I realized something yesterday morning: that for the past few weeks all I’ve been saying is negative things, which is unlikely for me. Yet, I’m as human as anyone else and sometimes we forget to pay close attention to our thoughts and words.
Yesterday I sat in front of my laptop wondering what to write. I found myself saying “I hate having writers block; why does my foot still hurt; why is everything taking so long to happen?”
Then I realized that I was putting all that negative stuff out there all on my own. At that moment I changed my thinking and choice of words and turned it into: “I’m writing everyday; my foot is healing day by day; and things are happening just as they should”
You see, sometimes we lose sight of our thoughts and words. We forget to keep them all positive, yet when you notice what it is your saying and thinking you can change it. You can change it to positive thoughts and words.
I remind myself today that “everything happens as it should, when it should and how it should.”
And I remind myself that I do the best I can everyday.
More importantly, I remind myself that negative thoughts and words are to replaced with “I can, I will, I am.”
Go easy on yourself and remember that you are in control of your thoughts, your words and your actions.
Wishing you love and light,
~Anne Dennish~
Every so often I take a look at all the people in my life; the ones I trust and that I’m closest to. I take a good look and ask myself if I’m my true self with them or the self they need me to be. I ask myself if they bring out the best in me or I simply bring out the best in them. And I ask myself, am I a matter of convenience to them when they need my attention and love or are they there for me as well?
Those questions have been in my mind lately and I believe sometimes we have to look at the big picture because we find at that moment that we’re not living the life we need for our Highest Good. We’re in control of our happiness and in order to be all that we want to be and have the life we want we also have to see who we allow in it, because they have an impact on it.
I have a close knit group of people in my life and I’m always cautious when someone I don’t know well comes into it, whether it’s through a social circle or worse yet, through social media. I don’t take every friend request that comes my way, especially when I don’t know them or I know could cause a problem with my relationship.
So yesterday my eyes were suddenly open and seeing things differently, and I wondered why. Yet I knew why: the Universe wanted me to see and so that I could think about it and decide what I would do with what I saw and felt.
Communication between two people is key; trust is earned and maintained; and love is felt by actions, not simply words.
So as I rode in silence I heard the following questions:
So many things to think about and I knew in my heart that I had the answers. And let me say that these questions pertain to all of your relationships, whether it’s a friendship, your family, or a relationship between two people.
And I ask to ask myself: Do they look different in my eyes now?
Now what do I do? What do you do if you find yourself in this position?
You take a leap of faith in who you are; you need to believe that you deserve to be treated as you treat them; and you need to communicate your feelings to them with love, kindness and respect.
And if you do these things and the response is not what you had hoped, then you’ll know the answers to your questions were right.
And that you need to turn the page in your book of life and move onto the next chapter…
Wishing you love and light,
~Anne Dennish~
I was talking to a friend the other day about her life and all the changes she wants to make, when suddenly I found myself saying to her: life is like a water bottle, if it’s filled to the top with all the negative people and situations in your life then there’s no room to fill it with the water of the positive.
She loved the analogy and I thought about it further. It’s always a good thing to be able to visualize things in a way that you can see it and understand, and my “water bottle” analogy is just that.
Imagine that we’re given one water bottle in our life, and that bottle represents our life. It’s filled with water, which is all the people and situations in our life. At the time those things may be purposeful in our life and best for our Highest Good, yet as time and life marches on, it changes. Suddenly you’re left wanting more, wanting something different or wanting to let go of certain people and situations.
But you can’t seem to do it, and that is the human nature of being afraid of change or of the unknown. We know what we need to leave behind yet we wonder what will happen if we let go. Will our life be worse or will it be better? Should we leave someone not knowing if someone better is waiting for us?
It’s a leap of faith in your Higher Power and in yourself.
I explained to her that at this time in her life her water bottle is filled with negativity, both with her job and personal life. I told her that unless she started emptying that water bottle of the negative she wouldn’t be able to fill it with anything new or more positive. She couldn’t replace the negative water until she poured it out and replaced it with the positive.
After all, you can’t put more water into a full bottle until you dump some water out.
