This isn't a surprise to you, but 2017 is here. It has been here for a few days and so far, so good. The sun even came out in the Berkshire's today! A January gift for sure just when people were getting a little desperate to see something shimmery.

It really shouldn't surprise us that it is grey here from December to March on most days, however, it does when following a particularly challenging 2016. I don't believe in blaming a year for the issues that come up in our lives. I've heard so many people saying good riddance to the year. That is stunk and it took so many things and people from us. No, no it did not. A year does not have that kind of power, but I can understand how it could feel that way.

2016 in numerology was a 9 year. 9 are endings and in my experience often bring out the level of not being able to take this you know what anymore. Everyone faced endings of some sort in their lives this year. Relationships, jobs, hopefully unsupported habits, homes, and yes, even physical lives. This is natural and we can't really have beginnings without endings. Even with all of this, which happens every year by the way, light shines through.

This last year gave us so many opportunities to show our true selves and people really did. A lot of people saw what needed to be done and stepped up. They saw their own light and allowed it to show others. It was definitely an act of courage if you allowed yourself to see a glimmer of who you are and allowed it to peek out a little too. Good for you. Maybe shining bright didn't happen yet; that is ok, because what follows endings? You've got it; beginnings.

2017 is a one year. Beginnings. Did you just take a nice deep breath? Good job! Now, much like a nine year can't be the reason for all the things that happen; a one year can't either.  You have to get involved in the blessing that is your life. Can you go along and just be pulled by the current? Sure, you can absolutely do that, but then you may not complain about anything in my presence. Can you decide to do something about giving this beginning its due? Of course you can. Act. Act on something to increase the enjoyment of your life.

The energy this year feels so full of excitement. Remember that excitement can often present to our systems as anxiety so check in and feel what you are feeling. I know the last three days I have felt like my stomach was going to flip right out of itself. At first I thought it was a return of that stomach bug that I chose to end 2016 with but it isn't. Phew! Thank goodness, it's excitement! For what? Well, whatever is unfolding in front of me. For some the unknown is a fearful thing but once you realize that everything is a form of unknown until it happens so we are always in the place of not knowing for sure, you get good at going with the flow. The practice of learning to trust in that not known is the real gift to oneself to develop. I highly recommend it.

To be in that trust, you would look to what you already know about yourself and the life skills you have. See? You've got this!

So, this year with all it's excitement is generating momentum for whatever you would like to move forward with. Energy does not discriminate. You can excel if you are willing to participate. There will be a great deal of emphasis on deciphering who is supportive in your life and who may need to exit stage left. For some of us, the last year made this abundantly clear but acting on it will carry into this year. The releasing of relationships can be done with respect for all parties. It's called being an adult and mature. Really focus on this if you find yourself clearing up your inner circle.

As we clean up that circle, the people who are most in alignment with our beliefs, goals, heart and intention will naturally be attracted to us. Sure, it may take some time to manifest this community in the physical and yes, you may have to actually leave your house to meet them, but the energy will be there to help you. Use it!

So, given that everything is fluid, take the next few days and think about what you may have seen come to completion last year and what could be a beginning this year. Also, do some inventory of relationships around you and including with yourself decide if there is anything there that could change for the better this year. Then, what is one thing you could do to contribute to the success of that today. It starts now.

Happy beginnings,
Vicki

www.vickibaird.com

So, recently I traveled to Canada for a training. The flights over and the first one back were pretty uneventful. The last flight was another story. It was one of those puddle jumper planes with propellers. Yup, didn't even know they used them still. Anyway, I load up with eleven of my closet friends (people I just met but if you are going into this type of plane in the rain and wind, you get close, fast!), the pilot and co-pilot (Who, by the way, I think I have shoes older than.). 

As we are about to take off we are told there is a slight delay as we have to wait for ice to melt. Yeah, ok, I'm still good here afterall, I know I am going to land safely. My fellow passengers were not so convinced. Two young, strong men next to me looked like they wanted their mommies while trying to not showing they were scared. I made eye contact and said, "I promise you, we are going to land just fine and the flight is only an hour. We've got this!" They didn't look convinced. 

Twenty minutes into the flight it got interesting. We were dropping altitude and the tipping sideways. I'll admit I said a holy macaroni and said "oh, heck no, my kids are not losing both their parents in one year!". Then I remembered, I love roller coasters and if I get freaked out, I am adding to the energy of the other passengers. I look over and the young man next to me is taking his pulse. Seriously? Ok, time to do some Belief Re-patterning. I asked them if they would be ok saying some phrases and breathing with me. They, thinking they were helping me, agreed. We had fun and shifted the energy and in another ten minutes were making the descent into the airport. 

When we landed I said "Man! That was fun!" The gig was up. They realized I was helping them, not the other way around. They said I was a bit off, but laughed and thanked me for distracting them. 

