Each day is an opportunity to reflect on what matters, who we are, and what we need to take us to the next level. This process is known as stepping into your power.

don Miguel Ruiz is one of my favorite teachers. Someone I consider a friend and a brilliant translator of timeless, Shamanic, transformational wisdom. His philosophies are based on the belief that we can awaken our power by practicing The Four Agreements and replacing the non-nourishing agreements we have made over the course of our life. don Miguel illuminates the path to greater happiness with insights on our early conditioning where we trained ourselves to make other people happy through a process he calls Domestication.

It is during these early years that we began to make the thousands of agreements that ended up dictating our feelings and behaviors. Our parents, our caregivers, our priests, our teachers, our coaches, our bosses, our boyfriends & girlfriends, our spouses, our brothers & sisters, our leaders, our doctors…all rewarded and punished us whenever we did or didn’t do what THEY wanted us to do.

And it was from this cause and effect, stimulus-response daily conditioning that we wove the fabric of our life. Even in our first few days out of the womb, we could sense whether our behavior generated smiles or frowns, and we began to practice and reinforce what would bring us more pleasure and comfort & less pain and discomfort.

As children, we learned behaviors and habits from our peers and the adults in our life in school, in the neighborhood, at camp, in church, and at home. The tools of reward and punishment were often emotional and sometimes physical as others’ opinions and reactions to us became a very strong force in the habits we created.

Each day, we SELF-domesticated ourselves as we created agreements in our mind of who we should and shouldn’t be, and what we should and shouldn’t do. And at a certain point that became engrained into every muscle in our body – every fiber of our being – as we lived a life and reinforced it based on others’ opinions and expectations of us.

In this process of domestication it turns out that the choices we make and the life we live is more driven by the opinions we learned from others than if we had grown up in isolation with no one around to tell us what was “acceptable” and what was not.

But if you want to be happier … you need to step into your power and take the reins of your life so you can be the writer, the main character, and the director of your life. And right now – in this moment – you get to turn the page and write the new chapter of your life.

Rabbi Hillel was known to have said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am for myself, what am ‘I’? And if not now, when?”

So, when you ask yourself those questions, what answers come back? Now is the time to take the step you’ve always feared or held off from doing because of what someone else would say. If finally, you just didn’t care what someone else (the person whose reaction you are fearing) would say, WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

Would you stand in the center of your truth and own how you really feel? Would you finally trust and bless your feelings, emotions, dreams & desires?

I think you would. So let’s take one thing we truly dream of but feel shut down when we envision how someone else will respond and:

Let’s own it … and do it. @davidji_com (Click to Tweet!)

Now is the time when we can step into our most feminine side of our being, listen to our heart’s guidance (rather than our head) and take a small step in the direction of our dreams.

Write your dream on a piece of paper. Stare at it for five minutes. Close your eyes. Use that as your mantra and meditate for thirty minutes every day for a week. Send me an email with your results.

Let’s step into the fire of transformation together. Agni meele purohitam. I surrender to the fire of transformation. And I’ll see you in the gap!

Peace. – davidji

davidji is a certified Vedic Master and a teacher of stress management, emotional healing, and conscious choice-making. He is the author of the best-selling Secrets of Meditation: A Practical Guide to Inner Peace & Personal Transformation and the creator of the award-winning guided meditation CD Fill What is Empty; Empty What is Full. Visit davidji.com for free tools, tips, and techniques to take your practice to the next level and follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Sometimes we all need a bit of guidance to help us through our life’s journey. Join davidji for a Spiritual RE-Boot workshop and find inner peace, forgiveness and light in a safe and intimate setting. Click here to learn more.

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