Bo Sebastian's Finding Authentic You!: February 2013

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Beyond Blessings

I once read a book called: “The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth,” by Gerald May. The subject seemed daunting. My dear friend Lisa had suggested the title. I trusted her spiritual path, so I bought it and read it on the plane to and from a long vacation out west.

In our darkest hour we learn the most about ourselves. We learn our strengths. Our fortitude is tested. Our endurance is explored. Our ability to withstand stress is weighed. In our times of deepest desperation, it could be said that we actually see who we actually have become as human beings.

Looking back at my life, I remember a time when I returned to Nashville from NYC. I was just about broke. I had relinquished my vocal studio to a friend with an agreement she never fulfilled. She had turned the ministers of my church of 20 years and half of my friends against me by the time my car rolled into Nashville, because she was afraid I would steal back the vocal studio from her. In turn, she stole my piano and got a lawyer before I even had time to move my furniture into a new home. And this was the person I had called my dearest friend before I left Nashville.

It was one of the darkest moments of my life. All of who I was, seemed to come crumbling down around me. I had little to fortify me, as even my friends had trouble believing that I was in the right.

I remember crawling into bed and wanting to stay there forever. I didn’t understand why everything was happening in that moment. I thought Spirit had directed me to come back to Nashville. I felt a strong peace about it. And my partner, then, also felt that same peace. So, we decided to stay in our truth and begin to tell friends that we would be happy to meet with pastors, lawyers, and friends and discuss anything with this antagonist and work it out. We were not afraid to come to the table with our truths.

So, one by one, these pastors, friends, and cohorts asked this mutual friend to make peace and talk. Each time, she refused and said that she would not meet with us. Eventually, every one of the people we talked to began to realize that the only person who was hiding something was the woman who took over the vocal studio.

At that time, I was also offered a position as the music minister at Unity. Some of this woman’s friends wrote terrible letters to the minister about me, but wouldn’t sign the letters. So, the minister, with wisdom, decided that anyone who didn’t have the courage to sign a letter, didn’t have truth either. So, I ended up with the position.

My life began to change as I sat in the darkness and face reality, as cold as it was. But I turned to the deepest truth in me. I recognized what God had shown me over and over again in life—eventually, truth will find you. So, I just had to be patient and wait upon the Lord.

There have been many other times in my life that have wrought bountiful blessings through dark times. Even now as I sit in my loneliness after a break-up at Christmas, I know that God is already preparing the perfect mate for me. I can see his face and can feel his spirit. I may have to sit in the darkness for a while longer, but not without knowing that there is a God that rewards courage with blessings.

The interesting thing about buying “The Dark Night of the Soul” was that my friend who suggested the book was actually talking about the book that Saint John of the Cross wrote. I never ended up reading that book. I ended up reading a book that changed my life and my thinking about the purpose of darkness. What scared me most, actually ended up blessing me the most.

I remember the words clearly as the writer wrote: “Remember that Jesus had to descend into Hell before he could ascend into heaven. Darkness to light.” I may be paraphrasing, because it has been a long while since I have read the book, and have long since loaned it out. But you see the truth in the metaphor.

I believe that the Buddhist thinking would be similar. The noble path to truth is facing that life holds unbearable pain. When you can fully embrace that noble truth, you no longer feel entitled to spending your life in joy. You recognize that darkness and light are side by side and each make way for their separate way of teaching us the path to spiritual growth.

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Bo Sebastian is a Hypnotherapist and Life & Health Coach, available for private sessions to QUIT SMOKING, Lose Weight, New Lap-Band Hypnosis for Weight Loss, CHANGE YOUR MIND, CHANGE YOUR LIFE! at 615-400-2334 or www.bosebastian.com.

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Dinner with My Broken Past

Last week I discovered that a second cousin, the daughter of one of my favorite cousins, had moved to Nashville about nine months ago. So, my mother and I invited her to dinner.