And that is my analogy on letting go and moving forward.
Sometimes you have to visualize your life in a way that you can actually picture it, and the water bottle is simply one way to look at it.
Is your water bottle filled with all that is for your Highest Good or do you need to dump some of the water out so that the “good” water can be poured in?
It’s the same no matter how you look at it. When you keep the wrong people in your life or are in a situation that is not good for you then there’s no room for what’s in your best interest to come in.
I’ve been taught by my spiritual teachers throughout the years that you have to let go of that which no longer serves your Highest Good in order for something better to come in. Holding on to negativity in any way, shape or form will prevent anything better and more positive to come in.
Dump out your water bottle if your life isn’t the way you want it and fill it with all the good that the Universe has just waiting for you.
After all, I believe that once we rid ourselves of negativity, whether it’s people or situations, the world opens up with more positivity than we can imagine.
I know this for sure…
And it’s a good thing…
I promise.
Wishing you love and light,
~Anne Dennish~
My love and I were talking yesterday and came to one conclusion: men have a simple way of looking at things and handling them, while women? Well, not so much! So I decided to write an article about it which will also be a part of a book I’m writing.
This is where I need your help. I need to know what you want from the man/woman in your relationship or if you’re single, what is it you’re looking for in a partner. It’s similar to “what a girl wants and what a man needs.”
I look forward to seeing all your responses! Thanks for your help! Who knows, your responses could help another couple better understand one another!
(Please know that I am not excluding same sex couples; my intent was more on the differences between men and women in a relationship.)
Wishing you love and light,
~Anne Dennish~
~This is an excerpt from my new book, “My Collective Soul,” which will be released in Octover of 2017~
We live in a time of blaming others for our shortcomings. It’s easier to blame someone else than to take our accountability for our actions. I see it all the time. People living less of the life they want and pointing the finger at everyone else. They blame others; they say it’s someone else’s fault; they don’t know how to stand in their own truth.
And they do that because it’s easier to blame someone else than to look in the mirror and claim our part in what makes us unhappy.
No one wants to look in the mirror. It’s the mirror of our face, our shortcomings, our faults, our weaknesses, yet what most people don’t understand is that it’s also the mirror of our strength, of our successes, of our truth.
Most people fear the mirror because they don’t always like what they see, yet what you see is what you can change, if you choose to. What we see is our soul and our heart and if you can’t come to terms to accept what you see, then you, my friends, have the right to change it.
You were gifted the ability to change in yourself and your life what you don’t like. If you look in the mirror and see a weakness then go out and strengthen it. If you look in the mirror and see your faults then change it and see your strengths. If you look in the mirror and see and ugly person then change it to make yourself beautiful, and I don’t mean in looks.
Our hearts dictate our beauty. Our hearts allow the outside world to see who we are. Our hearts are the keepers of our secrets, and they also hold the keeper of our truth.
Let it out.
Look in the mirror and yourself and see your beauty. See your strengths, see your accomplishments, see all that you endured, see your illness, see your broken marriage or relationship, see the pain and the hurt.
See it all…
And then look again.
Look at YOU.
Stare at yourself for as long as you need to.
And within a few minutes your face will look different; your demeanor will change; your soul and heart will start to break through the negative sight of what you see and show you the light.
Let it.
Let go.
And know that all that stuff that happened to you is simply that: stuff. Let it go. And accept that anything that happenened to you was meant to. It was a lesson from your Higher Power to stop and take a look at your life; to take a look at yourself.
We all have a hand in our life. We love to blame everyone else, yet it takes two people to argue; two to fight; two to find love and two to end it. It takes two people to have an affair and two people to join together in marriage.
Stop blaming and take a step back.
Look in that mirror, point the finger at yourself and say: “It’s your own fault.”
And then forgive yourself for not being perfect, because you’re not supposed to be. You’re supposed to be human. You’re supposed to make mistakes, and you’re supposed to learn from them.
You’re supposed to feel pain so that you can feel happiness.
You’re supposed to give freedom for your heart to break so that you can learn how to heal it.
You’re supposed to fail at some things so that you can succeed at what you were meant to.
