This article & these images are provided by kind permission of Laurie Huston. "Please feel free to distribute this article. It can be shortened for publication, however, all references to Laurie Huston and http://www.intuitivesoul.com/ must remain intact."

Magic of the Holidays; Shifting Focus in Times of Need

Written by Laurie Huston, an excerpt from her forth coming book, "Your Intuitive Edge: To Dating, Relationships and Life", due early in 2006.

We all need to be able to Shift our focus, especially during times of need and using the memories of the Holidays is one way to do this. Of course this is only beneficial if you remember the Magic of the Holidays, when you knew Santa's Truth, his generous Spirit and believed in the Limitless Possibilities of Life and Love.

This past year has brought disaster and struggle to many we love, a pain felt around the world, beginning with Tsunami and ending with the most recent in Mexico. Ironically, this year has been all about water and air… emotions and thoughts, our intellect and our plans. The shake up has left many of us stagnant for most of 2005 failing to move forward towards our dreams!!! Only recently has the energy lifted and movement has allowed progress forward… but no matter where we are, it is our focus that creates the synergy to realize our dreams.

However, we are often focusing on our problems, concerns and worries, on what we don't want. The issue of focus is extremely important. Every person, every question has a focus. And it is not generally on what we want, but on what we don't want. Why is it that we put so much focus on the things we don't want? Why do we put so much energy on those things that pain us from our past, to our future? We seem to waste all this potential energy on all the things we don't want in our lives!

People can make amazing steps forward, moving into a whole new world and yet still hold on to the problems of our old world. And there are so many examples of this it is painful. People refusing to focus on what is right in front of them; the love and joy that is theirs. Instead focusing on their fears. Why do we do this? A question asked over and over. Is it a mirror we need to understand? Of course, but because we need to heal this darkness within us, our need to play "victim", and our need to be in control of our life where each day we are reminded about how little control we actually have over our lives. We need to instil the magic of dreaming back into our lives, instead of the darkness of our fears.

Our fears overtake us, and they debilitate us from being truly happy and living in the moment. We feel like we have no control in our lives, and we give our power away to so many people and situations. We give it away to our past, to our future, our bosses, our clients, our friends and family, while we play our role as a victim. While we feel we have no control. While we allow our fears to play havoc on our lives. Then we wonder why we are exhausted, have low energy, are depressed and our bodies become unhealthy or not functioning like we would like or when we were younger.

It is the stress we put ourselves under constantly, through our focus on our fears. And what are our fears? They are what we feel we have no control over... money, body image, love, relationships, family, work... all the things that we give our power to and create unnecessary stress in our lives. It is all the missed opportunities, our regrets, our disappointments and all of our stressors.

How many opportunities have you not taken out of fear? What is your motivation, your focus? Can you overcome your fears and choose love from the heart? When we love something so much that confrontation scares us because what if they won't love us enough to accept us getting upset with them? What if by saying the truth, being true to what we want and believe, isn't enough? Who ever created "selfish" as a sin, somehow it has gotten completely misunderstood! That somehow we aren't worth everything wonderful happening. We aren't worth having love, a child, the perfect job, having a salary that meets our needs and wants, or of being happy! Maybe we don't deserve to be happy! Or maybe that is the focus we have chosen for so long, it is unconsciously imprinted in our choices we make everyday, and the outdated thoughts we don't realize we believe in but are still programmed in our subconscious mind and we still react unconsciously to this belief.

We worry, feel guilt, fear people's responses and reactions, why is that? What power do they hold on us? Why do we care? What about guilt, we spend so much time worrying about and feeling guilty about our actions, and worrying about being seen as selfish. Most of us need to be selfish, we need to love ourselves and give permission to "be" who we are, to laugh, to love, to have joy, to live in our hearts, to let go of the guilt, the pain, and the fears! We need to not care about what others think and be okay with who we really are. Do we really have to give away our power because we perceive what someone else is thinking and may be gossiping about us?

What is the solution? Our focus!! If we stopped focusing our energy on what we don't want, it would cease to be amplified in our lives. We are feeding our fears by focusing on them. What we focus on we create more of in our lives. We are creating more disharmonies in our lives by putting focus on the very things that create anxiety and stress.

Can you imagine if you put the same amount of focus on the things you want in your life, rather than on what you don't want? Even if you didn't believe you are what you think, or even if you couldn't conceive that we actually create our own reality. Instead, if you just stopped to consider how much time, effort and pain of your life has gone into focusing on our problems, our fears, people and situations that have brought us pain. Think of the wasted time, energy and pain we have self-inflicted because we worry about these situations. Spend wasted time thinking about the past or worrying about the future. Creating anxiety, sadness, anger and fear in our lives. Having these situations happen over and over. Often there is a solution, an action we need to take… sometimes we delay it worrying about saying the right thing or doing the right things. Often we just focus on us being "right" or the pain of the situation. It can create focus that adds extra stress in our lives.

So… what do we do? What would we create in our lives if we refused to focus on these stressors? OR what if we gave them an allotted time slot, where we consciously chose to put our energy onto our fears or problems, because sometimes it is necessary? Or even better, if we wrote down every thought that creates anxiety and stress in your life, and put them on a piece of paper and created a shoe box or file cabinet, to place them into. Once they are in the box, you can't put your focus on them until your allotted time. And every time we found our focus going where it shouldn't be, we write down our thought, insert it in the box and let our self/ego know the time slot that we will give to focus to our problems. Then we choose one issue or upto a certain number of issues during this allotted time slot and work on them. And we also consciously choose to create in our lives a longer period of time to focus on our dreams, joys, heart and love. Those things we want to create in our life, this could be written in a journal that we review daily or three times a day. If we could use even just a fraction of the time we spend on our fears and choose instead to focus on what we want… what do you think would happen? At the very least, we would have happier lives, because it would bring the magic back in our life. Just like when we were children and we spent time daydreaming, our parents would yell at us to do something more productive, yet when we thought about our dreams, what our life would be like when we got older, we were happy. More importantly, our soul and spirit was happy. It was a time of magic, when anything could happen in our lives and everything was new. We need to recapture this innocence. We need to remember how great this felt and we need to incorporate it in our lives again.

Laurie Huston - http://www.intuitivesoul.com/ - (c) IntuitiveSoul