She arrived at the door just minutes before the Italian feast was about to be served. My mom is a stickler about time. If you say dinner is at 6:30, she means the dinner will be on the table at 6:30—not appetizers, not a glass of wine first—DINNER. She’s diabetic and 80, and everything is about getting that dinner down her throat before 5 pm, bless her heart.

Nonetheless, we waited tonight till 6:30 for our honored guest. Her smile lit up the room when she came in. It was as if she had brought in to the house my entire heritage from my father’s side of the family with her, in a good way. My family had let go of that side of the family soon after my father had passed away because of how poorly that side of the family treated us at my father’s funeral. We just figured they would never understand us and our decisions about our father.

Our circumstance was one where my father was one person when he was with his family and a completely different person when he was with us, including being with his ex-wife, my mother, whom he professed to love until he died, but would never admit to any of them.

Anyway, between the fragrant Italian food, the beautiful Pinot Noir, and my cousin’s face reflecting every Sebastian I knew, it was as if I sat down to dinner with everyone I had left twelve years ago. She was delightful and expressive and very much of the ilk that I have embraced both spiritually and mentally over the years. I was happy to see and hear her stories of how she had come to her truths. We sat like old friends for what felt like hours talking about life until she had to go feed her dogs.

After she left I felt something shift inside. I had spent a lot of time putting up walls around my heart so that they wouldn’t be broken concerning my father’s family. I’d forgotten a new generation existed from the old, and that even the older family tree had grown as well. The dinner ended up being not just a introduction to a new family member, but a reconnection to family in general.

I remember one thing my father said to me before he died. He told me that it was my turn to take care of my sisters and the family. It was as if he was passing the Sebastian family mantle down to me. I didn’t quite understand why it was me. I was never his favorite. In fact, I have an older brother and three older sisters. Why does the second youngest son get the mantle and the responsibility of such a large undertaking? It was only after he died that I understood why he chose me.

All of my sisters respected me and listened to my advice, as did my mother. So, he understood that they would come to me, one by one, needing my help now and again. This happened time and time again over the years. When it happens, I always ask my father for advice, as I feel he has become one of my angels in the spirit realm, something else, I never would have expected.

Life is full of unexpected gifts if you look for them. Life can be filled with unlocked treasures as well. Don’t be afraid to search for them, as I did that one lonely night on Facebook, as I went back through about 50 pages of people to find the few relatives I felt like I really would want to see and talk to again after twelve years.

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Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Singing Falsetto in the Shower

Fact: Almost everyone sings in the shower.

Fact: Almost everyone sings higher, louder and with more passion in the shower.

Fact: People are naked and free in the shower.

What do all these strange facts have to do with anything?

When we are abandoned and free, we tend to do the things that we are most passionate about. These very same things come from a core place in our bodies and voices that resound loudly and strongly into the earth.

This metaphor for life would be: what are you doing in the shower that you should be doing in your life? What are you dreaming in the steam of the shower that could be made into a reality outside the doors of your nakedness?

Life is built on dreams. Dreams are built on seed thoughts. Expressing your desire and building on yours dream by research, study, and practice, waters the seeds of your thoughts. Soon these seeds germinate into strong plants with firm roots—foundations that are placed deeply into your subconscious mind. And a mind that is free to dream can release these dreams into consciousness and reality and let the physical realm play with the sub-matter to create real-matter.

Basically, this is the thought process of New Thought. God, which is creative source made up of unlimited resource, is constantly regenerating itself. Ideas like free flowing thoughts float freely in the ethers for anyone to gather. So, if you are meditating and getting out of the physical mind, you have a chance at a grand part of your untapped mind stumbling across one of these new ideas. When this happens, anyone—because Spirit is no respecter of persons—can take one of these ideas and manifest it with time and diligence.

And as I wrote before, all one needs to do with an idea is start from a dream and let it manifest through the subconscious into conscious reality, as expressed in two paragraphs before.

So, next time you find yourself singing in the shower, think about the freedom you feel there. Imagine the biggest and best you on stage manifesting a powerful new song that only you can sing. Allow your mind to dream big. Don’t stop at emulating someone who is a star or a person you know who has already made it. Create a new path. Dreamer bigger than all the others. Let Spirit lead you to the highest path that you can get to.

