How Will You Get There?

This week we are contemplating the ensemble of “Big” life questions: Where are you Now? Where are you going? And for today through Saturday:

HOW WILL YOU GET THERE?

On Thursday I asked ‘What is your Shangri-La?’; that spiritual destination you aim to return to or arrive at in order to best fulfill your sense of personal Mission in this life. Then I had a significant dream Monday night that really supports my motivation to communicate about the principle intrinsic to our question this week:

 

I was co-teaching to a large class of students. One woman I had been talking with individually addressed the class with her profound answer to a question we had been discussing. Then I went to address the full class with that same question. But as dreams go, a shift occurred, and as I approached to speak, I saw the students were being assembled by some beings in white coats or uniforms , down and off to the right a ways. They were being assembled in a circular formation around something red in the center. I addressed the class anyway, figuring somehow they would be able to hear and sensing this was a very important question for them. I asked them:

“What is your purpose here? Not ‘What is your purpose HERE’, but ‘What is your PURPOSE Here?”

Now then, that dream became prophetic the next day. I was preparing for a large class I am co-teaching which involves conducting mainly college seniors through a full life mapping rites of passage cycle. I was already going to share the dream, as it is of such obvious relevance!  While prepping for the class, I was reading “Confrontation with the Unconscious” by Carl Jung (in Joan Chodorow’s Jung on Active Imagination), and I was also reading in Jung’s The Red Book, both of which were assigned for the class. You who appreciate Jung will appreciate what happened next as “synchronicity”: The very image from my dream of the students being assembled by white clad agencies in a circular formation around a red center is almost identical to a dream that Carl Jung himself had that revealed to him the importance of the integrated Self as an archetypal CENTER of consciousness! Jung dreamed of a town set up in a circular fashion (with milky white colors) with an island in the middle, and on the island was a magnolia tree with “reddish leaves”!

So in my dream I dreamed Jung’s dream within my wider dream, and it was about helping the students to orient around the concept of the Integrated (both conscious and unconscious, unified) Self/ soul and to answer: “What is your PURPOSE Here?”

 

Wow! So now for this blog post, let’s take this one further step to consider how the question being posed in my dream (and Jung’s archetypal image of wholeness at the center of Selfhood) pertains to: “How will you get There?”

Knowing your PURPOSE orients you to your GOAL. The CENTER, which is Self or Soul, IS the Goal.  (as stated in Jung’s words re. his dream: “There is nowhere to go beyond this Center”!

How then will you approach the center of your divine Self? One way or another, it is through integrating outer and inner, conscious and unconscious domains of consciousness.

Through the class I am teaching this semester an image has come through:

Do you see? This shows our conscious awareness, or the “outer” reality itself, as being like a film AROUND all that which is in the dynamism of the Unconscious, or “inner”. We live outwardly as if this were the sum of reality, but we are only surface dwellers in that light. We must go within, make a Descent, find a way to maintain connection with the content of our unconscious awareness.

That is how we can get There…

I welcome your insights and stories!

Where Are You Going?

Socrates is known for the following zinger:

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Why did he say this, do you think? It is so easy to become settled into crusted routines and habits in our lives. Years pass, decades even, until one day we wake up and ask ourselves, where has the time gone? This is especially true with regard to fulfilling our life’s purpose.  I have shared before the motivational “wake-up call” I received one morning 13 years ago. Plastered before me like a placard posted squarely  in my inner vision between sleeping and waking were these bold words:

YOU HAVE THE RESPONSIBILITY

TO REALIZE YOUR DREAMS,

NOT JUST FOR GETTING BY.

Believe me, I know how hard it can be to persist, daily, toward the realization of your dreams. For ever since I received this inner beckoning, I have not turned back. This inner vision led me to revise my career in the direction of developing the approach of life mapping which my book-in-progress, Life Paths: Live Your Dream, Now! will, eventually, provide for the general public. I realize now that this visionary admonition to pursue one’s dreams was intended not just for me but for everyone, including you.

So, WHERE ARE YOU GOING?

