How clean is your side of the sidewalk?

How clean is your side of the sidewalk?Or are you more focused on what’s happening on your neighbor’s side of the street?   Hmmm.  Gotcha!Putting your nose back in your own backyard is a conscious practice.  This is my stuff - this is your stuff, mind your own beeswax and shuffle on home.  At moments, life allows us to easily veer off course with the slightest unpleasant interaction.  Driving in one’s car is a perfect example.  Have you ever noticed how quick you are to judge someone else on the road while driving?  They may have cut you off, tailgated behind you, or somehow managed to piss you off, and in return, at lightening speed, you peg them with some judgment (usually of the four-letter-word nature).  And God knows, you don’t know their story and they certainly don’t know yours.  You don’t know what hand they have been dealt that day.  It’s easier to make assumptions…but we all know where that leads.Oh how quickly we give our power away.  And therein lies the slippery slope.  If you feel yourself heading in that direction, try putting practices in place that will remind you to readjust the course.  As Dr. Wayne Dyer points out, we spend a great deal of time and energy finding opportunities to be offended.  When we feel offended we are practicing judgment.We get to choose how we are going to interact with the world around us.  There’s no such thing as a “bad day” that you didn’t somehow participate in.  Some days we wake up with the sun shining, the birds singing and things flow with ease.  Those days are full of green lights and open doors.  Others days, not so much – they appear to be filled with resistance and roadblocks.  From the moment we open our eyes each morning we need to muster the presence of mind to declare where we are going.  Whisper a prayer, recite a mantra, give a big ‘ol shout-out of gratitude to the Universe and chart the course of your day.  Ask for guidance.  Ask to be of service.  There are a million and one things that can detour us from our intended path – everything from an alarm clock jarring us awake, to a stubbed toe stumbling out of bed, and yet these moments at the start of our day are pivotal to the overall outcome.  Pay attention to it all.“I don’t have time to meditate,” or “I don’t have time to pray.”  My response is, “Do you have time to feel like shit?” - Gabrielle Bernstein When something’s going down in my life and I feel like I could use a shift, I like to recall an experience I had about 8 years ago.  It now stands as a metaphor, a note to self – a reminder that you choose your experience.  On that particular cold, early winter morning I trudged outside, bundled in layers, with my dog in tow.  I was grumbling and complaining to myself and in return everything I saw was ugly; the yard looked bare and exposed and all I saw in this glass-half-empty mode was what was missing, not what was there.  As I made my way towards the woods, I glanced over to my neighbor’s yard.  Oh this isn’t going to be good.  To say that our backyard aesthetics differed immensely would be an understatement, but hey, it is their backyard, their business.  I told myself to mind my own business and put my nose back into my own yard.  But I was clearly looking for energetic trouble – as I glanced across the way, I grew more incensed.  How could the town allow them to pile up all that crap?  Why can’t they just clean up their garbage?  And further to that, I’m going to take a picture right now.  And I marched back to the house, like a nosey Gladys Kravitz, and grabbed my camera, determined to gather “evidence.”  Next thing you know, I was stomping my way back out when I got completely sidetracked by the most glorious golden sunlight cascading across the trees as if to say “Good Morning!”I know, it sounds corny and a bit whoo whoo…but it stopped me in my indignant tracks.  It was as if the Universe screamed out to me – “Hey Lady, over here.  Take a picture of something worthwhile.”  Energetic shift.What do you see when you look around…your house, your life, your office?  Do you see problems or possibility?  When I start veering into a “getting-all-edgy-mode,” I reboot and ask myself – what’s underneath this?  What is this saying about me, what’s up?  It’s never about the garbage in my neighbor’s backyard, or what someone else said or did, it’s always about me.  The way back to “center” isn’t through your neighbor’s yard.The take away:Feeling offended = placing a judgment on someone or something.  Judgment is an act of the ego (and we know how that can get in the way!)Hold onto the reins of your own power – don’t let anyone or anything be the source of your resentment.  When you feel offended, redirect your focus to your own stuff…your side of the sidewalk.  What do you need to clean up?