As I said before in my blogs, dreaming big doesn’t mean manifesting lots of money and fame; though, it doesn’t deny it either. Dreaming big is about changing the world, changing the way people think, and changing the way life operates for the better.

If you could be a part of this paradigm shift in the world, would you stay in the shower singing in falsetto, or you would you belt out your new song for all the world to hear?

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Monday, February 25, 2013

Wicked

“Are we born wicked or is wickedness thrust upon us?” from the musical Wicked.

You have to wonder about a world filled with so many atrocities, especially where children are concerned, how this affects the amount of crime in the world. If children were given the chance to grow up in environments that helped them flourish and have healthy self-esteems, would crime even exist? Personally, I think most of it would disappear.

So, how do one stop the process of wickedness being thrust upon the world by unmeaning and ignorant parents, teachers and friends? Can we legislate who gets to have children, be around them, teach them, and have laws that can be broken and fines accrued for those abusing these laws? It would make some sense. What about the children? They seem to have no advocates until it’s too late.

In my “sitting in the loneliness phase of my break-up,” I’ve watched a heck of a lot of television. It seems that every crime drama is traced back to some kind of childhood abuse. Who is going to be the wise politician who comes up with a brilliant idea to prophylactically protect children by possibly interviewing them individually at schools? Will we cause too many family interferences? Will we have deceptive children trying to get parents in trouble and get away with more trouble? Probably. Social worker already seems to cause a myriad of problems, but also contains some real solutions as well.

It doesn’t seem like there is a real definite solution to stopping the problems with childhood abuse. Someone said tonight that if you could go back in time, what would you change? I thought hard about it. Every bit of abuse that happened to me as a child made me the person I have become. But then again, had I not had to spend my entire life getting over childhood drama, maybe I could have done something dynamically profound to change the world. Maybe I would have gone into medicine as I had planned and cured cancer. Who knows? So, the answer to the question was simple, I would go back and make sure I was raised by my mother, who clearly had a handle on compassion, which I severely lacked as a child. Perhaps, had I had compassion and more love, I wouldn’t have had the heartache I suffered. Also, maybe I would have tried so hard to gain avoidant and unavailable love.

I have a divine opportunity that not too many people get in life. I actually get to relive some of my childhood by having my mother live with me now. We get to go through the problems of my past together and sometimes even resolve them with just a compassionate and loving embrace. Mothers are magical when it comes to love. I can’t imagine not having her here as I’ve waded through the deepest waters of my relationship’s emotions. She has helped me heals parts of my past that I didn’t realize she could fix with her presence.

If you’re a mother or a parent and have a child who is going through something traumatic, know that you still have a tremendous influence on their neuro-dynamics. Everything in our minds relate back to our parents and to our childhood. So, parents can often bring clarity and truth where no psychologist and therapist can. But parents have to wait for the child to be willing to have their help. And the help may be realizing that their point of view was far different than their young child’s. Remember that no one is right or wrong in reliving the past. We simply are trying to make sense of feelings and decisions made.

So, if saying your sorry helps, then do it. If trying a different tact at treating your older child with respect rather than a demeaning tone, do that. Our words and our actions still have a great impact no matter how old we get, especially when we are related to each other in such a symbiotic nature.

Perhaps it’s not too late to change wickedness. Maybe we can change it from the future. We can look back at what we’ve done and simply be available to help change the problems that our children face and lead them through their hardest issues with divine compassion—the same compassion we’ve learned from God and spirit through finding our authentic selves in meditation and spiritual work.

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Overcoming Performance Anxiety

This morning I had to sing two extremely hard songs. I haven’t sung in public for about a year. I’m not sure why it has been that long, but for some reason I have shied away from performing. So, you can imagine the amount of anxiety that built up as this morning arrived. Here is how I dealt with the stress.

First of all, preparation is the most important part of performance anxiety. If you have prepared well and have coached your piece/s with someone who knows what s/he is doing, then you have taken the majority of your anxiety away from the process. The next thing to do is record your self. You are definitely going to be your hardest judge. So, when you pass the test of being your own critic, you have gotten through another big hurdle of allaying your stress.

