Truth, owned and claimed, inhaled and exhaled, invites comfort's expansion into more of itself and discomfort's release of itself. Hey, 'discomfort', you are now free to leave your what you thought was your entitlement, your real estate, behind. Whose original opinion did you choose to rely upon, anyway? Was it ever naturally yours?

Truth, denied and avoided, sees breathing shortened, curtailed and, ultimately, stopped; When we chose, heels dug into the earth for dear life, to die to be right... well, we invite discomfort to always, in all ways, find it's traction, there. Ultimately, that traction, can dissolve into quick sand.

So, what does an opinion have to do with any of this?  Well, here are some questions to ask:

How do I authentically feel, inside, about what I am hearing? What gets triggered in my body? Am I breathing? When I own the truth of my feelings about it all, do i insist on adding extra locks to an area, where there is no door in site? Alternatively, can I allow myself to see that a door does exist... and that it can open to reveal another possibility? 

In summary, the one thing I know is that no one can be 'right' for me about what I hold as 'right' and true for myself. In the same way, neither can I be 'right' for another about what she holds as 'right' and true for herself. My reality is MY reality. Yours is YOURS. In my experience, most of us have metaphorically died, time and time again, to be 'right' about others, so they cannot be 'right' for themselves. We live polarized lives. It is exhausting and it is sad. Still, dying to be 'right' about 'it' all, we still go there, attempting to bring some order to that which we do not understand. So, I ask you, What is there to understand? 

How could our lives be different, if we were to simply take a breath, let go and let god? Your willing choice to become your own next moment for the big exhale in/of your life, will become your next expansive inspiration, oxygenating an an already emerging future; it can't not be that way; metaphorically - and, indeed, in the most literal of terms - THAT, biochemically, is how we breathe ourselves; the exhale invites the next inhale. THAT is how we create our personal realities.  

On one of our regular road trips in the last couple of years, a friend presented me with this hypothesis (as we were entertaining Siri’s back roads travel advice, yet overriding this form of artificial intelligence by organic impulse/intuition): Sheila, if you had found yourself with amnesia and had had to set out to re-create your life, how would it have been different and what would you have created? I said to her, That’s a hard one; I have no reference points for that. And, she reminded me that THAT was the point. Amnesia has no reference points. And so, I knew immediately, what my life would have looked like. 

No reference points. Like the back roads we were travelling on, we had no historical reference points to guide our choices for where we were driving; what we knew in each moment, however, was an intention. We were taking an unknown - yet intuitively known - route and choosing the turns, by feel and by deep and internal knowing… leaving Siri scrambling to catch up to us. 

Our beliefs are the gatekeepers to our thoughts; our thoughts become our things, our realities, our lives. For our realities to transform, a continuing pattern interrupt to how we are thinking about our lives and our living is essential. It demands knowing that, not only do we have choice, a very different choice is critical to our evolution and to our well being. When we consciously choose to take time to actively inhale our lives into the very cells of our bodies/our beings and to authentically exhale our unique experiences into our worlds, we magically invite the collapse of all that we have ever held as true in our realities about who and what we are as human beings; lies inculcated as truth, yet incontestably untrue. We ARE NOT our bodies.

It is essential, I believe, that we - meaning you and me and everyone the world over - remember that we are HERE (meaning on planet earth) because each of us is and has IMPACT. There is nothing we need do but to take a huge inhale followed by a long, resonant exhale, and to choose to BE our magnificent Selves and to speak the truth of our experience, warts and all. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Sounds easy. I look outside of me and I ask myself, Why, then, would we continue to be so hard on ourselves?