Life is a hectic fast paced continual stream of things to do. Work, home, kids and the mountain of other things, we have to fit into our day. Time also appears to speed up and before you know it another week, month or year has passed by. Do you recall the verse, “what is a life without a care if we have no time to stand and stare?”
We have so many cares that standing to stare or stopping to care no longer fits into our fast paced life and if we do the chances are that your thoughts are still on one or more of the tasks that need your attention, so we feel uncomfortable and walk on.
Our World Our Choice by author and Riki practitioner Annie Templeton is most definitely the book to read if you feeling out of touch or out of sorts and want to regain a zeal for life and renew a spiritual connection. Annie is a medium; she worked in public relations and has been a practitioner of alternative medicines for 25 years. Her first book Your Life Your Choice was published in 1998; in her new book she shares some practical and inspiring advice with us to reignite that spark of life from herself and spiritual mentor Saint Germain.
First and foremost OUR WORLD OUR CHOICE teaches us to heal ourselves and to turn the negative into the positive through simple exercises throughout the book. Some of the exercises give you the opportunity to sit back and take a closer look at yourself and what makes you tick, what presses your buttons and how to cope with people who press those buttons. Annie has been open and honest in her writing and it shows with some really amusing narratives that we can recount in our own lives.
THE INTERVIEW
I asked Annie how she finds the time and the energy to get through her busy day and what she suggests to help us do the same; “One of the biggest challenges we all face in such a fast paced world is consistency, you know we might get hyped up about something for a little while but it doesn’t take much of a distraction and we are out of the pattern or good habit.
If I don’t do that little bit of inner work in the morning before I start my day, it’s you know kind of higgledy piggledy, but if I do that little bit of meditation or whatever it is, it sets the time for the day, that helps a lot, so you kind of have to find more in your day to make it easier.”
So taking a little time each day for yourself to meditate or walk or whatever you like to do to, is really important, there is a part in the book Healer Heal Thyself, and it is so true, we can find it hard to do anything constructive if we are not happy with ourselves.
“I think that’s the first thing, probably the only thing we come to do and we get distracted along the way and it’s the last priority to just kind of be happy in your own skin and feel that connection to source or god or whatever you like to call it, that’s the bare bones of it, everything we can achieve after that is bonus.”
Let’s talk about the button pushers, you know the people I mean, it’s happened to us all at some time or another in our lives, but it’s how we deal with them that can make it a delimitating negative or an enhancing positive, this is what Annie says on the subject.
“Well, I remember doing Stuart Wilds metaphysical course years ago, the Wilds Wisdom and one of the things he used to say repeatedly to us was “someone else’s opinion of you is none of your business” and I think if we can be really free of the opinion of others, that’s liberation.
It can be a thoughtless comment or it can be something that’s a little bit of a tender spot for you, and they press your buttons, but if you think of them as being a friend for pressing your buttons and then look at what buttons are being pressed, you can turn it around as a positive. We are all connected and we are all here to help each other on the path, some of it might turn out to be a negative function.
But if it’s pressed out buttons in the first place then there is something we are uncertain of in ourselves that has allowed us to react, if we didn’t react we would be clear and it wouldn’t worry us, when it does worry us we can think ok there’s something to look at here, that’s how I do it anyway.”
There are different types of criticism just as there are of people, how do we tell the difference from positive and negative and stay on track with our goals?
“We focus on ourselves and stop comparing with others or listening to others too much, when someone gives us positive criticism that comes from love, you know it, you just feel it resonate that they are really wanting to help, but when we see something coming from anger you know they are in distain with themselves, then you think, no, that’s coming from their ego, it’s not coming from their higher self or the connected self, so we won’t worry about that too much.”
I asked Annie for her take on why we have become so self-centred and afraid of extending the hand of friendship and help to each other, why do we seem to be lacking in community spirit?
“I think the financial pressures and such are pushing everyone into survival mode and that people are concentrating on getting themselves and their family’s through, sort of like there’s not enough time for everyone else. I think we’ve just lost that community spirit you were talking about, and that’s a shame and it’s also a hope for my book, that we start to open to those possibility’s.
Bit by bit I think people have shut down their hearts to cope and people have been hurt, so the easiest thing to do when your hurt is shut down, and that’s what I say in the book as well, that’s what Riki helped me with. It was like six steel gates across my heart opening up and I thought I’m never going to close those gates again.
I remember when I lived in Melbourne, I was walking down a busy road at peak hour traffic at night, and there was a lady sitting in the gutter, I just walked past her thinking she’s had too much to drink, as I got past there was some little instinct going no, that’s not someone who’s drunk that’s someone who needs your help, so I went back and she was having a small heart attack.
So it’s taking the judgment off things too, we’re not responding as good human beings should respond, we’ve been conditioned a lot to not respond as well. It’s about making an individual choice that I’m going to respond and being a practitioner that’s what we are doing all the time.”
Change is really our own choice and if we want to open our hearts and lives to the infinite possibilities that living in a more contented and caring world can give us, then Our World Our Choice is the book to open to start us on the path.
