Interview on Rebelle Society

Today, I am incredibly honored and humbled to be interviewed by Rebelle Society, where I speak about the importance of taking risks, of following one’s inner guidance, and about how my yoga practice radically changed my life. A special thank you to Tanya Lee Markul for making this happen.
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Inspirational tidbits from a positive thinker extraordinaire.

via Tanya Lee Markul on Jan 17, 2013

Rebelle Society hearts Jeannie Page and was lucky enough to cuddle up close with her and a smidgen of her day to get inspirational advice about a whole bunch of goodies – taking a leap of faith, what to do in times of crisis, how yoga has been a source of transformation, dealing with heart-break, lessons from the .com world, and what she’ll be focused on in 2013.

Here’s a super-duper inspirational dose of motivational speaker, writer and positive thinker extraordinaire, the lovely Jeannie Page…

You have taken a leap of faith as a result of losing your job. However, there are many people who ‘stay’ where they are as they are afraid to follow their heart, are unsure of the risks, etc. What advice could you give them?

Jeannie: Losing one’s job can certainly come as a shock, and initially as a blow to the ego. However, with the right attitude, being forced out of a job can actually be a huge opportunity…  and in turn a gift. As the old saying goes, it is up to us to “turn lemons into lemonade.” So often we become complacent and stuck in our jobs. We tell ourselves “one day I will leave,” but sadly often times days turns into months, and months turn into years. And for many, unfortunately, that can mean years of unhappiness. For that reason I truly believe that being let go from a job is actually a blessing;

It is a friendly kick from the Universe, a nudge to push us out of what is often a misaligned path and instead towards the direction of our dharma, our true calling.

I think at heart I have always been a risk-taker; I have always seemed to seek out experiences and create changes that will push the edge of my comfort zone and in turn will bring deep learning to my life. At the tender age of 20, I took the risk to move to a foreign country, by myself, to live abroad for a year. I later took the risk to move across country to fight for love, and I’ve taken the risks to move to several new cities, starting over from scratch each time. I’ve dropped out of graduate school, and I’ve quit jobs without having another lined up. Through all of these experiences, I have learned that there truly is no reward without risk. I believe wholeheartedly that the Universe responds with opportunities and experiences that are in direct proportion to our courage.

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The Good, The Bad… and The Grateful

Photo by Flickr User KateWares.

Yesterday I was inspired to post the following expression of gratitude on my Facebook wall:

I am so grateful for my life: for every triumph,
for every crushing defeat, for every choice,
for every risk, for every life-altering decision,
for every raw, devastating heartbreak,
for every betrayal, for every lesson learned.
I am grateful for every moment,
for each one has made me who I am today,
living this incredible life, so full of gratitude.

As we have just celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States, we were all reminded to pause and give thanks for the blessings in our lives. But as someone who has come to understand, firsthand, the sheer power of gratitude, I have learned that the practice of gratitude is really meant to be a daily one, not one that we simply do just one day a year.

A few years back I found myself at the darkest depths of my soul, living through the most painful, most challenging years of my life. I was at rock bottom and I had become merely a shell of the vibrant person that I had once been. Through a stroke of Grace, a new friend stepped into my life and introduced me to the Law of Attraction, to the idea that our thoughts do have power and that with those thoughts we can attract both positive and negative into our lives; and that whether we realize it or not, we are doing so unconsciously, on a daily basis.

As the clouds above my head were growing ever darker and more ominous, I decided that I would try anything to turn my life around. So in order to shift my thoughts to the positive, I began a daily practice of gratitude. Every single day I would write down a list of all of the positive things that had happened in that day, and all of the things for which I was grateful, however small. It didn’t matter how miserable I felt or how little I wanted to drag myself out of bed, I forced myself to write the list.

Photo by Flickr user wocado.

