If you can see the similarity between trying to run around the bases and still keep one foot on home base and your present situation, then this is going to be the most important getting on with life lesson you've ever had.

      This middle aged lady from Canada came to one of my divorce recovery classes and spoke about her adjusting to the loss of her husband who had died of cancer.

She shared her personal experience getting on with her new life alone as a single person.

       She had gone to private counseling sessions she said, attended self help groups like ours and had essentially done everything right, that you should do on the end of a long term relationship.

       But, she said after two years her life was now mediocre and not progressing.

She was stuck in neutral.

       Here's what she told us changed her life:

       "She said one day I was driving somewhere and for some unknown reason I drove into the cemetary

       "I went over to my husbands grave where I had been coming on a regular basis."

       She said I knelt down and for the first time ......

      "I said good by to him."

       "She said it was like an enormous weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

"I had let him go."

       "My life changed completely she said from that day on."

She then went on to relate some of the steps she had taken to a great new start in life.

       Note: We told those coming to our classes for the first time, that it makes no difference if you are going thru the end of a relationship, because of divorce, death or disertion, you will go thru basically the same steps.

      We relate in these lessons, this widows success secrets and others like her.

Poweful techniques they used to get to a good place in their life.

      We pass on to you what worked for these suddenly singled people going thru very similar situations to what you are going thru. Steps in letting go of "what was" and getting on to making a great new part of their life.

       " We did tell the divorced that the widow or widower had a slight advantage: they knew for sure that their last relationship was over, but as you can see they too have to process that fact and get on with life.

       "One more story we ran into on not letting go, that was almost unbelievable, that really brings this up.

       This lady and her three kids were still setting a place at the table for her former husband who had divorced two years before. The thought was he just may come to his senses and return any time.

       The punch line of this story is he had been remarried to someone else for over a year.

       As we said early on here, before you can run around the bases, you are going to have to 100% let go of what was.

      What do you do when your marriage bombs out? You get divorced.

      So what do you do when your single life bombs?

      Some get back together, if they are both bombing as single people, and try it again.

      Some singles in our classes had said they had gone back and retried their marriage again as many as three times.

       Apparently, many not knowing how to make life as a single work and have a happy successful life as a single, conclude, marriage was bad, ..

      but it wasn't this bad, so maybe I should escape from this and see if my ex wants to try being together again.

They go back and try it again.

Then it all comes back, why they split in the first place and they get out again.......

       This is like cutting off the dogs tail one inch at a time so it wont hurt so much.

       Use the meat cleaver approach,

One fell swoop and it is over.

Convince yourself you are now 100% single.

       Cut off ALL contact with your previous relationship for one year. (only necessary kid transactions)

This is an absolute must, or you are wasting your time here.

      You M U S T close the door to the "what was"

      Before you can open the door to your "Exciting" new life as a unique successful happy single person.

________________________________

      We have good news for you.......

       The more devastating the death of a relationship was for you the better.....

       Over the long term the person nearly wiped out makes a lot of changes and moves on to a lot better life.

Those with little upset just keep doing reruns and advance their life very little.

       So if your life building was destroyed nearly to the foundation, you now rebuild your life from the ground up, often entirely different and far better then what was. Often moving to a better place to build your new life..

       If only slightly damaged you just repaint and go back to the same life you had before, - like nothing ever happened.

      When you are in this wiped out stage you reconsider, do I really want to recreate my life to where it was before?

Or is this an opportunity to really grow and change my life.

      Detour Ahead......

      You have this void, you are sure you need someone, someone to help you make these tough life time decisions, scary decisions I have never had to make before.

      Someone to replace the over 100 pounds that have been surgically removed from your life..

Someone to touch and be close to again.....

      You are a relationship addict.

       GOING THRU WITHDRAWAL....

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The Power Of Letting Go

By Rebbie Straubing

When the tightly packed petals of the rosebud let go, the rose blossoms.

I have found that confusion often clouds the subject of letting go. Many dedicated seekers of spiritual truth seem to stumble on this point. We all let go naturally to a certain extent. We let go and allow life force to flow. We release our hold and let the divine forces act in our lives. Good always comes from this.

We all resist it, too. We try to control everything. We attempt to orchestrate the divine unfolding from our own personal point of view. Like a fish trying to control the tide, we stress and strain in an attempt to use our muscles to keep life on track. We seem to think it is our job to keep the planets spinning. We try to control the motives of other people. We try to run life the way we think it should be run. Frustration and fatigue usually come from this.

"Don't Let Go!"

