Here is a contributed story (and cool offer) from Aimee Rousseau, she just announced the release of her newest painting of a chocolate tree. Below is the story or you can click here to go the web site and read it. i love her paintings and recommend them as a healing tool. You can purchase  limited edition signed prints at by clicking here. 

My Friend Eric Albertson wrote a moving story about his mothers recent illness. It touched my heart and I thought it would be valuable to share it with you. This is from his newsletter. This is a professional that applies his heart to his business and his life, and worthy person to put turn your attention to.

Thank you Eric…

In this issue: Love is the answer

by Eric Albertson,  www.succeedinginbusiness.com 

I wanted to give you an update on my mom, and her
recovery from stomach surgery.

No apologies needed if you want to pass on this. So
many of you have written and called, I would feel incomplete if I didn’t give
you an update.

As some of you may recall, my 78-year old mother was
sped to the hospital by neighbors about 30 days ago with acute stomach pains.
The MRI showed what appeared to be several large tumors. I was on a business
trip but came home immediately. The doctor thought Mom probably had advanced
stomach cancer and, given the size of the apparent tumor, was likely to not be
with us long.

She was lucky, she had several large ulcers. After
losing 1/3 of her stomach and a little of this and that, she is on the mend.

I also shared with you in that earlier article, that
she has been an inspiration to me and everyone who knows her. She grew up in
what we would today call poverty, married, and at 56 was left with
next-to-nothing when my father died. Within a few short years she earned and
saved enough from selling residential real estate to get a home to live in
without debt and had enough savings to have a secure, if modest retirement. She
retired at 65. She still saves money on her meager Social Security payment.

She considered getting married again for about 2-3
minutes. Did I say that she is very independent?

Life had not been easy for mom. The stories she tells
of her growing up make you want to cry. None of us should have any doubt about
just how lucky we are to be alive at this time in history. Despite all that, through
it all, she was almost always positive, giving and very loving to everyone in
her world. I am grateful to be her son. I have something to give because she
had something to give.

Mom had never been sick beyond the occasional cold,
had not been in a hospital and has never had a prescription. Stomach surgery
was bad enough. Recovery has been a bear.

This woman at 78, could out-walk most 40-year-olds
and had the stamina of a plow horse. She fully expected that she would bounce
out of bed and be back to normal once released from the hospital.

To her great frustration, life is not so
accommodating. She was released from the hospital two weeks after the surgery.
We were delighted that she could come home to my house and stay with me, my
wife Caroline, our two boys (Alexander 14 and Zachary 8), our 4 lb. scruffy
poodle named Teddy and our six chickens (Gladys, Hanna, Natalie, Henrietta,
ZaZa, and Whoopee — a.k.a. "the girls").

Caroline has been a total saint. I try to make 90
percent of mom’s meals and do all of the dishes. Still, Caroline has her
mother-in-law in her house and our 14-year-old is bunking with our 8-year-old,
all without a complaint. I can only pray that I would be half as well behaved
were the tables turned.

Each day mom gets a little better. The first few days
all she could do was sit up to eat a little and walk down the hallway once or
twice when I pushed her. She hated the slow speed of her recovery. It was made
all the worse because she had nothing to compare it to, given the fact that she
has never really suffered any ailments in her life; lucky her.

At times she slipped into depression because of her
slow recovery. So far, she always pops out of it after a good night’s sleep.
Today she walks up and down the hall every hour and then sits or lies down to
recover from the 60-foot walk.

Gifts come in the most surprising packages. As you
can tell, Mom is not thinking this slow recovery is a gift to anyone. She
thinks she is a burden to me and my family and she wishes she could go home.
Despite all that, her slow recovery is a huge gift. One she is just beginning
to see.

The gift is that we all have had more time with her
than we would normally have gotten in many months; we don’t have to chase her
down to say hi. The kids have volunteered to provide various forms of
entertainment, from magic shows by Zachary (really good show if you are willing
to close your eyes at strategic parts of the act), to micro-sized ice cream
deserts by Chef Alexander. The favorite is just a quick hello.

The real gift is that Mom knows in new ways how much
we love her and vice-versa. Had she not fallen ill, she would never had slowed
down enough for us to have a chance to show her the full scope of our love for
her when it wasn’t convenient, easy or common. Our relationship will never be
the same.

The other gift is that we all know anew how precious
life is in new and important ways. Mom now has more empathy for her aging
friends who didn’t win the genetic lottery that she evidently did, and that has
enabled her to feel so good and healthy for so long. She now has empathy for
the tens of millions who have had to endure seemingly endless experiences with
doctors, hospitals and insurance company fights.

I probably won’t write to you again about mom. It was
a delight that so many of you expressed such amazing love and compassion for
someone you have never met; it was pure inspiration to me about the quality and
character of the people who read our newsletter. I am honored to be in your
company.

All of us have ups and downs. The lesson for me in
all this is that there is a gift and an opportunity in every turn of events. It
is often not what we wanted, but it is what we have. Making the most of it and
finding the hidden gift is the magic of a life well-lived.

