Five Beautiful Truths About Women

I've been told I'm a survivor but I'm not living to survive, I'm living to thrive. Sure, I've had to deal with some tremendous obstacles in my life, like losing my beautiful son to cancer, but I also know that I, like you, are instilled with five beautiful truths to help me through this journey.

I choose to celebrate each day with thankfulness in my heart and use my passion and love for nature and music to lift up my life. Are you a passionate person? How does your present level of passion serve you, motivate you and help others? Are you merely surviving or are you thriving?

As women, I believe most of us thrive as we live through various stages of our lives. We are competent and capable of doing many things and we constantly grow and better our inner selves.

We women are made up of five beautiful truths that we may need to be reminded of.

Women with passion bring strong emotions that motivate them to move beyond their comfort zone and to achieve the potential that resides within them. How powerful this is. You women with passion can become all that you are meant to be. Nothing can stop you. And you can achieve your potential regardless of your circumstances. From this perspective, passion is long lived and can grow as you discover how much potential you really have.

When you think of your passion think of perseverance. Passion compels you to act. So test your own capabilities. Be persistent and disciplined. Challenge yourself to confront any obstacle.

Drive yourself and explore new possibilities. You may fail but if you're not failing then you're not taking enough risk. There is no progression without failure.

Her husband was a prominent Doctor who loved being married to her for over 50 years. After he died, she was left all alone with only her memories to keep her company. A mutual friend suggested that she contact me about learning how to play the piano; this was something she always wanted to do and her spacious living room held a lovely grand piano.

At age 89 Phyllis began piano lessons and was a very dedicated student. Oh, how I admired her discipline and resiliency! As long as we're breathing, we will be challenged, but what is important is how we respond to changes and tough situations.

When you reflect upon the changes and obstacles in your own lives you can see how through your inner strength, flexibility and resiliency you were able to turn obstacles and changes into opportunities.

Focusing on your strengths and not on your weaknesses is the path to being resilient. Making every action count is the secret of a well lived life.

As women, we feel connected to someone who supports us in our mission. We feel safe with someone who feels our pain. We feel trusting of someone who tells us the truth. Each of these concepts is " nurturing in action."

There are many facets to nurturing: bonding, sharing, empathizing and supporting to mention a few. While some women spend the better part of their lives raising children, siblings and special pets, other forms of nurturing have their place rating equally in the scale of importance.

• Caring for an elderly parent
• Assistance with the handicapped both physical and emotional
• Raising a younger sibling
• Caring for drug related and sick babies
• Helping out in a shelter for the homeless

According to www.thefreedictionary.com - nur•ture

1. to feed and protect or support and encourage.2. to bring up; train; educate.n.3. upbringing; training; education.4. development: the nurture of young artists.5. something that nourishes; food.

As women, we have all been aware of the importance of nurturing others. Most of us are quite good at that. But so few of us make the time to nurture ourselves. In fact until we make it a priority to engage in self-nurturing activities we fall short when it comes to nurturing others.

My late best friend, Julie, nurtured me every single day of our precious friendship. Through her, I learned to love myself. She never failed to tell me what a beautiful person I am or what a good job I'm doing. She never once criticised me. She was the one to lift me up when I needed it the most. Julie found good in everyone. Just days before cancer took her beautiful life she asked me for one last favor.

I had been her vocal coach and she loved singing more than anything in the world. She wanted to record a CD singing her favorite songs. This was her final gift to her children and grandchildren. I took her into a recording studio and set up a session for her. Weak, very sick but very determined, we finished the complete recording session and walked out with copies of her CD.

How do I spell nurture? Julie.

" A woman that knows her worth doesn't measure herself against another woman but stands strong, calm and self confident." ~ Unknown

Women have an inner-wisdom called intuition or insight. This inner-wisdom is beyond our rational and logical thinking and represents the real you. It comes from living a life of integrity, compassion and empathy. And it's the real you. It's an expanded level of eternal strength, clarity and direction.

A beautiful woman is both kind and gracious. She contributes to others through her talents and capabilities.

She respects herself and stands up for her principles. She stays true to her word. She is dependable and loyal.

The final beautiful truth is this. Women live in a spirit of forgiveness. This is sometimes hard to do but it's a powerful way to reduce negative emotions. It's also a way to increase happiness.

No one is perfect and we all make mistakes throughout life. Children are very good at forgiving and we can learn a valuable lesson from them.

Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky calls forgiveness “a shift in thinking” toward someone who has wronged you, “such that your desire to harm that person has decreased and your desire to do him good (or to benefit your relationship) has increased.”

Forgiveness, at a minimum, is a decision to let go of the desire for revenge and ill-will toward the person who wronged you. It may also include feelings of goodwill toward the other person. Forgiveness is also a natural resolution of the grief process, which is the necessary acknowledgment of pain and loss.

• Apologizing does not always mean that you are wrong and the other person is right. It just means that you value your relationship more than your ego.

  - Unknown
  

• Always forgive your enemies - Nothing annoys them so much.

  - Pamela Daranjo
  

• When you forgive, you in no way change the past - but you sure do change the future.

  - Bernard Meltzer

The Women in America report describes various demographic characteristics and trends in women’s marriage, living arrangements, childbearing, and poverty. The Census Bureau is the primary source of the data (census.gov).

As the report indicates in regard to people, families and income:

• Women are marrying later and have fewer children than in the past. A greater proportion of both women and men have never married, and women are giving birth to their first child at older ages.
• Although more adult women live in married-couple families than in any other living arrangement, an ever-growing number of women are raising children without a spouse.
• More women are remaining childless, although eight out of ten adult women have children.
• As the baby boom generation ages, a growing share of women – and men – are older. Because women live longer, women continue to outnumber men at older ages.
• Women are more likely to live in poverty than are adult men. Single-mother families face particularly high poverty rates, often because of the lower wages earned by women in these families.

An overview of this section is available in the Women in America fact sheet (pdf).

The list of beautiful truths and great qualities in women go on and on. Of course not all women have good qualities although I like to think they do. If given the chance, those decent traits hidden somewhere within, may appear and even overwhelm us.

Women regard being beautiful as the result of qualities and circumstance: being loved, being engaged in activities that one wants to do, having a close relationship, being happy, being kind, having confidence, exuding dignity and humor. Women, who are like this, look beautiful. They are beautiful.

" The finest qualities I have learned in life came from the women in my life." ~ Bill Holland

Thank you for being here. I look forward to your comments.

vocalcoach

http://www.pbs.org/

www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/cwg/data-on-women