In order to disperse some of the confusion about letting go, let's see what's at the bottom of it. Let's look first at why it is so appealing to cling to our efforts to control everything. Everyone knows that if you are holding something precious and you let go, it will drop and possibly break. Gravity has us well trained. You will often hear the cry, "Don't let go!" It is the motto of the physical world and it is a valuable dictum in its realm. If you are carrying a beautiful, handmade ceramic bowl that a dear friend crafted just for you and you "let go," gravity will step in before you can achieve enlightenment and carry you into sadness as you suffer the loss of your bowl.

On the mental level we feel we must hold everything carefully in our minds or chaos will ensue. The grocery list, the meetings, the work to be done, the babysitter's phone number. The list is endless and we hold on tenaciously with the muscles of our minds. In the mental realm, we fear chaos will get us if we don't keep our minds tightly packed.

The Dilemma

So we can see why we don't think it's a very good idea to let go. It seems like it will give us broken bowls, missed appointments and a generally chaotic life if we let go. And yet, we have all heard the very popular phrase "Let go and let God." Similarly, Abraham talks convincingly about the Art of Allowing. In another idiom, Buddhist teachings expose the problem of grasping. We again see the same principle in the teachings of the Science of Mind in the essential stage of prayer marked by release. In fact, it seems most spiritual teachings not only mention, but emphasize the importance of letting go. Is it that they want us to break all our bowls?

No. It is something mystical and profound that they are teaching us. But as long as we keep testing the teachings by dropping bowls and convincing ourselves to "hold on tight," we will never learn the lesson.

Faith in Something Greater

The letting go lesson has nothing to do with bowls and phone numbers. It defies gravity and entropy. The message encoded in the words "let go" is one of trust. When we let go, we have faith that the planets will continue to spin in their orbits without our help.

When we let go we honor the great and infinite layers of organization that hold the universe together.

By joyously letting go, we find that gravity has an invisible partner. And as reliable as gravity is when it comes to bringing things to the earth, its partner is as reliable in bringing good outcomes. It is a force, greater than us, acting whether we are aware of it or not. It acts when we hold on and when we let go. It acts when we are alert and when we are asleep. This force is always moving things in the direction of the greatest good. It is moving "heaven and earth" for the fulfillment of your heart's desire. It is answering your prayers without ceasing. It is, like gravity, tireless in its enthusiastic embrace of its role in the scheme of things.

When we let go of the bowl, gravity gets hold of it and takes it to the ground. When we let go of our dreams and desires, this other tremendous force comes in like a wind. It carries our dreams to fulfillment. It guides our hands, moves our thoughts, leads us to greater and greater fulfillment.

Letting go does not mean giving up. The lesson is not one of learning to live a meager life, satisfied with crumbs. Letting go means, rather than trying to blow in your sails, let the wind carry you and see how far you go. It means rather than trying to manipulate others, enjoy them just as they are and be amazed at how their beauty shines through. It means rather than trying to control all outcomes, make it your work to open the pathways for the energy to flow and see how magnificently your dreams take form. © 2004 Rebbie Straubing

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The first phase of coming apart we call the:

Disillusionment stage.

You were always fairly sure that you had married the right person and. now you have decided or are about to decide that the marriage was a mistake, that this wasn't really Mr. or Ms. Right after all.

Previously you had been gathering evidence that this was Mr. or Ms. Right and you held out this gathered evidence to friends and relatives justifying your decision about your marriage.

Now you are doing the opposite--gathering evidence that this is Mr. or Ms Wrong, to prove it to others and yourself.

Things in the marriage have been bad and the trend is not getting better but everything seems to be getting worse.

You had been looking forward to always being happy in this relationship and now you are saying, is this all there is?

There must be more to life than this.

You develop a sense of helplessness and hopelessness.

Sometimes you go to a marriage counselor at this point and there is a slight chance the marriage counselor might help put you both back into the marriage.

Usually by the time you arrive at the marriage counselors one has already made the decision and has gathered enough evidence to prove to themselves that this marriage has died, is no good and they must get out.

The counseling and the marriage in general are just not getting anywhere.

You bottle up things rather than fight them out and when you do store up enough and explode you do not fight constructively.

You tear each other down, chipping away at the marriage and destroying each other bit by bit.

You become emotionally deprived and you no longer, fill each others' needs.

You get in crazy making situations.

An example would be-- -your spouse says "you know that I love you" and at the same time is fooling around with other people,

Your mental computer can not handle this type of double contrary input and the whole thing is driving you crazy.

You decide that the only hope for any type of life for you worth living is to get out.

There is no future for me here."

