“From the bottom of your heart,

seek what makes you sing and once you find it,

do nothing but sing your song.

Chance everything to dance to your tune.”

It says in a nutshell what my heart had literally screamed at me for the last 20 years!

Unfortunately I was a big ol’ chicken! Petrified of stepping too far out of my comfort zone, risking all I believed I had built up, and worse still looking like a raving lunatic in front of all my fancy friends haha!

‘Letting go’ certainly wasn’t conducive to the lifestyle and image I was trying to portray and create! The one I ‘thought’ was going to make me happy.

Don’t you think it is strange the power ‘fitting in’ has over us? Is being seen as ‘normal’ or ‘successful’ really so important we are willing to sacrifice the happiness of our entire life, to satisfy the critical eye of the few who we call our peers.

For me I banged my head on life everyday hoping for different results. Maybe one day life would crack and I’d wake up without a ‘headache,’ I thought!

Of course in a head banging contest life always wins, and eventually as the ‘pain relievers’ and ‘distractions’ I had used to numb myself over the years wore off, there was and ever increasing realisation that, this AIN’T WORKING!

This human trait of ‘self’ preservation, to ‘stay within our box’ no matter what the price,’ has always fascinated me.

How can we want to change so much but be so terrified of the consequences.

Especially when these days the consequences are hardly being cast out of the tribe to starve to death in Jurassic park.

Our self image is a powerful thing and we defend it literally to the death.

But what exactly is it? What is pride? Fear? Ego? Self Image? – It is the exact reflection of that which we believe we are missing or will lose. (Think about that for a second)

We create our self image and defend it so passionately because it compensates for what we believe we are NOT! It is our smoke screen, our sanctuary from the scary world around us. Like the puffer fish that blows itself up when frightened to look twice its size!

Even a poor self image protects us from taking risks that might involve humiliation or emotional pain.

Like a lover with rose coloured glasses in an abusive relationship. We see only the protection it gives us and not the pain the self critic inflicts on us, or the freedom and life it is keeping us from.

So how do you Let Go of this controlling old ‘lover’ and really live?

For me its been surprisingly simple! once i figuerd it out. (Although it took 20 years I admit)

Find YOUR song. And sing it with all your heart. Stop second guessing yourself and trying to sing other peoples song’s

Just like any song it will have high notes and low. You don’t have to know how it ends, or even what the next line is, you just have to sing what is given to you with all your heart.

And you may find, as I have done much to my surprise, that others in this world will be singing along with you!

UPDATE:- AMAZING INTERVIEWS

We have already started interviewing some amazing people with some life altering ideas. We will be showing these interviews when the new Video Blog is set up, and discussing with you the topics they cover. So stick around and PLEASE be part of the conversation, so we can learn from you too.

It is a VERY surreal feeling. Sitting here today with little more than the clothes on my back as possessions. I feel so incredibly FREE for the first time in years. I feel almost ELATED!!……… WE DID IT!!

This crazy, stupid, irresponsible, wonderful, enlightening, thing! My god it was a trial, but stage one is over and I REALLY AM sitting here a changed person. With a spring in my step and lightness in my heart like I have not experienced since I was a teenager.

The world is truly our Oyster! And we are open, ready and inspired to go on the journey the universe had planned for us from the beginning. The very journey we had been fighting against for the last 20 years, simply because WE KNEW BETTER. We could plan and control better. We knew what we REALLY wanted!…. Didn’t we?

Of course now I look back and realise just how little I actually did control, other than perhaps the stubbornness to not let go of the dreams of my ego, and the self deprecating voice reminding me I was useless and should not venture too far out of my box.

But today – Free of everything I allowed to define me, I don’t feel in the slightest bit ‘without’. I don’t feel poor, or less. In fact im watching commercials on TV now and seeing dust, rust and debt rather than a sparkling new product that will make my life all I hoped it would be!

I looked out the window yesterday and realized all the beauty and the sunshine, the roads, the trees, the conversation, the beaches, the experiences were 100% FREE – So I set about talking to people I wouldn’t normally stop and talk to and that opened my eyes to new possibilities. Possibilities I would NEVER have seen with my head down and bum up in my old ivory rut!

ONE STEP

My sister has been here for the past few days and we were talking about how hard it is to do things when we can only see objections and barriers to the journey.

I pointed to a large highly wooded hill and said ‘If someone said lets go to the top of that hill, from here you would say It’s impossible. To steep and thickly wooded, I can’t see any paths and it looks so far away.

But if we simply concentrated on the part we COULD SEE, by putting our shoes on and stepping out the door in the general direction, we would find after a short time that the woods weren’t so thick. The hill not so steep and the fact there is even a perfect little path helping us wind our way up to the summit.

From where we sat complaining about the impossibility of it all, none of these aids and ‘opportunities’ existed in the world we perceived.