This week I am presenting you with journaling or contemplation prompts to consider: Where Are You At? (Sunday); Where Are You Going? (today through Thursday); and How Will You Get There? (Friday).  These are not random questions. Together they comprise a call to action with respect to your life dreams. They allow you to examine your current position within the overall life you choose to live. 

Have you read or seen a movie version of Lost Horizon? When I was growing up, maybe around 12 years old, I read and re-read that amazing novel by James Hilton several times, about Hugh Conway finding his mission in life at the fabled Himalayan temple of Shangri-La. The Universe/ Spirit delivers Hugh and his brother and a small group of fellow air crash passengers to this hidden Temple where an aged master awaits Conway to bestow upon him the mantle of responsibility to maintain the vision and purpose of Shangri-La as a place of peace and knowledge that will be of immeasurable value to the future of humanity in the case of a worldwide calamity. After having to escort his brother and other non-believers back to the mundane world of European urbanity, Conway returns on his quest to find Shangri-La on his own, and eventually, he does. Here is a Soul who knows “where he is going,” at least in the sense of his life’s calling and mission. He becomes so passionate about fulfilling this Quest that nothing can possibly prevent him from achieving his purpose; he is a man utterly transformed by the awareness of his own potential and responsibility to life itself.

Can you relate to Hugh Conway’s Quest in some way in your own life? What is your Shangri-La? Let me ask again, then:

WHERE ARE YOU GOING?

I invite you to contemplate inwardly and to journal or otherwise engage with this question and the response that it elicits from Within. As always, I invite and welcome all of your insights and stories.

What is Your Purpose Here? The Road of the Idealist

This week is for Practice. I’m simply going to present you with some contemplation or journaling prompts to help you bring together your Idealist outlook with the metaphor of Life as a Long and Winding Road. This time, while I am definitely journaling about and contemplating these questions myself, I will not be sharing my personal responses here.

I encourage you to reflect this week on three sets of questions:

Sunday: Where are you now in relation to fulfilling your ideals?

Tuesday: Where are you going in order to fulfill your Ideal Vision?

Friday: How are you going to get there/ manifest your Ideal conditions and values?

So, for Sunday/ Monday, I invite you to gently consider:

Where are you now in relation to fulfilling your Ideals?

• What are your highest Ideal values and goals?

 

 

• Where are you at now in relation to achieving those ideals? 

 

 

 

• How do you manifest (which of your) ideals daily?

 

 

 

• In what ways do you fall short of fully realizing your ideals in the present?

 

 

 

 

 Allow me to add one question that comes from my dream this Sunday morning. I  was teaching to a large group of persons. I asked first one student, who spoke beautifully, and then I addressed the same question to the whole class:

“What is your purpose here? Not, ‘what is your purpose HERE? But, ‘What is your PURPOSE here?”

I welcome all of your insights and stories.

The Road Leads Home

Many times I’ve been alone and many times I’ve cried
Anyway you’ll never know the many ways I’ve tried
And still they lead me back to the long and winding road
You left me standing here a long, long time ago
Don’t leave me waiting here, lead me to you door

https://www.youtube.com/embed/fUO7N-zSMYc?rel=0“>Beatles, The Long and Winding Road

Road songs, road trip novels and movie scripts, mythic journeys (e.g. the Odyssey): why is the Road such a common, universal cultural motif?

Usually the Road leads Home or completes a full cycle of Departure–Transformation–Return, as per Joseph Campbell’s well known insight about “the Hero with 1000 Faces“. The mythic journey we all take is a “going and a Return”; it  is a journey of Self-discovery and advancement to ever greater horizons.

Is it an Illusion, though? The Journey or Winding Road metaphor is after all just that: a way to frame experience as an ongoing, coherent Process. We depart from point A, traverse through obstacles or vistas, and ultimately aim to arrive at a “later” destination, one that is the same as that which we departed from, but we have gained through the struggle and lessons learned a greater maturity, skills and awareness. The Prodigal offspring, we seek to acquire wisdom in the lower realms in order to be of even greater service and humility when we finally return to the divine source of our own true essence. And every lesser journey is a microcosm or a small step along that ultimate Pathway of spiritual unfoldment in the eternal Nowness that IS.

