Basic Missions

Last night I watched the New Orleans Saints acutally win the Super Bowl. Unfortunately as much as I enjoyed myself and I did. I missed my Dad. My dad played ball for a while and was a fabulous quaterback he hold many of the records that may have been broken in the Super Bowl last night we are not sure yet. He holds the record for the longest run in Louisiana football history for a touchdown by a quarter back and the longest pass ever recieved and run in for a touch down. And several other minor records. This morning he will be taking a tons of radio calls on how he saw the game and what he feels like being almost 75 and holding the records for so long. He is entertaining and gregarious and full of information but not full of himself. So I am sure he will be charming and have a ball. All of this hulabablu got me thinking… how have we as a family and we as a nation learned to handle failure. When you are striving for success and working hard at anything, do you have the ability to bounce after you are shot down, knocked down or knocked out?                                                                                                                                                                          

 As a nation we have not been taught how to fail with grace and know that nothing is failure unless we quit. Nothing. I noticed on last night’s game that once the clock hit forty seconds and the Colt’s had no way of winning they all just stopped the game. Well that is not good sportsmanship, children watching cannot be  taught you just quit. But it is a common thought now days. In order to begin over you must finished what you started. So this led me to thinking about the fourth lesson in Manifesting Miracles and how we respond to failure.  You receive a ton of accolade just because you win at something. But it doesn’t always mean you learned the most or you will retain the most life lessons. I love football. And no matter how much I wanted the Saints to win Peyton Manning played damn good football and if he would have stayed in that game last night the Colts just might have won. But he didn’t. They also gave the most valuable player of the night to Bree’s he won the game so enjoy. But who played the hardest and who gave that game the push Peyton. I bet we see him in another Superbowl and this time he won’t sit out two quaters he is magic out on that field. Here is my point. In football like in life sometimes we learn the most out of our fears or our failures. Did the Colts fail last night.. not on your life. The played one hell of a game. They didn’t win but they were great. Now what can we learn from them.

 First we need to pause and access our failures, lick our wounds and re-group. What have we learned in the past six weeks of the new year that can lead us to victory in our personal Superbowl challenges. What have we done that sunk our efforts? In that vision notebook it would be a good time to re-group see where things are going well and where things can be improved upon. Are we sitting on the sidelines afraid of failure or injury or illness getting in the way of what we want for our lives?  I know I have procrastinated a few challenges over little stupid things. Why have I not shot the first pilot of Callie Cooks! for our local station the time is paid for and the means and ability are there. The truth ten pounds… now is that so stupid. I want to be my skinny self on the new cooking and lifetime show.. What if Julia Child heaven help her was afraid to look less than perfect on t.v.  we would have no French Chef, she would have stopped her own progress. I have not advertised BasicMissons as much as I should and I have been overwhelmed with life which is a form of procrastination and not posted on Callie Cooks! as I should have. So I haven’t the readership I should nor the number I should. When BasicMissins began it had high readership and much higher hits. So I am re-building I took my eye off the prize and stood back from  the internet for a while to help folks who came thru the missions. I have learned a lot of valuable lessons in how I have lived my life since opening the mission and now turning it into a global initiative for change. So I do not regret my decisions.  It just means I must gather up both victories and failures and reboot.

The question is how are you letting life get in your way.. are your fears of failure stopping you. Our most celebrated people on the planet have failed for more than they have suceeded so don’t get down when something goes array. I learned early in cooking school that learning from your mistakes and why something fails is as important as learning from your victories..so let”s get moving.

My new saying will be… I can do anything and the Saint’s won the Superbowl for the next year.  Congratulations Saints and thanks for the lesson in perseverance against all adversity. And as a native Louisiana .. you did a damn fine job!!!  And Hell did not freeze over!

So Go Saints and Go Friends… the year is young and we have not yet begun to fight.

Callie

Tags: Colts, family, football, learning, life lessons., manifesting, miracles, practice, reboot, Saints, winning

     Two different thoughts. Two different actions. But are they really deeply connected?

     In several books of Religions, in several places, each book says something like this (and remember that right now I’m NOT quoting any of them, only paraphrasing), take care of the temple which holds your soul. In other words, take care of your body, it seems that the way to feed and take care of your soul is to study your Creator, Pray, Listen, and Do for yourself and others. The way to take care of your body is to be healthy – eat correctly (which I’ll talk more about in a later post), exercise (walk, ride your bicycle, weight lift, play a sport or two – get your heart rate up for at least 20 minutes per day and play a sport or two. Taking care of yourself in Spirit AND in Body can be both enjoyabale and quite tasty (have you tried any of Callie’s recipes yet? I have, and I’m telling you right now that eating a healthy diet is delicious, and you don’t even have to miss out on great deserts).

     The reason for these things being so important is simple, you never want to come down with any awful disease (or if you already have, you’ll want to have the stregnth to fight it). In the Christian Bible, for example, there are many rules about what foods that a person should and should not eat. During this time, the people didn’t know how to cook certain foods correctly, so as not to get sick, so many animals with cloven hooves were forbidden to eat. It was God’s way of taking care of the health of His people. Exercise wasn’t necessary until later, when people began to learn how to not have to work in the fields so hard, and other ways had to be found to keep your body in shape and your heart healthy. And, as time went by, we found that things such as lead in paint, and drinking out of tin containers were also killers to your body.

     Human kind has always had a facsination with their relationship with their Maker. Inter reflection, prayer, meditation and a certain amount of kindness to your fellow man (if you weren’t at war with them), always seemed to be a very important part of your life.

     In today’s world, we’ve seemed to start to move away from these things.  Come on, we’ve got to be honest with ourselves. Yes we have gyms, but we go to the gyms to work out for 45 minutes, then we spene 3 hours eating junk food, sitting on the sofa watching sports programs. We keep looking for things that make things simpler for us in our everyday lives. I’d be willing to bet that at least half of the people who live in the U.S. have forgotten how to put up and preserve foods for ourselves, and would do a fairly poor job if we were asked to put in a garden.

