​I returned from eastern Oregon early this morning and I am committed to allowing the beauty that I feel in my heart to continue. Returning to our seemingly busy lives after spending the better part of a week in ceremony is a opportunity to begin to assess what is truly important. When we step outside of our routine we have a chance to look at not only what we do but how we do it. If the expansive open hearted feeling that I returned with is important to me, then I will allow it to continue. Doing so begins with trusting that it is not only possible, it is our natural state of being. The purpose of the ceremony was to invite a new way of interacting with the world. We were invited to become co-creators, to be active participants in this change process.

I always say that change begins with a strong intention, so why is it last in this series? It is last because without having a strategy and a method of tracking the behavior change, it will be of little use. Let's be honest we all want a magic bullet a pill or a diet or even a hypnosis session to cause some rapid change. We essentially want years of non-productive behaviors to go away and never come back and the marketers who sell you stuff, want you to buy into that billion dollar fairy tale. We look at the sexy bodies and fill up our garages with dust gathering exercise equipment. Did it occur to us, that the sexy fit body took time to get that way, not really because we bought the fantasy. ​

ou have made a choice to change a behavior and you are really frustrated because you just did the very thing that you did not want to do. You may even be feeling some shame or self-loathing around what just happened. Crazy as it sounds I want you to celebrate the milestone that has just been crossed. 
Our behaviors operate on a mostly unconscious level and we may not feel good as a result of doing them, yet we seldom associate that feeling directly with what we just did. In this case bringing conscious awareness to a behavior we are not proud of may cause us to feel  poorly. Yet it is this conscious awareness that will begin to pull us out of our ditch of unconscious programming. 

Humans will almost always choose convenience. In fact most everything in our modern world is designed to have us do so. Let's start with the obvious choices. Fast food is seemingly convenient and even if you are stuck in a slow moving line of cars, perhaps not so fast, yet quicker than making a healthy meal from scratch, especially if you have to buy the food first. Remember nothing has to be as advertised, just close enough to support a rationalization for making that choice. The lure of convenience is strong and once the mind makes a choice to take the perceived easy route it locks the new pattern in fairly quickly. In other words it becomes another largely unconscious behavior pattern. ​