Category: Words To Live By

One of the greatest gifts any of us are given is the ability to dream. The dreaming I am referring to is actually not the one that happens when we are asleep, it’s the one that can occur in any given waking moment. And it’s the one where the mind, body, and soul unite together solely for the purpose of visioning something truly special that each of us individually strives for in our future.

Children do this all the time…

I want to grow up and be a fireman.

I want to grow up and be a doctor.

I want to grow up and be a policeman.

I want to grow up and be a pro athlete.

I want to grow up and be the next President.

Somewhere along the line though, many of those children become adults and forget about their childhood dreams of things they once envisioned for themselves. They settle into jobs and relationships that only bring them temporary satisfaction, and all too often, more misery in life. That’s only because deep down within each of their souls is a bigger dream desired in life. Unfortunately, most never pursue them ever again and instead choose to remain uncomfortably comfortable throughout the rest of their life. Some choose to numb themselves from those distant memories of a life once thought about by falling into any number of addictions. Others accept it as the cards they were dealt. And then there are those who will say that they’re too old or too poor or have too little time to ever try to pursue any of those dreams once thought about.

I honestly can’t remember what my childhood dreams were for my future. I think that’s because I grew up in an environment that didn’t fully allow me to think completely outside the box. Along the way, I ended up becoming a businessman and following a career that was really a lot more like what my parents wanted me to pursue than probably what my inner self wanted. For years I went from job to job and relationship to relationship seeking more satisfaction. But even when I got that, it only lasted for a short period of time and always felt as if something was still missing. Today, I believe what was missing was my heart and soul in all of what I was doing and a closer relationship to God.

Through all the healing work I’ve been doing on myself, I have thought a lot about the inner child who still lives within me and what he wants to dream about for the rest of the time I have in this life. The Shaman I am a student under recently asked me to start visualizing that by writing down some things I want God to guide me towards as I continue to heal and spiritually grow.

The following is a list, in no particular order, of those things my inner child and I have started dreaming about of a future I am working towards with God at the helm. I wrote each of them with the phrase “I will” solely for the fact that it’s putting myself in a greater place of empowerment and manifestation in life.

1. I will be physically healthy and well enough again to fully play golf, basketball, bowling, and tennis, as well as to hike, bike, and jog.

2. I will be employed in a career that I look forward to going to when I wake up each day.

3. I will be earning a living doing something that is also helping make this world a more loving place.

4. I will be married to my current partner and strive in that relationship to help create a society that embraces same sex relationships rather than tear them down using religious viewpoints.

5. I will be a prominent author who is represented by a well known publishing company that also books speaking engagements to talk about what I’ve written.

6. I will be a spiritual motivational speaker around the world that talks about all the things I’ve gone through and healed from including addiction, codependency, racism and prejudice, bullying, growing up in a broken home, and more.

7. I will be meditating into deeper and longer states.

8. I will develop all the spiritual gifts that were blessed within me in this life.

9. I will be living in a climate that is more warmer than colder year round and have a house there on some body of water where I can sit out on a deck in peace and serenity.

10. I will be a beacon of hope, light, and love that naturally inspires others to find their own path to God.

There are plenty of other things I’m sure I could come up with that are also dreams for my future. But the most important thing is that I’m allowing myself to dream again and not numbing myself anymore from thinking about them. I believe that with God guiding my life, all of them and then some are possible.

I encourage each of you to take a moment today, breathe, and dare to dream again in your life by writing a few of your own aspirations down like I just did. Ask God to guide you life path towards achieving all of them. What do you have to lose other than the few moments of your time that it takes to write them out and say a quick prayer over them???

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

One of the greatest gifts any of us are given is the ability to dream. The dreaming I am referring to is actually not the one that happens when we are asleep, it’s the one that can occur in any given waking moment. And it’s the one where the mind, body, and soul unite together solely for the purpose of visioning something truly special that each of us individually strives for in our future.

Children do this all the time…

I want to grow up and be a fireman.

I want to grow up and be a doctor.

I want to grow up and be a policeman.

I want to grow up and be a pro athlete.

I want to grow up and be the next President.