     The point that I am trying to make is simple…we as a people have become lazy in many important ways. Yes, its very impressive that I can type on this computer and reach so many readers, and I am so greatful that you are reading what I feel is important and have to write. But, I would love to see all of us use this growth of information at our fingertips to look at some of the old ways of doing things, you never know when we may need that information, and try to find a great workout program (that you get approved by your doctor), get some good information on nutrition and how to keep your body balanced by the way you eat, get some good recipes, find some friends and get them all together to enjoy these things with you.

     If you simply do these things, I guarantee that you will start having more energy, enjoying yourself more often, laughing a lot more, and generally have a better overall life. I even bet you’ll start wanting to get closer to your Maker as your life grows in a more healthy and happier way.

My Blessings to All of You! Duncan

Of course, everyone knows how to give. It makes us feel good to help other people and to give to those that we love and watch the smiles on thier faces. We love the time when we watch our loved ones receive our gifts  escpeically children at christmas and on birthdays because there excitment is uncontaineable!!.We lose so much when we grow up. Like how to have that uncontainable excitement when you recieve a surprise.  There are other things that we lose as we grow up  that we really need to try to get back as adults. One of those things is to be a graceful receiver. You see a dear dear friend of mine Don Bryan told me one time that I needed to learn to receive. That I had no trouble giving but I had a lot of trouble receiving. Everyone knows what it feels like at christmas time to sit around and feel a bit uncomfortable as everyone watches you unwrap your gifts. I use to prefer for everyone to tear into there gifts  everyone at one time and thank each other as we went along! So that no one would stare while I opened my gifts even though I loved them all. As Callie has told you many times before, I have been sick for quite some time. I have been confined to a wheelchair for years at a time and instead of asking for help I invented ways of doing things like getting up stairs by myself even if that meant going up each step on my butt and dragging my wheelchair behind me. Don had had enough, he pulled me to the side and he said “Why won’t you let other people bless you. Belive me they need it! It makes people feel good to help others. There is a difference between taking advantage of people and letting others help you when you truely need it: and you know the difference. There is nothing wrong with being proud of your accomplishments  but there is something wrong with being to proud to let others help you when you need help.” As Don told me that day, giving is fun and it makes you feel good but if you don’t allow others to give to you, you are taking away thier chance of feeling good and doing good for others. Sometimes all people have is the ability to give of themselves at a given moment and because of pride you take that away from them. When you look at things that way, letting others help you when you really need it can make you feel just as good as giving to others, when they really need it. After that speech I realized how guilty I was of being to proud to accept help and I felt ashamed.  I promised myself that I would let others bless me when I could as my gift to enable them the same joy that I get when I get to help others. It doesn’t have to be anything big something as small as opening the door for someone when their hands are full or picking up something someone dropped can change someones day. The reverse is also true. Sometimes we need to be the receipant.  That is all it takes! Opening yourself up and not feeling guilt over help can send a wave of joyful giving and you begin to see a circle of giving in life. Everyone learns and is able to love. So open your heart and do both… give and receive. We are blessed so that we may bless others but the opposite is true. Be a graceful receiver it is an art. 

Peace and Love,

Duncan Wheeler

Hello World.

Me, Cancer Free!

If you don’t know me my name is Callie Broussard-Wheeler and I am a kick-ass take no prisoners cancer survivor and I want you to be one too!

Eight years ago on my husband’s birthday I had gone to the emergency room after a fall at a puppy training class. What the doctors found was a 27 inch tumor in my left femur. It turned out to be encapsulated bone marrow cancer. I had my left femur removed and tons of chemo and then hit the natural method of holistic healing. I have had reoccurances in my lungs and lymh nodes and  cervix but blessedly, I am cancer free as I call it; cancer unrepsonsive as the doctors call it. But for all intents and purposes I am cancer free. I am alive. I have two feet and two strong little fat legs that do yoga, ride a bike and walk about seven miles a day. I swore after the miserable year of laying in bed as the jibberjacked scaffoling “set” in my leg. (This was a compromise on my doctors part because his only suggestion was remove the leg.) I have news for you it takes two feet to wear your Jimmy Choo’s and I was keeping mine. So we found a way all be it not perfect way for me to keep my leg. He got to keep the sexy tumor and we parted company.

Today, I thought would be a perfect day to share something with you. First of all on a personal note, my dad has been sick and all his biopsies came back completely negative today. So what a fitting day to talk to you about your health. I have to say that at times I can be a hippocrite about this subject. Although I pound into all my loved ones and total strangers to get complete physicals, mammograms,prostrate tests, and be viligent…I procrastinate my scans from fear from  January until Febuary every year. So this month is my month to get checked. But I know that all is clear. I have never been more well or more aware of my health. Before I was a cancer survivor; I had a healthy life despite a few allergies and a migraine a month. But never before have I looked into the mirror and seen a glow.. today my skin is clear, my body is in good shape, my mind is stimulated and not dulled down and over-chemicalized by the food I eat. I am detoxed and on a mission to detox you. I want you to sleep eight hours, have a great day at work, keep you body and wieght in balance and stop posioning yourself. But before you can do that you need to understand how blessed you are to be alive and begin treating your body as a temple. God did not intend for us to eat crap and I have never seen a processed marshmellow growing on a tree. If we eat animal products they should be free range and organic and have fed on organic produce and fed. That is hard to know. So stop the meat cycle. We have to remember if we eat them we are also eating all the garbage they were fed… the cycle goes on.

We as a culture   wedo not realize we are on the verge of a world wide cancer epidemic. I bet everyone of you know someone with cancer. Next year it is said by statistics from the American Cancer Foundation that Cancer will be the number one killer for people between the ages of 25-45, and the number one health killer period. Does that get your attention. It should.. so let’s all band together to stop this killer.