Once you know that you are duly practiced ready and your project is at a stage that is good enough to be performed, the only other thing that is a problem is what will happen when you get in front of an audience. So, you must set the stage for creating a space in your mind for an audience. You can even invite some close friends to listen to your final practices, which I did. Their opinions were favorable, so I felt even more at ease.

Now, since I was working with my voice, an important facet of creating less stress is dealing with the health of the voice. You must make sure that the few days before you sing that you are getting enough sleep, drinking enough water, and vocalizing daily. If you are an instrumentalist or an actor, you should prepare your craft according to whatever exercises you see fit.

On the evening prior to your performance, you must take even more precautions about your voice, drinking warm beverages, eating the right food, sleeping no more than 8 hours. Sleeping too much can make it very difficult to get your vocal chords back into shape, especially if it’s a morning performance.

The morning of the performance, you should wake up early enough to get a little exercise, a hot, steamy shower, and a light and healthy breakfast. In the shower hum and use your head voice, but try not to sing anything in full voice. Work on your speaking voice first. Lifting the soft palate and generating sound with your breath so you feel nothing in your throat the entire time you speak but resonance and vibration in your chest.

The objective as you warm-up that morning is to keep the muscles in the larynx and the back of the throat completely released (except for the lifting of the soft palate and the temporary closure of the epiglottis for high notes) and out of your practice completely. In so doing, you relax the throat throughout the warm-up, continuing as you begin to sing through your songs.

The morning of the performance, I sang my songs seated, in half voice, a couple times before I sang them full out. Then, as I had practiced completely before, I sang them through at performance level once. That was it. I kept a copy of the words near me, in case I had any blank outs with the words. Sometimes, just having the words near you on a music stand is enough to keep you from having to look at them.

I think during the entire performance, I glanced down maybe three times for both songs, just to be sure of a couple words. Since it was my first performance in a long while, I gave myself the luxury of having a music stand. I usually don’t do that.

Next was the rehearsal with the musicians and back-up singers. I sang very lightly for that, even though we needed a good sense of what the song was going to sound like for the sound tech. I gave the sound tech enough of what my voice would sound like to get a good feel for the performance.

The entire time I sang, I kept breathing slowly and affirming that the performance was not about me, but about sharing something important to me with people I cared about. This is an important facet of taking the burden from the ego self. If you let the entire performance be about the measure of your self-esteem, then it makes for a very anxiety-driven performance. But, if you focus on the words and the message, and more importantly who you are singing to, then the action and intention of the song lead you out of that last bit of performance anxiety.

I hope that helps.

This is the YouTube of the performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWJ7qychymU

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Saturday, February 23, 2013

What Are You Waiting For?

Suffice it to say, life is a waiting game. For most of us, dreams come slowly and with consistent diligence. For others it seems like it’s overnight, but rarely that’s true. Most people have been dreaming their entire lives for what transpires in one moment.

What exactly are you waiting for to fulfill your dreams?

I look at life as a big womb for gestating our dreams. We have ideas that are the like fertile eggs. The world, relationships, hard work, diligence are the seminal power that can fertilize these dreams with inspiration, steadfast certainty, and sometimes luck.

But the bigger picture to me is: What are we meant to be and what are we meant to manifest here on this earth?

If we know the answer that question, the journey forward into success is simple. One step in front of the other. Forward. Keep moving forward. Don’t look back and turn into a pillar of salt. Keep driving forward.

If you are on the wrong road, looking for fame and fortune for all the wrong reasons, you’ll soon find out that though you may achieve some success—because the power of truth is universal and works for all—it will mean nothing in the end.

This concept works with aspect of your life that move toward developing a closer relationship to your divine reason for being on this earth; your relationships, your job, your destiny, your life’s passion, even your fun dreams like skiing or having a home on the beach, could all be leading you to divine destiny if you let Spirit direct your every move.

