Better Endings are New Beginnings

My apologies for a two-week aperture. My new book, Better Endings: A Guidebook for Creative Re-Visioning (click link for url) is now available for pre-order at a discounted rate at all major retailers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble) and it will soon be available as an ebook at Kindle, Nook and several other sites. I have been on a daily learning curve, aiming to announce this book in as many ways as possible; if you are an author you know what I mean! While the publishers have announced the book to retailers and independent bookstores through Ingram at a good trade book discount rate, still it is up to me to let people know about the book, and that is a heady, onerous and daunting opportunity. The official release date is May 6 for retailers. There will be a book launch at my local Lewiston, NY Library on May 13, thankfully. I have set up a Goodreads Author Page and print book giveaway (6 free books chosen randomly, so you can find it there if you like), from April 26-May 8. Otherwise “pounding the pavement”: sending out postcards to selected bookstores, visiting local stores, submitting info to Barnes & Noble store placement, and basically learning something new every day about possible ways to get the word out.

This blog site has been the rich source of the concept that developed into Better Endings: A Guidebook for Creative Re-Visioning. Over the past 9 years or so we have explored herein the multifaceted jewel that is our own inherent creative license to envision and to flexibly re-vision a Story: everything from composing actual ‘better endings’ to movies, fiction, or historical events whose conclusions might leave you personally dissatisfied or yearning for a twist of fate, to journaling about ‘shaping events’ or Turning Points in our own life stories: Past, current or to come.

I have come to realize how fundamentally empowering it can be to creatively re-vision a situation from the past, any current situation, or a future aspiration or prospect. Doing so has guided me through three Big Moves just over the past four years, and has brought many new opportunities and vistas into clearer view. Re-visioning a past event helps me see it with new (more mature) eyes, and prospecting a desirable future through ‘alternate futurescape’ journaling has helped me zero in on what values I aim to establish in my home setting and in all my relations. Better Endings lead to New Beginnings! Sometimes this can mean simply bringing closure to a long contemplated worry from the past, or setting out in a new direction based on realizing the path you choose to follow!

Better Endings: A Guidebook for Creative Re-Visioning is the fruit of these many years of applying the creative principle of creative re-visioning not only in this blog but in my life. Central Park South Publishing has helped me to produce honestly a very well designed book. I am especially grateful that this book provides ample journaling space for readers to explore this faculty of creative re-visioning for yourselves.

Below is the Table of Contents. With each chapter, I introduce the chapter’s theme, share a sample ‘better endings’ story and some personal reflections about the topic, and then turn the theme over to you as the reader, to reflect on and to journal about with respect to your own life experience. The final of four lined journaling pages ask you to add your Reflections after you have personally explored your own ‘better endings’ perspective.

images are from pixabay.com

I guess you can tell, I really like how Better Endings: A Guidebook for Creative Re-Visioning has emerged as a book of true potential benefit for those who wish to reflect on life’s lessons and golden opportunities for transformational growth and fulfillment.

If you get the book, please do the journaling! That is the heart of its gift. Feel free to reach out to share with me about your experience with the themes in the book; I would gladly post your own ‘better endings’ stories here to share with others. And if you would, please do leave a review somewhere, at Amazon, B&N, Goodreads or on your own blog if you like. I understand reviews can be most helpful for letting more people know about a book.

Thank You for visiting and especially to those of you who have been Following this blog site; the fact that people actually do read what we write and share in a blog is what keeps them going and growing!

May You Find Your Better Endings!

Love Will Find Its Way, May the Blessings Be!

This month the phrase “Keep Your Heart Open” has been a mantra and a lesson for me. Now I can connect this with its lyrical counterpart:

Love Will Find a Way!

Let’s make that, “Love Will Find Its Way” and we find a Better Endings mantra of positive resolve and acceptance.

Folks, I want to express my deep gratitude to each and every one of you who has been or is currently reading this post. I have so enjoyed the Blogverse this past several years, and some of you have become friends as I have liked reading and viewing your brilliant pieces and I have enjoyed sharing here.

Because my life has suddenly burst open with several new responsibilities and opportunities with which I am happy to engage, after long consideration I am signing off. This is my final post.

May I leave you, in deepest respect for all of your unique and beautiful Soul paths, with a universal mantra, the word HU (sung Hu-u-u-u-u-u on a long drawn-out breath, either aloud or inwardly). This is a breath mantra of divine, unconditional love that I have learned through my spiritual practice of Eckankar.

images are from pixabay.com

Keep Your Heart Open;

Love Will Find Its Way.

May the Blessings Be to All!

