It's Almost 2016. . .Are you ready to Move "in" ?

It is one day before the new year’s eve of 2016 and I needed to share this one with you. Most of us go through life exactly the same way a really treasured object whose owner loses to the waters of the ocean while aboard a cruise ship would turn out. Notice the object gets more beat up the further it travels through the currents of the ocean because it is pummeled in all directions by the waves and the elements as it floats aimlessly and endlessly. Finally, it may drift ashore onto a beach somewhere. Sometimes, it gets lucky; someone who happens to be on the beach recognizes the value of this treasure, picks it up and takes it home, putting it to good use. Other times, this treasure might not be that lucky and simply gets buried in the sands of the beach, forever!

A lot of us still believe that life is happening to us when in fact; we are active participants in charting the courses of our lives through our current actions, thoughts, and words. We always chart either consciously or unconsciously every single circumstance, experience, events and even people that come into our lives.  Our biggest problems in life is usually how we go about building up the courage to step into our own lives or how to go about taking full ownership of our lives or simply how to live as fearlessly as we possibly can without worrying about what others would think or say about us.


The sad reality is that often times, we tend to play the role of outsiders in our own lives; who merely observes from the outside! An outsider is usually unable to do much in a situation that he does not own or control. Fear usually holds us back and makes us slaves to other people’s toxic emotions, feelings, and opinions. Listen carefully, unless you are still minors who continues to be answerable to parents, guardians or other care-givers, nothing should stop you as adults from moving into your own life and asserting yourself in it.  

I came to the realization that truly living our lives to its fullest potential, means taking full ownership of it and resisting that urge that makes us constantly to seek approval and validation from everything outside of ourselves. This is in recognition of the enormous power that resides within us! (your Victor) This power makes anything we believe and work fervently towards possible!!!

A life that is lived through the mirror of another’s experience, feelings and opinion, is a tainted life and often, we are merely living life through the mirror and experiences of others. How many times have you wanted to do something you really like and after talking to another person, you have a change of heart? Think about how many dreams, goals and aspirations you have lost as a result along your journey. Until we assume full ownership of our life by living it on our own terms, we really have not started living; we are merely simply, “existing”.

I personally believe that a lot of inventions, dreams, and aspirations that potentially could have re-written the course of human history are taken to graves by their owners on a daily basis simply because their owners never quite moved into their own lives!

Some people who seek affirmations and approval from others end up abandoning a dream that could have been worth so much! Perhaps, it could have re-written the course of human history or even positively impacted one life! Sometimes, the person you are seeking affirmation from is not on the same frequency as you to appreciate the genius behind that dream or aspiration; or, he does not appreciate the meaning and magnitude of that dream to you; or, he may be simply misguided by other negative emotions like jealousy or envy; or perhaps they simply lack the requisite expertise needed to offer you any advice on that topic.

Begin asking yourself this question on a daily basis especially today that we are on the verge of meeting and greeting a new year; 2016!  “Have I really moved in into my life; am I still an outsider or have I emerged as the true landlord in my life”? If the answer is a NO, ask again, “Am I ready to emerge into my life as the owner/landlord”? Hopefully, with time and more exercise on “self-belief”, the answer will change to a YES!

Remember this today in order not to frustrate your new year’s resolution again, “Unless your goal, dream or aspiration injures, or harms the interest of a third person, every dream is worth pursing relentlessly because it is your dream and your life, and you’ve committed to living your life to its fullest potential and making a grand exit when this is all said and done”

As the clock ticks down to 2016, let us begin to renounce living our lives as strangers or like outsiders looking into our own lives. Let us commit to stepping it up a notch and announcing our presence in our lives, unafraid of anything or anyone!

On a closing note, a lot of us are still trapped in our “stranger cocoon” unsure of when we will eventually emerge into beautiful and handsome butterflies that we are meant to be. Resolve not to live in that cocoon especially in 2016.

