This past weekend my husband and I attended a wedding legally uniting two of our special friends.  I say “legally” because they were so united before and this wedding was really a celebration of their deep love for each other and for themselves.  As I listened to each of them speak their beautifully written vows my mind wandered to the subject of love and why some relationships grow stronger and others grow further apart and how I came to be where I am right now, which is happy and in love with my husband, my son, myself, my friends – in love with life.

When I was younger and didn’t know myself, I chose a partner who did not compliment me.  And how could I have known he wouldn’t compliment me, if I didn’t know myself?  I chose a partner because I thought I could fix that person. But how can I “fix” a person, if I haven’t yet “fixed” myself.  And why did I want to fix someone else anyway?  The answer is I wanted to fix someone else, because I did not want to focus on myself.

I’m Taurus through and through and I tend to be thick headed, which requires a bit of knocking around for my eyes to open and my heart to open.  The past three decades I’ve been knocked down more than once and each time I discovered a silver lining of learning.  At one point I took a very deep breath and stepped ‘off the curb’ and out of an unhealthy marriage. And then a wonderful thing began to happen.  Jobless, single mom terrified but determined to improve my life and a friend shared her Abraham Hicks tapes with me on law of attraction, the power of deliberate intent and so on. I embraced and practiced everything I was learning and slowly a bubble of happiness began to grow inside me.  I met a wonderful man, who later became my husband (that’s us above).  Just as I was about to run out of money, I was asked to interview for a management position.  I got the position and the next five years I grew and learned until I knew what I really wanted was to own my own business.  This didn’t happen overnight, but it happened because I launched a thought and two years later I bumped into a store owner who had actually taken his store of the market and blurted out, with no prior thought to this what-so-ever, “I’m interested in buying your nutrition store”.  A few months later, I owned this nutrition store.  Why did this happen? It’s called love. I was beginning to value myself, my skills and self-love was growing.  This self-love, gave me the courage to step ‘off the curb’ yet again.

Not only was I beginning the journey of knowing myself, I was also allowing myself to let go.  Joseph Campbell says, “We must be willing to relinquish the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us”.  I laugh often when sharing the story of how I came to own a nutrition store. Years earlier when I launched the thought “I want to own my own business”, I was clear on just two things.  #1: I wanted the business to impact and help others. #2: I did not want it to be retail.  I got one out of the two but received exactly what I needed to continue down my path of growth.

Back to the subject of love.  I spent most of my life living outside of myself, comparing myself to others and judging myself harshly.  I’ve given so much thought about this process of discovering me.  How did this happen?  How did I go from self loathing to self loving?  There is no one answer and the answer is different for each person.  But this question has led to me ‘stepping off the curb’ again.  This summer I am spending time weaving my next chapter in life, writing  Owning Awesome™ and sitting next to my laptop is a notepad full of ideas for a free mini-course I’m writing called “Igniting the Wonder Within©”.  It is taking more time to write than I planned, because I am human.  Self doubt creeps in and I find myself saying “who the heck am I to teach others how to Own their Awesomeness, I’m not perfect at it yet?”. 

Who is perfect?  I am, you are, we all are beautifully imperfect.  And that my friends, is the ‘perfect’ place to begin your own journey to LOVE!

 “I love ALL that I am, just as I AM” ~unknown