When something feels right, you know it in your heart. It doesn’t matter if it’s the simplest of decisions. It could be finding a parking space or buying a house. They both have one thing in common: the opportunity to ask your heart’s permission. I believe there is a divine source moving through each of us, whether we have a belief system or not, that live and breathes and moves us to our next step forward.

The only difference with one who is awakened to the idea that Spirit is helping is if that person has taken the time to see things like synchronicities and signs and wonders that occur to give us assurance that we are on the right path daily. The nonseeker moves through life with the same opportunities, but with a sort of blindness to the spiritual help and guidance moving through them to get them to their destiny.

I look for these spiritual signs every day, always aware how easily I could be side-tracked and coerced down the wrong path for the wrong reasons. I’m human. You’re human. We make decisions, sometimes, because our human needs outweigh our spiritual ones. But when we take a higher road in meditation and prayer, we can ascend the lofty heavens and become an observer of our own humanness and keep our own souls in check.

Everyday I pray for that power and hope to help my clients come to see their own personal power too.

Don’t just dream your life away. Take your personal power to the next step and begin to move forward, trusting in the spiritual guidance your heart gives you each step of the way. If you are a believer in loftier, spiritual truths, know that where your heart is, so is God!

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Waiting in Your Uncomfortable Silence

Nothing is worse in life than waiting: waiting for a suitor to call, waiting for a job offer, waiting for your paycheck to come, waiting for the doctor, waiting to hear news about someone who is sick. But one kind of waiting may be even worse: waiting in your own uncomfortable silence while your mind and body work out the problem you are facing, instead of running away or diverting your attention.

This year has been about sitting here waiting for understanding. I have had many people ask me what’s wrong or if am I feeling okay. My friends aren’t used to me being quiet and looking a bit sullen. But the truth is my heart is in a bit of a cocoon trying to understand itself. And that is exactly where it should be until I have learned what I need to understand about my life’s hardest lessons.

You see my consciousness needs to know that I am protecting myself for my own sense of self-esteem and honor. And when I sit in my silence, I honor my commitment to the deepest spiritual truth of my life.

In Buddhism, the first noble truth is that life includes dissatisfaction. When I can agree with this statement I can free myself from the idea that I deserve anything in the way I imagined it would be. In so doing, I can see that all people are open to this same dissatisfaction and release myself from all the past tears and present crying for situations that simply are.

When I stay with myself, I prove one big solid: I don’t abandon myself when things get rough! This, my friends, can help you with all your issues of abandonment.

When you prove to yourself that you won’t abandon the ship when things get bad, then you have done the hardest work in reconciling your spirit’s work to your human condition. You won’t need all the knights in shining armor to rescue you, if you are at the helm of your own ship or castle.

In my silence I have found some answers, but not all of them. I keep finding myself in situations where I choose to be alone instead of with friends, and that’s okay for now. My quietness will be fulfilled when all the answers lead me to the strength of character I search for.

It’s okay to be quiet for a season.

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Thursday, February 21, 2013

A New Paradigm for You

Every year New Years comes around. We all vow to make life long changes. We commit to creating new work that will suit us better, to taking more time for love and play, to spending more time with family, to loving more and spending less time griping, and to exercising and eating better instead of treating our bodies like garbage disposals.

We do this in hopes of changing or shifting the paradigm of our lives to something more positive and loving. But we try to do it by making external commitments. Let me tell you, the external is only where the internal stuff is appearing. If you want to break the habits of old and create a new paradigm, you’re going to have to make the shift from the inside out.

So, how do you do that? Well, nothing is easy that shifts an entire life from negativity to something positive. We have to first find the roots of the system of negativity. When was the problem sown there and why? Who was responsible? Are the trappings of old easily changed by new thought, or do we have to do some strong digging to find out who abused you or hurt you in the past with negativity that dug so deeply, that now you need chains and a tractor pull to get to the roots? This may take more than just a strong will. I may take a counselor, therapy, or hypnosis.

I know from whence I talk. I have been pulling at roots from my own past that I thought I had gotten to the bottom of. But they remind me of a fully-grown crepe myrtle tree I dug up and transplanted about three years ago in my front yard. I must not have gotten all the roots, because each year where I dug it up, a new tree grows again. I now have five small trees from that one root. Well, there is good and bad news to that story. I love crepe myrtles. That’s the good news. But if you are dealing with a weedlike tree that keeps growing back every year from the same root, you need to dig down deeper until you get to the darn bottom of it; otherwise, you’ll never stop seeing seedlings and saplings from the same root.

We all have a lot of baggage from our past. I know I do. But as I dig to the bottom of it, I actually am finding that there is an end to the roots. I’m finally seeing that relief is ahead for me. A new paradigm shift is coming, because I’ve worked hard to make it happen. I don’t confess old beliefs over and over again, allowing negative thoughts to flourish. I cut them off at the roots. If they come back, I dig deeper until I find the bottom of the root. And that’s exactly what you need to do to make change in your life—lasting change.

A new paradigm for you could be a new job, a new relationship, feeling great about being single, finding a new home, moving to a new city, or establishing a great spiritual relationship with God. All of these things can be yours if you start with what is keeping you from your dreams. Breaking down the blocks to your paradigm shift is the most important facet of change. When you find what stops you internally from making change, you will grow into the best person you can be.

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Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Trying to Change What Is

I watched “Criminal Minds” tonight. The show was about a young gay man who was put in a camp by his parents to change him to be straight. The camp used shock therapy, prostitutes, what is considered masculine behavior models to change the thoughts and ideas that were currently inside the brain of the gay children.

I help people change thought every day. That’s what I do as a hypnotherapist. When someone asks me to help him/her be motivated to study more, I place trigger thoughts in the mind to remember easily and activate stronger attention. When someone wants to lose weight, I induce positive thoughts about good eating behavior and project into the mind ideas about having energy and desire to exercise. When someone wants to quit smoking or another habit, I help introduce ways of change that will consider the old habit as extraneous and impure, and create new habits that will overpower the neuro pathways in the brain to make positive change. That’s what hypnotherapy does.

But always, on the onset of the therapy, the client is asked the simple question: Is this what you want?

Plenty of times, I have told people to leave their appointment when they told me that they were simply doing this to appease a spouse or their children. You can’t change to appease anyone! You only can change to help yourself.

Now, let’s break down change. In a matter of hypnotherapy, we are talking behavorial change that is generally a quality that is affecting the individual in a bad way. The behavior is creating ill health, bad grades, bad self-esteem, or something that might promote negative life patterns.

Now can we look at homosexuality in this same way? This is the conundrum that many of these homosexual to heterosexual conversion workshops are trying to unfurl.

A couple years ago, I had been privy to a friend, actually an ex-lover who had been married with two children. He wanted to stay married because of his Bible-thumping belief that homosexuality was sinful. Nonetheless, when his job would take him out of town, he would be on the Internet immediately and be hooking up with men every time. Soon he would get HIV. As a result of the disease diagnosis, he had to come out to his wife and kids. This man decided in an effort to get his wife and kids back, that he would go to a conversion camp.

After the first week at the camp, my friend called me and basically was on this huge high. He believed without a shadow of a doubt, that the reason he was gay was totally psychological. His sexual behavior had to do with his childhood and the way he idealized men. The project made him believe that if he developed solid relationships with straight men that this would solve the problem with his sexuality. But throughout the entire time he was going to this conversion therapy, I know he was “acting out” with strangers almost every week. He even came on to me a couple times then would get mad at me afterwards. Later, he would call and apologize, saying that he was out of order and that God would lead him back.

As you can imagine, I was trying to be supportive of whatever my friend needed to feel safe and loved, but what he was getting into was making him hate himself and the behavior he had come to know as a normal outpouring of his own sexual needs and desires. Though, for some, that may be sin, for this man it had become simply self-hate.

When I am given a choice between feeling self-hate and feeling as if I have sinned, I’m going to think, it is simpler to think that falling prey to sin and wrong-doing is normal. No one person should feel too badly about sinning since it is a commonality of the human existence.