You’re supposed to cry so that you can smile.
You’re supposed to end a relationship so that you can begin another one.
You’re supposed to be human.
You see, you are amazing. You are an incredible individual and no one else is like you. We all have faults and that’s okay because the right friend or partner will love you for them. We all fall and we all can get up and we can get up stronger.
We all can make a choice; we all can take a chance; we all can fall deep down to the bottom.
And you can choose to get up.
So pick yourself up and get it right. Straighten up and straighten up. You can do it because I have. I’ve fallen so deep throughout my life that I couldn’t see the sun. I’ve been so weak that I lost sight of what strength felt like. I felt so alone that I forgot what love was.
And then I looked in the mirror.
I looked long and hard, and at first I didn’t like what I saw.
But I kept looking.
And within a few minutes I saw a girl who was simply broken from all that life had handed her. I looked her hard straight in her eyes and saw something that she didn’t: her will.
I wanted to be strong, I wanted to be better, I wanted a different life.
I kept looking at this girl who had become a stranger to me and felt compassion for her, and in that moment I realized I was feeling compassion for myself.
So I forgave myself for everything.
I knew it was my fault because I allowed it all to happen.
But as I looked at her in the mirror I let it gave, told her I loved her, and changed my life in that moment, just like that.
She changed.
She became strong.
She believed in herself.
She loved herself.
And no matter what was her fault, she forgave it all.
And she forgave all the people that were a part of it.
And she cried tears of sadness as she let go and tears of happiness as she stood in her truth.
And all was right with her world.
And never again would she say “it’s your own fault” because she would never allow it to be.
Wishing you love and light,
~Anne Dennish~
I’ve had many people tell me how strong I am and I always wondered why they thought that. After all, I had bad days, sad days, and days of crying for no reason and every reason. Was this being strong? I didn’t think so until a few years ago when I changed my perspective on tears and what they meant.
Tears are our soul’s way of releasing the pain, the pleasure and the emotion built up within us. Tears cleanse our soul of those feelings so that we can again move on with our life. Tears are simply a moment in time that was necessary for our Highest Good.
My cousin is a strong woman, the one I call “the gypsy.” I’ve seen her cry and heard her ask me how people could think she was so strong? Well, a few years ago I would have given her a different answer, but on that day I told her she was strong, especially since she knew that there were moments when she knew she had to cry, and she was strong enough to allow herself to cry.
I believe that your strength is in knowing yourself well enough to know that you have to shed a tear or two, or a thousand. Your strength is allowing yourself the time it takes to release your emotions and knowing that you need to do this for yourself.
And your strength is picking yourself up, wiping the tears from your face, and moving forward. Your strength is knowing that you’ve released all that you needed to for that moment and knew it was time to smile again.
That is strength.
Strength is knowing who you are, accepting who you are, and willing to be who you are despite the opinions of anyone else.
Strength is knowing when you need a day to cry, to feel emotions, to miss someone, to want someone, to lose someone. Your strength is within you and the tears you release are merely the soul’s way of helping you through your pain and sadness.
Cry if you need to and cry if you want to… after all, “it won’t be like this forever, just for today!”
And after you’re done, smile, smile, smile!
Wishing you love and light,
~Anne Dennish~
There are times in my life that I find myself standing at the crossroad of which path to choose. It happens just as life is going along calmly, and it happens to change my path, offer me a new opportunity or simply to shake things up. It happens because something in my life needs to change, and while the change may be difficult, it’s necessary to move forward, take the next step, and live a better life.
I’m right at that point now. My career as a writer is taking me in directions I never thought possible and with these changes are decisions to be made in my life. I’m conscious of my life and the life that surrounds me. I pay attention to the signs I’m given by the Universe and I feel the emotions necessary to feel when faced with differences of opinions in my private life.
There are moments when the page we were once on together in a relationship change…one person stays on the same page while the other turns it. It doesn’t mean the end of the relationship but it brings change and sometimes the change isn’t what we had wanted but becomes a change of what was needed.
“Do I take the road known or the one less travelled and follow my heart?”