Emerging into one’s life and having the courage to announce your presence in that life is the ticket to your peace of mind, success and happiness! Say today and mean it, "Hello _______, (say your name), It is nice to finally meet you, I am ready to love, honor, protect and fight for your dreams because those dreams will bless the world”. How does that feel to say? Guess that felt goodJ

Pardon me as I ask you once again? “Whose life is it anyway”? If it is your life, then, it is time to move into it, immerse yourself completely into it; Live it to its fullest potential; Celebrate it as much as you can; Dream as crazy as you wish and please. . ., please, . . . BE NOT AFRAID to pursue those dreams as fervently as possible especially in 2016! Why? Because IT IS YOUR DARN LIFEJ

Happy almost 2016!!!

~Ogorgeous~

It's all in your thoughts. . .

Your Feelings are everything. . .

What are you currently feeling now? I want you to relax and close your eyes and let your mind and spirit fully settle into the core of your being? Listen to your breathing and feel your heart beating in your chest. (Do not cheat. . .eyes, still closed, so you can get an accurate reading of your feeling mode) What are you feeling? Christmas is a couple of days away and typically most of us feel a literal panic about everything at this time of the year; almost totally forgetting the true message of the season! Perhaps, like me, you are not quite done with your “to shop” list; perhaps you are planning on sending money or gifts to support family abroad and have not gotten around to doing that; or your office table is still not ready to meet and greet Santa!

In all honesty, how do you feel right now? Are you happy, stressed, anxious, sad, overwhelmed, tired, excited, angry, grateful or joyful? Hopefully you are at a good place. If you happen not to be at a good “feeling mode”, right now, this moment might just be the perfect time to usher in the right feeling mode especially for Christmas which is literally one day away!  OMG!!! One day away (lol)

But, why am I always concerned with this “feeling mode” topic that I always talk about? I’ll tell you why; because your feeling mode generally dictate the kind of experiences, people, circumstances and outcomes you’ll encounter during the course of your day. The minute I discovered this correlation was the instant everything changed for me! EVERYTHING will change for you when you understand and apply this universal and eternal principle. What you “choose” to feel at any given time charts the course of your day, week, month, year, and eventually your life? And yes, it is your choice!

 We’ve all had it at one time or another when up wake up from the farthest and “wrongest” side of your bed and watch your whole entire day go from worse to worst; yep! That literal day from hell. Did you know that as long as you let that “bad feeling mode” from your morning remain with you throughout the course of your day, you are definitely on the guest list for “the day from hell” party which you know is the worst party to get an invite for!

Thoughts are powerful energy! We vacillate and process millions of thoughts throughout the day at really rapid successions. Most of these thoughts end up not influencing our feelings at all. There are however some thoughts that we choose to pay attention to (because they bother us more or for whatever reason) that eventually evolves into our feelings and dictates our pervasive emotion. This is the critical point where you are called to Action!  I say “called to action” because at this point, it demands a conscious effort on your part to stop this transition to the next stage of its existence. What thoughts amongst these millions of thoughts that we think throughout the course of our day should we allow to evolve into the “feeling mode”.  Sad, stressful, negative thoughts should not make that list and yet they are often the ones that make the guest list into our feeling mode pool party!

Resist, Resist, and Resist! I will let you into this secret; I generally would not talk about a thought that gives me a negative vibe because I have seen that talking about whatever it is, gives that “thing” a separate existence! You actually power what you always talk about, thereby giving it an existence that should have been extinguished in your mind the minute it was processed! You talk about it and you create a monster with huge eyes, ears and mouth!

Remember always that thoughts evolve into feelings; feelings are potent creatures that can grow wings and take flight; choose to create only productive and positive feelings that can only gather positive and productive experiences for your life. Talk only about those thought that makes you feel empowered, validated, happy, etc.