Well then, just think of it! Nothing is ever wasted; every experience carries within it the Seed of this ultimate Return.

Ithaka

BY C. P. CAVAFY

TRANSLATED BY EDMUND KEELEY AND PHILIP SHERRARD

As you set out for Ithaka

hope your road is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.

May there be many summer mornings when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

But don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you wouldn’t have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

C. P. Cavafy, “The City” from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Translation Copyright © 1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Reproduced with permission of Princeton University Press.

The Oak in the Acorn

A primary tool I will be offering with the upcoming book Life Paths is the Archetype Dialogue Practice. This approach lets you use active imagination and journaling to engage directly with your unconscious archetypal parts-of-Self (personae) so you can get to know these ever present aspects of your own Self and so you can enlist the Strengths of your archetypal cast as Allies in the pursuit of your most integral goals or Life Dream.

The process of active imagination has been well described and exemplified by Carl Jung.  Wikipedia explains:

 As developed by Carl Jung between 1913 and 1916, active imagination is a meditation technique wherein the contents of one’s unconscious are translated into images, narrative or personified as separate entities. It can serve as a bridge between the conscious ‘ego’ and the unconscious and includes working with dreams and the creative self via imagination or fantasy. Jung linked active imagination with the processes of alchemy in that both strive for oneness and inter-relatedness from a set of fragmented and dissociated parts. This process ultimately resulted in the Red Book.

A simple method for engaging in active imagination yourself to explore or to meet & greet some of your own archetypal energies (or, synergies) is simply to close your eyes and imagine going down into a subterranean cave or down a set of stairs where your archetypal sub-selves can meet with you. Use this or another active contemplation technique to encounter or to observe these aspects of your psyche, then when you return to your usual conscious awareness, as if waking from a meaningful dream, you can record what you experienced or learned. You can also use any artistic media to represent this encounter or what you have learned from it.

I find it easy after long practice with this approach to simply “shift down” to a subconscious perspective and to journal a dialogue directly with my own archetypal aspects. It is important to be receptive and allowing; create an internal environment of acceptance and offer a safe space for the dialogue to occur. Note that the ‘voices’ you will encounter will feel naturally to be aspects of yourself; they are not external ‘entities’ (you can discontinue your session if these voices do feel external). You will know you are ‘in the zone’ when the alternating perspectives in your dialogue feel inwardly to be authentic and clearly distinct parts of Self.

So for this week’s pairing of Idealist archetype traits with the metaphor of life as a Long and Winding Road, allow me to demonstrate, and I invite you to encounter your own “inner Idealist”, too. Remember that your archetypal personae might manifest either as masculine or feminine images and they might present in either Strength (positive) or in Shadow (repressed or feeling suppressed) modalities.

LW: Calling Doña Jeanne [a combination of a female Don Quixote and Joan of Arc!; I  used to address my fencing foil by this name]; come in, Doña!

DJ: We like how you animated and personified your blade in this way; ‘et la!’ we would say…

LW: Thanks. How are you doing these days?

DJ: We—Let’s say I—am always available. I wish lately you would allow me and the rest of us to shed light on why it is so important for you to maintain your trust, your faith. It is one thing to claim a faith but quite another to demonstrate the ‘faith of the mustard seed’, remember?

LW: Or of the Acorn?

DJ: Tell the story; have you ever found its message for you?

LW: Ok… One of my greatest mentors, Antoinette Paterson (Toni), loved oak. All her furniture, mostly from Salvation Army stores around Buffalo, NY, was made of oak. She once showed her young son an acorn while under an oak tree in a park, saying to him, “There is God!”

DJ: And the meaning, dear?

LW: I have always figured she meant that the Acorn, as the seed of the great Oak it will grow into, is a manifestation of the divine principle of Creation. Isn’t that the message?

DJ: But there is more, much more.

LW: What else then?

DJ: The Acorn IS GOD, as God IS the essence of Everything and No-thing—the Alpha and the Omega; Yin and Yang; beginning and goal achieved; inner and outer; Spirit and form; Sea and Foam. Do you see?