Here are some simple things you can do to change your life and your health. Before I get to this list I am not talking about tobacco.. you know the answer there so do the  right thing.. moving on……….

First eat mostly green whole foods… meaning all the veggies you can pack in..make sure they are not canned or processed. Make sure you eat one salad a day and one meal with three different veggies on the plate a day…

Stop eating red meat.. you have heard it before but I will say it again. Stop.. it is processed and polluted and not healthy for your heart or your cells. Stop drinking milk or animal milk in any form it is bad for you. The only animal meant to drink cows milk is a calf. A calf is meant to go from 35 pounds at birth to 200 at weaning you are not.

Eat good fats… avacado, coconut, fish oils,flax seeds, olive oil, raw nuts…

Lay off the soy. This is a debate that is not settled but soy has phytoestrogens in it.. that means that it supplies a healthy body not lacking in estrogen more. This is the same thing breast cancer feeds on so don;t give estrogen based cancers a chance to take hold.

Work out daily..yes even if you are shot to shit.. move for twenty to thirty minutes to ensure digestion and move the food throughout your system and take care of getting your heart moving.

Sleep. Figure it out. Sleep helps our body rebuild itself. We cannot run on three hours a night or six.

Eliminate all Sugar from your diet.. one cancer cell will feed on one sugar molecule and tripe in size in twelve hours. Now expand that throughout a body- YIKES!  All sugars contribute or cause all sorts of health problems. If you eat a sugar do so in a form of complex carbohydrates that release slowly and don’t give you sugar spikes. Some carbs like rich brown rice, bulgar wheat and sprouted breads are healthy and although they contain sugar it is a simple unprocessed low glycemic index food.  And don’t eat that damn no carb bread.. it is not food. Get sprouted breads and living breads and eat those. Yes, Momma your diabetes will handle the carb count. (I love you)

Meditate or Pray daily. Find yourself some me o’clock time and make it work. Praying transforms the body and heals.. ask a yogi.

Ok..and go get checked and after the check-up comes out perfect and thankfully so pull out your check book and send a donation to Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong Foundation, The American Cancer Society, BasicMissions take a minute and change the world.

Once you have done that.. encourage, nag, irritate and navigate all your family member to get checked, not to ignore pap smears that are less than perfect and do those exams..breast and skin monthly. Don’t become a statistic.

And all you survivors out there: reach out to the newly diagnosed and lend a shoulder, a tissue a vegan cook book. Make a difference you lived because someone made a difference before you pay it forward.

And for the newly diagnosised. First make this a make my life better moment. It feels like crap it is terrifying but you are not your cancer! Your body has a few rebellious cells and mostly healthy ones.. fuel the healthy ones and focus on those. If you need a friend write me here. I will walk thru it with you. I walk it daily.  God Willing you will come out healed. Maybe not cured… but healed can be better. Healed means whatever happens in our lives we can walk thru it with an open mind and the assurance that we can empower ourselves to be our own best advocate, listen to our bodies, heal our temple and move past it all.  We can break the power cancer has on the world and begin to eliminate the need for that hateful little word. We are stronger and we can change the world with thru one loved person at a time.

Ok… folks.. sermon over.. get to living and say a prayer of thanks if your not sick and a prayer for those who are. Make today the DO OVER POINT  in your life.

I kicked cancers ass and lived to tell about it so can you.

Much love. Stay Strong.

Callie

Hi Friends,

Sometimes in life you realize that “this ain’t gonna be easy” as ol’Duncan would say. I have been working hard on this week’s lesson and the week’s webinar and unfortunately the webinar will have to wait. I cannot work the gizmo. So my apologies and I will announce the date for the first webinar soon. Thank you all for all the inquires and the participation! I am greatly touched. I am so frustrated. I had a list of how to’s and I am just not doing it right. So onward and upward right. I am writing out this lesson with the hope that we will keep moving on our journey in manifesting miracles in our life.

This weekend has been trying for me but it has also taught me some very valuable life lessons. In the last post I talked a bit about a clogged toliet well… that is going to be the jumping off point for our lesson tonight. Have you ever felt like shit literally is coming at you from all sides. All week long I had that saying in my brain and guess what folks…. I manifested a ton of it. Since we moved into our lovely cottage we have noticed some pecularatities with the plumbing. Since I do home inspections on the side and Duncan is an engineer we have noticed that the pipes were a bit small and sinks and toliets got clogged easily. After paying the plumber and the home owners insurance 160 bucks I decided to take matters into my own hands and by Saturday I was feeling like I had a life over running with shit. Here is the run down. The toliet was broken. Saatchi had managed to put her doodles directly under my solar powered clothes dryer… hehe..( clothesline) and I was worried about money..  financial shit was hitting the fan. My insurance carrier raised my insurance deductibles up to a small fortune and I knew that for my monthly meds I would be paying out the eqivalent of a house note to get my prescriptions out of hock. Come to find out, all of this was a lesson in “life colonics.. getting the shit moving!”

So, Saturday morning after pouring tons of sulfric acid in the toliet and  being determined not to call a plummer; I googled my problem and found the answer. I popped down to my very cool old fashioned hardware store and got some advice from another cancer warrior and hero and got down to buisness. Off came the toliet, and in went the snake, out came the snake and poo and in went the acid mix. While this sat and marinated I went to cleaning and checking the toliet and making sure it was sparkling clean and my carpet outside the bathroom never got messy or wet. Note this little victory because plummer always mess the carpet up and make a mess… this way I was happy and my ocd about cleanliness was fine.  When the time came I decided it was  to put the toliet back on. Another call to cancer warrior number one and he told me exactly how to replace the toliet and we would be back in buisess. Now folks this is literally moving the poo. So, I did it. My back ached my house smelled and my husband was a wreck because he had a major seizure and couldn’t help me. So like the good husband he is he was guilt ridden and would have rather been anywhere else but listening to me do this work. I have to say smells and back aches aside, I had a ball. When I was finished and flushed the little beauty: I was so thrilled. So what does this have to do with manifesting miracles. Everything.