I did this every day for months on end, and as I did so, I was shocked by what began to happen. Little by little,  unexpected, positive things would appear in my life: the right people would show up, happy synchronicities would occur out of the blue, and slowly but surely the circumstances in my life began to change. The negative began to be replaced by the positive until after a few years of continued gratitude practice (complemented by a consistent yoga practice), I found myself living the most fully and vibrantly that I had ever lived in my life. This is where I sit now. I have become whole, I have fully embodied my spirit, and my inner light glows more purely and brightly than ever. I largely credit this to the practice of gratitude.

Unfortunately, it is a sad reality of the human condition that all to often we find ourselves feeling like victims: we blame others for the pain and betrayals inflicted upon us, we feel sorry for ourselves for the bad things that have happened to us, we find ourselves asking, “Why me?!” We say to ourselves, “If only “X,Y or Z” would happen, I could finally be happy.”

The problem is that every time we embody one of those feelings, we are giving away our own power. When we hold someone or some force outside of ourselves responsible for our happiness, we are giving that force power over us and we are ignoring the reality that we have the power to co-create happiness in our lives. The power resides in our thoughts and our feelings.

Photo by Flickr User exper.

If we look back on our lives with anger, bitterness and regret, we are sending negative energy out into the Universe, and that is exactly what we will attract back: more negativity. And then we head into a downward spiral. So instead of begrudging our past, we must look back and embrace every aspect of our journey: the good, the bad, and the ugly. We must look for the lesson in every experience, and if we look really hard, we may even find a silver lining, something beautiful that came out of a dark experience.

We must embrace the light and the shadow sides of life. We must be thankful for our challenging and painful experiences, for teaching us invaluable lessons, for giving us strength, and for delivering us to new places where we were meant to travel. We must look back and delight in how the dots connected, realizing that so much of it was for a reason.

So, yes, when I look back at my own life, I am grateful for every triumph for giving me courage and showing me that of which I was capable.

I am grateful for every crushing defeat for giving me the motivation and the fire in my belly to get back into the ring and keep on fighting.

I am grateful for every choice, no matter where it led, for each choice has taught me that there are no mistakes, just detours; and that often those detours proved to be for a beautiful and important reason.

I am grateful for having the bravery to take risks, to walk boldly in the face of fear, and to forge my own path, regardless of society’s “rules.” It is these risks that have allowed my life to expand beyond all wonder.

I am grateful for every life-altering decision I have had the courage to make, for these decisions have afforded me rich, breathtaking, and priceless experiences, and have allowed beautiful souls, from all over the world, to cross my path.

I am grateful for every raw, devastating heartbreak: I am grateful for the first for revealing to me my profound capacity for love. I am grateful for the second for allowing me to feel true soul connection and subsequently for breaking me, because it was that experience that set me free for future love and growth. And I am most grateful to the third for showing me the highest vibration of light and love I have ever known, and for shattering that which was already broken… for it was this experience that led me into the powerful fires of transformation.

I am grateful for every betrayal, for each one made me a stronger, more resilient person, and allowed me to better understand my own values and inner truth.

Photo by Flickr user Manue@PrettyKiku.

And lastly, I am grateful for every lesson learned, no matter how excruciating, no matter how much the wind was knocked out of me, for each lesson has allowed my soul to evolve into the conscious and awakened being that I am today. I am grateful for every single moment, from the breathtaking, life-altering ones, to the seemingly unimportant ones, for I understand that every moment is a precious step along the soul’s journey.

For all that has come before, for all that is now, and for all that will come, however unknown, I am and will always be grateful.

 ♥

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Happiness Starts on the Inside

We are so fortunate to live in a time of such amazing technological advances, a time when social media can connect us to our fellow brothers and sisters on the other side of the globe. For me personally, Facebook has largely been a gift. I have reconnected with old friends, I have discovered new ones, and I have uncovered priceless opportunities waiting around every turn…and all because we are connected.

But while Facebook has proven itself to offer many wonderful benefits, there are also of course some negative attributes. One is the “instant gratification” factor; the fact that we can vent, moan or complain about our woes in an instant, at just the touch of a button.

