Trying hard has been a way of life for me. It has been almost like a religion. It was the foundation for all of the lessons I was handed as a child growing up in an all American, Midwestern family. I was told that if I didn’t TRY HARD nothing in my life would work out. I was led to believe that nothing in life worth having comes easy.

The funny thing is that I have never found that trying hard gets me what I want, or that it gets me to the place I want to be. As a kid, I was in trouble a lot for not trying hard enough. I was also constantly surprising myself, and my family with the way that things appeared to miraculously work in my favor. It kinda pissed my mom off. She kept telling me that I had to try hard because the favorable results I had already experienced were just luck.

So, I learned to try hard and I found myself in a mess. I found that everything was a struggle, but I kept struggling because they told me struggle was the only way to have a good life.

I struggled and struggled until I realized that the people who had the kind of life I wanted had given up the struggle. I noticed that they had surrendered to life and that they were TRYING EASY instead of trying hard. I saw that people who were joyful were focusing on what they could bring to life rather than looking for what they could take. I saw that they were seeking love in all situations. I observed them exchange struggle for joyful effort. I came to realize that struggle and effort are NOT the same thing and that magic things happen when one puts effort in to things they love. My new friends told me that struggle and trying hard were the results of my fight against life and that effort was the natural result of focusing on things that bring me joy. They told me that effort should be EASY! They told me to try easy!

Trying easy doesn’t mean I stop working in the direction I want to go. It means taking the struggle out of it all. It means that I relax and direct my energy toward the things that are right in front of me and toward the things that are joyful.

So, here is what I have found: When I give up the struggle my life works. My life works better than I could ever have imagined when I was planning how to force life to bend to my will. I have found that trying easy yields immediate results because I experience an immediate sense of relief. I have found that I am a lot nicer to people because I’m in a better mood! When I try easy instead of trying hard, miracles happen in my life and things that were stuck get unstuck.

I’ve been focused on trying easy for the last few weeks. I decided to get back to the simle solution that has ALWAYS worked for me in the past.

What’s the result? Little has changed with regard to external circumstances, but my whole attitude about those cirtcumstances has changed . I’m not feeling anxious about the outcomes anymore. I feel better. I have more energy and I’m excited about possibilities instead of being scared of disappointment. Trying easy is returning me to the life I love and it is my access to peace of mind.

So, how about we all try easy together today? When you try easy it helps me try easy too. Thanks for showing me the way back!

Follow your heart. That’s what I’m hearing today. That’s actually the message I get every day, but I just asked for specific direction and that was the thought that followed.

So, what does that mean? It means that I spent most of 2012 trying to figure out how to MAKE life work out the way I wanted and trying to FORCE external circumstances (read money, appreciation, vanity and material possessions here). Making things happen and forcing events only brings me dissatisfaction, pain and frustration. These actions never involve following my heart and they usually don’t work.

Following my heart has little to do with accumulation of wealth or possessions. It typically has to do with sharing love, experiences and joy with others. It has do do with sharing and giving and not getting and having. It is all about expressing.

When I am following my heart, I am focused on offering the very best of myself to those around me regardless of what they offer in return. This is the only time that I feel joy. It is when I share the things that have moved me and transformed my life through my living of them that I experience the best life has to offer. It is when I do what I love without concern for the reward that I feel most fulfilled. Operating from this place changes my perception of the world and typically turns my life in to something that feels like a miracle.

I’m tired of the strain. I’m tired of doing things because I think they might get me somewhere or bring me something. I’m tired of feeling like a bottomless pit of need.

So, this is my prayer for 2013:

May we all follow the voice inside our hearts that brings us the joy that is the experience of the Devine. May all of our actions be expressions of love and may we know love through the experience of ourselves as powerful transmitters of that love.

And so it is.

-Emily

Helen Keller said that security is mostly superstition and it doesn’t really exist. She said life is a daring adventure or nothing at all. I agree. I try to live my life with this in mind. It works for me, most of the time…

It works until the days like today, when I feel the tight grip of fear and disillusionment at my throat. It is on these days that I can not make it matter that security does not exist. I want to pretend. I want security to be real and I find myself doing everything I can to make my illusion appear real. On these days, I want to crawl in to the fort I’ve created in my head and give up the adventure. I want to feel better. I want to keep what I have and I want to insure that I will get the next thing that I want. I want to have some control. I find myself obsessing about how I can get IT, or I find myself taking every action with the intention of gaining something.