LW: I like the sea and foam image.

DJ: It is no metaphor. It Just IS! From out of the Formless, Form emerges. Then and Now, Once and Forever, IS. What does this imply for you?

LW: I look into the Acorn to see therein the Oak in full expression. It is not now and later but it is One. The Oak already exists in the Acorn. Is that what you mean?

DJ: Can you apply this to your recent displays of frustration and impatience?

LW: You mean re. the arduous, nebulous publishing process?

DJ: How can you bring about the bend in the Road you desire?

LW: By focusing on the End achieved.

DJ: No!

LW: By further editing?

DJ: Not even!

LW: Hmm…just by allowing the process to be already complete from within?

DJ: Indeed.

LW: So when I dreamed last week that several large boxes of books were ready for delivery…

DJ: Precisely! On the Inner first; the Outer is a reflection. “All creation is finished in the lower worlds.” (Paul Twitchell)

LW: So trust, allowance, acceptance!

DJ: Love is All! Love is the acorn is the oak and all its roots and branches and leaves. Even its corpse is Love.

LW: Thank you.

DJ: God Bless!

LW: God bless you too, with Love.

 ******   ******

I invite you to your own Idealist dialogue. I welcome all your insights and stories!

What’s a Heaven For?

Throughout this year at Life Paths for Better Endings, each month we are conjoining one of twelve universal archetype character types with one positive Life Metaphor, forging an ‘alchemical’ pairing of elements. These conjunctions are to help us manifest Better Endings with respect to our highest values and pursuits. The archetypal energies we are invoking can help us to actualize the Life Metaphor impetus; that is, calling upon the strengths of your intrinsic archetypal character modes can help you realize your highest life values and goals.

This month we are pairing February’s astrologically associated IDEALIST archetype with the metaphor Life is a Long and Winding Road.  This feels a very natural conjunction in that sometimes, when the Road feels too long or windy, we can derive needed inspiration from our deepest ‘sense of idealism’.

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” said Robert Browning, “Or what’s a heaven for?” (“Andrea del Sarto”, line 98).   Let’s call upon our Idealist traits of fortitude and perseverance this week. An ideal or your ultimate Life Dream is worth all the patience and love you can give to gradually realize its highest form of expression.

Like the Monarch butterfly, we cannot be pulled too quickly from our chrysalis of an ideal; only by its own natural struggle toward unfoldment can the strong and healthy, beautiful butterfly emerge from its cocoon.

I am reminded of the Buddhist practice of travel via prostration to reach the pilgrimage center of Bodh Gaya where the Buddha is said to have reached enlightenment under a peepul tree.  A monk, e.g. Sherab Gyalsten from Tibet recently (see story), “takes three and a half steps forward, then prostrates flat on the road while chanting mantras. Then he gets up, folds his hands in prayer and repeats the process.” The pilgrimage may take the monk many years to reach the destination. I have seen a documentary about such a monk who arrived after several years to attend a special ceremony at Bodh Gaya. When he arrived he learned the ceremony had been cancelled for that year due to weather conditions. He turned around, prostrated and chanted, and began his journey home.

In what ways are you set upon a Long and Winding Road in your life? How can you draw upon your Idealist strengths to help you to realize your Dream?

Sketch of the day no 514 in my art journal: stewart the #seagull wish upon a #star for your #dreams to come true

Sychronicity rings true again!

BulanLifestyle.com

Sketch of the day in my art journal is Stewart the #seagull wish upon a #star for your #dreams to come true.
The inspiration behind this is from my own experience last night. I was sitting on my friend’s balcony looking out at the sea and I saw a shooting star.
It’s going to be a great year xoxo

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Don Quixote, Idealist of La Mancha

One of the most iconic IDEALIST protagonists of all Western literature is “Don Quixote, the Man of La Mancha”. When I was around 10, I read Cervantes’ Don Quixote as if it were a bible, allowing myself only one of the picaresque stories per night (though sometimes cheating to read ahead). I loved this bumbling, well-intentioned but humble everyman sort of hero, and it was not until I was older that I learned in school how Don Quixote is not universally regarded as a heroic figure at all but rather as a misguided, neurotic antihero.