Linda

Thank You! And… The Value of a Vocation

Dear Readers:

I want to add a few words  as a sort of preface to this blog post. It is all about GRATITUDE.  I thank each and every one of you for reading Better Endings when you do, and especially I am grateful for every Comment shared.

This week I am particularly GRATEFUL to every one of you linked to this blog or from Facebook  who took the time to come to the launch of my new personal growth & development book, Your Life Path (see side panel for ordering info and to read an interview about the author; the book is now available through all major outlets). Friday and Saturday nights March 9/10 were well attended and I got to see some of my best friends and closest colleagues along with several former students! To see you all before I move to NY after retiring this summer was such a blessing; you can only imagine how wonderful it was for me to touch base with each of you.

My Thanks also to all of you who have ordered this book, Your Life Path. It is a labor of love for over 12 years and provides the best techniques I can offer to you for engaging in the Art of Life Mapping. I have seen how the approach that has emerged with the Life Path Mapping Process embedded as a self discovery toolkit with this book has helped many people already to reflect on their lives and go forward with greater clarity and passion.

AND FURTHER GRATITUDE YET: to my Super Agent, Linda Langton and to the team of publicists Paula Kalamaras and Paul Kraly of Scribes Unlimited, without whose inspiration and expertise this book would certainly not have been manifested. (Further thanks are of course in the Acknowledgements to the book.)

A word to you ALL from the Zuni language, which I have been blessed with myself through the years:

ELAHKWA ! (Thank You!)

The Value of a Vocation

We are multi-dimensional beings. Within our core Identity we house several sub-identities, formed somewhat distinctly depending on the roles and statuses we “take on” in our lives. Jung called these sub-identities archetypal members of our personal unconscious domain of the Psyche.

Elder Leader, Lover, Warrior, Nourisher, Artist, Idealist Golden Child, Descender, Teacher, Communicator, Healer and Mystic :  these are twelve universal or “primordial” personal archetypes recognized by the archetypal psychologist Dr. Charles Bebeau, founder of the former Avalon Archetype Institute in Boulder, Colorado.  All of these are latent or active component sub-identities we may develop in relation to our relationships, our jobs, our hobbies or other activity roles and identities.

Most of us develop a few of these archetypal personas more than the rest. Some even become over-balanced in one or another of these ‘dimensions’ of the Psyche. A strongly developed or rigidly enacted ELDER LEADER mode, for example, may lead one to downplay their more nurturing or playful ‘sides’.

Vacations (I am about to step into Spring Break mode!–may not blog again until April) are good times to step away from primary workaday roles to expand or exercise other facets of your Self. The IDEALIST, for instance, is often associated with travel, and on vacation you can give yourself more freedom to enjoy your more idealistic nature as “a breath of fresh air.”

VOCATIONS also allow us to express a more balanced and integrated Self and Psyche. Hobbies, artistic practices and “callings” bring greater harmony of our “cast of sub-selves” into our core Identity. We benefit by expressing our full multi-dimensional capacities.

I value Julia Cameron’s invitation in THE ARTIST’S WAY for us to give ourselves an “Artist’s Day” at least once per week. Do something ‘out of the box.’ Take a new way home, go to a museum, walk by a lake or river, dream, journal, try some new food; anything to shake you out of any ruts you may be in.

images are from pixabay.com

Forge new pathways of thought and emotion. Expand your horizons.  Let a part of you that you may usually submerge or repress “out.” Experience the FREEDOM to BE all that you are, not just your “responsible” or “dutiful” persona.

I welcome YOUR Comments and STORY!

Gratitude for the Blessings of Spirit—Life Lessons, Part Two

Last Friday when I posted the blog on “Life Lessons,” I actually had a great experience that reinforced another Life Lesson, too.  It has a Christmas theme about it, so I share it today as a positive Holiday message.

I was feeling a bit down that Friday morning. Mainly I was feeling very alone. En route to my regular weekly writing session at a cafe in Castle Rock, Colorado, I stopped along the way at a Village Inn restaurant for a breakfast I could eat  with my low carb diet.

Writing can make me feel lonely some times.  It is a paradox that an activity someone uses to communicate with a wide range of people is accomplished by practical necessity in relative isolation.  Even when you work with a writing partner or share a writing session with a friend working on their own project as I occasionally do, the self-discipline of writing requires the sort of mental focus and concentration that to some extent excludes the world around you.  That’s why I choose to write in a public space when I can; at least there are others in the background environment while I immerse in the ideational process.

