Blog 2

Well it is all go in my household at the moment; my eldest daughter is to be married at the end of this week. All the weeks of preparations finally coming to fruition as the plans for the big day finally come together. When the engagement was announced in December last year we anticipated a wedding in September this year and began to make plans towards the happy day, but it seemed that at every turn and twist of the way the plans met with difficulties, initially the venue for the wedding was a major issue, the Bride from East Yorkshire, the Groom from Lancashire but the Bride and Groom now living in Staffordshire. Where was the wedding to take place?

The plans shifted from Lancashire to East Yorkshire; then from East Yorkshire to Staffordshire and finally settled in Lancashire, much to the relief of all those involved in the planning. Along side of this concern was the timing of the wedding, my daughter watched dismayed as a number of her friends planning their summer weddings were disappointed with the weather at the last minute, and her plans for September shifted to May the following year and finally settled in November this year. She reasoned that with the state of the weather at the moment that was not really to be a consideration as to when the wedding would or should take place.

So finally the venue and the date were set and then amazingly everything else fell into place. Friends who initially thought they would not be around for the wedding because of holidays and the like announced that they would be able to come along after all, seeing as this was now out of the holiday season, and prior to the Christmas celebrations, and would provide a high spot in the midst of the gloom at the end of the year.

How typical this has been in the way that it has mirrored things in my life. When I am trying to plan something and at every turn everything seems to be stacked against me and the plans I am trying to make, I often think it is for a very good reason. However, once I have got on to the right track everything just miraculously falls into place and all the plans come together with much less effort, leaving me wondering why I had found everything so difficult in the first place.

It seems that there is a greater plan out there for all of us and when we work with harmony within that plan we can make progress easily, however, when we try to run away from the way our life should be going then we encounter difficulties along the way, until we are back on the right path.

We talk about coincidences happening along the way, as though we are surprised when things happen as they should. For my daughter little things like the florist offering a good deal, because she was a friend and wanted to be able to help, another friend who had the time and space to ice the cake prior to being too busy with Christmas cakes, the venue she wanted to use having the availability in November which otherwise would have meant her waiting till 2010, all little things that built to make the bigger picture come together, to make her day come together as she wanted it to be.

I am a great believer that as one door closes another one springs open offering numerous opportunities that may have remained closed to us without the door closing. It just needs a different mind set sometimes to see the opportunities we are being given rather than being consumed by what we are losing.

For me, the opportunity to work in the university teaching students had felt like the perfect job for quite a long time. I enjoyed being involved in watching the students develop and mature in their minds and attitudes, as they moved towards graduation and I enjoyed meeting them again, once they had been in practice for a while, when they came back to tell me how a piece of my teaching had helped them gain a sense of what their work was about. When recognition came to me that I could not continue in that field, I was initially overcome with grief for the life and life style I would be leaving behind. I continually looked to the past and focused on what was familiar but couldn’t envisage a future with the new opportunities that was coming in for me.

Life is a journey, at each stage along the way we develop skills and pick up tools to help us on the next stage of the journey. The secret is to only take from that experience what is useful to help you to move on to the next stage of your life. Then move forward with confidence knowing that life will have equipped you with what ever you need to move on.

Clients come to me when they feel that their life is in disharmony. Through the sessions we explore what it is that they want to achieve with their life, in the short term and the longer term and then we chat about how things are at the present time for them and what progress they feel they have made along the way. We then look at what is preventing them from achieving their plans or objectives and how to get them back to feeling in harmony again. Sometimes it takes a little time to get back on track but often it is just about voicing and then giving yourself approval for the plans you are making. Once those plans are spoken out loud and shared they can begin to become reality. The next stage is to have a belief that your plans are valid and there is no reason why you cannot make them happen. Then if that is truly what you want, all you need to do is stand back and watch them come to fruition, just like our wedding.

Just remember, if thoughts become things, think good ones!

I will be back again soon with more thoughts to keep you thinking!

Barbara