Messages from the Universe, An Update

So I signed up on a website to receive daily (weekdays) messages from the universe. They are so awesome & I love them. To give you an idea of how accurate they are for my life, here are my most recent messages on the appropriate dates:

19th - There are really only two conditions of the human mind: Very, very happy. Or about to become very, very happy. Which are you today, Crystal?

22nd - When in a hurry, Crystal, step #1 for changing the entire world, is falling in love with it as it already is. Same for changing yourself.

23rd - By design, Crystal, whenever you have a new dream, or re-commit to an old one, at that precise moment everything in your life is perfectly suited to bring it about even faster than if you had thought of it earlier. You are always where you most "need" to be. (P.S. This was on my birthday, great one for that day as I deal with my age crisis!)

24th - Crystal, it's as if the stars have aligned, the word has been spoken, and you've won the cosmic lottery. This is it! There's never, ever, been a better time for you to touch, teach, and heal millions of people.

25th - Like waves eternally lapping at the shore, Crystal, the Universe is eternally knocking at your door, with abundance and riches beyond imagine.

26th - Crystal, right now, all around you, outside your door, down the street, and in every corner of your world, there's evidence of a conspiracy. All the elements are secretly marching to the beat of your drummer, while casually pretending to be detached and indifferent.

29th - The cards of life are stacked in your favor, Crystal. Overall, you're far more likely to succeed than fail, and to thrive than dive. Don't let the inevitable setbacks get you down. After all, having a Monthly Income is not asking for much!

30th - Don't forget, Crystal, to put a picture of yourself in your scrapbook or on your visionboard! I'd hate to deliver your new Monthly Income to the wrong person.

And for those of you who expressed worry, I am better this 'morning'. I think hormones may have had a bit of involvement last night. Plus I've always been more suseptible to feelings in the night time hours...

In a Funk...

As the title may have tipped you off, I am in a funk. I'm so "funked" that I'm not even sure what my funk is. Sometimes I get in a mood where I feel like I just need a giant, big cry. Not for any particular reason but for all of them.

Getting really personal...

Another item that's in the back of my mind if my brother's life. He's twenty, but honestly a pretty young twenty. We're very different people in most ways: my academicness vs his athleticness, my leadership vs his following, my straight-laced vs his rebelness. I complained a lot about my upbringing but he suffered in an entirely different way than me. My parents were quite strict with me about my life and bedtimes and homework but I was a pretty quick learner and didn't rock the boat much. He was a brat from the moment I first remember him: peeing in plants as a toddler, chasing my friends and I around with golf clubs and knives, and I was stuck baby-sitting him all the time as I was six years older. He seemed to break the rules all the time and get into trouble at school. My mother did the classic "wait until your father gets home" (which I swear I never want to do) and my brother would get spanked when my dad got home. When I think back to those moments I feel completely sick. It really caused me to fear and almost hate my dad which was completely unfair for him. It wasn't until I was gone from home a few years until I was able to start really building a relationship with him. Now there are reasons when I would argue that spanking is good and there are many reasons why it isn't. I think it's important to re-evaluate each situation and each child to figure out how you can help them learn the lessons they need to learn. I guarantee you that my brother didn't learn a single thing from those spankings nor the groundings that they attempted to give. The only purposed\ they served was to drive him away and into the arms of the drug world.

When I left home for college he was a mere 12 years old. He went through the hard teenage years without the benefit of an older sister. As the kind of guy who likes to please and go with the crowd, he fell into the drug scene and moved out of my parents before he was even 16... and across the back alley into a house with a known drug dealer who was almost 30 and another guy who was my age. Eventually he moved to my Aunt & Uncle's down in Medicine Hat and has spent the last 5 years moving back and forth. With the benefit of hindsight and the relationships I have with my brother and sister now, I feel a tremendous amount of guilt for not being there for them during those years. I hated my life in Grimshaw and when I moved to Red Deer in August of 2000 I never looked back. I avoided even visiting Grimshaw for a long time (I called home at thanksgiving and announced i wasn't coming home & they could redecorate my room as I'd never be moving back). I've made some peace with my life there and have gone to Grimshaw more in the last year than I had probably combined for the first 5 years.