When you are broke and have a problem the best thing you can do is roll up your sleves and get to work. I got that plumming repaired for 19 bucks. I picked up the dog poo. I prayed and meditated on the prescription bill the called and asked the pharmacist to work with me and told him my budget. Today after buying my meds, I was 23 bucks under budget and got all those glorious anti-cancer drugs I have to take. So it all worked. Now, if I would have sat here and moped around about the toliet and let the poo pile up and not called the pharmacist… I would be up to my knees in shit. So I manifested my own miracles by providing the work and the muscle and the brain power so the Universe to get the shit moving. I am looking forward to taking on each problem I have now with a new and renewed sense of  pride and determination. If I can clean out my pipes and learn to tar a roof in 60 days so maybe I can do anything I set my mind to.

The point is, how often in life do we wait and pray for the answer to come to us. Using our resources unwisely and not thinking of the end game. We wait for a rescue in life. We are trained to do that. Guess what no one is coming. You are it. Yes, your mate will love you and help you through life but even they may one day be sick for a time or out of town. The Universal truth that took me years to learn is putting your back and brain into your dreams and desires will change you life. Having dreams and desire will cause you great misery if you do nothing to achieve them.

If you knew that at the end of a three month period that you would not have to buy groceries for six months.. except for tolietries… but.. if your like me and struggle with pain issues would you work an hour or two a day on making a garden and then make sure it was tended. This was you could pocket 800 dollars a month and share with those less fortunate or your friends and family or would you moan that your back hurts, your legs are weak your feet have bone spurs. Everyone hurts but if you sit all day you will have nothing to show for that sitting but saddness. Now if you are in a chair like Duncan, he does not just dream of getting his books written he writes them. He has days when he cannot hold his eyes open but those are important too. Everyone needs rest at a different rate depending on your health.. but don’t let the poo in life and a bad attitude sink your ship. Use your body and your mind to get moving and make those dreams happen and yes unfortunately sometimes we have to deal with the shit in life. But who doesn’t!

I have a friend who is always bemoaning her circumstances. She makes a good, well- very good living. But she is not rich. But…. both of our father’s are. We have both decided to make our own lives and earn our own living and I love it. She hates it. She cannot order a tanning bed for her fourth bedroom, or have two nannies and a ten thousand square foot house. So what is the answer. More work.. she could do it. Our father’s did. Nope it is Zoloft. To help her deal. Now many need Zoloft.. but please. If I cannot make my life work and folks  fail a lot the video blog remember.. I make another plan, another job, another buisness and off we go.  I also have to take a long look at may deams and make the realistic. I will not make a million in a month. A lifetime yes.. but not a month. Life is there and you are the creator of your dreams. Here is a good analogy.. say you woke up and hated your home, your furniture and your life. You needed a complete change. What if you would be happy sitting on pillows for a time and working a weekend at Dominos for five months to re-do your house rom by  room.. would you jump and throw out all the furniture in the first room and start delivering pizza’s or just keep moaning. The same with college debt or a credit card debt. The credit fairy is busy and will not be visiting you. Sorry, but a weekend job although taxing will settle the problem. It may take a year but think of the peace of mind you will have and the good night sleep you will get knowing you are changing your life. Life is what we make it. So.. what does your dream look like do you have poo in the pipes.. and is it time to put some mucsle where your mouth is. That food won’t juice itself, those books won’t write themselves and if you want to “become” you have to begin by” being” in the moment and shoveling shit may just be the first order of buisness.  Being is a verb! SO I hope this blog serves as the shovel you need to get moving.  I know this week has taught me to practice what I preach even when tired and my life is piling up with poo.

Miracles are 90 percent perspiration and ten percent prayer. You have the prayer down. Now it is time to get the perspiration running. Even poor Moses had to climb the mountain and engrave his own stone tablets with the ten commandments carry those heavy suckers down the mountain and deliver the sales pitch of all time and he stuttered.. God just dictated. Is God dictating to you?

Now move the POO.

While  I have you would you please let me know what time zone and country you are in so when we set the webinar up for the first run I will place it at an optimal time for us all. I am flexible. I want as many of you out there to be involved who want to.

Grace and Linus and all my Csl folks thanks for being so involved. I love having you here.

Remember we are blessed so that we may bless others! Move that Poo you have a miracle to accept.

Callie

I was thinking dear friends about all we learn in this life. How so much of the problems we have, seem to be on a wheel that just keeps rolling back our way. After I read the post that Duncan wrote yesterday about forgiveness and  meditation it hit me. That I carry a lot of unnessasary guilt around in my life. I feel guilty for a multitude of things most of them silly. In this new year of  facing the fears and moving on, I am planning to fill my little rock with the fears, regrets, old emotions that pop up that eat at me like sulfuric acid and toss it.. Goodbye and don’t come a knocking old toxic thoughts.

Have you ever dumped sulfuric acid into your toliet or a drain it seems to work invisibly. No bubbles no big chemical reaction the silent killer just sits in the bowl eating the clog. Well the toxins in  your soul are will eat away at your dreams and how you interpret reality.I call it Killing the Zen. We have to live a life of letting the Zen in!