I never take the road known because it offers me nothing more than the same thing over and over. I will always follow my heart and take the road less travelled because I trust my Higher Power, the Universe, and more importantly, I trust my intuition.
So I sit here now, thinking about the life I’m living in now and wondering what changes need to happen. What decisions need to be made? What do I need to do to move forward? How do my loved ones and I get back on the same page?
Life is changing for me and some of those changes can be a bit scary, especially when I don’t know how they’ll change my life, yet I have to trust my Higher Power and listen to my inner voice…my intuition. I need to pay attention to the life and people that surround me. I need to focus on myself first and believe that everything else will fall into place.
After all, I believe that “everything happens as it should, when it should and how it should.”
I don’t have all the answers to the questions, or even know what changes need to be made right now, but I do know which path to take and today is the first day of this new journey.
And I believe that it will be an amazing adventure.
Wishing you love and light,
~Anne Dennish~
Photo by EvnFlo Photography – 2017
I’ve been knee deep in finishing up my next book, “My Collective Soul, Things I Know Without Knowing Why.” It’s been long days and nights of writing for 14 hours followed by a day of recuperating from it all. It’s been nights of “take out” for dinner and spending time with Rob and the kids during one of my hourly five minute breaks.
And I love every minute of it.
I love the writing for hours and hours, the pushing myself late into the night even though I’m exhausted, and I love the pressure of having a deadline.
I love getting up in the wee hours of the morning, putting on my headset and sitting down at the laptop with my coffee to begin the process all over again.
This kind of exhaustion is exciting because I’m doing what I love and what I know I’m meant to do: write!
I know that life has been a bit different in our house. The normal tasks of laundry and cleaning are on the back burner at the moment; the time of relaxing and watching television with Rob are limited; and my kids have become used to saying good-bye in the morning to me while I’m sitting with my headset on and writing and they’re used to coming home and seeing me the same way.
And they’re all okay with this. They love and support me through this time right now and I hope they know how much that means to me. I wouldn’t be able to do any of this without their understanding and support.
I couldn’t do any of this without the support of my closest friends and Rob’s family, who have become my family. They keep me going when I’m exhausted and are there to answer the phone if I need to talk to them. Those phone calls help to get me back in balance and are the encouragement I need at the moment I need it.
The new book is just about ready to go to my publisher, Morissa Schwartz, owner of GenZ Publishing. She believed in me and was willing to take me on as one of her authors, 
and for that I’m grateful.
And in the middle of all this writing are meetings and phone calls from my marketing team, Marketing Ventures. Jill, Jennifer and Lora are amazing and are making dreams come true for me. They’ve gifted me with opportunities I never thought possible and they’re still working at gifting me with more! I’m grateful to them for all their hard work at promoting me. It’s growing into more than a business agreement between us; it’s growing into a friendship. It’s a beautiful thing.
And that’s what my life has been like lately. It’s filled with everything I love, and while mentally exhausted, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
My dreams are coming true day by day and I’m glad that I never gave up on them. There were times things weren’t working the way I wanted, yet I knew everything would work out when it was meant to.
Sometimes our best dreams don’t go the way we want; they turn into “better” dreams that we never could have imagined.
You can’t give up.
You have to remember that “everything happens as it should, when it should, and how it should.”
I’m living proof that it does.
Wishing you love and light,
~Anne Dennish~
Just a “typical” marketing business meeting with Jill and Jennifer!
The internet is filled with a mix of emotions over last nights’ tragedy in England, from anger and hatred to sadness. The world can feel so safe until something rocks our world and fills us with fear.
It seems that when tragedy strikes there are those that will say to “hug your children more, say I love you to those you love and be grateful for each day you are gifted,” yet I say we should be that way everyday. It shouldn’t take a tragedy to open our eyes to the life we are blessed to have and to be grateful for our loved ones.
So today let us all join together in compassion and kindess, love and understanding for the world. Let’s pray for England, for an end to violence in the world, and more importantly, let us pray for each other.
Wishing you love and light
and peace…
~Anne Dennish~
Photo by Anne Dennish – copyright 2017
Anne Dennish - Writer/Author 