You have a great deal of anger at your spouse for not living up to your expectations whatever they were,

You are angry at yourself and your spouse that you could not make it last when it was 'supposed to last.

You decide, I am going to live before I die and this just is not living, so you make the big decision.

You make the decision to get divorced for the same reason you make the decision to get married,

You feel that it offers hope for a better life.

You still feel a sense of general hopelessness but decide that you have to do something and anything will be better than this.

You have a feeling that you just don't care what happens but this marriage definitely is not it.

You have been saving brown stamps.

Negatives about your marriage.

You have collected so many that you can now turn them in for a divorce.

You make the spouse an ogre to your friends and, yourself, enough to justify your getting out.

It happens you actually physically separate.

You enter a bewilderment period. Is this really happening to me?

No matter how you looked forward to and no matter what a relief it is, you are still somewhat shocked when it happens.

You now enter an emotional yoyo.

A roller coaster of mixed feeling.

Elated that it's over but you are miserable alone.

Next:

A period of great trauma.

You become under stress for these reasons:

• 1. You are entering unknown or unfamiliar territory.
• 2. You go through withdrawal pains from not being able to do what you have always done,
• 3. Like a drug addict you have a painful withdrawal period to go through.
• 4. You do everything now on manual (mental process instead of doing them automatically, subconsciously.
• 5. You have to think about everything you do because your life style has changed so much you cannot do it automatically yet.

It uses much more energy, it has physical manifestations and you just plain overload' your computer.

• Now you enter the WAITING Stage,
  like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

You wait to hear from your ex.

You want to make contact, even have a fight, anything.

You get into legal hassles, then you wait for something to happen.

You wait for new people to enter your life.

You wait for a new job.

You go through a period of grief not unlike a widow or widower.

You try to let go of yesterday or what might have been.

You try to get over your anger.

You eventually give up on "if only."

You eventually learn to stop rehashing (regurgitating) the past and stop worrying about the future and gradually you are learning how to make today a great day.

You get ready to let go and realize you have to say some final goodbyes before you are really ready for some new hellos.

You have already passed the bottom of the "waiting" miserable stage.

You start gaining a new identity.

You are no longer a part of something, you are a total something.

You start to regain a new self-esteem and you start to let go of the "I am divorced and I am a failure" syndrome.

You drop that idea that no one will ever like you again.

You decide that maybe you are not as defective as you thought you were.

You decide to walk out of the scrap pile of human debris on your own.

Y ou do some experimenting and testing to find what is right for you.

You start to decide on what type of new life you want.

You start to live again and then move on to living a better life than you have ever lived before.

One entirely of your own choosing.

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2-5-06

CHOICE

 by: Louise LeBrun & Gwen McCauley

The toughest part of life - whether personal or professional - is making the right choices. We teach our children that smart choices make for successful lives. Is that just empty rhetoric? Or do we really know how to make those smart choices for ourselves …at work and at home.

In the cause/effect equation of life, cause is a more powerful place to stand. For many of us, our experience of work is that we are at the effect of (or victim to) the system. Being at the effect of something implies that we are without the capacity to choose; without the ability to cause something to take place and are at the mercy of the choice someone else has made. The capacity to choose implies the presence of power. And yet, the power is not in the choice itself but in the process of the choosing.

The power does not reside in the end result of the choice but in the ability to choose again, and again, and again …allowing each subsequent choice to reflect new information, new experience and new wisdom. We sometimes make choices and then believe that we must now lie forever with that choice; that we cannot change our minds and choose again, or choose differently. And yet, movement is a sign of life. Each subsequent choice allows for the movement that is required in order for us to get on with our lives; to grow; to create new things to experience. Without movement, there is no indication of the presence of life. Without movement things eventually die. With the power of choice comes the experience of creating. With the power of conscious choice comes the awareness that we have always been creating - and can choose to create again and restructure our worlds.

The key to living at cause is noticing our response and deciding whether it gives us power or keeps us victims. When I think, "My team is making me do things I hate" "My boss is making me work too much overtime", and so on, I ask myself: how does being a victim serve me? What rule do I have that says I have no choice? What responsibility am I avoiding? Who would I become if I spoke my truth about this?

More choice begins by noticing what I say that gives power to others. I write those down. Then I practice responses that let me live at cause …and I notice the fear that brings up.

Dr. Victor Frankl survived the Nazi death camps by discovering that he ultimately had choice in his emotional response to what was done to him. Do you or I have any less choice?

This article was originally published in Australian Business Magazine, October 2001 issue. You may reproduce it in its entirety with appropriate acknowledgement of the authors.

 http://www.wel-systems.com/aritcles/choice.htm

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