2015 Bagua Vision Board

Building Your Feng Shui Vision Board

What is a Bagua?

The Bagua is the map or grid used in Feng Shui that connects your life areas to your physical spaces.

In the last few years I have used this Grid as a basis of aligning my thoughts, feelings and actions to support my Center or Core or Goal.  I have renamed the areas on the Bagua to what I feel is the essence of each.

Where we are at in the our Center affects the flow and energy into the surrounding squares.  Some areas may need more attention than others to get aligned with our core.  

I would love to share my technique with you and am putting together a series of emails and perhaps some video to guide you in creating and supporting your Vision for 2015.  

Join me by signing up for my email list by clicking here

Intentional Gratitude: The Bounce Back

What do you do if you set your  

pre-gratitude intention and things go

...not as you intended?

Paving the way by feeling grateful in advance for something is not immunity against it turning out differently than intended.  There can be a host of extenuating circumstances at work that can influence and affect the outcome. 

If you were feeling the gratitude vibeage and were focused on everything going right and instead everything went wrong.  I would ask you this:

How did you bounce back when that happened?

Using our thoughts, intentions and feelings for creating goodness in our lives is a powerful force.  When they do not manifest as we had focused on, it can feel anti-climactic and downright crummy!

This is where choice comes in...

You get to choose how you respond to the outcome!

How cool is that?  You get to choose how you respond to a successful intentional gratitude effort as well as to one which was not so successful.

If you have the experience that what you intended with the focus of feeling and being grateful didn't manifest:  Did you handle it with more flexibility?  Did you bounce back easier?  Rather than get mired in the disappointment? 

Let's look at the opposite scenario: 
Have you an experience when you felt that niggling feeling about something, someone, an event or experience that was going to go sideways, and sure enough it did.  

Then in domino tipping fashion that one thing may be followed by another then another.  Further proving your point that you knew that nothing good was going to come from this and your intuition was correct.  You had anticipated and braced yourself in advance to be disappointed, upset or angry.  And you were one, two or all three and then some.

In the event that the niggling feeling did not come to pass, then you may have shrugged it off casually with a semblance of relief, while still possibly waiting for something wrong to happen.

I've certainly have been there done that!

So how did you bounce back when that happened?

Were you prepared for clean up afterwards when things got messy or depending on the circumstances you may have even felt that you were going deeper and deeper into the abyss.  Preparing ourselves for a potential disaster doesn't mean that we are preparing to respond, rather we may be still in a reaction state.  

If your intentional gratitude vibe doesn't manifest I invite you to choose to look at it as: 

1. A way to practice your try try again attitude.
2. A chance to celebrate your ability to bounce back easier
3. A way to increase your gratitude muscle by looking at the bright side of what you did create...a chance to learn!

Think of Gratitude like a muscle, flex it, use it and it strengthens!

Enjoy the process and celebrate the effort!

Intentional Gratitude: Scripting

I wanted to share some scripting ideas to use when thinking, journalling, speaking and above all feeling your Intentional Gratitude.

Setting a pre-gratitude intention is like crafting an affirmation.  Affirmations are declarative statements of something that is true and is a positive statement. 

When choosing your statement it is important to employ 3 things:

1.  Take ownership of the statement.

Begin your intentional gratitude with "I am... or I feel", this makes the affirmation about YOU.  You are the one who is wanting to create the goodness, so you are who the statement is about.

2.  Stay current or present.

Granted this is about being thankful for something in your future, however, you will be best served by using a current timeline such as "I am Grateful NOW for... or I feel so Grateful NOW that...".  

Using words like "will and when" as in "I will be Grateful when....such and such happens"; is wishy washy.  If you are saying you will be grateful, then you are not grateful now; If you are saying when it happens you are not attracting it back in a timely manner.

That verbage puts your thought energy out into the world like playing catch with yourself.  You throw the ball high and long but it lands in the grass so that when you want it to come back you will have to go look for wherever it landed.  Anchoring your intention in the present projects your vibeage out there like a boomerang, as we want it to come back to us.

3.  Feeling the Gratitude.

Language can anchor our thoughts, but feeling it empowers our thoughts and ourselves.

If you are saying this or any affirmation by rote and not believing it, more importantly feeling it, then its simply words.  Dialing in on with the anticipation that your intentional gratitude will come to fruition.

This bears repeating... When you intend to be grateful for something and anticipate how grateful you will be for it and feel it; your energy is conspiring in your favor for you to achieve it!

I'd love to hear your experiences, feel free to share in the comments!

I Am Grateful NOW, for the comments posted on this blog post :)

Intentional Gratitude

Did you participate in the social media Gratitude Challenge?  Whereas as friend tagged you and you were to post 3 things daily which you were grateful for?  I enjoyed reading the posts on my news feed and participated myself.  Then another friend tagged me and I decided to do things a little differently. 

Rather than posting a daily Gratitude Reflection, I decided to post a Pre-Gratitude Intention.

For the first couple days I wrote my Pre-Gratitude in the morning, and posted what I intended to be grateful for that day such as:

• Grateful for mindful drivers and safe travel to my destination.
• Grateful for the ease in accomplishing something.

Fun Fact:   

My success was immediate. Traffic can especially be a nemesis so I was elated that travelling with everyone else on the roads was easy. Plus since I began my day with setting those intentions they were in the forefront of my mind, so my actions followed my thinking.

On the third day I decided to change the format again.  

What if I put my Pre-Gratitude thoughts out there the night before rather than the morning of.  Would that impact or improve how I felt and what transpired?  

Think about this:  If you have ever gone to bed dreading a task or situation set for the next day?  Gone to bed thinking about it, mulling it over, worrying and anticipating the potential level of yuck its going to be?  Potentially having a fitful sleep only to wake up the next morning feeling exhausted and unsettled.  I certainly have.