I could have allowed myself to be scared out of my mind, but what was that going to serve? If it was my last flight, I didn't want to go out freaking out when Howard had been so brave. We enjoyed healthy competition and he wasn't getting that one! 

We have a choice about how we respond to a situation. We have a choice whether to see something as fearful or as exciting. How much more exciting can being 35,000 feet up in a tin can being pushed around by Mother Nature can you get? Bring it on, I say. Enjoy this chapter on how to do the switch and be excited by your flight in this life too!

DO YOU FEAR IT OR GET EXCITED BY IT? 

Have you ever sat in a movie where the scene was very dramatic, a good place for drama is the screen, and waited on the edge of your seat because you just KNEW something was going to jump out and you were going to scream? Remember that feeling? Was it fear of the scene and what would happen to the girl who ALWAYS went downstairs to see what the noise was, or was it excitement that she just might do it again? It’s hard to tell isn’t it? It is really difficult to distinguish between the excitement and the fear of it happening. This is true of the movie of our lives as well. 

One of the best processes I learned along the way was to picture my life as a movie, with myself as a character, and watch the interaction, hopefully without being engaged in the story. I rarely go into the basement if I hear a noise so it was pretty easy to stay detached. Try this the next time you find yourself getting involved in the story of something. Take a step back and allow yourself to just view and see if you aren’t able to find a solution because you don’t get bogged down in the emotions of it all. It feels really good to surf on the plot rather than the drama and perhaps write a different ending than what would occur if you were emotionally engaged. It may just give you a perspective that in your too involved state you wouldn’t have seen and make room for those a-ha moments we love so much,

If you are able to see the story you are brilliant, but what if it is harder to identify? It doesn’t mean you are less brilliant, it simply means your compass could use some tweaking. I was reading for a client a few years ago and while we were discussing how she could learn what she could from the relationship she was in before she left it as it was perfectly safe for her to stay in it and discover herself, and perhaps that it wasn’t the relationship that was the issue, the difficulty in seeing the next step to take was really what she was stuck on. As I was watching her movie, I asked her if she was aware fear and excitement have the same vibration in the universe. It really depends on how we are programmed to respond on which identity is used. If one hasn’t felt safe in their lives, for instance, they will usually respond with a fear feeling but if one has been raised or wired to have an open mind and see the adventure in life, they will often respond with an excited feeling. 

For this client it was extremely difficult for her to determine the difference in the short time we had to work together so I suggested a few exercises that may help you as well. 

• Take a nice deep breath and exhale ALL the air. Really let it go and clean out those cobwebs. Now do that again with gusto! 
• Close your eyes and imagine a time when you were feeling frightened and unsure of what to do. Open your eyes (unless you can read through your lids). Can you feel that within yourself? Do you feel where it resides in you? It is different for everyone so really identify where fear shows up for you as it will be the beginning of adjusting that compass. Ok, notate where that was as we will come back to it soon. 
• Take another really deep breath or two and clean out the fear vibration. 
• Now, remember a time when you were so stinking excited you couldn’t stand it and wanted to shout from the rooftops. Feel that zing. Where does it show up in your body? What speaks to you as the location of that excitement?  Notate this as well. 
• Ok, now take three really deep breaths all the way down into your belly. Now, expel the air and feel that cleansing energy putting you back to center. 

So, how was that for you? Did you get to know a little bit more about yourself and where you hold energy? Good! That was the point! So often in our busy lives we go through the day without any intentional breathing that it is a good thing it is an involuntary process or some of us would be in real trouble passing out all the time when we forget to breathe! 

Now, even though those two exercises are at opposite ends of our emotional yardstick they still result in similar physiological responses. Your breathing changed, your heart rate went up, your awareness of the situation you recalled was at an all time high and you weren’t certain you could maintain it long. This is what drew me to feel the vibration of both of them without any response and darned if they weren’t the same frequency! This was very exciting to me as it explained why so many people had a challenging time shifting behavioral patterns once they were conditioned into them. It is fascinating how we have moved away from our senses looking for things to make sense when the information was there all along. 

Let’s try the fear exercise again and see if the energy changed for you now that you are a little bit more aware of yourself. Repeat the steps from above but this time try to feel where it could possibly be excitement for you rather than fear. Of course, if your example was a danger situation, it doesn’t apply because our fight or flight response is there for a reason. If you are in a dark alley, do not stop to try this experiment, get out. 

My client and I worked on this for a few sessions and she has gotten really good at seeing her programmed response was to flee a situation when it felt like it was changing. She wasn’t confident in herself to allow herself to simply follow the bouncing ball of life and see where it took her prior to this realization. Now that she is able to take a moment and feel out the situation or the opportunity, she has built confidence and now if she feels fear she evaluates it and decides if it is time to leave or if she could stay and adjust her energy from reaction to responding. By taking the time to breathe and feel she shifts from that reactive place to one of response and confidence. Also since that time, the relationship has gone from one she was going to leave to one of marriage and so far two little ones. Amazing what breathing will do isn’t it? 