Here’s the thing, I actually feel worse when I scramble and claw for that security and control. I experience increasing discomfort and fear when I spend the whole day focused on getting. I feel like there is nowhere to turn and I feel desperate. There is never enough of anything to make me feel like I have sufficient security and control. I start to feel like there is no point to any of the things I’m doing, and like life is a struggle. I am confronted by the terrible discomfort that comes with chasing after something I can not hope to achieve.

The solution? Service. Love. Gratitude.

The solution is always the same, and I avoid using it like it’s going to kill me. I avoid using it because it is going to kill me, a part of me anyway. It’s going to kill my ego and I struggle with that every time.

I have ample experience demonstrating that I will feel joy and that I will find spaces in my life that I didn’t know where there, if I focus on how I can bring something to a situation rather than focusing on what I can take from it. There is always some form of relief when I apply this type of thinking.

The problem? Staying with thoughts related to love and service is difficult. Discipline is required. A daily action to reaffirm that love and service are my direction is absolutely necessary. Without that action, I quickly slip back to fear and grasping. I quickly lose my interest in the adventure of life.

I want to maintain my sense of life as an adventure. I want to experience the relief that comes with application of love. So, today I’m writing about my solution. I’m writing to remind myself to use it and to share it. I’m writing so that I can focus on the possibility of offering relief to someone else who’s struggling with the same shit. I’m writing instead of focusing on my fear about my husband finding a job, or moving, or what people think of me.

I’m writing to send love in the outward direction, toward you. May it find you now.

Love and blessings to you,

Emily

Again and again philosophers, spiritual teachers and scientists have told us that fear and resistance are the root of suffering. Why is it that we so often find it difficult to remember this simple teaching or put it into action? Why is it that we live in a cocoon of fear and direct most of our actions from that space? What is it that we think our fear will do for us?

Most of us use fear as a talisman and believe that living in the fear will ward off whatever we are trying to avoid. The irony is that living in fear actually brings on that which we are trying to avoid. This is not magic, or any secret spiritual teaching. This is knowledge passed down through the generations and validated repeatedly by science.

We live the life that we CHOOSE to live and experience things the way that we SAY we experience them. We are whatever we create through our thoughts, feelings and actions. Our feelings about ourselves and our life are the direct result of our thoughts and actions. If we choose thoughts and actions that are fear based, we get results that are related to fear. If we choose thoughts and actions that are based in something that is opposite to fear – LOVE – we get results that are related to that opposite. We get results that are related to LOVE.

Here’s the funny thing: if we are not loving ourselves, we can not start from a place of love in any other area of our lives. That means that we will find it difficult to believe in abundance, compassion, self expression, freedom, creativity, etc… when we are not loving ourselves. That means that it is difficult for us to express love to others when we are not loving ourselves.

This resistance to self love has been the most significant thing responsible for stopping my expansion and the expansion of the people I work with. The question is, how do we cultivate love for ourselves when we do not believe that we are worthy of love? How do we generate a space of love when we don’t feel loved? How do we let go of our belief that beating ourselves up and living in fear is the only way we are going to get things done or become successful? Can we release the thought that the only way to love ourselves it to be selfish?

We can not fool ourselves in to believing that we have love to give away when we have not allowed ourselves to receive any love to begin with. If we can not find the space to practice love for ourselves, we can not really receive it from others and our reserve of love stays dry. When our reserve is dry, life starts to get difficult and begins to feel like a struggle.

We must begin to PRACTICE loving kindness toward ourselves if we want to live a life we love and access the abundance that is inherently part of us. It is the vital ingredient in creating the life we want. Love must become a discipline in our lives. That discipline begins when we start noticing the moments when we are in fear or lack, and we consciously turn toward the loving thought or action.

This is difficult, I know. I know that we have all heard this story a thousand times and have struggled to take consistent action toward this practice of loving kindness. That is why we say that we must PRACTICE loving kindness and we must DEVELOP the skills of caring for ourselves. When we can do that, life and our relationships will change.

Manifest your reality! Envision yourself in paradise! Join Alchemy Travel and LEAP Yoga in Jamaica as we practice moving from fear to love and begin cultivating the life we want, rather than the life we’re stuck with. Visit us at www.alchemytravel.com/jamaica for more information and options. We know you will not want to miss this experience and that you will walk away transformed!