Suffice to say, setting a Pre-Gratitude Intention before going to bed resulted in my feeling the Opposite of that!  My experience was that it was as effective in results; but I felt a greater connection to the intention.  In my opinion, setting the Gratitude Intention the night before allowed my subconscious mind work out the details.

What can you be Pre-Grateful for tomorrow?  How would it feel to set your intention to be and feel Grateful for something before it even happens?

Feel Free to share in the comments below or on my Facebook page

The Expatriate to Repatriate Journey: Are We Home Yet?

I'll have physically been back in my "home" country Canada for 4 months.  We did move to a new city, in a new province, to us, despite my having had a past experience with living here, I'm saying its new.  I had to approach this like I had the last two moves that this was a "new" country move as we had on the previous occassions.

The actual moving process began around February, the suggestion which unleashed the resistance vibe, the stress which complimented the resistance, which was the tossing around of the idea etc., leading up to the packing and follow through.  

I'd love to say that the "stress" part of the move was fluctuating and that the resistance to the move diminished as we moved forward.  Yet, when your heels are dug into the ground, as mentioned in the previous post,   the energy around the move had a resistance vibeage and so to answer my own question, "Are we home yet?", the answer is No.

One would think that moving to Europe, where we were foreign to the culture, language and pretty much everything would have been more difficult than coming home.

One may think that leaving a foreign culture and language and landing in an English speaking country would have been easier, well except for the whole driving on the wrong side of the road business (LOL)!

One could think that returning "home", would be the easiest of peasiest...No visas to worry about applying for, no translation issues, no health care dramas, no applications to buy a home process.  One may be inclined to think we would simply slot back in where we left off.

We arrived "unsettled". 
Partly because I believe there were expectations, both self-imposed and collective that were not aligned with the "new city/new province" actuality.  

In reflection I can see the strong contrast between:  everything is new and fresh versus picking up where we left off.  Those two vibes are in contradiction and we can not have it both ways; and trying to do so adds a great deal more pressure to an already dynamic situation.

Inhale.........Exhale..........Inhale........Exhale.........Inhale.....Exhale.......

My approach was simplistic:  Start.

Start by finding our way to the grocery store then back.
Start by finding our way to the shopping center and back.
Start by buying a coat.
Start by finding some comfort.
Start by reconnecting when and how we can.

Starting from where we were and working out from there.  Doing what we could with what we had and establishing our new "home base".

There is a re-calibration of your set point as you release what your normal was and create what your normal will be.  Its building a new foundation.

To answer the question "Are we home yet?" My answer would be, "We are closer to it everyday."

World Suicide Prevention Day Reblog: Illnesses that no one saw coming

Originally Posted in 2013

I believe in synchronicity.

I believe in and welcome the arrival of the most perfect people, teachers, words, inspiration, motivation, products etc coming into my world.

As the Universe would have it, I was compelled to click on a link that led me to the following post regarding the language used in, amongst, around and in association with Suicide.

Here is what’s troublesome about the term “suicide survivor.” With cancer, heart disease, liver failure and so on, the survivor is the person who is directly affected by the health problem, who lives it and sometimes dies from it.

By taking on the role of “suicide survivor,” the bereaved accept the role of “victim” as well, since they are inexorably connected. You cannot be a survivor without being a victim.

And to be a victim, there must be a perpetrator.

Would that perpetrator, then, be the very person for whom they grieve? 

This post has shaken my core, in as much as I have been precipitating the very stigma around Suicide that I "wished" did not exist, however never thought to turn the language around as I have in other areas of my life.  The author has given me a powerful tool to do just that.

When we replace “killed themselves” or “committed suicide” with “had a fatal depressive episode,” we start to see the horror of the mental illness that took our son, our daughter, our sister, our brother, our husband, our wife, cousin or friend.

And we can reduce the stigma, we can open a real dialogue, we can stop blaming our loved ones and ourselves and get to the tasks at hand – understanding, healing and prevention.

No matter if or how you have had an experience with suicide this post may very well be a catalyst of change.

Change in how we think about Suicide;

Change in how we don't talk about Suicide;

Change in how we feel about Suicide;

Change in how we heal;

Change in how we move forward.

I am grateful for Joel Kobren's, honesty, vulnerability and courage in this post 

"Illnesses that no one saw coming".

This post is infused with Peace and Love,

Sherry

http://sherrytrentini.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/the-emotional-oil-water.html

The Expatriate to Repatriate Journey: Turning Our World Upside Down...Again

In the last 4 years I've moved a couple times.

At a Glance:

• 2010 Canada to Germany, 
• 2012 Germany to Australia, 
• 2014 Australia to Canada.

That is a lot of moving, packing, purging, Kilometers, and change!

The decision process to move takes a great deal of endurance.  Whether its across town and especially to another continent.  

It is possible that from the outside looking in, it may appear that casually over coffee one morning we just decided to pick up and relocate... and poof there we landed on the other side of the Globe.  No muss no fuss.  

When the energy around making a continental move is well a Continental Shift!

When you are keen and eager to relocate, the physical move is a fairly straight forward. And may look similar to this...

When you are hesitant to relocate, the physical move is substantially more scribbly. Like this...

Either route gets you from A to B. 


As with any major decision there is a tremendous amount of 

• back and forth, 
• pros and cons, 
• ups and downs,
• tears of joy and sadness
• along with various and other sundry emotions.  

Think Roller Coaster, and that ride doesn't necessarily stop when you land.
When you arrive at B, you have to start to unpack and untangle what you brought with you, whether you knew you brought it along or not.  

Its a process, just like any move.

You have to decide where stuff will go and how it will fit; one box at a time.  Not just your furniture but yourself.