So, that Friday morning en route to a solo writing session, I had a fine breakfast and prepared to move on up the road. I asked the waitress for the bill. She smiled and said mysteriously:

“You can forget about it. Someone has already taken care of it.”

I was dumbfounded.  What did she mean?

“Somebody paid for your meal. He didn’t want me to say who he was.”

Oh, my! I asked if I could at least leave a tip but she waved it off, saying he had covered that quite well too.

“Did he have a white beard, with a jolly big belly and a red and white suit?” I joked.

“He did have a beard,” the waitress replied.

images are gratefully from pixabay.com

I left the restaurant feeling thankful for this unexpected gift. It was more than a free meal in mid-December.  It was a reminder from Spirit, I do believe, that I am/we are never truly alone.

 

The Blog

Blogging has become–for now, for me–a primary mode of communicating. Whereas I used to journal profusely, apart from dream journaling, book editing and working on scholarly article projects, I find that when I sit down to “just write,” almost invariably since I started this blog, it is a “post” that emerges.

Blogging is a vital genre for sharing and for self-exploration. Any writer desires to connect with readers, and blogging is a ready form for reaching a general public. I find that when I sit down to write a post, my inner Communicator archetype persona is an Ally, a part of Self that knows what to write about next as an unconscious wellspring. I love to observe this process, to allow the blog-author within myself to gradually unfold and unwind the archetypal and self-discovery/ personal development topical themes around which this blog site is focussed.

 

After 370 posts since November 2014, I am somewhat bemused to see how the blog ‘voice’ has taken on somewhat a life of its own. Hopefully some of you have tried out some of the life mapping tools being presented. I want to thank every and any reader for helping to facilitate this particular Muse!

 

Shifting Attitudes for Better Endings

I began this blog site three months ago around a simple, fun concept of Better Endings. How might we change a movie ending or a story to a more desirable outcome? How might King Kong finally survive, “this time”? That simple concept turns out to be neither so simple nor mundane, after all. If we can change a Story, we can change a Life (Story), especially our own!

So, week by week, we have been applying Better Endings here to topics ranging from better movie endings, to revisionist history, to revising our own personal decisions or to changing our night dreams so we can realize our Dreams.

Somewhere along this journey, already, especially as more of you have been joining in on the adventure, we have discovered that Better Endings is more than a fun concept to flirt with. It is a creative principle we can draw upon to help us move from any one state of affairs, conditions, or fixed perspectives to another, more flexible position that allows us to grow, to expand our reach, and to transform our outlooks to embrace creative solutions for difficult or apparently ‘stuck’ situations.

This week’s topic is Attitudes. Let’s explore the open terrain of how our sometimes mixed or conflicting attitudes can shape or interfere with our experience. We can share stories about how shifting an attitude can transform our view of some aspect of our lives and can potentially transform our own outcomes.

With this week, Better Endings will exceed its first 100 blog posts. At this stage, I want to thank all of you readers and ‘follower’-Readers and contributors to this site for your excellent comments and great posts of your own that you have contributed or have allowed me to re-blog here.

I invite you to share your stories, insights and comments about Attitudes this week. Have you had an experience where you found that just by slightly changing your point of view on a subject, everything about that experience changed?

I am especially thinking about “paired (or, opposing) attitudes” as I look at our topic this week.  I’ll share a list of these tomorrow, but think about it. One attitude always seems to be paired with an opposite point of view.  Some would say this is due to the “duality” we deal with in the nature of human consciousness.

For myself as a starting example, I find lately that I sometimes vacillate between the two attitudes of Impatience and Contentment. If I focus on one end of this spectrum, Impatience, I feel like I will never reach the goals I have set for myself, for example, with a major editing project within which I am now enveloped. However, when I shift my attention to think about how much I gain from immersing in something I love–the very same writing project–I find I am content with where the process is at right Now, in the Moment. Then I wouldn’t change anything, no matter what the results might be, or not, down the road. I realize how fortunate I am, as well, to be writing this blog every day and to have found that there are people, other bloggers and other blogs, and Twitter or Facebook readers, et. al., who actually form a ‘cyber’-community of ardent people sharing ideas and authentic communication!

So, let’s–for any of you who feel like joining in–plant some soul-seeds this week around the topic of Shifting Attitudes. If this topic lights up a story or an example for you, please feel free to share it with us. (You will always keep copyright for your ideas posted in this blog, of course, and I will publish an author’s byline and bio for you with contact information.)

P.S.: I grew up with the Beatles! This week in honor of their 50th Anniversary since their USA appearances, all Quotes of the week are by them, so feel free to send some Beatles lyrics that relate to Better Attitudes.

Better Endings to You! –Linda