So when I look at my brother now I feel like I absolutely contributed to the things he missed out on and where he is now. If I were to grade myself on being a big sister i would definitely give myself a failing grade. I know that he's a chronic pot smoker and I know he's dabbled in other drugs but I have no way of confirming exactly how much he does (he has a tendancy to exaggerate). He got duped by a 24 year old woman and now has a 5 month old to look after...he doesn't have his high school education and he has an uncanny ability to attract losers into his life who take advantage of him. He has a great big heart but doesn't have the self worth built up to take control of his life. I know that he has the ability to choose his options in life but there's a reason that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer in this world. I know he feels stuck in his life and I'm not sure what his way out is...

How do we open the eyes of our loved ones to this great big world? In my family, it's the weirdest thing: we would fight to the death for each other but we have a really hard time saying "I love you" or even hugging each other. In Tyler & my relationship I was often the "guy" in the way that I felt uncomfortable saying how I felt. To this day I struggle with validating my emotions and feeling like they are as important as my intellectual opinions. Sometimes I can be very open, to a fault, but then i also have this invisible barrier that NO ONE gets across. Writing this blog is a struggle, and even now I am not sure it will ever see the light of day...as it is very personal. It's scary to be this personal. I tend to use humor to cover these things.

Like with my career right now. I find myself constantly saying "since i'm not working" or "since i don't have a real job" when really i think i am working just as hard on these things as I ever did. The first time I really started to embrace my self worth was when I got my first job at KFC. I grew a voice there and felt like I finally was finally someone. I guess it was at this point that i equated self worth with making money. I love being an Independent Consultant for BeautiControl and Home & Gift but it's also not completely fulfilling me, especially financially at this point. I've created this high maintenance lifestyle focused on stuff for myself and it's hard to break it. I hate having to ask tyler for money for MY bills and MY life. When people ask me how it is going (which is a common courtesy question) I feel like I need to say "oh i'm making X dollars" for it to be valid. Of course all of these things boil down to my own issues and my perspective. I treat people how to treat me, right? So how do I get my mind in order?

All the important people in my life are saying all the right things. My mom and surprisingly even my dad think its great that i'm doing this. My dad hates "sales people" and he completely respects what I am doing. To the point that he even paid for my flight to my convention in Dallas. Tyler has been supportive in every way imaginable. At the end of August I had a breakdown because I officially had no extra money coming in from being laid off. I felt like I was nowhere near when I thought I would be after working my BeautiControl business for 6 months and that Tyler would expect me to get "a real job" to continue paying the bills.

Tyler was the one who pointed out how much I had done in those 6 months (verus the "nothing" I was critizing myself with) and said he had no problem with me continuing to pursue my independant consulting versus looking for other work. Who could ask for a more supportive husband? However, now I feel a huge weight on my shoulders for how hard he works. It's not like he has an easy job. He lives at his mom's in edmonton for the work week and does ten hour days of physically labor so I can pursue this. And he doesn't even come home to a clean house!

I seem to be busy all the time but I am not sure what I am busy doing...I hate my sleep habits but also don't seem to be able to control them.

With my consultanting work I sometimes feel as though I don't make the cut in a lot of ways - like being consistant or having the drive to get up early on my own. But then in many ways I feel like it is for me and that I want to prove that I can do it so I can lead the way for others. I love my products and I feel passionately for them but sometimes I feel like there is a gap between how I feel about them and how I am getting that across to others. How do I get people passionate about their skin? One of the things that keeps me going is when I get feedback about people loving the products and when I hear about how the products have helped them. My mom has seen improvement in her skin discoloration (noticed by my aunt & grandma), my mother-in-law has less wrinkles, my skin looks healthier and one of my team members had her eczema clear up...

It's really hard for me to look at my successes over my failures...