Here is a thought. Noetic Science is the sceince  studying the power of thought. It has proven that our thoughts even the smallest and most fleeting have mass. Can you imagine that a thought has mass that means that it exerts gravity on life. Ultimately it means that we are what we think. Literally. The debate has been raging for years in new age circles over whether we are what we think: do we create our own reality. Lets see if we can work this one out and come to some very vital conclusions on our own. First, if you belive something with all your heart can you manifest it. This is something I belive is so true: that we even manifest the things we don’t realize we belive. When I was young I was blessed with a body not to  be belived. For years I was emabarrased and wished not to be seen. I was very unhappy. I had lived threw an incident that although was seemingly harmless to this 13 year old with a grown playbody ready body I was not ready for. One afternoon my parents where having a tour of people come thru our home. The children rooms we off limits but since we had sitting rooms and a beautiful functional libray and state of the art bathrooms the upper level was being toured. One nice lady on the tour accidently took the wrong turn down a hallway and opened my door. She opened it at the very moment I had just pulled on my jeans but had nothing covering my top. The men that peered through  the door catcalled and yelled things like that room was worth the price of admission on the tour. It was imature for the men but devestating for me. For years I felt shame about the shape of my body. I was embarassed when someone made a comment. I often told my mother I wish  I could have surgery to remove my breast so I could be could be like everyone else. I was use to vulgar remarks and young boys talking to my chest but in 1980 this was not something I could process. So as the years went by I bought bigger clothes put on weight and began to feel less gawked at. Then another problem reared it’s ugly head around the time I was 18. I wanted my body back. I was happy and carefree and wanted not to be embarassed by wearing a swimsuit and was tired of hiding behind the weight. I wore that wieght like a saftey jacket. It seemed like overnight the weight disappeared. Literally! Just as it had appeared.  When I changed my mind it fell away. Just like when I had decided to hate my body it came on. I was not an overeater nor did I work to eat to gain wieght. On and off in my life I have had this same thing happen. If I got to feeling unhappy about myself and wanted to disappear  I would. Then the swing in my brain would happen and the wieght would fall off. Now as I have grown and learned the lesson that I could not begin to imagine in my youth the problem has gone away. That lesson being that I love myself. It took cancer to teach me that I loved my body. Each part of it and I wanted to keep it all. It was worth fighting for. The truth of my manifesting my own reality has only continued. Another example. There came a time after the eternal search in my life for “what I wanted to be when I grew up” that I found my niche. I had known it all along deep inside but I keep pushing away my gifts.  I wanted to be a spiritual teacher in some way but couldn’t quite wrap my mind around it. Once I did my world turned on a dime. The city opened up to me with new opportunities to help and spread the word of love and light. I changed my life and began to follow my own dreams no matter how “out there” people might have thought they were. Belive me even my own church treated me like a person in need of couseling. I have not asked  them why.. so this is conjecture..but when I spoke to my minister about my call he politely said great. The head of the church in our area set me up with a spiritual life coach and I am sure they thought this would blow over. People with cancer and sick husbands have swings mentally and want to have drastic changes in life. I was told over and over that maybe I just would not be able to handle the pressure and the work. It shows how little they knew me. Surprisingly enough the mentor they placed me with helped me clear out old baggage and was truely a gift to me. She taught me to claim what I belived and slowly I began to  do just that  and slowly I stopped  the couseling.  The counseling was meant to help me discerne what I was called to do. I knew that the first day I walked into the church. Luckily for me the counselor and mentor taught me to claim it. The counseling helped, but there was no way I was going to advance in that church. If I am honest there was no way I wanted to now.My dream had not been fleshed out on that first day but after two years I had it down to the last centimeter who and what I wanted. But the only words of wisdom I have for naysayers is never underestimate a person who is willing to expose themselves to you.  And to each dreamer remember there will always be someone who doesn’t belive in, or a place you don’t fit… that is o.k. it is not where you are meant to be. Plow your own row. You may miss a brillant opportunity.Life happens even when you have cancer and a sick husband. Some make drastic decisions I am sure; but some of us know our own hearts have come to terms with the medical life lemons and have we have moved on and made a plan. The best part was  doors flug open to welcome me. Folks were hungry for what BasicMissions had to offer. People called whom I had never heard of but who had heard of me. Life turned into my picture of life.  Last year as I wrote out my vision board and pictured my vision in my head. I had the idea of wanting a home surrounded by water and on a big piece of land. A cottage with a garden and room to stretch out and be private within 30 days of looking I had found it. Beyond all comprehension I am sitting at my desk in my Cottage right now.I had fleshed my vision out down to the bicycle I bought and have been riding. Yesterday when I road back from the libray I realized that I was riding in one of my day dreams where I had obtained the life I wanted.  It was a huge deja vu moment. So my thoughts had mass and excerted gravity and became my vision down to the last floorboard. Now I have new visions. Thought of babies running the floors and new buisness venture and those thing too are coming  I can feel them.  The message here don’t let others influence your vision. It is yours alone. Go for it. Some thought Elvis couldn’t sing and his ladies shirts and dyed hair was too much! I bet they feel like fools today.

So here is the plan. Lets share our vision boards and see at the end of one year and then five how they come out. This year I have several plans and I am determined that all of them work out. Some of the answers have yet to come as to how I will accomplish these dreams…but I am putting them out there none the less.

First of all I have a massive case of baby fever. So we are looking forward to a new addition. This baby may come from us or from a lovely town yet unknown. The universe will let us know. I am making room for all answers. This will be challengeing because of my health problems and my age.. but I love a challenge. I am looking forward to the three books I am completeing being published. I have a publisher for the cook book. Since I have helped write a cook book before. I am almost finished with it. Almost. Care to help. Sample the reciepes I put here. I need the feed back. How did they work for you? How did you like them? I have a new buisness and I am not going to give away the bank here but it will be in line with BasicMissions as a global initutive for change. It is time to take my views on life and the universe and give them away as a practical guide to living. I plan on finding a way to get Duncan completely well this year. He is going to have three bs. to look after a dog and a baby so we have to get him moving. I plan to practice yoga more, garden like a maniac and introduce my t.v. program here locally. You will see that first on this sight. I plan to have my home decorated and in perfect order and I plan to get this plumbing working perfectly by then end of today. I know all these things will work out. OH.. and one honeymoon a year with my husband, one trip alone to a spiritual retreat or buddhist compound.  Buy another home in this historic district that I live in  for an office, and spend a lot more time with my family. And I plan for my life to bloom.  We can make all  of our dreams come true if we take our dreaming into a new realm lets call it creative belief. Bringing the Zen in. First you have to build it in your brain then you are able to build it in your life.

