Do You Know How You Came to Be Who You Are?

To reinvent your womanspace you will have to begin to re-create your perception of yourself and the perceptions you hold of your experiences—particularly those perceptions that you find to be troublesome and painful.

Reinvention involves throwing away thoughts and ideas that are no longer (and maybe never were) useful to you, and inviting yourself to think differently.

You will have to apply a healing balm of Divine Wisdom to your emotional wounds.

You will have to hold and rock the baby-girl inside you, who needed to be rocked way back then—or maybe yesterday.

You will have to mother yourself with the understanding and unconditional love of our Creator.

You will have to look at yourself and remember exactly what you’ve been through, and what you’ve done, and what has been done to you, and choose to, unconditionally, love yourself strong about it.

You will have to know that, always . . . always, you did the best you could do, given who you were at that time.

This will free you to move up into a higher space of self-knowing, where you can love yourself better.

For right now, stop censoring your thoughts. Allow them to flow fully from raw emotion—without any self-judgment, guilt, or fear. Acknowledge what you’re feeling . . . what you’re going through emotionally. Sit with your Self and listen to her thoughts as you would the thoughts of a dear friend. Respect Self at least that much. Love your Self at least that much.

Today . . . begin to do your Self the kindness of remembering, in detail, exactly how you got to where you are. Sit with yourself, for as many days as it takes, to begin to understand how you came to be who you are today.

Then you will begin to know what steps to take, what prayers to say, what forgivenesses to offer, and what healing to seek . . . to point yourself in the direction of where you want to go.

Excerpt from From Trouble to High Places: Meditations for Women Who Are So Ready to Cross the Bridges that Lead to Joy! Copyright 2009 Esther Davis-Thompson.

How will you cross the bridges that you’ve imagined?

Have you realized, yet, that the path to your High Places is not accessible from the road of troubled low-beliefs?

Imagine walking on the road next to a bridge . . . and just as the bridge begins to ascend and stretch across the body of water, you reach the shoreline and you have to stop. And all you can do is look up and wonder what it would be like to cross that bridge.

From where you are, you can only imagine what it would be like to stand, suspended, over this water. And, you can only imagine what might lie at the other end of this bridge.

Walking a ways alongside a bridge is obviously not the same as actually ascending that bridge . . . yet, this is the very scenario that represents reality for many of us.

Don’t we often play things out over and over again in our minds, but always stop short of taking any real steps?

We become familiar with what we presume to be the slope of the bridge.

We envision what the problems will be.

We imagine the fierceness of the wind on our faces.
And we imagine the fear we’ll feel at looking down into the deep water beneath us.

We imagine and imagine until we have gathered enough reasonable support for our initial fear-notion—that something will go wrong if we were to try to cross the bridge. So we don’t cross. In fact, we don’t take any steps on the bridge. We come up with a million and one good reasons why we shouldn’t, yet, we can’t get away from our intuition’s insistence that we should try.

Moving your life from Trouble to High Places is a courageous undertaking that begins as a prayerful urge, and grows from a high-belief-lurching-forth into an awkward, indescribable, half-flying/half-crawling leap of pure Faith.

Your desire to change will come sporadically at first, like little hiccups of longing. But your desire will have to become full of Faith before you can take your first real steps.
Spanning the bridges with your mind, and rocking your considerations back and forth, you will sense yourself living between two different realities—the reality in your womanspace, where your visions are already real and grown, and your outer reality, where your hope-seeds may not have even sprouted yet.

Today, imagine yourself being ready to leap forward.

Imagine the amazing things that could happen if you were to leap!

Know that the most effective leaps are leaps of Faith!!!

Excerpt from From Trouble to High Places: Meditations for Women Who Are So Ready to Cross the Bridges That Lead to Joy!  Copyright 2009 Esther Davis-Thompson.

What do you really feel?

One of our most important responsibilities to one another, and to ourselves, is to own and communicate our own truths. Saying what’s on our minds as purely and simply as possible, without being unduly attached to the outcome, or to the drama—taking the initiative to have a conversation, and being willing to open ourselves to hear what others need to say to us—is a precious offering that creates a table of clarity and integrity for our relationships to open and expand upon.

Some of us have become more comfortable sitting in the victim seat, than in the owner seat, of our own lives. True communication scares us, because we’re afraid to make waves. What we are failing to realize is that sometimes it’s the waves that move us all forward.

If you’ve been choosing to suffer in silence rather than to communicate your true feelings to the people in your life, it’s time for you to figure out why you feel so unworthy!

Learning to value your emotions might sound a little self-centered and selfish . . . but when we keep hedging our words, swallowing our truths, and spending most of our energy trying to hold up the earth and all its wounds and misgivings with our own minds and hearts, we are doing ourselves and the people we care about a great disservice. We’re missing out on opportunities, for ourselves and others, to take steps within our purpose, and we’re postponing our mutual journeys toward our Good.