Cheers,

Eric Albertson
Portland OR
May 17, 2007

PS: Don’t forget, no matter
what you might buy from us at www.succeedinginbusiness.com,
your purchase is guaranteed with a lifetime 100% money back guarantee.

                                                                                        END

Today on my birthday, I am giving you a birthday present. I
am giving away
15 personal tele-healing
sessions (a $100 value). To the first
15 people who link to my blog, either as a blogroll or just quoting one of my
recent posts (see rules below), and you’ll get a link back when you "win".

The "winners" (eight still left to win!)

• Journey to One Million Dollars Blog
• Savvyology Blog
• Smashed Frog Blog
• Ordinary Mystic Blog
• Absolute Lee Blog
• Mimi Writes Blog
• Remedial Rumination Blog

Here is a description of a typical session…
what you will receive:

I go
to where your body is calling me, usually where there is pain and tension.
I look at it from the "inside” namely dropping my attention internally to
that place of tension (pain fatigue, discomfort) then we investigate it. I ask
it to show itself. Together we then have a dialogue with it. Sometimes it shows
up as a person (your little self, or your relative, or old rival). Sometimes it
shows up as a color or an object, sometimes it is just a sense or emotion.
We ask into what it is, what it wants to do, how it served you, why it is
there, and what needs to happen. While the dialogue is occurring I am finding
other areas of the body where that energy block is also impacting and
follow the tissue into an unwinding pattern until balance is achieved.

Then
something shifts, you will get a tool or a helper to engage with the
block or it simply changes into another configuration or goes away. Then
we fill the space with love and light and bless it, thank it
for showing up to be released, apologies for the part of you that
needed to create it, and love it and yourself.

It
is similar to the observer effect in quantum physics, when you look at
something, and watch it, the something that is being observed says “oh your
watching me, let me show you a few things” and usually moves into the issue or
trauma. By watching it and witnessing were it moves and what it does when it is
observed, the block has the opportunity to change and alter and
reorganizes into a new system or pattern of renewed health and balance. I add
the healing piece with craniosacral therapy and Reiki energies (even long
distance).

This
work seems to “stick” with long term effects. Many of my clients who came for
chronic life-long issues have had them simply dissolve never to be an issue
again.

I won’t do this type of giveaway again, with the word
getting out about my work in Joe
Vitale’s new book, my schedule is booking up. This is a one time birthday
surprise!

Rules:

· Send me the permanent link to your post or the
blogroll once you have posted it

· Your blog must have been in operation for at
least one month and have a minimum of 15 posts.

Happy Birthday to you and me [GRIN].

The truth, what is that? We experience the truth from our
unique perspective of the world. One person’s truth could be another person’s
lie. The truth can also be somewhat malleable, especially if life’s lessons
force us to change our minds. Through life’s challenges and lessons, the angle
of our perception can change and what we thought was the truth might actually
adjust with circumstances.

The diagram to the left is is my version of an illustration
of these variances of “the truth.” Our
lives can be seen as journeys from judgment to truth and back to judgment
again. We judge… that is what we as human beings do. Animals and plants don’t
judge in the same way humans do, they just “are.” We judge in many ways, we
declare, “the sky is blue,” or “your skin is a different color,” and “that a
dog is a dog.” We can also assess and judge the events or relationships we
experience from a positive or negative perspective. Those less positive
judgments might lead us into darker emotions and even create fear, eventually
moving us away from the truth or on the other hand may even move us back to a
new version of the truth we are ready to experience.

The idea is that we constantly move from judgment then back
to what we may experience as the truth in that moment. More importantly that
movement is life in its own cycle of creation and destruction, involution and
evolution, expansion and contraction. When we find “the truth,” that version of
the truth then becomes the platform upon which we view the world. That “truth” leads
us to compare and contrast which in itself is inherently a judgment and the
process circles around upon itself. The
opportunity is to use these moments of life to move through to the next.
Looking through the potential judgment and seeing that there is something more
wonderful on the horizon that you never imagined possible.

Darkness is God as is
the light

The process is similar to moving from the light to the dark,
it is the Yin and Yang process. From this perspective and to further illustrate
the premise of my book (The Big Book of You), it can be said that; darkness is God as is the light.
Through the light we become aware that there is dark. The borders of the dark
become a landmark or a contrast to see and align with the light and reflect to
us what living in the light means. In essence one can’t understand what the
light is unless there is darkness to make the light known. Similarly judgment
in its negative sense is the juxtaposition of the truth and the lessons of
judgment can actually lead us back to the truth, it is a necessary piece of the
puzzle. You know what you want by contrasting it to what you don’t want.

It is judgment and fear that create the chains that bind us.
However, if we have a clearer understanding that judgment, and the fears that
arise out of that judgment, are useful and can assist us in finding healing for
old unresolved issues, we can live a life that has more faith, light and trust.
Eventually we have the opportunity to explore our judgments and fears without
moving too far away from the truth (our truth), each time we explore our
individual perspectives on the world we have the choice to stay closer to the
“boundary of truth” (as illustrated in the diagram) or move further into
judgment. It is creative extremism; it takes a creative exploration into the
extreme reaches of judgment or darkness in order to find a middle ground or
better yet, the extreme reaches of happiness.