Initially along my journey, it was such an arduous task to painstakingly sift through my thoughts throughout the day and I was making a conscious effort to stay on a great feeling mode and be happy even when the odds were stacked against me. (It is so funny because there were times that the odds were not only stacked against you, but they had me pinned under them, and the worst thing to do is to allow these monsters to stomp you on the head when you are down and pummel you into a state of despair and hopelessness) It was a lot of work at that time. However, through constant practice, your body, mind and spirit become allergic to toxic thoughts and your default mode is one of instantly killing it once it is processed. It no longer has the chance to evolve into your feeling mode and ravage your experiences.

One of the most significant realization for me in embarking on this journey to finding peace, happiness and success is the realization that the people that are currently in our lives are usually mirror-images of our predominant feeling-mode or frequency. If we have people that are constantly whining, pessimistic, hyper-critical of others, negative, etc.; chances are that WE are the same way or slowly drifting to the same feeling mode and frequency. 

As we are counting down to the birth of Christ, you have a choice to recalibrate your thoughts and feeling mode. Constantly check in with your feeling mode/frequency during the course of the day! How are you doing? Take stock at the end of the day, did you do well? Could you have done better? 2016 must be your year of mad success if you believe it and remember it all starts from your thoughts.

A life of abundance, peace and harmony is your birth right! Do not ever let anyone tell you otherwise!

Wishing you and yours a fabulous yuletide!!!

XoXo

Authenticity: The Great Liberator!

What does it mean to embrace one’s authentic self? It simply means being true to who you really are on a cellular level and answering present in your own life in spite of people seeing you as weird, phony or crazy. Authenticity means having the courage to love yourself while standing firmly in the vulnerabilities of all of those blemishes, ruffles and wrinkles which are often times part of the human reality and experience. Authenticity is a fierce and unapologetic loyalty to oneself!

Why is authenticity so important for our lives?

Because Authenticity means freedom and liberation! It means joy! It means living our lives as us, rather than as others. Being authentic means that we are living our truth especially given that only truth can effectively set one free. Freedom means true courage to soar in most aspects of one’s life. Living our truth almost always propels us in the right direction; ultimately steering us to our right calling, path, or destinations. When we are living our truth, we are approaching life from a path of conviction and courage and in that process, fear is conquered. When fear is conquered, almost every obstacle and challenge becomes exactly what it should be for people who get it; a positive teaching experience. When fear is conquered the sky becomes one’s limit. Throughout history, it has been men and women who are not afraid of being their authentic selves; sometimes being that lone messenger with the courage to voice their truth who continue to leave their imprints on the sands of time.

A lot of us go through life pretending to be who we are not for fear of getting disapproving glances from others or being unpopular. The effect of this of course, is a situation where we become stuck in the rot of a job we do not like, or the company of those that we cannot stand, or remain silent in the face of a glaringly wrong act perpetrated against another in our presence because we feel that if we voice out our opposition, we lose our friends. (Now, seriously! Do these people even meet the definition of a “friend” for starters, they probably do not!)

When we live our lives different from whom we really are at the core of our beings, life becomes unhappy and overly complicated. Our relationships suffer because our partners cannot even decipher who we are and often wonder why we changed when the reality was that we had faked it all the way! Even our professional lives suffer because we never conducted the business from a place of conviction and truth; we tend to be always edgy and angry, ending up infecting and contaminating people who cross paths with us with the same negative emotion we harbor and ultimately, we fail to excel at what we do and even take ignorant hostages along on our failing spree!

Ever noticed what happens to us when we lie? Ever notice our tone of voice sort of falters. We normally do not have the same courage and convictions that we usually exhibit when we are in the right or when we are telling the truth.

Without question, no two human beings are exactly alike. As children, we usually have different personalities and ideas and are usually unafraid to say exactly how we feel.  In that state of absolute truth and innocence, life is less complex and more fun! As children, everything is out in the open and generally we are mostly happy. We are unafraid of anything, (ok, may be . ., except for the boogieman and ghosts or dead people) until that drastic tsunami halts our nirvana. As adults, we try to conform to a set of unwritten norms and become boring and in the process lose our individualities. We begin to exercise tact in the most rigid and ridiculous manner and in the process become bland! Every adult acts just like the next adult and sounds just like someone they are not. Of course we mostly fail abysmally at what we do because we are fake! Many success stories today are about people who are different from the rest of the bunch and most of us fail to notice this or are too envious to acknowledge them.

