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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A Reflection for The New Year

As we begin a new year, I pause to reflect back on all that has come before: all of the trials and tribulations, the beautiful and painful moments, all of the invaluable lessons learned. And I realize how far I have come, how much every experience, every moment has contributed to a beautiful transformation that has made me the strong, vibrant, and happy woman that I am today. And I am grateful.

After living through the darkest years of my life, I came to fully understand the valuable piece of knowledge that through our thoughts and our feelings, we create much of our own reality. Armed with that knowledge, I made a conscious choice to turn my life around, and in turn throughout 2011 and 2012, I have experienced and LIVED the happiest, most joy-filled, abundant, expansive years of my life. Now that I have integrated very conscious practices into my everyday life, as a way of life, rather than something fleeting, I know that I hold the power to make 2013 and beyond equally as potent, magical, and blissful.

Here’s to a lifetime of continued abundance and happiness. ♥

Photo by Flickr user Chema Escarcega.

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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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Punishment or Gift?

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We’ve all had bad things happen to us, when we’ve felt like we were being punished; when we’ve looked up at the sky and screamed “why me?” And we wonder why this situation, whatever it may be, has happened to us and not to other people. What did we do to deserve this?

At the end of 2010, I learned that two different friends had lost their jobs unexpectedly. Both felt the expected range of emotions: anger, resentment, hurt, fear of the unknown, uncertainty about their futures. My gut reaction was the same to both friends: I immediately felt a sense of freedom and jubilation for them. Although they were upset and resentful, I knew that this was a gift for them. I knew that the Universe was simply giving them a friendly “kick” in order to move them on to bigger and better things, into situations that were more aligned with their true purpose. They of course did not share this sense of excitement that I felt, which is understandable. At that time I wanted to write a blog examining whether such events are punishments or gifts. But something told me to wait…

Little did I know, a month later I too would unexpectedly lose my job. I was floored. I will admit there was a part of me that was relieved, as I had been unhappy in this job, but the larger part of me felt furious, upset, unappreciated, and out right hurt. I wondered “why is this happening to ME?” I knew I had been a good, hard-working employee, so I kept asking myself what I had done to deserve this. Now was my chance to test my own conviction and listen to my own advice! I had to remind myself of what I had felt and known about my two friends in similar situations: that they were in fact being given a gift.

You see, I had been through similar situations before, where I was certain I was being punished by a cruel Universe. But once time passed and events were allowed to unfold, in every one of those situations I was able to look back with 20/20 hindsight and see that the events that I had perceived as “punishment” had actually been gifts: True gifts.

Many of you already know of the hard times I lived through when I was living in Los Angeles: Rejected, heart-broken, jobless and largely friendless. After an extended period of unemployment, I was finally able to find a job, but only to be laid off 8 months later, a casualty of the deep recession that descended upon the country. Considering all of the other things that had gone wrong in my personal life, I just felt like nothing would ever go right. I felt completely trapped, completely stagnant. No matter how hard I tried to change and improve my situation, I just couldn’t seem to find a way out. I felt like I was being punished.

But then, a year later, just when I thought that that job in Los Angeles could never have helped me, that there couldn’t have been any good reason for it, I was offered a job in San Francisco, that was a direct result of having had that job. That job that had laid me off in Los Angeles, had been my ticket to freedom, it had been my ticket out of stagnation. It had been my ticket to San Francisco.

So here I am more than two years later and I’ve just lost that same job that brought me to San Francisco. But now I have perspective. I am able to look back and see how the dots connected. I know that that job in Los Angeles led me to this job here, and I know that this job led me to San Francisco. And I now know that losing this job has led me to freedom. I know now that the Universe is giving me yet another gift: it has released me from another unhappy situation, and has given me the opportunity to pursue my dreams.

As I said about my friends, I know that the Universe has given me a friendly “kick,” a slight nudge of encouragement to align myself with my truth path. And so now I walk forward, into a bright future, aligned with my true purpose. And I know that whenever something happens to me that at the time seems like a very clear punishment, that I will be grateful, because I know it will only be a matter of time before it reveals itself to actually be a gift.

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