Terry Kohl has been a fantastic guest blogger for the past few months, generously sharing her gifts and talents.  Thank you Terry!  Details on her story are shown below, as we offer the final blog in her series.  We invite subject matter Passioneering experts to share their guest blogs with us in August and September!

Guest Expert Blog:  Passioneer

By Terry Kohl

Passion; the stuff romance and true love is made of.  The “I can’t get enough of you, can’t eat, can’t sleep,” syndrome.  Hot, sweaty bodies lost in a world where reason is not allowed….right?

Hmmm…been there, done that. And while I am grateful for those juicy moments, the passions that stir my soul now are all about life and how I wiggle around in it.

Passion is love of each and every day because it is a brand new beginning and consequently the chance for a brand new adventure. It’s loving myself and how I came to be the woman I am. It’s trying things on for size that I think I might really enjoy. It’s about not giving a hoot what anyone else thinks or does. It’s going with the flow of life rather than trying to staunch the river of experiences life hands me. It’s about growing, and sometimes being painfully aware of the little time we have on this huge rock hurtling through time and space. It’s falling into bed at night with such gratitude for all that life has shown me that my heart nearly breaks from joy.

Passion—it’s having an idea and running with it. It’s about allowing that fierce, sweet fire of creativity to burn itself out no matter how long it takes. It’s getting out my watercolors on a rainy afternoon and abandoning all I was taught and instead, creating something from my darling passionate heart.

Passion is about being in the now, which is truly all we have. All that is real is only ever experienced moment by moment; everything else is fiction. Passion is about the courage to walk towards the light so that the shadows are always behind you. It’s about digging in the dark, moist earth of your soul and harvesting an unregrettable life.

**************

Successful author and coach, Terry Kohl is our guest blogger for the next few months.   You can reach her at either www.LostYourJobNowWhat.com or www.TerryKohl.com.

Thank you Terry and Happy Passioneering!

Perseverance is not about struggling, fighting, or forcing something to happen. It IS about putting more air into your tires so that when your rubber meets the inevitable rocky roads, you keep rollin’, rollin’, rollin’. You CAN appreciate the ride, even if you’re holding on for dear life!

Quote
Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go. ~William Feather

Passioneer Challenge
Consider an area of your life where you feel as if you are facing many roadblocks. Ask yourself (or your higher power) these two questions, with an open heart and mind: “Who am I to be in this situation, and what am I to know?” When you are really ready and willing to hear the answers, they will come, and when you shift out of doing and into being, infinite possibilities emerge.

Happy Passioneering!

Passion and Perseverance

By Elisabeth Manning

I am a poster child for perseverance from the day I was born. Perseverance itself was the beginning of my own dawn to pursue human potential, which led  to discovering my passion in work.

Persevere, according to Webster means to persist in a state, enterprise, or undertaking in spite of counterinfluences, opposition, or discouragement.

I persevere now at a whole new level today, because I have passion for my life, my work, my self, my future, and the service I offer to planetary evolution. But I had a few hoops to jump through first to understand the value and source of passion and of human potential, and looking back I built a very big perseverance muscle which I learned comes easy when you have passion. Early on however, it was about survival.

How it all began you ask? Being raised in an alcoholic single parent home in a small town, living on welfare. My grandparents were millionaires, go figure.

Perseverance then was about showing up for a wounded mother.  Most of my family says I raised her. She checked herself into a mental institution when I was three but they threw her out and said she wasn’t crazy enough.

It was about survival and doing what had to be done. I was opening cans of soup by climbing on a chair at the kitchen counter when I was 5. I was allowed to miss school because my mom always got me out of bed at 2 am to listen to her cry to Barry Manilow records about how she was never approved of by her own father, and then she’d fall asleep drunk with a cigarette in her hand.  I would routinely transfer my pillow to her crooked neck, put out her cigarette, and crawl gratefully back into bed.

Perseverance then to me was about getting to school, my source of hope out of this cycle. Once I missed 21 days in a row because my mom liked the company. One day the principal came and we played possum and my mom squeezed lemon juice through the mailbox slot when he tried to peek in. Perseverance then was about having enough school supplies, so I stole them. Got escorted home by a nice policeman and had to go visit a probation officer who felt I had to have been wrongly accused, I was “too good”. So we had nice visits for the next 6 months while he scratched his head. Then I was taken away when I was 13 when mom was deemed “unfit.” But arguably in her defense, there was love. I just didn’t ever see her love herself.

Then came the day in psychology class at age 16 where we were introduced to Maslow’s Heirarchy of Self Actualization. I heard a voice and “it” took my pencil tip to the tippy top and said, “you are going HERE.” It was like an angel had given me a road map to life.

Fast forward 20 years of struggle, self loathing, self discovery, and finally consciously coming into my life’s work. It is no wonder I am passionate about sparing the children by helping parents see infertility as an opportunity to awaken to their potential to heal, and to consciously conceive, which leads to conscious parenting and broken destructive family patterns.

Today, I cannot NOT include my story in my current passion for my work. My life and work is ALL about stepping into our highest human potential to become worthy of the children coming into the world. And I wouldn’t change a thing, except maybe my definition of perseverance today: passion in action.

I couldn’t have had a better road map.

*********************

Elisabeth Manning is a Certified Spirit Coach and is a teacher in training at the Foundation for Spiritual Development in San Rafael California. Unlike traditional coaching Elisabeth works at the spirit and energetic levels to get to the root of the issues blocking her clients from achieving their soul purpose and unlimited nature. At this level sustainable healing and growth is achieve whereby the clients become their own guru and healer. She has a practice called Conscious Conception empowering women and couples to co-create fertility in all areas of their lives to regain health and wealth of spirit mind and body, and to prepare to live a mindful parenting path.  You can reach her at www.consciousconception.net, and please click here for her radio show interview.