I have deeply identified with Don Quixote. I’ve seen the play Man of La Mancha performed several times, and throughout college years I knew all of the musical’s lyrics by heart. To me, Don Quixote had an idealistic or cockeyed optimist purity and innocence that eventually won over everyone’s hearts. Aldonza, the “harlot,” is raised by her interaction with Don Quixote to her true inner stature as “Dulcinea”, a Lady; the peasant Sancho Panza becomes an adventuresome Squire on his donkey; and Don Quixote himself, dubbed Knight of the Woeful Countenance, tilts at windmills as if they are dragons and wears an old wash basin for his helmet. His chivalry is as pure as his Idealist energy is strong, even if at times the consequences for those around him are less than positive.

My favorite Idealist lyrics are from the play Man of La Mancha :

“The Impossible Dream”from MAN OF LA MANCHA (1972) (music by Mitch Leigh and lyrics by Joe Darion)

To dream the impossible dream To fight the unbeatable foe To bear with unbearable sorrow To run where the brave dare not go To right the unrightable wrong To love pure and chaste from afar To try when your arms are too weary To reach the unreachable star This is my quest To follow that star No matter how hopeless No matter how far To fight for the right Without question or pause To be willing to march into Hell For a heavenly cause And I know if I’ll only be true To this glorious quest That my heart will lie peaceful and calm When I’m laid to my rest And the world will be better for this That one man, scorned and covered with scars Still strove with his last ounce of courage To reach the unreachable star

Can you relate? Well then, take a knee! By what chivalric name shall you be dubbed? What is the nature of the most Glorious Quest YOU are on? Look up to the night sky to find that Star you seek, and FOLLOW!

The Idealist Archetype

Pegasus

I soar through the Heavens

On gossamer wings,

Aloft in the faith God is All.

Place your trust in my buoyant,

exhuberant Way,

and in Truth may you always prevail.

— LW

Our February archetype is the Idealist. An AIR energy that MAINTAINS and develops any process, the Idealist pairs nicely with this month’s Life Metaphor of life as A Long and Winding Road.

You can count on your Idealist tendencies to strengthen your motivation to achieve any worthy goal. It is an active, lifting mode; a part of you that—when in Strength—carries you forward in a transcendent, joyful way.

In my own contemplative inner adventures I often actually do encounter especially one Pegasus horse which is a beloved inner companion. She takes me on winged flights of unspeakable beauty. While I don’t necessarily see this dream Pegasus as my Idealist part-of-Self, she certainly is real and animated in my awareness and raises me to a more idealistic state of consciousness about life whenever we connect.

If in Shadow, your Idealist may feel trapped or frustrated by limitations or delays. It may help you to find a way around such apparent confinement by offering an alternate activity or route that bypasses or transcends these illusory bounds.

Remember then to listen, and to ask your Inner Idealist for guidance on your next step (or leap) to a desired destination.

 How do you imagine or experience your own Idealist nature? Try answering this question and see what it might evoke for you:

WHEN I GROW UP, I WANT TO BE  : ____________________________

I invite you to journal your answer, or engage in an active imagination ‘flight of fancy’!

Your Key Turning Points

This next few days I have a simple life mapping tool to share with you.  I invite you to reflect on some of the Turning Points in your life, either up to Now, or from Now toward your desired future. A turning point can be thought of as an event, choice or situation in your life “before and after which you feel you were a different person” in some respect or capacity. But I will make this game a little more focused for you: you only get to pick (A) THREE turning points from your past up to Now, and/or (B) imagine THREE turning points from Now leading toward the fulfillment of an important personal goal or Life Dream.

You may use the image below as a template design for this life mapping activity, or devise your own.

(A) Choose THREE events or situations from the past that were major turning points in your life. In the process of choosing these, you may reflect on how each of these pivotal moments or situations altered your future in the ultimate direction of where you are Now.