There are times when we all need to vent, and I’m sure we’ve all posted our fair share of complaints onto our status updates. (Believe me, for me it only takes encountering a bad driver!) But where this instant communication effect can be negative, and in fact harmful to ourselves, is when it is abused to the point where people are incessantly complaining about their lives, airing their dirty laundry, or dwelling on their woes, publicly. I have seen a sad number of people posting about how dreadful their lives are, about all of the bad things that they perceive to be happening to them, and blaming the world for their problems. I have seen so many people desperately seeking happiness outside of themselves, in external factors.

I’m sure you’ve all seen this and many of us have probably been guilty of it at one time of another: we post a scathing comment about the evil ex-boyfriend who broke our heart, we hold our boss accountable for making our lives miserable, we blame the betrayal of a friend for ruining our lives. You name it. If you’ve been on Facebook for any decent amount of time, I’m sure you’ve seen these kinds of comments and many, many more where those came from. And I’m sure you’ve also seen the comments where people post what they need to be happy: “If only the right guy would come along, I will then be truly happy,” “When I get my dream job, then my life will be perfect,” “If only I could have a baby, then I will feel fulfilled.”

Here’s the thing: All of those statements are tragically flawed. When we blame someone or something outside of ourselves for our problems, it is a mistake because we are giving someone else power over ourselves and we are refusing to take responsibility for our own lives and our own choices. And when we state that we need x, y or z in order to be happy, we are refusing to live in the present, we are refusing to look inside of ourselves and realize that true happiness resides only there, within us. Happiness will never come from outside of us.

I do not care if you find the dream job, if you make millions of dollars and if you find the dreamiest guy (or girl) that ever walked the Earth; if you are not truly happy within yourself, those external factors will never truly make you happy. And not only will they not bring you happiness, but until you do the necessary inner work within you, all that “appears” to be good in your life, will eventually itself disappear or fall into ruin.

Our internal state entirely affects our external state. If we are unhappy, afraid of being alone, terrified of life, riddled with guilt or hating ourselves on the inside, then our outside life is always going to reflect that. Always, without exception. You see, we attract back what we put out. And if we are unhappy on the inside, then we are putting out negative vibes on the outside, regardless of how much we might try to put on a happy face or a false front. We cannot trick the Universe.

If you yourself are in a negative place, and if you continue to blame the world for your problems, you will continue to attract more negativity into your life. And you will continue to be unhappy. And as long as you continue to desperately seek happiness in external factors, it will continue to elude you. This I state to you as Universal truth.

To change the world around us, we must first change the world within us. We must face our demons. We must resolve the unresolved pain, anger, and fear that dwell in the darkness deep inside of us. We must face loneliness. And not only must we face it, but we must walk through it, however painful, and truly conquer it. We must take responsibility for our own feelings, our own actions and especially our own mistakes. We must see where we went wrong, learn the valuable lesson from it, and make the necessary mid-course correction to ensure that we don’t repeat the same mistake, over and over. We must admit our flaws to ourselves, uncover what we need to work on in ourselves, and truly commit to working on it and improving ourselves as human beings.

And most importantly we must learn to change our thoughts. In the same way that our muscles have “muscle memory” and we can condition our physical bodies, we can do the same with our brains and our mental/emotional bodies. We all have periods in our lives where we feel unhappy or even dreadfully depressed and miserable. And during those times it can feel impossible to change anything. I have lived many of those moments. But the truth is that we hold 100% of the power within us to do just that.

When we can force ourselves to focus on the positive in our lives, to find one simple thing for which we are grateful in any given moment, we have the power to create powerful magnetic shifts in our lives. All it takes is one tiny positive thought, and as we can continue to make the effort to focus on such positive thoughts, it becomes easier and easier and they become more and more magnetic until suddenly we begin to see subtle and then eventually dramatic shifts in our lives.

So when you are scrolling through your Facebook status updates and you see a friend expressing negativity and blaming the world for their problems, make the choice to not enable them. Instead of encouraging them to further steep in their negativity and create a downward spiral,  instead take the time to remind them of what they have to be grateful for. Post something positive and encouraging. Challenge them to focus on the positive instead of dwelling on the negative.