As you read in the introduction I LOVE acronyms so when I read years ago a quote from Neale Donald Walsh, a self described spiritual messenger and author, which read “FEAR is an acronym in the English language for “False Evidence Appearing Real”. While I loved this quote and had used it often, I found it shifting for me to False Expectations Appearing Real. A little bit of literally license on Mr. Walsh’s expression but one that fit well for what I was seeing in my clients. There were a lot of false expectations on how something was supposed to work so they would get so disappointed and not be able to move forward as they were so tied to how they thought it would turn out. One of the dangers in this is it will block some really great synchronistic events from happening. Our universe is so magnetic that we are literally drawing to us our experience and I felt that if we were always trying to figure it out we were negating those opportunities coming to us by our control. 

One of my favorite clients, as she has become a great friend, Lisa Liberatore is the queen of acronyms. She has come up with some really amazing, always funny, ones over the years and always with joy and excitement of what it could manifest. So, when we started discussing this vibration within her own life she, of course, came up with an acronym for Excitement to which I had to share with you. As she sees it FEAR is very black and white, not real fun at all so it remains just false expectation appearing real. But Excitement is a whole different story for the world of acronyms, and the always fashionable and usually dressed in pink Lisa, so here I give you Excitement as seen by Lisa Lib as I call her along with my descriptions in parenthesis. :)

• E=Energy (because everything in the universe is energy) 
• X=Xengenous which is defined as due to an outside cause which she saw as how we often see how our lives are but then find that we are always connected to self and realizing that is so exciting.
• C=Certainty (the knowing we all have inside that once tapped is a calming source of balance and the gas pedal for moving forward) 
• I=Intuition (Of which we are all born with and carry eternally) 
• T=Trust (what we are born with and learn to do once again if we are willing. Trust in self.) 
• E=Expectation (because it’s a great word when applied with forward motion in regards to the greatness of one’s soul and ability to succeed in whatever is tried.)
• M=Movement/motion (always moving forward and being willing to see what is rocking and rolling in front of us!) 
• E=Enlightenment (that place that many are trying to achieve only to find they had it all along if they would just listen to self. ) 
• N=Now-ing (Allowing oneself to be in the Now and accepting things as being present and not something in the future. Trade marked word by the creative Lisa Lib. ) 
• T=Totality (the feeling of the total self when physical self and soul become aware of each other and function as a whole unit, powerful, fun and totally awesome. ) 

Can you come up with your own acronym for Excitement? What would you choose for the words? Give yourself the space to be creative and to put words that mean something to YOU in there, who knows, it could be exciting! 

This life's journey really is about how well we can fly it. Before Howard passed he asked me to keep being me and to fly as high as I possibly can in this life. While it is still a navigation doing that, I know he can meet me at those heights now and that is freaking exciting. Want to join us?

Who needs a spaceship? We've got our souls!
Vicki

www.vickibaird.com

There is popular language in the self help world that has, I believe, been challenging for people. I'm a word gal. I can feel the vibrations in words so when someone uses these terms it is the equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard to me.

One of the phrases is "I am working on myself." It took me a bit to figure out why this felt so resistant to me. It is the working word. Doesn't it create a feeling of drudgery in you as well? I love my job but the idea of working on my business can send me out to the playground and into avoidance really quickly. Suggest that I create a new avenue or enhance what I am doing and I get excited. It isn't simply a mind over matter or semantics in the word choice, there is a vibration to everything and I am suggesting we all start paying attention to that vibration.

So if work is a four letter word, what is another way of saying that for you? We could suggest play, or exploration or even application, that would work too. Give yourself the time to feel this out and see what works for you. (See what I did there? Made work an action not a judgment.) For one of my clients last week it was practical discovery.

She was lamenting on how she had been "working" on herself for decades and nothing was "working". I had to stop her and ask if that felt good to say it that way. She obviously knew it didn't but wasn't sure where to go with it. I suggested that she see herself in practical discovery.  A bit of a treasure hunt to the great parts of herself and then a plan to apply them. She likes plans which is why the working on self worked for her. It gave her a sense of action and doing something but if she was never reaching a place of the work working, what was the point?

We are eternal. We are never going to get it all done. So, why not be in a space of excitement and wonder with our own selves. We are pretty amazing you know.

I'm suggesting a softer, more compassionate way of growth. One that takes into consideration we must build on what we learned today and implement it tomorrow and carry that into whatever comes next. Build up the potential rather than see what we have as flawed and in need of "working" on.

Let's leave the hi, ho, hi, ho, it's off to work we go, to the Disney movie and sing a different tune!

Rocking out to Life is a Highway,

Vicki

www.vickibaird.com