Now there was hurt in the last year. So I plan to spend more time with my friends and family and find a place that feed me spiritually. I plan not to over schedule and become disorganized. I plan to leave the hurts of the past in the past. Duncan and I even made a deal no bringing up the past in a spat. So we are moving on in every way. I plan on never saying I cannot or falling victim to my fear. If I am afraid to climb on the roof. Tomorrow I will get a ladder out and climb on the roof. I will face my fears. I will do the backbend in yoga. I will know I am going to make enough money. I will settle a lawsuit and not let the lazy lawyer I have sink that. I plan to set my seeds into things I have researched and made a strong foundation for. NO jumping into things. Oh and I am going to say NO…. NO>>> NO!!!  NO<<<<  If I mean NO… no more people pleasing. I will take time for me this year and not give all my energy to others. I was drained at the end of last year and that was my own fault. So… lets go.. tell me about your do’s and don’ts…

So please tell me your vision for the year. Let all of the past go. Practice meditation and good nutrition and use that stone to let all the trauma and toxic thinking out of your body. It is a new day and a new age. If we belive it ….. it will come.

Belive, Belive, Belive….Build.. and Be Grateful. We are what we think. Repeat that.. Imagine it. Belive it.

Callie

Can you see a pattern in these post? I hope so. For those who haven’t been following or haven’t gotten the message: so far, we are doing several things let’s go over them. All of the steps of the week are getting you ready to absorb some information and ideas that will make your life better! I pray  more enjoyable and more productive. There  are only a few more things I want to say until we get down to work.  The following exercise will get our souls ready to take in and remember the new things we learn. So please meditate take a minute to do the exercise below and make sure you have vision of where you life and the light of your soul wants to go in the next yearand don’t stop praticing after you read the post.

On to Forgiveness! !

What is one of the most important things we can do for ourselves? Forgive ourselves! You have got to admit that most of us carry around entirely too much guilt. If your creator your GOD can forgive you:  who are you not to forgive yourself? We are told in all of the holy books that we must forgive ourselves and let the weight of the sins go. If God can forgive and forget who are we not too. Your relationship to your God allows you to let  it go then helps you to get back on track. Let it go! It’s not a get our of jail free card! You have got to be determined to change not to make the same transgressions again.

It can be exhausting to carry around all that guilt and feel like you couldn’t get back on track even if your were a train. Here’s something you should try, it is an exercise in letting go of your sins, your past baggage and  it works.  It works because human beings are not very good at forgiving themselves nor letting the past go! Sometime we need a ritual or meditation to allow us to let go and getting back on track. Many of us feel unworthy of forgiveness or resolution,  somethings are hard to let go! Staying on track takes constant thought the work although that is not  the hard part. Forgiving yourself is. It is so important because it allows you forgive yourself and to forgive others and open your heart to the world. Not to mention forgiveness is the perfect vehicle for allowing God in and developing a deeper walk with God . Here is the thing, go outside and find yourself a rock one you can hold comfortably in your hand and even rub like prayer beads  as you meditate on what you are wanting to release from your heart. Talk to your creator and just convey that you will be learning forgiveness  yourself and you will need as much  help as possible. Even though God knows already why you are going to be carrying this rock in your pocket for the next week I want you to follow through on the meditation and go somewhere private and convey everything you are wanting to rid yourself of outloud. The reason is when you communicate with god you will be laying your sins any lingering  guilt, any transgression done to you,   the weight of all of these things is will be placed in  this rock. You may even want to rub the rock  in times of crisis or when the old thoughts come back into your mind to remind yourself of Gods love and his forgiveness. As everyday goes by, you will notice that the rock will start having a very strong meaning to you.  You will become attached to it. Remember you have been attached to these wounds for a long time. At the end of the week tell God that you are casting this rock and all of its  weight and sins that you have put into it over the past week into a lake or a field or someplace that you will never find it again. Then go there and throw that rock and all it carries away from your sight. You may find it hard to let go of your rock. But do it! Now it is imperative that you carry this exercise all through until the end ! KNOW that all that those negative thoughts feelings and actions have just been removed from you and your soul has been loosed from them you are free. You should feel a lightness and a happiness of heart. You have symbolically  and mentally allowed yourself  to let it all go! Good job. Now go out into the world with a fresh start and a clean and unburdened heart. 

Now find a new rock, carry it with you. This rock is to remind you of this cleansing practice. It will also remind you that the joy and lightness you feel is how your creator wants you to feel all the time. It will remind you to stay on track and not to get weighed down by the hard things in life. It will  also remind you that you are not carrying the weight of guilt that you once did! It should also serve as an important reminder to forgive others as you have forgiven yourself and not get weighed down again. But most importantly it will be a remind you that your Creator is an active part of your life working with you to make yourself whole and happy. God loves you so love yourself, and remember to love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Let me know how it goes.

Live and love in peace!

Duncan

So how has your week worked out for you? I have had a very revealing week. I have realized that I was harboring habits that were keeping me stuck in a few places! Habits that were not allowing me to achieve things I have had on my vision boards for years. These nasty little nippers have been hanging out in the back of my mind since Junior High and it was time to say goodbye to fear of judgement and fear of rejection and a whole bucket full of fears. All of which were fears that are basically fears of not “people pleasing”  instead of handling things like an adult and saying no when nessasary and yes to me for a change. I think women in particular have a real problem here. I know some men who never say no but most of the men I know were taught early to take care of themselves and thier loved ones at home first then add things to work with  after that. There is something to be said for that.  Lesson learned.Well time for lesson two.