Be sure you have chosen the “right” three; that is, those specific turning points that have led to where you perceive yourself to be in your life today. When I did this mapping today, I first picked three major events, but in reflecting I realized I wanted to disregard any negative turning point because ultimately, for me, it was the more positive TP’s that have led me to my present position in my life’s journey. I chose first a very positive early relationship, then a spiritual turning point of finding my ‘path’ in this life, then a failed relationship, but then instead of this third situation, I claimed instead the decision to begin the studies and practices that led me to develop the life mapping process that I am passionate about sharing to this day. So this has been a learning experience: the most important, defining events have been the most positive fulcrum points that have helped me to develop my highest potentials.

(B) As an alternate method, or even better, after you complete part A of this life mapping tool, I invite you to envision three Turning Points that you expect to experience or bring about in your life from Now up to the full realization of a significant future scenario or goal. What plateaus will you arrive at or what crossroads will you need to pass through in order to manifest your future as a Dream come true?

 With this Future Life Mapping activity (and you could do this for A as well), I encourage you to include minor steps you anticipate that can lead to and from these three KEY future mileposts as well as the Turning Points themselves. Also, as the golden star in the template map diagram indicates, consider the endpoint of your Future life map to be your goal or Dream achieved, and go ahead and represent what that is, either pictorially or by writing it out at the destination point you are envisioning.

I welcome your insights and sharings!

Is Your Life More Like An Arrow, a Spiral Staircase, or “Whatever Happens”?

How would you answer (today, anyway) the following question:

“What, to you, are the typical stages or phases, if any, of a normal human lifetime?”

I have asked this question to around 500 people and the answers they have given fall into three basic categories or kinds of Life Course Schemas: Linear, Cyclic, or Seamless.

If you consider a life as structured according to developmental stages, like infancy, childhood, young adulthood, adulthood, elder status (bordered by Birth and Death), or if you similarly describe critical stages such as innocence, education, marriage, career, empty nest, and retirement (still bounded by an Entry and Exit), then your Life Course Schema is a LINEAR model. This is a very popular schema and most educated Westerners have been conditioned to this model from learning about such developmental psychologists as Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget or Abraham Maslow. Erikson in particular defined eight life cycle stages that people could be expected to pass through as they mature, facing critical challenges at every stage.

 

But Erikson’s framework, devised in 1950, may actually have fit a typical life course better then than now. What happens when the linear expectations (one education, one marriage and family, one career) hit a roadblock? Then one might perceive themselves as falling into a midlife crisis. Nowadays, since change is more likely than stability, many people are composing their own more flexible models of the life course.

If you think of your life as being cyclic or like a spiral, with opportunities for ‘starting over’ with every cycle change, then you can plan for the next cycle or Chapter even as you finish the one you are in. Frederic Hudson, in The Adult Years: Mastering the Art of Self-Renewal, is a psychotherapist who coaches clients to reflect on where they are at in a “cocooning” phase of a Chapter in order to decide whether to improve where they are, or plan to leave and start over elsewhere. In my studies of the life course, I have found that many people whose parents divorced while they were young or who had some other sort of early critical life disruption were more likely to construct a cyclical Life Course Schema than a Linear one.

Or are you more likely to answer the above question by saying you don’t believe life has any fixed structure or pattern at all; it just happens, and you deal with what comes up? This may seem a more creative model, though I find many people expressing this schema tend not to be highly goal oriented.  They love the mystery, though, of what might be up around the corner; they revel in the surprise!

Do Life Course Schemas matter? I think they might, a lot.  Schemas are cognitive frames; they orient our minds according to the structures they impose. They serve like filters between our experiences and our interpretation of that experience. So they can lead us to develop self-fulfilling prophecies or to feel stuck in repeating kinds of situations (like job loss or relationship failures). Or, they can lead us to “mop it up” and try again with greater focus or even to decide in advance of a cycle’s end how we will improve the situation next time around.

So, where are you in your current Life Chapter and where do things appear to be heading for you? I invite you to reflect on your Life Course Schema. How might it help you or hinder you from making desired changes in your life?

I welcome your insights and stories!