To add more craziness to my mind is the whole baby issue. We've been off any form of birth control since November. I got pregnant right away in December but had a miscarriage. I haven't gotten pregnant since and in some ways I am thankful for the time to prepare and in others I am completely impatient. I know I will never be 100% ready for children and I know I want to have kids in my life so sometimes it's like "hurry up already universe!" But then I know I'd really have to get my ducks in a row if I had a baby coming...which is partly why I want one. Cuz I work better with deadlines and pressure! I am totally a person who doesn't deal well with not having control over things and I am trying really hard to be blaze about the baby thing and say that everything happens for a reason and that I'll get pregnant when we are suppose to. One of my friends happened to have the same due date I would have if I hadn't miscarried. She had her baby a few weeks ago (she lives in Grimshaw so I haven't met baby yet) and it is completely surreal to think that, that could easily be us. Tyler working out of town complicates matters even more and in more ways than one...getting pregnant and figuring out how to make life work when baby comes.

Ulg, it's late and I don't even know if this blog makes sense. My mind is all over the place, I kind of feel like my mind is swimming in the deep end. It'll be interesting to see what kind of comments I get on this one.

Business Blog Update

For those of you who may have clicked on my blog link, I typo'ed! The website is:
http://spa4yoursoul.wordpress.com

I accidently added a "d" after soul in the previous entry but that's been fixed now.

I am Addicted to Staying Up Late

So I have this stupid, annoying habit of being tired but not wanting to go to bed. Sometimes I just stay up ridiculously late (like 4, 5, 6am) and sometimes I just end up staying up the whole night and starting another day. It sucks. Well in some ways it sucks but as Dr Phil says I must be getting some sort of "payoff" to continue the behavior.

The ways that is sucks is that for one I am not really that product in my time awake. I'll maybe get some shows watched, or putz around on the internet, or read but nothing that is really income generating or happiness generating for myself. Also because then I am on the opposite schedule of the rest of humanity and I don't get personal errands accomplished and visiting times in with friends, etc.

The ways that I enjoy it is, in some sick sense, I get a sense of accomplishment by "beating the clock" so to speak and staying up all night. I feel like I am in on some big secret that other people aren't by being awake. And in some ways I don't want to go to bed cuz I feel like I am "giving up on the day". It's bizarre. It's also a very vicious cycle because if I stay up late like say 7am, then sleep until like 3pm then I don't feel tired at a normal hour such as 10pm...see what I'm saying?

My psychiatrist gave me sleeping pills and told me to take one or two at like 9pm every night so that it makes me sleepy and forces me to bed. So the first night I took two and viola, up at 5:30am and off to the swimming pool. But I wasn't consistent with my sleeping pills and habits and I am back to square zero again only a couple weeks later. I've even set my cell phone to ring at certain times of the day so that I'll have a reminder to take them, but I just resist.

I've gotten countless lectures on how I am damaging my body with my erratic (sp?) sleep behavior but I don't think I've ever done well with critcism. My therapist (who was amazing) is on mat leave right now so I'm just now sure how to work through this hurdle.

I read a great book recently and the author's advice was "just do it"...I'm sure there is boundless wisdom in that.

With that being said it is now 8:10am, I haven't been to sleep yet, but my bed is calling. Adios.

Business Blog

Ladies & Gents,

I know it seems a little silly to start another blog when I barely maintain this one, however I was reading on http://www.salesdivas.com/ (an excellent marketing source by the way) that you should offer a few "free" services to enhance your business and stay in the forefront of customers minds. So I started http://spa4yoursoul.wordpress.com/ (hmmm, maybe a website faux pas to mention other blogger sites on a blog site??). Add it to your bookmarks because it will be filled with tips, quotes, book recommendations, jokes, etc that nourish your soul. I will try not to be too repetitive between what I post on that one & this one but some crossover may happen.

However, for those of you who enjoy my rants, raves and drama/comedy (dramedy) stories on a personal level, those will remain on this site as I don't advertise this one to "clients".

Ciao for now,

Your Fun & Funny Spa Diva

Crystal

Tut's Universe

If you do only one thing today, go to http://www.tut.com/ and sign up for the daily "note from the universe". The notes are inspiration, profound and leave you feeling just a little bit more loved! Upon sign up you can take this oath that's is so positive. I am very tempted to retype the whole thing but I will only quote one sentence "thoughts become dreams, dreams come true and all things remain forever possible." Doesn't that just make your spine tingle & put a smile on your face? A reminder that anything you can dream can be yours. I love it & it totally fits in with the positive path I have been trying to walk down for the last year or so.