We spoke a bit before the New BasicMissions was revealed about our vision boards. Those handy tools that allow us not only to know what we want but keep the vision buried deep within our frontal lobe. It is so important not to get side tracked. Have you ever sown a seed for a garden in a dixie cup? When you place that seed in the soil it takes days of watching it and praying over it for the first little sprig of green to show up. Then you take your precious little seedling and transplant it into your garden. You mark the spot where you planted it with a nice little wooden stake and write on the stake “Sweet Peas” as time goes on your little seedling shoots up and you also begin to see other greenry around it; little weeds that may choke your little seedling to death! We have to pull those weeds and keep the soil watered and feed so that soon we have beautiful fragrant flowers to put on the dinner table.

Life is just like that little seedling. If you don’t watch out the weeds in your world will choke out your dreams. Fortunately  tending dreams and goals is also SOUL TENDING. As you take care to make sure your life follows the paths you have chosen the mean side of reality pops up. Then we find ourselves far from our vision board wondering why our dreams are not working out. When all along the universe is giving you the opportunity to weed your little garden. Negative things that happen are just learning experiences. Take them learn from them then delete. Boom you have weeded your garden.  Are you looking for a job that accentuates your skills the job of your dreams? As you read this you are getting ready to go to work in an unrelated field. Well here is your chance to change your path. By all means do not quit your job. But apply in your off time for a position in the new field. Begin to make a buisness plan if you want to start your own buisness and take steps to weed your garden until it  looks like the life on the vision board.

Duncan and I have a great deal of experience with down time. Duncan spends about 90% of his life in bed. His disease has progressed to a point that he has to work at his life’s journey in a different way. Are you disabled but dream of making jewelry and selling it. Well down time when your not feeling like you have been beaten to death can be turned into design time. Duncan writes his books when he cannot get up and by just making that mental leap that being in bed is not the end of his journey just a different place to see the view; changed the way he felt about himself. He has spent the better part of his life being uber active. He was a special ops troop then an aeronautical engineer and then a vp for a huge areospace firm.. In all of these jobs the one thing they had in common was he was always on the go. So life from a king size bed is a stark slap in the face to his dreams. So he re-wrote his dreams. We all have challenges but we can tend our universe in ways there were never possible before. The world is full of sucessful entrepanuers who use the internet to make thier living. Well or sick they can make thier dreams come true. And so can you. There is really no obstacle that our minds and spirits cannot overcome if we try. Only apathy will kill your dreams. Not trying is failure. The one thing all sucessful people have in common no matter what they do is they fail a lot!!! They spend more time flat on their ass than anyone would imagine. They just get up and make it work. Try again. Weed out what failed and learn from it that way the failing is a learning point if you are positive you know that the experience was valuable because you won’t do that again.

Now once you have the life you want firmly established you have to continually feed and weed your garden. Where do you garner inspirtation. What feeds your soul. If you constantly give out energy to a job or your loved ones you must be fed . Every action has an equal but opposite reaction. Energy spent means your tank is low you must fuel up or you will end up at the back of the line wondering why your needs have not been met.

 I think I go to the market every day. For some reason I never get what is needed all in one fail swoop. Probley because we eat a raw diet and fresh food needs to be fresh. Do you know what I see most often there?? No it is  not the veggies, it is exhausted and spent women trying to find dinner supplies! And they are miserable, grouchy, slapping kids and huffing and puffin’. Thier hair is not fixed, there clothes are sloppy and undone and everything about their huffiness screams ” I have given it all for my family!” But if you can show the world you have nothing left to give while at a market exactly “what” do you have left? I am working on the idea here that you put you best face forward in public. It frightens me to hear women say the last time I had a minute to myself was in the bathroom and the kids come in there. Well somethings are inevitable and poo free time if you are a busy Mom may be one of them The point is that most of these women are saying they never take any re-fueling time ever!!!.I know I can be blamed for my mother’s constipation; as a child my sister and I never left her alone. One thing I did learn from my beautiful mother was to tend my garden. Take time to care for myself. Don’t give everything a way! Being a martyr is not the way to make you or your family  happy and sucessful. So weed folks. As you remove the obsticles from your life that don’t feed you or your dreams, the universe will open doors for you that do.

This is a long lesson..but it is so important. If I want to see my dreams come true working towards them daily means. Working… WORKING. It will not be easy.. just like gardening to reap the rewards of fresh fruits and flowers on a lovely table we have to plant, weed, feed and take care of the garden then we have the chores.. ironing the tablecloth and polishing the silver. But the result is having a meal that satisfies all the senses and feeds your soul as well as you belly.

I tease my mother because we have been very fortunate and in the hard years she has said there is never a reason not to polish the silver and have decent meal. I think that more than the actual work that we did to make the meal and the table beautiful the point was….no matter how hard things are make a time that is beautiful for yourself. Care about how things look, care for you things but use them, don’t let your talents gather dust.

As we learn to take our talents and put them to good use you will find that God was waiting all along for you to take the most unlikely talent and make your life rich with it. Abundance is all the holy books from all religons preach.. abundance of love to each other, abundance of joy and abudance of needs met. God only asks us to go for the brass ring not to settle. I have met so many people in my life who where so talented. Picasso was a dime a dozen to these folks. But for some reason they opted out of using thier talents. Maybe someone told them they would starve to death if they followed thier dreams who knows. But if you know in your gut you could be__________ if you just did ______. The please do it. We cannot reap if we do not plant the seeds.

So seed, weed and grow! I cannot wait to hear about your growth. You are all in our thoughts and prayers.

