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February 29, 2020,
For those of us who hated taking tests at all school levels and especially in college, which was gruesome, we absolutely hope that life is not a test.
If it is, it’s the biggest test of all.
Please pass. Heaven forbid, don’t fail.
Now if life is one big test, in some ways it takes the fun out of it.
Who is the test giver?
In school we met some fairly sadistic ones along the way.
So if life is one big test, are we all taking the same one or are varying ones passed out to each of us?
If so, then it does seem to come down to choices, right?
Same questions for you and for us as well. Then we get to pick A, B, C, all of the above or none of the above.
Neutral choices can be the most dangerous of all. Then life or others have a way of influencing your choices or worse, making them for you.
Take a stand. Make a decision. Make a good choice.
One aspect of Showtime’s hit television series The L Word, is that it was a story filled with choices and options.
Especially in the sequel.
As only Showtime can say, “The groundbreaking drama series, The L Word®, revolutionized a generation and this fall the highly anticipated sequel The L Word®: Generation Q debuts. Returning cast Jennifer Beals, Kate Moennig and Leisha Hailey will resume their original roles.”
The story line begins in the first episode, over ten years after the death of Jenny Schecter, Bette Porter is running for Mayor of Los Angeles to succeed Eric Garcetti, but her electoral position is threatened during a live press conference when a man, Tyler Adams, accuses her of having slept with his ex-wife, Felicity, who at the time was one of Bette’s employees.
Talk about making choices. That was a whopper.
Alice, now with her own successful talk show, is in a relationship with therapist Nat and struggles to mother Nat’s kids and get along with Nat’s ex-wife, Gigi, who is also the kids’ biological mother.
The original L word characters reunite after Shane moves back to Los Angeles after selling her hair salons in Paris and New York.
Now that really was a choice. If we could make a living in New York and Paris, not sure we would go back to a place that we’ve already deeply experienced, and whatever happened there, decided to leave.
Choices, choices and more choices.
We’ve made a choice to present this important life component from another angle, through the eyes of a visiting female writer.
Joleen Halloran is the author of Finding Home – Breaking Free from Limits under the pseudo name of Joleen Bridges. This book represents over 10 years of research and inspiration in personal and spiritual empowerment and provides readers with a pathway to overcome limits and discover authentic divine qualities in their lives and to live a life of unbounded freedom. .
Additionally Joleen is the owner of ZoomIT Marketing, a social media and internet marketing coaching and training company. Joleen’s business background includes extensive experience in project management, leadership, specializing in motivational techniques and corporate culture.
Beyond Joleen’s professional life, she is an avid reader and researcher of books and other materials related to her profession, but also to her special passion, which is metaphysical and spirituality topics. You can find out more about Joleen’s book at her books website. Additional articles of a spiritual and inspirational nature can be found at the book’s website as well. The book is available for purchase at Amazon and at a discounted price directly from the books website.
Please enjoy her thoughts.
Our Choices – A Gift or a Curse?
Each moment, we are making a choice. Many times, our choices are so habitual and customary that we make them unconsciously. If you really stop to think about, literally every single move we make and every thought that we think is a choice, either conscious or unconscious. This fact either offers us an amazing opportunity to direct the flow of our lives in the direction that we want or to allow ourselves to be pushed and pulled in the direction of our current situation or environment. Furthermore, not making a choice at all, by ignoring, denying, deflecting issues and emotions, is really making a choice too. This sort of choice voluntarily gives away our authority of choice and leaves it to chance, fate, outside influences, or to others.
As most of us go through our daily routines, we may not give a lot of thought to the choices we make, and especially to how often we allow our choices to be determined by something or someone else, by default. But we do, in abundance. A quick example of this is a typical drive to work. It starts out pretty mundane, but on our way, someone cuts us off from emerging onto the freeway. Next thing you know you are angry, anxiety ridden and tense. The next couple hours of your day are less than productive or happy as you relay the story to a few co-workers who can easily relate similar stories. What were your choices here? First, you unconsciously chose to allow a total stranger to arbitrarily impact your thoughts and feelings, and even though you will never see or speak to this person, he/she has just affected you as harshly as a good friend might have. Further, you chose to prolong these bad feelings by getting validation and sympathy towards them by sharing and receiving feedback from your co-workers. In a very short time you have made two choices that invite negative “vibes” into your day; one rather unconsciously and one very consciously.
This scenario, and many like it that you can now recall, including choices from the most trivial daily things, to major choices that could impact you for years to come, can be considered a “curse” because we do them very unconsciously. So, having the ability to make a choice in the context of all choices be attached to every single human action becomes a burden and excess baggage. To see the act of choosing in any other way (like a gift), means that we have to take full accountability for our choices, which many of us do not want to do. To see the ability to make choice as only a survival or base human instinctual capacity, allows us to divert blame or responsibility because we can justify our choices as instinctive, involuntary, mechanical, or unconscious. If we are really honest with ourselves, we can see that many of the choices that we make that are impulsive, unconscious, reactionary, and habitual, we take very little accountability for and have a tendency to blame a condition or another person for the choice that we made. Choices that are unconscious and habitual choices today, were once conscious choice that has been made so repeatedly, that they are now methodical. The process of externalizing our accountability in our choices is also unconscious. It’s a process of mentally “kicking the can down the road” and the result is situations continue to rise up due to these choices, because we have not associated ourselves with them.