And when you find yourself on the verge of posting a negative status update, pause for a moment and ask yourself the following: Are you about to blame the world or something outside of yourself for your problems? Are you about to vent negativity which really serves no positive purpose? If so, then use that opportunity to create an internal shift. In that moment think of something positive that happened to you that day: think of the dog wagging its tail, think of the smile of your child, think of the sweet taste of the chocolate that melted in your mouth. Think about something for which you are grateful, even if only one small thing. And instead of posting the negative comment, choose to post a positive one. And always remember that happiness is never outside of you, it is only within you. You hold the power in your hands.

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The Overflowing of Gratitude

Today is Thanksgiving Day here in the United States, a day of giving thanks and expressing gratitude for all of the gifts in each of our lives. Thanksgiving as a cultural holiday is all about turkeys and stuffing, pumpkin pies, laughing with family, watching football, playing board games…so many different ways for families to come together and share their joy with one another. For many families it also involves saying Grace at the dinner table.

I remember as a kid being very uncomfortable with this concept. I didn’t come from a particularly religious family, so for me saying Grace was synonymous with praying. It was something that religious families did, something that for me involved that awkward and elusive word “God.” It was simply something that was not part of my vocabulary and it was definitely something that felt a bit too ritualistic for my taste.

I have now realized that while saying Grace is a practice performed by many different religions and spiritual traditions all over the world, at its core the concept really has nothing to do with the institution of religion itself. Grace is simply about the attitude of being grateful, expressing joy for all of the beautiful things in your life. It is not about wishing for more, but instead it is about being grateful for exactly what you have, whatever or however little that is. And I have also realized that it is far more than just a mere ritual of words. The act of saying Grace, the proactive and conscious practice of gratitude has much, much more power than one might possibly imagine.

The Gratitude Tree by Nick Wormell

Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, has spent his whole adult life centered in and sharing the practice of gratitude and gratefulness. He explains gratitude as having two inter-related branches: one is gratefulness and the other is thanksgiving. He describes gratefulness using the image of a bowl, as a representation of life. As one has the experience of feeling so appreciative, so full of gratitude, their bowl gets filled to the brim, just to the point where it is almost overflowing. You’ve all felt this sensation at some point in your lives: When you are so grateful for something that has occurred to you, perhaps the news that you landed the dream job, perhaps a dear friend or family member giving birth to a healthy baby. Whatever the situation may be, you are so elated and bubbling over with joy that you feel the sensation of the bowl filling up with happiness and gratefulness.

As you focus on these jubilant life situations and wonderful emotions, as you feel the overwhelming sense of gratitude and appreciation, the bowl gets so full that it begins to overflow into the second branch of gratitude: thanksgiving. As a result of feeling the ecstasy of the absolute fullness of life, you now begin to attract beautiful things back into your life. As your own gratefulness overflows, thanksgiving brings ever more bounty into your life. And as you begin to become aware of and consciously focus on your feelings of gratitude, you notice that as they get more powerful and more a regular part of your life, so too does the flow of abundance into your life.

This awesome power of gratitude has become ever more evident to me as I’ve studied more and more about the power of the mind, the power of our thoughts to impact our surroundings and our experiences, the power of our emotions to attract beauty into our lives. As I wrote about recently in my post “The REAL Secret,” our thoughts do have power, both for good and bad. And if we can allow ourselves to live with conscious awareness of what we are thinking and feeling, and if we can harness our thoughts to focus on the beauty, to feel absolute joy and gratitude for any and all of the positive elements in our lives (regardless of what other negative elements may exist), magic will happen. By focusing on that for which we are grateful, by practicing gratitude every single day, by seeking out the beauty and the positivity in every waking moment, we can create our very own cornucopia of abundance.