Excerpt from From Trouble to High Places: Meditations for Women Who Are So Ready to Cross the Bridges that Lead to Joy! Copyright 2009 Esther Davis-Thompson.

How do you handle your true feelings?

Our relationships and our personal power are so closely related that they are often, imperceptibly, intertwined. Just looking at the way we approach our relationships with others can make us aware of innumerable aspects of our relationship with Self.

For instance, in your major relationship, are there things you need to say, but are reluctant to share because you’re trying to spare someone’s feelings?

Have you been trying to avoid a particular response or reaction from someone?

Do you fear that speaking the truth in a certain relationship would be so problematic as to end the relationship . . . and you really don’t want it to end?

One of the first steps out of your Trouble Zone is to acknowledge, and assume responsibility for, your feelings. What’s true for you has to be honored and accepted, first, by you.

When the continuance of a relationship seems to hinge upon your willingness to swallow your truths and ignore your feelings, you really have to give serious consideration as to the potential-damage-factors of that relationship.

Excerpt from

Why aren’t you feeling your power?

In truth, we can only be moved to give away our power when we are, secretly, afraid to use it ourselves—afraid of the stark responsibility that comes with being power-toting adults.

Here are just some of the self-sabotaging ways we give away power we will definitely need if we’re trying to move our lives out of Trouble:

We assume a responsibility, that really doesn’t belong to us, for some aspect of another person’s well-being . . . thus putting our own agendas on hold.

We give in, conceding our right to do the things we want to do, as a peace offering to avoid conflict.

We depend on the approval of others for our sense of well-being.

We make decisions based solely on the approval and validation of some voice other than our own.

We let our fear of having-to-face-the-world-if-the-thing-we-try-to-do-fails stop us from trying.

We let past failures, mis-steps, and decisions that didn’t work out well, stop us from trying again.

We use up all of our time and energy doing things that are details on someone else’s agenda, leaving ourselves with no time or energy to create and carry out our own agendas.

Realize, right now, that any power that a person seems to have over your life was given to them, by you, and stoked by your own fear-notions and low beliefs about yourself and your capabilities. Most of our lack-of-power issues are fear-based, in that we fear losing some emotional element of the comfort zone we’ve created for ourselves in Trouble. The only way to re-claim your power is to take it back one step at a time . . . by making one high-belief decision at a time.

Think about it. What changes could come about in your life if you were to make some of the following changes? –

Stop trying to please everyone else and begin to start pleasing yourself

Realize that success at anything is part of a process that includes some failure

Stop viewing failure as an acceptable
endpoint of any effort you make

Begin to re-claim some of the time, energy, and resources that you’ve been giving to the interests of others, and use them for your own interests

Start saying “no”, when “no” is what you’re feeling

Practice listening for your own voice. The more you listen, the more you will hear your spirit offering you her wisdom and guidance. Honor that voice. It’s a God-given gift for you! We sabotage ourselves and our efforts when we keep choosing others’ voices over our own.

Excerpt from From Trouble to High Places: Meditations for Women Who Are So Ready to Cross the Bridges that Lead to Joy! Copyright 2009 Esther Davis-Thompson

Is there a Giant in your pocket?

Is there a person, a habit, a problem, or maybe a situation in your life, that seems bigger than you? Stronger than you? More powerful than you? Overwhelming to you?

Do you really believe that it’s your lot in life to have a giant sitting on you, settling itself right dead center in your life . . . controlling you and your world with fear?

And just what would you do with your life if you were free of this giant?

Would you, maybe, go and find another giant to take its place?

Is having this giant in your life actually serving you in some, albeit negative, way?

Has having this giant in your life kept you from developing some aspect of your Self?

Have you been hiding behind your giant? (Note that I’m calling this your giant.)

You do realize that this is your giant—right?

The strengths that we assign to our giants are a reflection of our own perceived incapabilities and weaknesses. The power that we perceive our giants have over us correlates directly with the lack of powerlessness we perceive in ourselves.

Did, perhaps, your giant seek you out because you seemed to need it to define your life for you?

Or did you, maybe, seek out your giant as something/someone you could hide behind while shying away from the daunting work of growing up and moving forward?

Do you think, if you were to begin to exhibit certain different behaviors, your giant would begin to lose its power over its area of your life?

Do you think things would change if you began to shift your focus from your giant’s strengths to your own capabilities? Reckoning with, not your giant’s power, but your own perceived lack of power?

Excerpt from From Trouble to High Places: Meditations for Women Who are So Ready to Cross the Bridges that Lead to Joy! Copyright 2009 Esther Davis-Thompson