Understand that I am in no way advocating the reality that an authentic lifestyle means that one becomes an insensitive potty mouth to others out of a need to always voice out one’s opinion, or that you must constantly be in the opposition simply for the heck of it. Not at all! I am merely advocating that a life lived from an authentic place usually is a happier one for the person living it and for others whom he encounters. His endeavors and goals are usually easier to accomplish because of the strength and conviction that backs the endeavor. His relationships are usually happier because it is less complex and not ridden with a lot of unnecessary baggage; business would translate to more clients and customers because nothing sells better than “truth”, plain ole simple truth! Devotion and conviction are by products of an authentic life-style.

Most importantly, the Universe would stand behind the truth, joy, conviction and courage that accompany an authentic lifestyle and knock “it” out of the park for you! Ready to kick start this new reality for your life in 2016! Let’s do this!

Happy Holidays family!!!,

Love,

Ogorgeous

We get served exactly and sometimes super-sized versions of what we dish!

It is an incredibly LOVING, fair and just Universe! Always pause before you think it, speak it, or do it to another!

The skewed definition of friendship in social networking; redefining social media friendship.

This is my personal opinion and reflects values that I hold dear and deep in my heart! If you find them helpful, then incorporate it into your online etiquette folder and use them at all times! The realm of personal choice has absolutely no bearing whatsoever when it comes to family! They are people who you find yourself in the same boat, cruising along through this amazing journey called life! Your best bet? Find a way to have fun with them as you cruise along! Friends on the other hand, are where personal choice reigns supreme! You have ample latitude to choose whom you deem worthy to be part of your circle. You can and have absolute right to exercise that power of choice how you deem fit and narrow or expand your personal criteria according to who you are! As much as people try to deny it, friends are really a reflection of who we truly are for good or for bad!

In the realm of social networking, the same holds true, each person must have a definition of who they call friend and no one should have a say in that definition but them! I find that I have tended to gravitate towards people who share the same interests like me. I love health and fitness, positive living, free spirits, inspiration, beauty, justice, and essentially anything or person that challenges me to be better on a daily basis! As in real life, in the world of social media like fb we run the risk of being in serious trouble if we reduce our standards on who we call friend! Social media should not make us reduce that standard unless we never quite had the standard to begin with! If in four years, (for me) you have never had a “friend” engage you or you engage them, you share nothing in common,. . .they are not your friend! “Engage” for me meaning wishing you a happy birthday, liking each other’s posts that spoke to them, liking each other’s pictures, poking (for some people), saying an occasional hello, or simply poking a friendly jab at you, etc.

Be wary, indeed, be very wary of people who leave no traces of themselves! We must be as territorial and protective of our online spaces/profiles with people who come to scroll through our profiles almost on a daily basis and leave no marks of their visits as we would be in real life about a visitor who constantly drops by our house and leaves no trace of their visit! If there is something about someone that you really like but hate due to your own insecurities (that you need to address) that make you constantly visit their profiles, and then leave feeling worse off, then you must really need that person’s friendship and so must tell them like we usually do when we were 6 or 7 years old. Those good old days, when we see people that we like, our child-like innocence makes it easy for us to say something along these lines, “I like you, can you be my friend”? :-))) LOL. . But on a really serious note, often times, these sneaky visitors never mean well! If they mean well, they would say hello or like a post or picture, etc.

In defense of the world of social networking, I have met so many wholesome and wonderful people through Facebook who I have gone on to have relationships with in real life! There are people on my fb friend list that I have never had a conversation with yet, I find them inspiring and enjoy reading their posts or simply following their lives which I find inspiring, chances are that I must have requested their friendship! Occasionally, I click the like button on a particular post by them that speaks directly to me! Those people reserve the right to unfriend me if they find me unworthy of their “friendship standards”. There are others that I really find that I enjoy nothing about them, we have no interactions whatsoever and the only things that we share in common are “mutual friends”. In reality, I also see the huge possibility that they also enjoy nothing about me, leading to a “friendship” that never quite translates to anything! Bottom-line, they are not my friends and the common sense thing to do is unfriend them!