Manifesting Mojo,

Callie

I hope that you not only received the obvious meaning of my last post but also the meaning behind the meaning. That we are all beautiful creations of God and none of us no matter our looks or infirmity are not beautiful. We are such a fortunate creation to have a part of our Creator inside of us. Can you even fathom the privalage of livng in the NOW of what that means, not only do we have the privlage of living and learning in this life. But also the duty of taking care of the temple of our bodies and all  we have been charged with. We are all our Creator’s vessel and it is indeed a privlage. I also hope that you can now: not only see the beauty inside yourselves  but  also the beauty on the outside and all around you.

Have you ever been told or asked to meditate?  Then that was it end of converstation. People assume that by some miracle you already know how to meditate. Luckily for me my brother  gave me a book on mediation when I was twelve. I devowered that book. Because it was my brother’s and  I looked up to him and wanted to be just like him! In the book it said that there were many ways to meditate and here is only one. I have to say this method  has worked well for me over the years and I practice meditaion often. To meditate is to simply concentrate and to get your ability to  concentrate on one  particular thing sharpened. Our minds today are so cluttered that it difficult to keep our minds on ten  thoughts  within two minutes let alone one thing for ten minutes. Start out, by getting comfortable in your favorite chair, on a sofa or in an old fashioned position sitting crosslegged on the floor;  whichever way makes you most comfortable.  I like to mediate on my favorite side of the sofa curled up in a blanket. The position doesn’t matter what matters is what is in your mind. Remember now the ultimate goal is to bring  peace within your entire self and bring forth sacred knowledge from your God-self and from your Creator.To start just take five minutes in your comfortable place and repeat what is called a mantra. A mantra is just a saying that has a divine meaning for you which you simply are  repeating the same thing over and over again so that you can sharpen your mind just to focus on one thing. When I started my favorite mantra was to repeat the words ” peace on earth” over and over. Since my brother had just returned from vietnam peace and the welfare of other people’s brothers was in the  front of my mind. I would repeat that sentence for five minutes a day after two weeks; I found myself doing it for ten minutes a day. After a month, I found the mantra changed to something else I was concerned about and shortly after that I found that my mind was not repeating a mantra but thinking of God and thinking with my God-self. From there I grew into learning to meditate and began bringing peace to myself and hearing God’s word whispered into my ear over concerns  I had and over things for which I was grateful. I cannot say how important this is along with prayer to your relationship with your Creator because it is just as important to listen as it is to talk in any relationship.  Meditation is a big part of listening for your Creator’s answer to your prayers. It is also a wonderful way of getting out of your everyday life, and finding yourself in the most beautiful places that your Creator wants to show you! Some things you will be shown will come from within yourself  some are from without, but all are  beautiful. I would like for you to practice this simple form of meditation in preparation for lesson that I hope will help many people in the world.

Peace to you all.

Duncan

     What’s beauty?  Well, I guess it all depends on what exactly you’re talking about.

     I’ll start off by telling you a very well kept secret…men don’t sit around together and “do nothing but talk”  about who we think is beautiful and who we think is not, so much.  I had to finally say it out loud!  You have no idea how many times I hear, that we men have a one track mind about beauty. When the truth is that most of the “standards for beauty” are set by fashion magazines and certain shows on television.  In other words, don’t blame us for thinking that you have to look a certain way or even dress a certain way! Blame the people selling the products. If you have to blame someone. 

     If you asked 100 different men what makes a person beautiful, you’d probably get just as many answers.  You could have a woman who seems to fit the “standard” for being extraordinarilly beautiful, but one minute later she may “dog out” a server for messing up her order, and boom…it doesn’t matter what she looks like on the outside, most guys would never see her in the same way again!! A beautiful inside is just as, if not more important than, a beautiful outside.

     Well, why do I say all of this in the first place?  There are a lot of people (both men and women), who, for one reason or another think of themselves as unattractive in at least one way or another. This causes them to think badly about themselves.  It leads to lowered self-esteem, lowered expectactions. It also bleeds off onto  the way others may treat you.  It leads to poorer job performance. People with lower self-esteem even take  jobs that they may be  over qualified for, simply because they don’t think of  themselves as worthy of anything better.  You can apply these same things to any part of your life.  You will see that the way you view yourself  is THE most important thing that you could ever do:  because it affects every other facet of your life – including your happiness, and all of your future achievements.

     I don’t believe that low self-esteem or poor self image is what we were put on earth to live with.  In fact I believe exactly the opposite!  The proof is all around you.  Callie and I were driving along in west Texas many years ago, and I brought the car to a sudden stop.  Callie asked what was wrong, and I told her to look out of my window.  There was a fallen down two story barn with a small pond beside it, and there were two mesas, just far enough apart to form a gap between their peeks where the sun was setting dead in the middle.  A tree on the other side of the pond broke up the orange-red sun just enough to make the most beautiful reflection in the water.  It was a shame that we didn’t have our camera right then, because that was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.  Now,  think about what this beautiful site was made of…a broken down barn, a drying up lake, a barren tree, two miss-shapen mesas, and the setting sun, all coming together at the same time.  Not too much to work with, but breathtaking all the same.

     People are the same way.  But we’ve got something even more than that scene.  Take a long look in a mirror.  Consider what you see.  Give credit where credit is due – do you have a pretty nose, nice pores, beautiful skin, soft hair?  Look, and you’ll see the good features, because, they are there.  Now, look into your eyes.  There are many creation stories that say the same things.  One thing that a lot of them have in common is that our Creator formed us from a substance from earth, but BLEW life into our mouths.  This means that a piece of your Creator was put into your body directly by your Maker.  I believe that  one act makes each and every one of us so beautiful in so many different ways.  If the eyes are the windows to the Soul, look deeply into them, and see your Creator inside of you.  No one can tell you, me or anyone else that  every person  on this earth is not Beautiful, should not have Great self-esteem, deserve the best that life can offer in every way, all of the time.

     Think about it. Learn it. Live It!  Make your life the best that it can be.  You deserve it – your eyes will never lie to you.

Much Love,

Dunc.