Never Give Up: The Power of the Heart To Hope and to Heal

HeartStart to Your YEAR!
Monday, December 31, 2007 from 5:00-6:00pm PT.

Free Conference Call
Conference Dial-in Number: (605) 990-0700
Participant Access Code: 992522#

Before you start reading this, I want you to ask yourself a question. Do you have a dream that you have let die? Or a dream that you have tucked on the back burner for more "practical" things to cook first? Or a dream that you have avoided pursuing in the fear of failure, or the burnout of too many failures?

Then this HeartStart for the New Year is for you! It is a time to reignite your hope, your potential, your dreams, and your power to see your dreams through by remaining true to YOU.

New Year�s is a time of endings and beginnings. One stress we sometimes experience at New Year�s is looking back on our resolutions and goals from a year ago and seeing how we have fallen short. Nothing robs us of Fyera! or ties our growth and fulfillment to a boomerang bungee cord faster than self judgment. The heart rarely judges and measures our progress. Usually, it celebrates our potential, appreciates our strides, and gives us direct and honest feedback about our gaps- all with love for exactly who we are right here right now. A fully blossomed rose is no more beautiful than a tight bud about to bloom- for each step of our progress and experience, the heart is always able to make room.

We do our end of fiscal year financial accounting, but what about our end of year energy accounting? It is our energy that is the most important resource we have. If we have energy, after all, we will be able to generate all the other resources we need including problem solving skills, hope, innovation, money, and above all, the stamina to ride through the tough times and remain committed to our visions and dreams long enough to see them realized. It is the power of the heart, as accessed through the tools of the beginner HeartMath webinar and the energy accounting tool in the intermediate webinar that replenished those things in me and gave me the power to be writing this for all of you! My heart�s message? �Don�t give up! Keep going! It�s getting easier! It�s getting there! Don�t quit! You�re almost there!�

The nice thing about having the heart on board is that as long as you keep coming back to listen to its signal, it will broadcast its messages to you in everyone you meet and every situation you greet. So, as I sank my teeth into the Cut Thru tool that we teach in our HeartBlueprints Webinar, to transform through my heart my negative repetitive patterns with money and my deflated defeat with my business, several wonderful things happened. The phone rang and it was my mother, to tell me how proud she was of everything I had accomplished this year. And while I was talking with her, the Little story to the right came to me in an e-mail, �Don�t Quit� appeared in my inbox and brought tears to my eyes as I read it aloud to my mother who is a piano teacher.

The next day, I got a call from a dear friend and client, Bonnie St. John. Bonnie is someone in my life who has taught me NEVER to give up. Bonnie had her leg amputated at five years old, and went on to become the first African American woman to win an Olympic medal in the Winter Olympics- on one leg in downhill skiing! The reason Bonnie called me was to tell me that she was speaking in Los Angeles at the Shriner�s Hospital where her leg had been amputated. She had not been back there since her surgery decades ago, and she called to ask if there was any way that I could come at the last minute to support her. I could have listened to my head say �no, can�t make it so last minute� because of my list of things to do and people to see and HeartStart call invites to write, but instead my heart leaped out of my chest into a resounding �Yes!�

I arrived at the hospital in the middle of Bonnie�s speech, right as she was describing her Olympic win. The downhill slalom�s were won as combined scores from two races. In the first race, Bonnie ranked first in the world! She was virtually guaranteed a medal! So in the second race, she decided to take it easy, play it safe, just make her time without doing anything foolish. She glided down the hill with ease and was just in sight of the finish line when it happened. On her one leg, she hit a patch of ice and did not have another leg to stabilize her! She fell! She couldn't�t believe it. She lay in the snow at Innsbruck, Austria feeling that she had just made a fool of herself in front of the entire world. She wanted to crawl into a snow pile and hide. But something came up from her inside that told her she absolutely had to finish that ride. So she stood up, and finished the race, never expecting to place. Much to her surprise, every other skier in the race had fallen at exactly the same place! She won a silver medal, and the only difference between her time and the competitor�s that took the gold, was that her competitor stood up faster! Bonnie has been interviewed all over the world about her message, �If you fall down, stand up!� and �Never give up!� Right as I walked in to hear Bonnie�s speech, she repeated to the Shriner�s and then to every child�s bedside that we visited together, �Never give up. Never give up. Anything is possible. Never give up.� My heart spoke to me loud and clear, through Bonnie, my Mom, my inbox, my soul. Don�t give up. Get up.

