Beauty in the mind breathes life into the world

As you embrace this beautiful new day of your life, look around you at the beauty in you and everything else?  

Can you see how beautiful and proud you are?  Look again, and again and again, until you can see it. Look as far and wide within your gorgeous Self until you find it. On your way to work this morning, did you see the flowers outside or did you see the litter, the billboards, the traffic?  Did you growl at the back-up on the expressway to work, or did you think you could take a deep breath and listen to that lovely song you were listening to the other day on the CD player? Did you take a moment to pray, to whisper a thought of thanks for this moment you are alive in?

When you find something beautiful (beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  It is what you say it is)  focus on it, allow it to grow and expand in your awareness. Allow yourself to see nothing but the beauty.  The interesting thing about this is what you focus on, persists and grows and gains and blooms.  Your concentration on something is like giving water to a thirsty plant.  If you watch, you'll see it actually perk up. 

This is true for what you want as well as what you don't want. If you keep thinking about what you don't want, it shows up more and more in your life.  If you keep thinking about something you don't like about your body, your looks, even the behavior of your spouse or child, what you focus on will increase.  Watch your thoughts.  Where do they turn to? 

If you focus on what you love about yourself, about your body, your job, your home, that image will come into focus and what you are trying to shift away from, will begin to fade.  Our outside reality is a reflection of our interior one.  So, if you think the world is a mess, it means that our minds are dreaming this up, it's what we're thinking about.  Sadly, I think we were taught to think in ways that created it in the first place. Now we have to change our collective worldview. If each one of us, like poppies in the garden, grew big and tall, whole and empowered, one by one, then is it possible the whole world would become a more beautiful place?

If you look around your life and think its not what you want, it may be falling short in one area or another, do you think about the shortfall, focus on what you don't like or don't want or about what you would like it to be? Are you an editor or a writer of your life?  If your life is your art, let's say, a beautiful Michaelangelo sculpture,  would you look at the big lump of marble before you begin to sculpt and be critical of it for being a big lump of marble? No, you see something beautiful in your mind and as you begin to bring it into focus, through sculpting the marble, it appears.

Your life can be like that.  Can you step back from being critical of yourself and look at all that you've done that you're happy about.  If there's stuff in your life you're not happy about, forgive yourself, and forget it.  Highlight, then delete it.  Focus on what you like about yourself and most of all on your dreams for your life.  Sometimes we forget that we are artists of our life and we can brighten the pallet, change the colors,  focus on the sunrise or sunset at the beach.  Erase the litter and see the beauty.  In fact, always see the beauty. I truly believe we can train our minds to do this.

When you look for the beauty, you will find it and you will increase its presence in your life by the simple act of observing it, seeing all of it and allowing it to fill the space, fill your mind, lift you into another space.  Beauty has a kind of life of its own.  Now, apply that perception style to your friends, spouse or lover.  See their beauty, as you look past outer appearances or at least consider what those outer appearances are saying about the occupant within. Outer appearances may reflect something about the person's state of being so it might be of value to at least take notice. Maybe appearances are like the front porch to the house.  Is it littered with old beer bottles and garbage, or does it have flowers and a wreath and a bench to sit on to take off your boots?  Some invite you in, some ask you to keep on walking past.  Same is true of people.

See the beauty in yourself.  What do your appearances say about you.  Do you invite others to engage in conversation and friendship with you, or do you send them away?  Do you even think about this?  Do you see yourself as beautiful (spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, relationally - as well as physically)?  If you use self deprecating language about yourself as in, "I'm just a college student," or "just an overweight middle aged guy who drinks too much beer and really should get to the gym a couple times a week" or whatever you are telling yourself, you are programming yourself to be just that.  You are focusing on the "justness" of who you have been told you are.  You're seeing the fence around the garden, not the garden. 

When you admit and invite beauty into your life, you are adding more life to your life.  To use some New Age language, you are upping the vibration of your life, raising your chi.  You are increasing your voltage.  You are increasing your own spiritual power to bring what you always dreamed of into reality.  There are far too many naysayers in your life and in our world.  They can't all be shot, shut down, put in jail, rather they can be ignored.  I don't mean shunned.  I mean ignored.  Water the flowers, feed them, see them, and they will grow.  

Yes. pluck the weeds (never use any weed killing chemical, please) Feed the flowers.  Praise your child for what he or she is doing that you approve of, and then maybe you won't need to punish him or her for what you don't like. I think if we can redirect our children's vision, also, will help them in the long run.  I see a new world, one without judgment or punishment, built around praise, affirmation, patience and love.  Do the same with your employees. Try to raise you child's voltage also.  If you do this with your employees, you'll have a happier team and better outcomes. Teach them this. Love them, as you would water the flowers.  We can turn our children into flowers, rather than weeds.  

Can you see how we can take this simple little thought and change the world?  


Alleluia!


P.S. This does NOT mean that we should pretend that what is happening, isn't.  This isn't some delusional trick into collective denial.  This is an invitation to see a beautiful world, a beautiful planet, your life more beautiful, and invite that vision to expand and come into existence, as well as cleaning up the environment and simplifying our lives into a more innocent existence, without so much stuff. If we focus on the flowers, they may just take over the garden, crowding out the weeds.  Do you water your weeds?  or your flowers.  You get what I mean.  This may ask you to download the optimist program from your brain's hard drive.