Looking back on my awkward childhood relationship with the concept of saying Grace, I now look back and nod with understanding. I now get it. I understand why people say Grace and I fully appreciate how powerful a practice it actually is. And while I am still not a religious person and probably will not be holding hands around the Thanksgiving dinner table to say Grace, I realize that I don’t have to. I hold gratitude in my own heart, in my own way, every moment of every day. And my cup (or bowl) runneth over…

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The REAL Secret

Have you ever known the person who thinks that they have it worse than everyone else? No matter what tragedies may have befallen your own life, their situation is somehow always more tragic. Whenever you talk to them they have that dreadful “woe is me” tone that makes you roll your eyes and want to hang up the phone. And even when you try to be a good friend and offer words of encouragement they find ways to pooh-pooh anything you say. The person who seems to pride themselves on spouting off nothing but negativity, that somehow if they can drag you into their negative web that they will feel better about themselves.

We’ve all known these people.  Heck, perhaps at one time or another we’ve even been that person. Come on people, let’s be honest. I know I’ve definitely been there at one dark time or another. I’m sure many of you have too.

Here’s the thing that those people (or we) do not realize. By allowing themselves (or ourselves) to wallow in their (or our) own angst and fester in their (or our) own negativity, they (or we) are actually poisoning themselves (or ourselves). Here’s why: our thoughts have power. Yes folks, you heard right and I can’t say it loudly enough. Our thoughts have power. Now many of you naysayers who have heard about the Law of Attraction and watched or read The Secret will now be rolling your eyes and think that this is new-agey horseshit. Allow me to clear some things up for you. I have studied the Law of Attraction for the past several years and I have seen proof positive of its validity in my own life: for both good and bad.

You know those days when you wake up and stub your toe and then the whole day spirals downhill from there? That is the simplest example of the Law of Attraction. You started with a negative thought and you focused your energy on it, and because of that you attracted more negative things into your life that day. You become like a magnet. I have seen my negative thoughts perpetuate more negativity and create drama in my life, and on the flip side I have seen how harnessing the positive thoughts can truly change your life in brilliant and magical ways.

Let me talk about The Secret for a second. While the underlying premise of this book and film resides in Universal truth, their portrayal of the Universal Law of Attraction is actually a bit too literal and oversimplified. The Law of Attraction does not mean that you can focus all of your attention on a new bike and then “poof” a new bike will appear. It does not even mean that you can focus on your dream job, and that if you put it on your vision board that you will one day manifest it. That is a false and very misleading teaching. Here’s why: All the Law of Attraction truly states is that like attracts like, meaning that if you focus on the negative, you will attract more negativity into your life; and alternatively if you focus on the positive, you will attract more positivity into your life. It does not allow you to focus on one specific thing that you really want and then allow that thing to come to you, all wrapped up in a pretty bow. No siree!

And the reason is because that thing which you may be trying to manifest may in fact not be meant for you. You may be trying to manifest the return of an old lover. But if there is another lover in your future that you are meant to find, that is a better fit for you, the Universe is never going to allow the return of the old lover. The same is true of the dream job. I use my own life for this example. I was trying to manifest success in the .com world, but instead the Universe pulled one of its famous tricks on me and got me fired and now on the path to being a writer. We often do not know what is best for us, therefore the Law of Attraction is not as simple as we focus on something that we really want and then we get it.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s get back to the main point, that our thoughts do have power. You don’t just have to believe me and my experiences about the power of thought. In this age when we as human beings are starting to become more aware of our consciousness and its power, quantum physics is no longer an occult subject for the airy-fairy hippies.  It has now moved to the forefront of major research institutions like Stanford, Harvard and Princeton. There have been loads of scientific studies performed about the power of the mind. As Lynne McTaggart points out in her book The Intention Experiment, the most comprehensive body of research has been amassed by William Braud, a psychologist and the research director of the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, Texas, and later, the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.

If you wish to learn more about the science of the mind, I recommend Lynne’s book as well as works published by the scientists on her team. In recent years I have also seen a plethora of articles published in major scientific journals about the power of meditation to actually change the chemistry of the brain. It is no longer just a fanciful theory. Modern science has finally caught up to the ideas that ancient mystics, scientists and philosophers have known for centuries: our thoughts do have power.