On the flip side, when considering choice as fundamental cause for everything that happens in our lives, is a viewpoint that choice is a gift. While sometimes it seems easier (so easy we don’t even have to think about it), to make choices from a deep sub-conscious level, to be a direct participant in your choices amplifies the human experience to a significant degree, both positive and negatively. Associating your actions to specific choices you have made, puts the power back in your court, as opposed to allowing choices to be made for you by external conditions. Going back to our earlier example of our trip to work, if we would have instead chose not to react or respond emotionally to the person that cut us off on the road, then the moment the incident occurs is the last time we think about it and on we go. The rest of the trip into work is peaceful or enjoyable and no further conflict arises because we have nothing negative to share with our co-workers to further aggravate the original reaction.
But the matter of choice goes much deeper than just taking more control of our mind to choose positive thoughts and actions over negative ones. It is literally a life altering platform to choose to either LIVE your life or have life LIVE you. Things happen, and initially we may declare we had absolutely no control over them. While I would argue this point, the more important part of any life situation is not WHAT happened, but WHAT you do with what happened. This is the beginning of the path to living a life by design as opposed to default. And it also a point of realization that by choosing to direct our own path, we open up the portal of integration with our divine purpose as well. These doors will appear to be closed without an awareness of our own choosing power because otherwise our choices appear to be separate from us or outside of our control.
Become aware of how your choices impact your actions, feelings, and outcomes. Like, when you talk to yourself that way, it feels bad. Choose to admit that when you watch too much TV, you are responsible for not having enough time to spend with the kids, or your new passion, or to get your laundry done. And, choose to realize that when you do take the time to meditate or pray, do yoga, take a walk, that you feel refreshed, energized, and satisfied that you did something to serve yourself. These are just a few small examples of how what you choose impacts your outcomes and your feelings. Recognize the choices you make that serve you and those that don’t.
As more awareness is brought into your mind about your choices, the more you will be able to discern the direct relationship between your results to your choices. This should not be an attempt to beat yourself up when you make a choice that slips back into unconscious behavior or that you feel might have been better. In fact, you should be appreciative and encouraged that you have the sense of awareness at all! More awareness expands the possibilities of choice, and begins to close the gap of separateness to ALL.
The idea of choice, as a fundamental divine right, is also a connecting point between the human and the spiritual self. If we did not have the gift of choice, how could we ever choose a path to enlightened living and purpose? Not being able to direct our own path, (like to choose enlightened living and connecting to Universal Laws), would mean that we are nothing more than really fancy robots. If all we have is our conditioned, biological, and instinctive nature, then we are barely more advanced than our primitive cousins. But we know deep down, that there is much more to us than what we can see. So much more.
It all starts by making a choice. A reactionary, emotional, and driven life implies a life where we must be constantly surviving and conquering the world as it is thrown at us. A relaxed, accepting, and flowing life implies a life where we direct our thoughts and actions towards our divine purpose and intentions. Challenges can either be met, with a spirit of resignation or furious willpower, or they can be embraced as a stepping stone to the next level of choice.
Making serious changes in our lives to begin to expand, grow, and realize the full potential available to us, from heaven and earth, requires that first, we make a choice. This is the gift. And an amazingly powerful one it is. The only curse about choice is the one that we have put upon ourselves with our very own choices (or by not choosing). Everything is a choice. What is yours? Choose wisely.
Joleen Halloran is the author of Finding Home – Breaking Free from Limits under the pseudo name of Joleen Bridges. This book represents over 10 years of research and inspiration in personal and spiritual empowerment and provides readers with a pathway to overcome limits and discover authentic divine qualities in their lives and to live a life of unbounded freedom.
Beyond Joleen’s professional life, she is an avid reader and researcher of books and other materials related to her profession, but also to her special passion, which is metaphysical and spirituality topics. You can find out more about Joleen’s book at her books website, [http://www.breakingfreefromlimits.com]. Additional articles of a spiritual and inspirational nature can be found at the book’s website as well. The book is available for purchase at Amazon and at a discounted price directly from the books website.
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Opening photo credit Showtime fciwomenswrestling.com femcompetitor.com, fcielitecompetitor.com, fciwomenswrestling2.com, Photo Credit: Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/SHOWTIME.
https://www.sho.com/the-l-word-generation-q
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_L_Word:_Generation_Q
https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Joleen_Halloran/1117536
http://EzineArticles.com/7357806
https://fciwomenswrestling.com/
https://www.fcielitecompetitor.com/