I read with great sadness the story of this incredibly beautiful and seemingly industrious young girl, Cynthia, who was murdered in cold blood in Lagos, Nigeria, by some psychopaths she met on Facebook! I watched the video of the two men confess and was just so angry that human beings have degenerated to the levels of beasts in the wild who hunt for preys! She did nothing wrong! She trusted someone whom she may have spoken with online over a period of time! They betrayed her trust and murdered her! There are millions of people on a daily basis all over the world that have found true love and romance and sometimes even made serious business and professional contacts on social media sites! She unfortunately fell within the statistics of people that were not so fortunate! I pray her family and loved ones find solace in God’s peace and love through this incredibly difficult time!

In conclusion, start today to redefine who you call friends on social media sites! If you don’t have a true, candid or happy reaction towards a particular social media “friend” or their profile did not meet the standards of what you hold dear and true in your heart, use your DELETE button! It is the most powerful tool for online-self-protection on your keyboard! It probably makes sense to use the same standard that you use in real life! I am game! Are you?

Lovingly yours,

Ogor Winnie Okoye

Are you still living your life in Standard Definition?

Imagine, believing that your life can become everything you want it to become! Imagine, actually believing that those dreams, and  goals are possible? Our choice of core beliefs hugely determine the possibilities and the dimensions our lives will take! Life can be lived in full high definition only when we begin to believe that it is indeed our birthright to thrive and become as happy, peaceful and successful as possible! The problem is that very few are willing to think thoughts like these and to believe in that possibility. Mediocrity becomes their reality, after all, that is all they are choosing to believe for their lives.


We can barely exceed what we choose to believe possible for our lives. Remember the saying that "anything is possible for those who can believe". I am choosing to live mine in high definition! How are you choosing for  your life?


Lovingly yours,


Ogor

Whose song is playing in your life?

Often times we do not even recognize that we are sabotaging ourselves unconsciously due to the every day choices that we make. Something as innocent as feeling hurt, disappointed, betrayed, belittled, crushed, etc. It becomes even more difficult when it is coming from a loved one. There is absolutely nothing wrong with expressing any of these emotions. Indeed, medical research shows that it is actually better to let yourself feel those plethora of emotions instead of bottling it all inside of you and then having one major our-burst due to the pent-up emotions that you have been suppressing. We see people snap on a day to day basis!


It becomes wrong, counter-productive, and outright, self-sabotaging when we unduly fixate on those feelings and unconscionably let them dictate the course of our lives. There are people that experience a physical revulsion at the mere mention of another person's name. This may be due to the fact that they were hurt, betrayed, or disappointed by those people. When we nurture and allow those feeling to thrive within our subconscious, we are in effect permanently mortgaging our body and soul to someone who had deeply hurt us in the past and essentially telling them that we are open to being re-injured and permanently scarred by them. We are essentially dancing not to our own music but the music of someone who had hurt us!


Do you really want to dance to their music? Do you really want to effectively block off the gates to your own present and future blessing due to those toxic, negative emotion that had taken over your life? As hard as it may be, you must forgive the perpetrator, any and every single thing they had done to you! Total forgiveness means you see or remember them without ever feeling that same negative emotion. By so doing, you are making an unequivocal statement to the universe that you do in fact operate on a more positive and healthier frequency than these other people who had hurt you and in the process, throw open the flood gate of blessings. Those blessings perceive you are housing a powerful and positive force and will easily find your life, a really attractive vault to inhabit! Most importantly, you are choosing to dance to your own music; playing your own tune, just the way it should be, after all, it is your life!


Lovingly yours,


Ogor