“The living moment is everything.”  ~D.H. Lawrence

One of the most powerful ways that my positivity quest has evolved lately, is in my aspiration and dedication to befriend the present moment.  Today I had plenty of opportunities to practice as I raced between multiple connections across the country.  So as I processed the real possibility of missing the next connection or realized that I had lost my bag claim ticket, instead of perseverating on the stress and developing the drama of the story line, I wondered what would happen next. Befriending the moment means literally that we face all outer circumstances as though we invited them.

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Today I begin my third edition of my positivity  quest blog with a renewed commitment to daily  writing as a vehicle for my awakening.   This is the third new year that I have begun the year by committing my life to positivity. Having lost touch with the daily practice of writing as I learn in this last year has made me long to find my writing voice again in a way that will guide me to putting the last three years of learning together in a book called Life that Works- How Positivity Reinvents Us.  I may just be writing it one page at a time here so please feel free to add your editorial voices and questions where I miss the mark.

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Sexual health and product safety are the cornerstones of the Good Clean Love product mission. The company was created 10 years ago in response to my own personal need for intimacy products that were not made with petrochemicals and parabens. Over the years our formulations have matured into a product line that is easily tolerated by even the most sensitive tissue. We work to provide products that people with a wide range of issues, including cancer survivors, can use to enjoy the healing benefits of intimate pleasure. In fact, many of the medical professionals we work with who specialize in pelvic pain report that Good Clean Love is the one product that has a consistently high success rate among their patients dealing with a wide range of sensitivities and disease.

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“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”   -Albert Einstein

Years ago I studied the Course in Miracles.  Actually, I just memorized the first three pages, which are the 50 principles of how miracles work.  You pretty much have to be studying 50 principles all the time if you expect to be able to recall #33 out of mid air.  Studying these principles all day, every day for a year created a filter for seeing the world as one continuous miracle. When you are juggling 50 of them in your head, pretty much one will apply all the time. That year I lived a magical, truly miraculous time.  Although I stopped studying those principles, the truth of what I learned when I was 24 never really left me. However, I could never really tap the power of that place again until I started re-learning how miracles happen in the space of positive thinking.

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“Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow men.” -Gandhi

We are basically good.  I trust this belief and try to live my life through this window of the world. All of my work on behalf of my beloved Positive Change Club is my most recent training ground, and there are days when I lose sight of my mission. I question my sanity in the moments when it feels like a continuous give and I wonder why I try so hard. It gets ugly when these feelings turn into judgment and disappointment about what the kids aren’t doing. My son gets angry at me and reminds me that there is nothing helpful about these feelings. “Go meditate,” he says. Then I get full enough within myself to trust this process and do the next thing. If nothing else is accomplished with the Positive Change project, I hope that a small portion of the future generation will have learned how to help and even more importantly realized that it is in our efforts to help that we hold ourselves in highest regard.

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Today in the grocery store,  I shared a real conversation with one of the mothers I knew in the years that my eldest son was consumed for a love of tennis.  I knew her son had been present at the accident when the two boys from South were swept into the ocean but I hadn’t heard about how the event had changed his life until today. Old friendships between mothers are re-kindled easily in the freezer aisle when we share real stories of the trials and tribulations of witnessing our kids’ struggles to make an independent life. She told me, “ He isn’t the same since it happened,  he used to be so outgoing and gregarious; now he stays much more to himself.”

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The New York Times

I remember a few years ago after a huge forest fire ate up a large neighborhood of homes in the Colorado mountains and a small statue of Mary appeared in my inbox. A friend’s friend was passing along this image. Like a sign, even in the midst of profound loss and destruction, what remains is holy, unchanging and somehow protected from the wins and losses that seems to define human existence on our beautiful planet.

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“If you had just one more minute to get a positive thought, that could change everything.” 

This is what I hear myself say at the end of our kickstarter video as I watch the faces of some of my favorite teenagers flash on the screen.  I am moved each and every time I see this video, which tells the story through the kids’ words of why they are spending their weekends moving concrete and gravel. Essentially, they are working to create a beautiful space, which will be available for generations to come to find their own unique positive spirit.

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I live in a rural area of Oregon, so when storms hit as they do here in the Northwest, it is not unusual for my home to be disconnected from the grid for a week or more.  It’s a weird thing to live in the middle of the grid, but not be connected to it.  In some deep ways your life can’t really go forward. You are in your home, but unable to take advantage of living in it.  My memory of it is a form of being dis-embodied. The other powerful memory I still carry is  how easy it is to take the whole grid thing for granted.  Kind of like the ozone layer,  we only started to notice how well it functioned and protected us after it was broken.

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One of the most rewarding projects I have ever created began last year in the wake of the tragic deaths of two boys at the high school my kids attend.  They were on a school outing at the Oregon coast when a wave came up and sucked them into the ocean.  Several others were there too, helpless to save their friends who perished in front of their eyes.  It is a jarring image to consider even several years later.  The memorials that followed the event and the immense community response were the most inspiring and compassionate experiences of loss I have ever had the honor to witness; the students all felt it, too. Tragedy creates a unique depth of tender connection between people because we recognize both our common frailty and humanity. The kids wanted to hold onto that connection and somehow permanently mark the event.

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