Somewhere along the line though, many of those children become adults and forget about their childhood dreams of things they once envisioned for themselves. They settle into jobs and relationships that only bring them temporary satisfaction, and all too often, more misery in life. That’s only because deep down within each of their souls is a bigger dream desired in life. Unfortunately, most never pursue them ever again and instead choose to remain uncomfortably comfortable throughout the rest of their life. Some choose to numb themselves from those distant memories of a life once thought about by falling into any number of addictions. Others accept it as the cards they were dealt. And then there are those who will say that they’re too old or too poor or have too little time to ever try to pursue any of those dreams once thought about.

I honestly can’t remember what my childhood dreams were for my future. I think that’s because I grew up in an environment that didn’t fully allow me to think completely outside the box. Along the way, I ended up becoming a businessman and following a career that was really a lot more like what my parents wanted me to pursue than probably what my inner self wanted. For years I went from job to job and relationship to relationship seeking more satisfaction. But even when I got that, it only lasted for a short period of time and always felt as if something was still missing. Today, I believe what was missing was my heart and soul in all of what I was doing and a closer relationship to God.

Through all the healing work I’ve been doing on myself, I have thought a lot about the inner child who still lives within me and what he wants to dream about for the rest of the time I have in this life. The Shaman I am a student under recently asked me to start visualizing that by writing down some things I want God to guide me towards as I continue to heal and spiritually grow.

The following is a list, in no particular order, of those things my inner child and I have started dreaming about of a future I am working towards with God at the helm. I wrote each of them with the phrase “I will” solely for the fact that it’s putting myself in a greater place of empowerment and manifestation in life.

1. I will be physically healthy and well enough again to fully play golf, basketball, bowling, and tennis, as well as to hike, bike, and jog.

2. I will be employed in a career that I look forward to going to when I wake up each day.

3. I will be earning a living doing something that is also helping make this world a more loving place.

4. I will be married to my current partner and strive in that relationship to help create a society that embraces same sex relationships rather than tear them down using religious viewpoints.

5. I will be a prominent author who is represented by a well known publishing company that also books speaking engagements to talk about what I’ve written.

6. I will be a spiritual motivational speaker around the world that talks about all the things I’ve gone through and healed from including addiction, codependency, racism and prejudice, bullying, growing up in a broken home, and more.

7. I will be meditating into deeper and longer states.

8. I will develop all the spiritual gifts that were blessed within me in this life.

9. I will be living in a climate that is more warmer than colder year round and have a house there on some body of water where I can sit out on a deck in peace and serenity.

10. I will be a beacon of hope, light, and love that naturally inspires others to find their own path to God.

There are plenty of other things I’m sure I could come up with that are also dreams for my future. But the most important thing is that I’m allowing myself to dream again and not numbing myself anymore from thinking about them. I believe that with God guiding my life, all of them and then some are possible.

I encourage each of you to take a moment today, breathe, and dare to dream again in your life by writing a few of your own aspirations down like I just did. Ask God to guide you life path towards achieving all of them. What do you have to lose other than the few moments of your time that it takes to write them out and say a quick prayer over them???

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

I would like to think I know a little about a lot of things in life. But I’ve learned there are a lot of things in life I don’t know very much about at all. For the longest time I gave the illusion to most people that I was a “Mr. Know It All”. Today I’m working on doing what I can to change that impression.

Does anyone really like a “Know It All”?

Growing up in grade school I often raised my hand and had the answer to many of my teachers’ questions. Of course it gave me the reputation of being a nerd and people picked on me incessantly because of it. As I grew older, I continued this pattern and believed I knew something about everything. One of the greatest downfalls that has come along with that is something I’m still working on. Unfortunately, I’ve had the tendency to use the Internet to look things up on the fly when someone makes a statement that I don’t believe is true. While I have often found inconsistencies in what people are saying and pointed it out to them, it’s also left me in an unfavorable light where I just seem like that annoying “Know It All”. Not only has this turned people off from wanting to get to know me, it has also prevented me from learning anything new. The best comparison I can make to this is to a full glass of water. What happens when one tries to pour anymore water into that full glass…? It overflows.

Though my journey of growth and healing to become closer to God, I have continuously been emptying out much of that glass of water so as to remain open to furthering my learning in life. In Buddhism, there’s a wise saying that says “as soon a student begins to think they know everything, the reality is that they really know nothing at all.” God continues to show me how profound this statement is. Each day now I ask to be emptied of my ego based belief systems that have kept me being that “Know It All”.