But when the kind of self recrimination of saying you can’t be who you are or God will hate you comes into play, then now you get into the game of self-hate, which can turn into suicide and retribution actions on the part of the person being blamed for acting improperly.

This was the case in the victim in the television show this evening. He fell in love with a man and killed him because he was taught it was religiously wrong. Then he tried to hook up with women to appease his father’s belief. When he couldn’t perform, he killed the women too. Before the confused gay man was caught, the story unraveled about his childhood and his father hiring a prostitute and forcing him to have sex with her in front of him until he got it right. Then the verbal abuse about God hating homosexuals happened. And when nothing else worked to get the child to conform to the parent, he turned to conversion therapy in the worst kind of conditions.

As you can imagine all of this combined was enough to turn a beautiful, innocent young man into a rage-filled killer. Though it was fiction, I believe the story was based on a true account.

Seriously, are we the kind of humanity that has to have everyone be the same homogenous creatures doing the same behavior? Or are we willing to accept the many colors of society and people and embrace our differences?

Until society gives each individual the right to his/her personal belief, we are going to keep procreating individuals who think dualistically. And in this homogenous society’s fight to keep everyone thinking the way they do, we will eventually destroy the human fabric of anyone who is young enough and fragile enough to be manipulated by condemning beliefs.

This kind of behavior in America has to stop. What are we doing to help this stop today?

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Tuesday, February 19, 2013

The Secret

What’s the first thing that happens when someone tells you a secret? They ask you to promise not to tell it.

Immediately, you begin to wonder who you could tell the secret to without getting in trouble. We are not meant to keep secrets. We are not vaults that store information. We share things. We share emotions. When someone tells me they have something horrible to tell me and that I have to promise not to tell anyone, the first thing I think about is: I have to know what it is. The second thing I think about is, whom can I tell this to that has no connection to this person, so I can get the burden off of my chest.

It’s a terrible thing I’m telling you. If you are one of my close friends, know this about me. I’m a horrible secret keeper. I really try hard to be the best friend and most loving and compassionate, but I usually end up telling someone innocuous, like my mother or a friend in NYC, someone that just would have no reason to spread the news any further.

I got some news about a three people today that has given me trouble digesting all evening. What do you do with information that just makes you want to throw-up the past year and make you want to start over? I’ve learned secrets about friends, lovers, people in my past that I just don’t know how to process. I wonder why all this information came to me today.

“So, Mr. Life Coach, what is it that you would tell your client about a day like today that you could tell yourself?”

What is Spirit trying to tell you? Have you been hiding yourself from the truth that has been staring you in the face all this time? And why have you been hiding from the truth? Are you needing relationships with these people so badly that you would simply look the other way when there are glaring signs of relationship problems staring you in the face?

The truth is: yes!

Ever since I was a little boy I have been the one who was picked on and picked last, who had to try the hardest to be liked, and had to be the smartest to be noticed. So, now in life, I sometimes pick people who wouldn’t normally choose me as a friend or a partner. The most handsome, the prettiest, the one with the television show, the one who has the most degrees… Then I show them my best hand. After which—when they begin to lose interest—I work harder to be a better friend. I always go the extra distance.

God, I have been that person who strives to be everybody’s best friend and to be the popular kid’s friends since I was in high school. Now, all grown up, when I have wonderful, loving friends who mean the world to me and are equally loving back, I still sometimes choose the same kind of people to maintain that old drama in my life.

My hairstylist said it to me tonight. Out of the mouth of a sarcastic, funny man, slapping color on my head and clipping my foot-long eyebrows. He says, “You just turn a blind eye to people’s faults, because you want them in your life.” When he said it, it cut like a knife, because I knew it was God speaking through him.

It was so true, that even tonight I’m feeling sick to my stomach, because now I know why for the last few months, I have had to purge my life of many “so called” friends who have been sucking the life and energy out of me.