“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make our world.”
~Buddha~

“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
~Marcus Aurelius~

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings
can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.”
~William James~

“Outer changes always begin with an inner change of attitude.”
~Albert Einstein~

Ok, so if it’s true that our thoughts can change our lives, how then do we implement that? I’ve discovered that the reason why so many people discount the teachings of The Secret is because they think “if it were that easy, everyone would be doing it.” We all know that when we are stuck in that dark and negative place, it can be extremely difficult to change our thoughts to something positive. It is our human nature that when we feel miserable and defeated, that just like the person I mentioned in the beginning, all too often we feel that nothing could ever improve our situation. We dwell on the negative. And in that situation the Law of Attraction IS actually working, but it is working on the negative side and against your favor. You are a magnet for more negativity to come into your life. To get it to work IN your favor, you have to change your thoughts. It is not an easy thing to do, but it is wrong to believe that it does not work. It takes a truly committed Spiritual Warrior to force themselves to change their thoughts, even when they are at their darkest.

There’s the old saying “fake it ’till you make it.” This couldn’t be more true when it comes to changing your thoughts. I’ve learned that even if you are feeling down in the dumps, if you can force yourself to focus on the positive, you can change your life. This is exactly what I have done in my own life. Because I have had such radically life-altering success by practicing the Law of Attraction and by choosing to focus on the positive, I want to share with you exactly how I did it.

Many of you who have read my prior pieces know that I have lived through what I can only aptly describe as a “dark night of the  soul” in recent years. There were many times when I did not want to get out of bed, when I felt completely alone, abandoned and unloved, when I felt that things couldn’t get any darker. I had reached my rock bottom. It was during that time that I began to study and practice the Law of Attraction, really as an act of desperation. I took a course about the Law of Attraction and I learned about the concept of a Gratitude Journal, a concept with which I’m sure many of you are familiar. By writing down that for which we are grateful, we are focusing our thoughts, our energies on the positive. I took this lesson one step further.

Every night before I would go to bed, I would make two lists: 1. First I would make a list of ALL of the good things that happened that day, no matter how small, no matter how seemingly insignificant. Even if it was something as small as the store clerk smiled at me, I wrote it down. I searched through my memory banks trying to find any possible positive thing that occurred in that day, and I wrote them all down. 2. Secondly, I would make a list of all that I was grateful for in that day. Some things would remain constant, others would change from day to day. But by writing these two lists, everyday, by actually writing down the words, I was giving them more power and energy. By forcing myself to focus on the positive, even though I felt deep sadness, I was beginning to shift my energetic vibration, and the energy in my life began to shift. I began to attract more positivity and magic into my life. As I forced myself to do these exercises everyday for months on end, I began to notice that more and more unexpected and beautiful things began flowing into my life. And the positive energy compounded upon itself. The longer I did it, the more powerful the energy became, and the more magical synchronicity came into my life.

I have shared these exercises with each beautiful soul that has reached out to me from a place of darkness asking for help. And one person after the next has told me that by doing these simple exercises, they too have started to see positive shifts in their lives. I am never surprised by this of course, because I know for myself that it truly works. So what’s the REAL Secret then? It is not simply to focus on a specific, tangible thing that you want in your life. It is instead to focus on every positive, beautiful thing that occurs in your day, to force yourself to change your negative thoughts instead to positive ones. It is to view the glass as half full, always. The REAL Secret is to continue focusing on the positive and then to simply allow, to be open to whatever beauty may come, and not pigeon-hole yourself into a specific outcome. If you do this, every day, if you truly make a conscious effort to look for the good in each day, to write it down and focus on it, I promise you that you too will change your life for the better.

For great resources on how to practice the Law of Attraction, I can recommend the following books, in addition to Lynne McTaggert’s book mentioned above: The Power of Intention, by Wayne Dyer and The Law of Attraction, by Esther & Jerry Hicks.

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