Bonnie St. John will be with us next week

To find out more about Bonnie St. John before she appears on next week�s HeartStart call, go to www.bonniestjohn.com. Simply meeting Bonnie has been a life transforming experience for many people. "If a one-legged, African-American girl from San Diego with no money and no snow can go to the Olympics as a ski racer..." people think to themselves, "surely I can follow my dream and find the joy in my life."

The heart has a unique capacity to �get up� faster- it gives us measurably greater resilience in the face of failures and challenges by increasing the flexibility of our nervous system and giving us access to intuitive centers in the brain that help us navigate our way to our greatest fulfillment and the realization of what matters most. The heart has the power to keep our hope alive in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Tune into tonight�s HeartStart call to reignite your dreams for 2008 and gain the power to stick with them through thick and thin to the inner win!

January HeartMath Workshop Dates

Beginner Webinar - 4 Tuesdays Starting Jan 8th

Intermediate Webinar - 4 Wednesdays Starting Jan 9th

Advanced Webinar - 4 Thursdays Starting Jan 10th

Where the Rubber Meets the Road - 4 Fridays Starting Jan 11th

All Day Beginner Workshop - Saturday Jan 19th

All Day Intermediate Workshop - Sunday Jan 20th

To listen to previous Heart Start calls go to www.fyera.com/heartstart.html

For more information about our four evening HeartMath class series e-mail [email protected]

Fyera!

The Business of Bankruptcy

Did you know that 50% of business fail within the first year, and 95% of businesses have closed their doors within the first five years? Here�s a multiple choice test: Do most businesses fail because they:

• Go bankrupt and run out of money
• The owner dies
• The owner loses hope and becomes emotionally bankrupt and burned out

Don't Stay Down

Those of us that realize our visions, goals and dreams are not immune to failure or to falling down. The only thing that makes us different from those who don�t succeed in life is that we get up faster, and never give up! Sometimes, to stay true to the heart of our dreams, we have to give up the forms that we thought that would come in. The power to know the heart of our dreams lies in being able to hear our own hearts, and know when to surrender our agendas (like making it down without falling down) and stay true to our values (like finishing the race).

A Little Story

Wishing to encourage her young son's progress on the piano, a mother took her boy to a Paderewski concert.

After they were seated, the mother spotted a friend in the audience and walked down the aisle to greet her. Seizing the opportunity to explore the wonders of the concert hall, the little boy rose and eventually explored his way through a door marked "NO ADMITTANCE."

When the house lights dimmed and the concert was about to begin, the mother returned to her seat and discovered that the child was missing. Suddenly, the curtains parted and spotlights focused on the impressive Steinway on stage. In horror, the mother saw her little boy sitting at the keyboard, innocently picking out "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star."

At that moment, the great piano master made his entrance, quickly moved to the piano and whispered in the boy's ear, "Don't quit. Keep playing." Then, leaning over, Paderewski reached down with his left hand and began filling in the bass part. Soon his right arm reached around to the other side of the child and he added a running obbligato.

Together, the old master and the young novice transformed a frightening situation into a wonderfully creative, experience. And the audience was mesmerized.

The lesson: Whatever our situation in life and history -- however outrageous, however desperate, whatever dry spell of the spirit, whatever dark night of the soul -- God is whispering deep within our beings, "Don't quit. Keep playing.

You are not alone. Together we will transform the broken patterns into a masterwork of My creative art.

Together, we will mesmerize the world