New Beginnings, published in "The light" January 2004

How many times have we established New Year's resolutions only to break them? A few weeks down the road?
This is because the very act of establishing a "This year I am going to...." A list is born of the idea that "I haven't been doing things right this year." Have you noticed how fast these decisions fade? A few weeks pass and we are back to self-recrimination, wishing we had a little more will power.

Reclaiming my will and my love for life and myself has been a most rewarding adventure for me. I do not make New Year resolutions anymore. When faced with a choice, I might ask myself: "Is this based on love or on fear?" "Is this going to empower me or sap me down?" "Is this congruent with my values or would I be betraying myself?" when I choose what feels good and is aligned with my highest and best, there is no arguing for or against it in my mind.

Our cells regenerate all the time, so when you think about it, we actually recreate ourselves entirely much faster then we think. Life recreates itself in each moment. Our decisions and our belief systems, which are gelled, lead us to recreate the same things over and over again. When you let go of the control that your belief system has over you, i.e., when you let go of the need to believe yourself, or anyone else for that matter, life becomes much more fluid, happy and lighthearted.

Everything is a beginning when you live in the moment. When you live in the past and with "should have," you carry around a weight too heavy to handle. You live a life steeped in regrets and berate yourself for any choice that you are about to make. It becomes so hard to make a choice and feel good about it. We then live with the insidious fear of what would happen if we
make the wrong choice, such as live in the wrong house or act when Mercury is retrograde.

I remember not too long ago, the voice in my head was so strong that anytime I was faced with a truly creative act, my inner critic would immediately lash out harshly, and nothing creative was accomplished. Even when I started writing this article, my intuition sent me a strong message to finish writing the very same evening. I let myself get caught up in other things and disregarded the message, several days passed and the article was still not finished. Thankfully, my Theta Healing training allowed me to connect up to Source directly to dissolve the blocks and open up the gates of creation once more. Now, my fingers are flying on the keyboard and I feel a slight weight on the top of head, where my crown chakra is connected to the Source of all that is. I am just letting the words come to me, acting as a channel for creation to express itself through me.

If you become detached from the running commentary of your mind and its inner chatter, you would be appalled at what it says about you. How can anything creative be accomplished? How can anyone stick to his or her New Year's resolution to do something new? No wonder people have "writer's block" or drown themselves in food or TV. It is quite understandable. Thinking that you shouldn't have these coping mechanisms only make matters worse, as these thoughts come from the same inner critic.

The mind is not bad; it is just doing what it has been programmed to do. It is an awesome survival tool, trained to always look for the worst possible scenario in order to keep you alive. It doesn't know any better, really. A lot of its programming is subconscious or even multi generational. In such cases, the energetic imprints are so deep that people come to me after they
have been hypnotized, have meditated and affirmed, without having been able to accomplish a permanent shift.

At every moment, we meet life face to face. Unless we are drowning in our inner chatter, our expectations of what we will see blind us to all the nuances of life happening anew. The people we see every day are in fact very different than they were the day before, but we expect them to be the same, to act the same way. They do, because we create our interaction with them based on our expectations. Wait a minute - am I saying that if we let go of our expectations, and allow others to be who they are, interacting with them without fear and judgments, they would behave differently? Here is an example of what I have observed in my own life:

I joke that the entire country of France completely transformed itself in one year: I was born and raised in Paris and I go to visit my family about once a year. On one such visit, I couldn¹t quite figure out what had happened to the notoriously grumpy Parisians. Most everyone I met was cheerful. People would go out of their way to help me, and I started telling all my friends that Paris indeed had drastically transformed. It took me a while to realize that it was I who had done most of the transforming over that past year. By examining my beliefs and cleaning up my emotional body systematically, I had let go of most of my ³buttons² and was now able to meet every one with more love in my heart, without expectations. I wasn¹t reactivating people as much anymore, and therefore the Parisians were able to open up their hearts to me. I didn¹t try to change anyone else. I just took full responsibility for my own life and my own emotional reactions, and started cleaning up all my fear-based programming. Family visits are now a delight for me!

Love is the essence of life, and when we let go of all the rest, life becomes joyous and creative. So before you start on your New Year's resolutions, I wish for you to not believe me and not believe yourself. Move beyond beliefs to the path of your heart.