It was a perfect example of how we felt before we were ready to put on our shoes and step out on this Experiment. However just like the little path that appeared we have had more opportunities open up in the last 2 weeks than I ever could have ever existed.

The lesson in this for me is NEVER EVER judge your ability to ‘walk a path’ any further than the next step in front of you.

STOP trying to predict what will happen on the way to the top – YOU HAVE NO IDEA. The universe doesn’t need you to work out all the solutions, plan the whole route and solve all the difficulties you may (or may not) come across on the way.

It takes care of all that for you when you get there!. You just have to put one foot in front of the other TODAY ! So why do we make it so complicated!

P.s Can you guys remind us of this next time we fall to pieces haha

I was FURIOUS at the time but decided to take the opportunity to ask WHY?

HUBBLE – And this morning as almost a reminder to me how trivial any of my earthly dramas are in the big scheme of things, I was greeted by news of NEW images from the upgraded Hubble space telescope. Why do I love this so much?

Just have a look at the images and put yourself and your problems in perspective http://www.universetoday.com/2009/09/09/hubble-wows-with-new-images/

Poor Bessie has been forced over the last week to endure copious Einstein documentaries due to it being ‘Einstein week on fox’. Fortunately she has plenty of emails to respond to thanks to all the amazing responses we have received.

Anyway in watching Einstein’s life I realised the HUGE and varied hurdles he had to overcome to become the ‘genius’ we all know and love.

What he proposed was so vastly different to, not only what the top minds of the day said, but what logic dictated. So from the very start he was batting being called nuts from both without and within.

I really stoped to wonder how he was able to take such gargantuan leaps in thinking as to propose, and later prove, things like time slowing with speed and matter being concentrated energy.

Thinking/ living outside the box is what this Life Change Experiment is all about. Allowing your mind the freedom to roam and explore ideas and possibilities it would usually rule out.

It’s only in these moments of non judgment of our thoughts that we find our own genius & flow.

Unfortunately most of the time we are so fearful of loosing control of the familiar, we never give our real creative an opportunity to flex its muscles.

To be honest, I find the thought of who I might be, if I totally let go my inner critic and stepped fully into flow, physically scary. Yes I admit it. Full flow scares the pants of me.

I mean what would be expected of me if the comfort zone police in my head suddenly took a day off from keeping me ’safe’ with comments like, ‘ohh I cant do that’, ‘No one will listen to me’ and ‘who are you kidding, your nothing special’.

Frightening stuff! But none the less stuff I intend to find out!

Truth is our brains are the most powerful pieces of matter on earth (and likely the universe), Yet rather than treating them like the creative Ferraris they are we use them to potter around like a bicycles, too afraid to put our foot down in case others laugh at us.

Thank god, Einstein, Edison, Picasso, Newton, and all the other creative geniuses that have shaped our lives had no quarms about stepping on the gas!

A little at a time I intend to re wire my inner critic and see what sort of horse power I can get out of this ol gray matter.

Its not that any of us lack genius, Its simply we lack the courage to be wrong on the path to expressing our genius!

Give yourself permission to be wrong, screw up, make mistake, get miserable, feel hurt – Then let it go and get on with the job of living n learning with no regreats.

You may have seen it but well worth repeating!
Washington DC Metro Station on a cold January morning.

He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approx 2 thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.
Only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace.
He collected $32.1 hour:He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

• No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world.
• He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written,
• With a violin worth $3.5 million dollars.
• Two days before Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston
• where the seats averaged $100.
  

This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people’s priorities.

The questions raised: in a common place environment at an inappropriate hour,

do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be:

(Sent to us by Bernita – Thanks Bernita

The more im out of my old life the more i wonder what on earth i thought I was doing.

One of the coolest things I have discovered is the clarity and insights that come from ‘letting go’. Decisions seem easier to make and answers don’t require 2 bottles of red to coax out of my fuzzy thick skull.

I almost feel foolish at the things that i let define me and stress me out. You know! Like ‘important stuff. .. Stuff I have GOT TO do……NOW!! Stuff like…..ummmm ……Well it was important at the time, else I wouldn’t have had to do it… RIGHT!!

If you had asked me then, i would have defend these things, and my need to let them dictate the terms of my life, to the death (literally, perhaps in some peoples cases)

But suddenly it’s like someone turned the lights on in a dark night club just as the beer goggles subside………… “Damn did I really stay up all night trying to impress these people!!… What was I thinking’, as you leave sheepishly out the back door wishing you’d thought of it before you lost most of your hair ‘trying’!

Well as i step out of the club of ‘Social expectations’ that i spent most of my life trying to be ‘someone’ in, I am discovering there is a whole world of other people outside the club I had never really noticed before.

Some of you have emailed us and told us your amazing stories of letting go and change, and they are truly inspirational.
I now wonder WHY so many people are cuing to get their 15 minutes in the club, when the freedom it promises is a laugh and there is a whole life to be had in the sunshine outside!!

G = Geoff’s blogging B = Bessie blogging