotionally when we do not like something, creating pain and suffering for ourselves. When you bring awareness to your relationship with life and see your beliefs, thoughts and emotions as fluid, you experience agility and the power to choose. You learn to go with the flow of life rather than resisting and "rowing your boat upstream".

One powerful example of this was when I was in India. I observed the relationship the people there had with death. It floored me. It was such a contrast to my own view of death. In that awakening moment, I realized my relationship with death was not "how it is" rather it was what I saw and how I was taught. How liberating.

I know there are many such stories in your life. Dispel the illusions you believe in and see clearly the truth about your life. Like Sleeping Beauty, wake up to your power. The fearful reality that her wicked Step Mother created actually had no real power over her. The poison apple she ate that rendered her lifeless is a symbol of the programming we think of as “real”.

The kiss that woke Sleeping Beauty is a symbol of the magic and wonder of love that exists within our own mind, heart and being. The truth is that when we are absorbed in our false perspectives we are merely asleep, not dead. Through the power of love, of truly and passionately loving whatever comes, we awaken to the beauty of life and break the spell of our habitual thinking.

We have endless ways to be in relationship and harmony with what is. Open yourself. Let the doors of your perception open wide and reveal a new reality.

Illusory Dream

We create our dreams each night. They vanish upon our awakening. We create our waking life too. This is the true nature of reality.

We take ordinary life seriously. We think of our waking life as concrete and real and our dream life as merely a dream. Our dream life is a creation of our thoughts, emotions, unconscious and subconscious energies playing out on the screen of our awareness.

Our waking life is also a manifestation of our attitudes, perspectives and energy. Both dreams and waking life are reflections of our mind. They are an expression of what we are attached to and think of as real. They simply reveal our fixed and rigid view points and the energy associated with them.
Like a dream, we project onto life what we believe rather than experiencing it as it is: illusory, dream like and temporary, like a water moon. Dreams and waking life are out picturings of our habits of thought formed from the information we receive through our five physical senses.

When you have a bad dream and become frightened, what do you usually do? Most of us try to wake ourselves up. We remind ourselves that the dream is not real.

Our waking life is similarly "not real". We need to remind ourselves and awaken to this truth. We’ve created our life from the fabric of our own mind stream. Our misconceptions of life, what it is and how it operates, is because we do not know and directly experience the true nature of reality. We identify so strongly with our thoughts, ideas and a sense of self that we have forgotten our experiences are a reflection of our mental interpretations.

So how do we "wake up"? We can wake up when we regain the awareness and remembrance that our waking life is illusory, dream like; no more real or fixed then our dream state.

When something happens to you in your waking life see if you can own and realize your mental interpretations and projections. Open to the idea and realization that life is fluid, energetic and illusory. Remember that life is all a projection of your mind and, like a dream, changes moment to moment. The old saying you can never step in the same river twice is an example of this teaching. When we deeply see and understand this truth we will wake up and experience the true nature of our reality.

Our experiences appear as solid and real because we have fallen asleep. We feel secure when we plaster our fixed perceptions onto life. True reality is constantly shifting and changing, alive, luminous and empty. This is also the true nature of who we are beyond our sense of self. Align yourself with your true nature and recapture the fluid, energetic and ever-changing relationship with life.

May we wake up from our slumber and once again be in direct experience with reality.

Love,
Lisa

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Joy

Joy is all about us, is us. Joy is the endless waves of the ocean, the infinity of space, as vast as the sky and as ever present as the air around us. It caresses us, soothes us, uplifts us and connects us with the good in life. When we feel joy we naturally feel happy, alive, open and at one with what we are experiencing. Imagine yourself experiencing joy, feel the smile in your being, the aliveness, the flow of energy through your physical, mental and emotional bodies. Joy is unlimited, we have everlasting access to it and are joy itself.

Most of us need to get accustomed to feeling and living joy because it is not something we live frequently. Our mental and emotional habits often keep us in some degree of numbness or lack of aliveness. We have learned to exist in certain familiar, acceptable and predictable emotional realities. We, unfortunately, find some degree of comfort or belonging living in these known and culturally acceptable emotional realms, but there is a broader spectrum of human emotions available to us.

We can retrain our mind, body and emotions to be more in tune with the flow of joy. Like any energy we want to be in harmony with, we need to become accustom to how joy feels. To reacquaint yourself with joy, start by simply contemplating this energy. Tune into the times in your life when you have experienced joy.

Another simple exercise is to train yourself to delight in another's happiness, successes and accomplishments. This is called "sympathetic joy". This might be difficult since our culture encourages other approaches, like envy, jealousy, negative comparisons, feeling lack, etc. Accept and allow these predictable emotional responses, than do
something different: simultaneously open to joy by relishing and deeply celebrating that person's triumphs and fruition. This approach is much more fun and it stimulates your oneness with all of life.

Through opening to joy in all its expressions, you'll powerfully feel your creative life force flowing through your body while simultaneously experiencing your connection to life more deeply. From that place of deep connection, you'll more easily attract your heart's deepest desires and joys into your life.

In Tibetan Buddhism Sympathetic Joy is one of the Four Immeasurables, a quality that is never ending and unbounded. It's immeasurable because its benefit and value is a pearl beyond price. Attune yourself to joy and live the flow of unending happiness and love.


Love,
Lisa