By guest author Dr. Sue Morter, who was  a guest on “Getting Past What Holds You Back” (see below)

There is a purpose for every event that occurs in our lives: service. Everything that occurs serves as an opportunity for us to come to know ourselves more fully as an empowered co-creator of our experience. No exceptions.

In the first three months after my mother, Marjorie’s, passing, I found 69 four leaf clovers. This was not because I was particularly gifted in any way, but rather because I simply slowed down enough to see them. And when I did see them, sometimes three or four at a time, a deep and overwhelming sense of joy slipped in between the crushing grief and reminded me that there was more to the moment than the obvious.

So what was different?

I sat down. I stopped from a pace of running a private practice, managing a staff, traveling to all corners of the country and abroad teaching professional seminars, being one of her primary care takers on the weekends and catching a flight back home in order to return to work and begin again on Monday. I stopped with the notion of everything having to get ‘done.’ I just sat down. I ‘had’ to.

In that sitting down, in the despair of what felt like losing such a beautiful and rare relationship, my mind stopped and it felt as though all that remained was my breath. Literally all I could focus on was my breathing. Everything else fell away. And something shifted in me. I felt an actual physical, shift. Something let go, and something else ignited.

A feeling (rather than a philosophy) — that it really was OK to fully accept my state, trust it, take action from that space or take no action at all, and let go of the outcome — was born.

“One of the reasons that people can’t find four leaf clovers is that they are too busy looking at all of the three leaf clovers,”  a favorite quote of mine, offered by Marjorie.

Part of the reason that we have a hard time getting to what we want is that we are so indoctrinated into what we ‘don’t want.’ But by allowing ourselves to sit down enough to listen within, our perfect path can be known. My business/speaking opportunities and revenues doubled in the year following my ‘sitting down.’ And the results I see in private practice are like I have never seen before. [Read more…]