It’s because I never chose these friends with Spirit and love and compassion. I never chose these friends because life and consequence brought us together. I chose them because I thought they would make me look better or be better to be around them. I’m ashamed to admit it. But now, I’m even more discontent that the very thing that I thought would help me has hindered my Authentic Growth and now I have to let go completely.

My secret is out in the open. Love is personal touch and personal touch is love. When you don’t get back what you return, there is no reason to maintain friendships that are unequal. Move on. Too many people exist who are willing to be there for us and nurture us. Why would we settle for anything less than a true, compassionate, authentic friend? There is no greater gift in the world!

Monday, February 18, 2013

Don't Put Your Faith in Appearances

Don’t Put Your Faith in Appearances!

About 27 years ago, I lived in NYC. I had a one-bedroom apartment in Midtown that I shared with my friend Gael. Even working two jobs, making the rent, taking dance class, acting class, and paying for food and subways was a struggle. At one point, I was down and out with my finances. I really didn’t think I was going to be able to eat that month. What I survived on then was .39 cans of tuna, .10 mac & cheese, .05 ramen noodles, and chicken thighs and legs, which were usually about .29 or .39 a pound. On a good week, I could eat for $10. You can tell how old I am by the cost of food. And that was in NYC.

I had my heart set on this acting class that a friend was giving that practically assured you some roles on “All My Children” if the teacher liked you, because she was the casting director. So, I bit the bullet and spent every cent I had saved and just prayed something more would come in to keep me afloat.

That week that I paid for the class, I got a call from a friend of a friend that Macy’s needed a guy to do some work for the Macy’s parade. From that interview, I ended up getting about $3000 worth of work in 3 months, which in those days was a lot of extra money. I led the world’s largest group of tap dancers as Bubbles the Tap Dancing Bumble Bee, then I was Tony Dorno’s Sporto the Duck for 3 months. I remember that this was the beginning of Spirit teaching me the lesson of moving forward with my heart and trusting in the abundance of God more than the appearances of what life looks like it may have to offer. And the even better news was, I ended up getting a couple bit roles on “All My Children,” which was the blast of my life at that point.

Now, that being said, I think there is a balance to be had here. I know some people who take absolutely no financial responsibility for their lives. They spend everything they make the moment they make it. I have never been that person. In fact, I save almost everything and I’m a penny pincher to put it lightly. My lessons were exactly opposite of this kind of person.

It has taken many of those “prosperous” kinds of moments for Spirit God to fortify me with the kind of faith that I have now. I believe that God works slowly to develop faith. You have small tests of faith. Then the tests get a little larger. Then soon you find that you are buying a house, when it doesn’t look like you really can afford it, which is exactly what I did.

I remember my tax guy looking at me and saying, “You bought a house that costs how much, making what you make? And not having a consistent steady income?”

I shrugged my shoulders. God moved my heart to do it. The bank approved my loan in exactly one hour. I had a plan. I turned the back of the house into an apartment and rented it out for $650 a month, which paid for about 1/3 of my mortgage. Once I did that, I ended up paying less for the house than I was paying for rent before I bought the house. And I had to put no money down.

When I got ready to refinance and the housing market looked like it took a terrible dive, everyone thought I wouldn’t be able to refinance. But I didn’t think twice about it. Even the loan officer said she didn’t think my house would appraise for the right amount. But it did, and I got the lower rate without having to get mortgage insurance.

I lead with my gut—where God is. That’s the difference in living by appearances and living by truth. Appearance is in the human realm of site and mind. God and unchangeable and unlimited truth is in the spirit world where everything is created. You must live from the latter world to accept the concept of Not Living By Appearances.

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Bo Sebastian's Finding Authentic You!

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Beyond Blessings

Dinner with My Broken Past

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Singing Falsetto in the Shower

Monday, February 25, 2013

Wicked

Overcoming Performance Anxiety

Saturday, February 23, 2013

What Are You Waiting For?

Waiting in Your Uncomfortable Silence

Thursday, February 21, 2013

A New Paradigm for You

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Trying to Change What Is

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

The Secret

Monday, February 18, 2013

Don't Put Your Faith in Appearances

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