For many people, like myself was for the longest time, the world can become a fixed and rigid circle with its own inner belief systems. When anything that comes up to that circle is different from within it, it’s often rejected with many “Know It All” statements. One great example of this is how too many of the religions today are teaching its followers that homosexuality is an abomination from God. When in reality, if people were able to expand beyond their rigid circles of knowledge, they might see that gay people are loved by God too and that is the way God intended them to be. That’s just one of the many things I have expanded in my understanding and each time it happens, I continue to remember that to remain teachable, I have to allow myself room to expand.

I don’t wish to be that “Mr. Know It All” anymore. It only impedes my spiritual progress in life and pushes people away. It also gives power to my ego and limits my ability to grow healthier and be more loving to everyone. I think the next time someone around me says something that I believe is wrong, I won’t look it up on the Internet or try to correct them. Instead, I will try to remain silent and just listen for once. Who knows, maybe in doing that, God might help me learn something new…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Karma is a word that has its roots tracing back millennia to the Buddhism and Hinduism religions. It’s also becoming a word that’s being widely used these days as well. I have heard many in recent times using the phrase “karma’a a bitch…” and have often wondered if those people know what they’re really saying when they verbalize those words. Ironically, many of them are doing behaviors themselves that would constitute the concept of bad karma.

So what is karma? Simply put, it’s the law of cause and effect. Or in easier terms, “one reaps what one sows”. I have been delving into understanding this belief much more over the past few years of my life since making the decision to clean my whole life up on every level.

Up until March of 2010, I had functioned in what could be labeled as doing a lot of negative karma daily. I was very selfish and self-centered and went out of my way to get what I wanted at whatever the price, even if it hurt others. My words were often vicious and nasty to those closest around me. I seduced and maintained relationships with married men. I often lied, cheated, and backstabbed to “move ahead” in life. In doing all of this, I took what Christians label as “free will” to the fullest extent possible. But eventually, I grew more and more miserable. In the midst of all that misery, I prayed to God to go through whatever I needed to go through, to rid myself of all the pain I had caused others and myself, so as to heal and never repeat those behaviors ever again. Within a month, my life had become riddled with tremendous pain and has persisted ever since. Many of the healers and practitioners I have seen, as well as the Shaman I currently use as a spiritual teacher, have all said that my pain is the release of all that negative karma, because I essentially had asked for it in prayer.

Given that it seemed like such a big word to me, I chose to understand karma in a much easier way by making it synonymous with the word energy. Good karma became positive energy and bad karma became negative energy where each could be stored in and around my whole being. So during all those extremely selfish years of my life, I believe I took on a lot of negative energy and unfortunately, I wasn’t doing much in the way of putting out the opposite of that with positive energy. What has been even more frustrating is when I think about the idea of reincarnation. Many of those Eastern religions also believe that a soul can be re-birthed again and again, life after life, solely to learn new spiritual lessons and become more enlightened. Having already had a few past life experiences occur about ten years ago, I have accepted truth to this concept as well. Sadly, though that I have had to come to the belief that many of the negative behaviors I was doing in this life, I was also doing in my previous ones as well. Thus, this has led me to believe that my negative energy release process is both of this life and all previous ones.

So far, I really have no hard core proof to the concept of any of this that I am writing about. But frankly, it is something that keeps me going now because there have been no medical or scientific answers to all the pain and suffering I’ve been going through for over three years now. If truly all of what I am going through is the release of all that negative energy I conceived in this life and previous ones as well, I’m totally for it. That’s only because I believe that on the other side of that release process will be a closer relationship with God where I’m not blocked by desires to go out and live in free will and act out more of the “bad karma” I once regularly did.

If anything, I’m trying to put positive energy, or the “good karma”, out into the universe now through most of what I do each day. The main reason why I write articles, such as this, everyday is to send out more love, hope, and spiritual healing into this world. I often speak about my recovery from addictions at places such as hospitals and detox centers to provide that same thing for those still suffering from addictions. I also try to do kind deeds all the time to brighten up other people’s days. But most importantly, I take time everyday to pray, meditate, and recite mantras to assist in my own release process, and I do everything I can to maintain a healthy body, mind, and soul as well.

So does karma exist? I can’t answer that. But what I can answer though is that at least I know I’m doing now what I can to correct all those former behaviors and actions that I did which added nothing but more pain and anguish to the world and myself. And I’m also doing what I can to love everyone equally a lot more than I ever used to. From taking this new path alone, I can at least say I’m a lot happier than I ever used to be when I was doing what those Eastern religions would classify as a lot of “bad karma”.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson