Dream ~ Act ~ Plan ~ Believe

Life brings us the experiences that we need to grow from. We grow as our experiences expand and eventually everything works out in it’s own perfect way. Often we do not realize it until years later when we look back at our life with a different perspective. That perspective, the way we choose to view things, makes all the difference in the world.

I believe strongly that our thoughts attract our life’s experiences to us. I also believe that we select (subconsciously) things that we want to learn in this life and that we attract circumstances to us that will help us learn and grow. Once the lesson is learned those type of experiences are no longer needed. Once the lesson is learned those life experiences are longer needed and therefor no longer need to exist.

Not so ironically, I learned this life lesson through my life experiences.

You’ll see a perfect example of how this works as I continue on with my life story. You’ll see that once I learned the lesson I was meant to learn the negative experiences, that I needed to learn from stopped.

So how does people get from a point of experiencing the same things over and over again to a new existence with greater speed?

They change their perspective. They change how they choose to look at their past experiences. They change it by “simply choosing.”

So choose.

Simply choose… (more…)

Posted on March 9th, 2008 by Leisa
Filed under: Healing, Life Lessons, Perception | 2 Comments »

My apologies if you’ve already read this. I’ve decided to break
the last post down into more manageable chunks.

I was probably twelve at the time when the next traumatic event happened. My parents had gone out for the evening. My friend and I were co-babysitting by younger brothers and sister. We were sitting in the basement, watching the Miss America pageant. We had one set of stairs, and at the top of those stairs was a door that opened to the garage.

Suddenly, we heard the door from the garage open and then close. We heard someone walk through the kitchen to the living room, down the hall, and into my parent’s bedroom. We heard them open the drawers and begin rummaging through them.

My friend and I glanced fearful glances at each other, but didn’t want to alarm my siblings. But they heard it as well. David, my younger brother,said, “Leisa, someone’s upstairs.”

Now this was before they taught us about 911. Perhaps it wasn’t even around then. Probably not. But we couldn’t figure out what to do. Why we didn’t think to call my friends dad is beyond me. But hey I guess we were too scared to think clearly.

My dad had a phone in his office and we decided to call a neighbor. We chose them because they had an easy phone number to remember and it was the first thing that came to my mind. So we went into the office and I picked-up the phone to call. But what I heard next terrified me…

I picked up the phone and there was the intruder on the line. I could hear him breathing. I must have gone as white as a ghost because my friend kept saying, “Leisa, what’s wrong?” over and over again. Thankfully he hung up and I quickly called, under the sound of movement upstairs. Luckily someone answered the phone quickly. The neighbors called the police and rushed to our house and rang the doorbell.

Now here we were, in the basement. Trapped. Or so we thought. How were we going to get upstairs and open the door?

We all grabbed something from the office. I grabbed a big heavy hole-punch. The others grabbed my dad’s antique bottles (and we were really hoping we wouldn’t have to use them) and we slowly made our way upstairs to the front door. We let the neighbors in who took a look around. He had fled and we were safe.

The police arrived and took a report. I remember vividly my younger brother staring with big wide eyes at the policeman’s gun. I remember thinking that the policeman didn’t believe us, and that they thought our imagination got the better of us. It only they had seen the looks on everyone’s faces when they heard the door open. It was simultaneous. Over active imagination. No! The second traumatic event in my life. Yes!

And planted within me was the slight belief that cops couldn’t protect us. And I realized that day that I wasn’t safe in my own home. That belief would manifest itself in more detail later…

The third traumatic event occurred not to long later…

Posted on February 27th, 2008 by Leisa
Filed under: Life Lessons, My Story, Trauma | No Comments »

In my last few articles I’ve written about regret; those momentary feelings of loss, disappointment, or dissatisfaction with something in our life. I would warrant that all of us have experienced some type of regret in our life. Something we wished we had done differently, or perhaps not have done at all. It’s my belief that those who say they don’t have any regrets don’t mean they haven’t ever had any. What they mean is that they changed the focus, or their outlook about the specific circumstances. They learned from it. They turned it into a positive.

Changing one’s focus or keeping one’s focus on what is important is the key to recovery, and the key to achieving happiness. Focusing on regrets, focusing on what’s not working in our life leads to depression. My mom always said that anyone can think themselves into a depression. Everyone has had things happen to them, or has done things that could get them down. But focusing on the past, focusing on our failings doesn’t help at all. Choosing to focus on our short-comings, or negative experiences can lead a happy person to a state of depression. (more…)

Posted on February 21st, 2008 by Leisa
Filed under: ADD-itude, Depression, Focus, Life Lessons, Panic Attacks, Recovery, Regret | 3 Comments »