Posts tagged as:

possibility

Close your eyes

by Brooke Leigh Sheldon on November 10, 2009

When you close your eyes, what do you see?

I’m not asking you about the times when you’re laying down on the sojourn to sleep.
I’m asking you a simpler, more complex, question. What happens when you purposely close your eyes with no intention but to see what’s inside your “vision” when your eyes are closed and you begin to wander?

I mean this not as trickery. I assure you.
Moreover, it can only be a question whose final answer belongs only to you.

However, I would quickly wager you that the answers you would give me would be completely different from my own. Additionally, carry that bet further, I’d put more down and assert further they’d be different still from the person shopping next to you at the market, standing ahead of you in line at the bank or sitting beside you in the doctor’s office waiting room.

You see, our inner world, or our internal construct, belongs to us.
As we close our eyes, we begin a journey inside.
This is where our silence and, yes, our noise within ourselves all begins.
Here we start to be alone with ourselves in a way unique to each of us.

We close our eyes and begin sensing the trail of our onliness.

Therefore, these next questions have not a thing to do with whether or not your individual eyes can see an ocean’s blue or the sun set or a seagull fly. They have nothing to do with the mechanics of the eye.

With that caveat, I ask you:

Are you seeing or unseeing?

Are you unsighted or insightful?

Do you envision or are you a visionary?

You see now what I mean; these questions do not have anything to do with our eyes. They are about our hopes, our minds and our hearts.

So I think, no, I believe, that You see a whole lot when You close Your eyes.
You see possibilities.
Now look closer.
You are the possibilities You see.
And if You look closer still, well,

You are the possibilities You seek.

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Are you living on purpose?

by Brooke Leigh Sheldon on October 18, 2009

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:45 — 18.9MB)

Are you living on purpose?

October 18, 2009

It’s important to stay present in your life by living in the moment, but what are you doing with that moment?

Are you living it or is it living you?

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Go on…pick a color! Any color!

by Brooke Leigh Sheldon on October 16, 2009

If you were to grab a box of colors and draw “you” what does it look like?

Which color would you catch first?

Where would you put the first mark? The left upper corner? The bottom right, toward the edge? Or, would you begin smack dap in the center of the sheet?!

Is the image in your head before you start? Do you know what you’re drawing already? Or is it something that will have to evolve as you go?

What choices define what you lay on the surface before you?

Will the picture be a specific representation of something literal, like a bridge or a tree? Maybe you see yourself as an amusement park ride or a totem, like an animal that inspires you? Or will you cast aside expectations of exactitude spilling out shapes and shades of only your own secret definition, something asserting the abstract within or about you?

You get to decide.

It’s all CORRECT.
It’s your DECISION of YOU.
Let your mind unfurl onto the wind of your imagination.

You can be lines along a graph, definitive and clear.
You can be dots upon a canvas, expressive and suggestive.
You can be swirls throughout the universe, cosmic and mysterious.

You can be anything.

Perhaps you’re a scarred and well-used solid work-worn steel hammer enjoying a hard earned rest, lying on a richly golden plank of virgin lumber.

Or maybe a white- and red-checkered tablecloth in the middle of a grassy plain on an exquisite day, stimulated and aroused by the tussle snap of the summer wind.

You can be everything.

You are the inspiration of your own art.

You are the inspiration of your own life.

Be your masterpiece.

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Stepping Off The Curb

by Brooke Leigh Sheldon on August 6, 2009

I stepped off the curb this morning and in a moment I heard the sickening scream of brakes crushing to stop.SteppingOffTheCurb

In the next moment I felt my world freeze inside me.

I was, in that moment, all I had come to be.
Every breath, every touch, every story,
every smile, every mystery, every wink, every role,
every joy, every adventure, every song, every tear….
I realized in that one moment I was, my history.

As if in a race, the next few moments began colliding on the stopwatch in my cognition; the car came to hard, tense rest, breathing heat inches from my taut, ready breath-caught form.

Now, as I sit here, with you near my page,

I write with the peace of mind I am intact, able to offer my complete body, mind, heart and energy to these thoughts.

Each of us steps off curbs of life’s offering each day.
We do this constantly unaware of what fate may hold for us.
What we do know, always, is we have no guarantee what’s coming around the corner.
All we can do is live as consciously as we are able.

Do we survive or do we strive?

Do we watch out or do we reach out?

Are we afraid of being hurt or are we open to love’s possibilities?

Will we only allow the outcomes we can foresee or will we accept the horizon’s amazing color changes as the day ages?

As I sit here, with you near my page,
I feel a deep and resonant space within me.
I experience it as the “well” of my experience.
It echoes.
It has, at times, a cavernous lonely sound.
How often we are surrounded by so many and so alone within ourselves.
Then other times, we long for this same space within us to be calmed by the quiet comfort of another with whom we can be still, hushed and safe.
Just longing for a space in time, when perhaps, the simple beauty of the eyes of another is the voice within our own inner landscape.

The “well” of my experience is vast.
Different in its diversity than your own, of this I am sure.
But the profundity of your life and my own is without question.
I speak with conviction unmovable.

I have in my various careers and roles, as a psychotherapist, a consultant, a CEO; the list goes on and on, worked with all types and demographics. The gamut of populations and the variations within them has been extreme. I’ve been lucky enough to have the double doors of my world rammed open wide by the breadth of ceaseless diversity that is the reality of our world. I have driven to the cliff of Knowledge and while I teetered on the edge I’ve seen the Truth:
DAMN, WE ARE PROFOUND!!!

Strangely, it is not unusual in presentations and trainings I give, for people to raise their hands and question, even refute my statements asserting the profundity of them and/or their lives.
I have to admit this saddens me.
To have people actively argue with me with a seemingly urgent need to convince me that they and their lives are “not profound” leaves me with an abysmal sadness.

But, this is not a light topic for me.
So I will not allow anyone to easily dismiss the quality and power of their own life.
We ARE profound, every one of us.

I will not refute that we CAN absolutely choose to neglect or reject our responsibility to ourselves and one another and therefore deny our profundity, but this does not make us any less profound.
It only makes us one who has placed our profundity on the shelf of inactivity.

But at any moment we can take our personal power off the shelf, dust it off and state with assertive initiative, “I’ve got important things to contribute. I’m necessary. I’m needed. I matter.”

We can be that person who accepts their “profound” truth:

Accept the truth of your own insight.
Accept the truth that you extend far below the surface of what others see of you.
Accept the truth of your personal intensity, which may or may not be hidden from others.
Accept the truth that you are more than what the world knows of you.
Accept the truth that the world has yet to see all you have to offer; you have more to give, more to share.

With my truest conviction, I implore you! Embrace your profundity.
After all, I have already embraced it for you.
It’s simply waiting for you to claim it. (I’m lovingly smiling at you right now……)

So, take it from me, you don’t need to wait for the moment when fate foreshadows your life’s finish line to make the choice to strive, to reach out, to be open to love’s possibilities or to accept the horizon’s amazing color changes as the day ages.

You only need to:

Choose to strive.

Choose to reach out.

Choose to be open to love’s possibilities.

Choose to accept the horizon’s amazing color changes as the day ages.

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