There is a denial within all of us; the mindset that if we just don’t think about something that it will go away. Do any of these statements sound familiar?

“If I don’t think about how unhappy I am then I won’t be”

“If I avoid confrontation it will go away..”

“If I just ignore it then I don’t have to deal with it.”

These avoidance techniques are often short lived. If life has taught me anything that it is:

If you don’t deal with your issues, they will come back again and again until you do.

You might be able to suppress it temporary, but it will be back; a repeating pattern that will haunt you until you find the courage to deal with it head on.

What are you avoiding in your life? What are you not dealing with?

It might be something as simple as not exercising or taking measures to be in better health, or it can be as complex as not liking the person you are…But whatever it is it will not go away just because you chose not to think or do anything about it or do anything about it.

We all have issues in our life that we avoid. However, by avoiding it instead of dealing with it we start to collect emotional clutter.

Emotional clutter gradually starts to weigh us down, preventing us from moving forward with our lives. Think of yourself moving through mud, with each step its harder to lift your feet…that is what emotional clutter does to us, it slows us down.

Ask yourself if issues that you avoiding and emotional clutter holding you back.

There is no time like the present to confront what you have been avoiding and dealing with it and then letting it go. If you are avoiding making some needed changes in your life, then get the help that you need to create the life that you want.

Consider the question: “Don’t you deserve to have the best life that you possible can?” Use the visual of a life that you always wanted as your motivation. Whether you believe it or not you have the power to change your life, you have the strength inside of you to confront the issues that are weighing you down and move forward towards a better you and a better life.

“The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.”

~ John Ruskin

Several times my daughter had telephoned to say, “Mother, you

must come and see the daffodils before they are over”. I wanted to go, but it was a
two-hour drive from Laguna to Lake Arrowhead.
Going
and coming took most of a day - and I honestly did not have a free day
until the following week.

“I will come next Tuesday,” I promised, a little
reluctantly, on her third call.

Next Tuesday dawned cold and rainy. Still, I had promised, and so I
drove the length of Route 91, continued on I-215, and finally turned onto
Route 18 and began to drive up the mountain highway. The
tops of the mountains were sheathed in clouds, and I had gone only a few
miles when the road was completely covered with a wet, gray blanket of fog. I slowed to a crawl, my heart pounding. The road becomes narrow and winding
toward the top of the mountain.

As I executed the hazardous turns at a snail’s pace, I was
praying to reach the turnoff at Blue Jay that would signify I had arrived. When I finally walked into Carolyn’s house and
hugged and greeted my grandchildren I said, “Forget the daffodils, Carolyn! The road is invisible in the clouds and fog, and there
is nothing in the world except you and these darling children that I want
to see bad enough to drive another inch!”

My daughter smiled calmly, “We drive in this all the time,
Mother”.

“Well, you won’t get me back on the road until it
clears - and then I’m heading for home!” I assured her.

“I was hoping you’d take me over to the garage to pick
up my car. The mechanic just
called, and they’ve finished repairing the engine”, she
answered.

“How far will we have to drive?” I asked cautiously.

“Just a few blocks,” Carolyn said cheerfully.

So we buckled up the children and went
out to my car.

“I’ll drive,” Carolyn offered. “I’m used to
this.” We got into the
car, and she began driving.

In a few minutes, I was aware that we were back on the Rim-of-the-World
Road heading over the top of the mountain. “Where are we
going?” I exclaimed,
distressed to be back on the mountain road in the fog. “This isn’t the way to
the garage!”

“We’re going to my garage the long way,” Carolyn
smiled“, by way of the daffodils.”

“Carolyn,” I said sternly, trying to sound as if I was
still the mother and in charge of the situation, “please turn
around. There is nothing in the
world that I want to see enough to drive on this road in this
weather.”

“It’s all right, Mother,” She replied with a
knowing grin. “I know what I’m
doing. I promise, you will never forgive yourself if you miss this
experience.”

And so my sweet, darling daughter who had
never given me a minute of difficulty in her whole life was suddenly in
charge - and she was kidnapping me!
I couldn’t believe it. Like it or
not, I was on the way to see some ridiculous daffodils - driving through
the thick, gray silence of the mist-wrapped mountaintop at what I thought
was risk to life and limb.

I muttered all the way.
After about twenty minutes we turned onto a small gravel road that
branched down into an oak-filled hollow on the side of the mountain. The fog had lifted a little, but the sky was lowering,
gray and heavy with clouds.

We parked in a small parking lot adjoining a little stone church. From our vantage point at the top of the mountain we
could see beyond us, in the mist, the crests of the San Bernardino range like the
dark, humped backs of a herd of elephants. Far
below us the fog-shrouded valleys, hills, and flatlands stretched away to
the desert.

On the far side of the church, I saw a pine-needle-covered path,
with towering evergreens and manzanita bushes and
an inconspicuous, lettered sign “Daffodil Garden”.

We each took a child’s hand, and I followed Carolyn down the
path as it wound through the trees.
The mountain sloped away from the side of the path in irregular
dips, folds, and valleys, like a deeply creased skirt.

Live oaks, mountain laurel, shrubs, and bushes clustered in the
folds, and in the gray, drizzling air, the green foliage looked dark and
monochromatic. I shivered. Then we turned a corner of the path, and I looked up
and gasped. Before me lay the most glorious sight,
unexpectedly and completely splendid. It looked as
though someone had taken a great vat of gold and poured it down over the
mountain peak and slopes where it had run into every crevice and over every
rise. Even in the mist-filled
air, the mountainside was radiant, clothed in massive drifts and waterfalls
of daffodils. The flowers were
planted in majestic, swirling patterns, great ribbons and swaths of
deep orange, white, lemon yellow, salmon pink, saffron, and butter yellow.

Each different-colored
variety (I learned later that there were more than thirty-five varieties of
daffodils in the vast display) was planted as a group so that it swirled
and flowed like its own river with its own unique hue.

In the center of this incredible and dazzling display of gold, a
great cascade of purple grape hyacinth flowed down like a waterfall of
blossoms framed in its own rock-lined basin, weaving through the brilliant
daffodils. A charming path wound throughout the
garden. There were several
resting stations, paved with stone and furnished with Victorian wooden
benches and great tubs of coral and carmine tulips. As though this were not magnificence
enough, Mother Nature had to add her own grace note - above the daffodils,
a bevy of western bluebirds flitted and darted, flashing their
brilliance. These charming
little birds are the color of sapphires with breasts of magenta red. As they dance in the air, their
colors are truly like jewels above the blowing, glowing daffodils. The effect was spectacular.

It did not matter that the sun was not shining. The brilliance of the daffodils was
like the glow of the brightest sunlit day. Words,
wonderful as they are, simply cannot describe the incredible beauty of that
flower-bedecked mountain top.

Five acres of flowers! (This too I
discovered later when some of my questions were answered.)
“But who has done this?” I
asked Carolyn. I was overflowing with gratitude
that she brought me - even against my will. This
was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

“Who?” I
asked again, almost speechless with wonder, “And how, and why, and
when?”

“It’s just one woman,” Carolyn answered. “She lives on the property. That’s her home.” Carolyn pointed to a well-kept
A-frame house that looked small and modest in the midst of all that glory.

We walked up to the house, my mind buzzing with questions. On the patio we saw a
poster. “Answers to the
Questions I Know You Are Asking” was the headline.

The first answer was a simple one. “50,000
bulbs,” it read.

The second answer was, “One at a time, by one woman, two
hands, two feet, and very little brain.”

The third answer was, “Began in 1958”.

There it was. The Daffodil Principle.

For me that moment was a life-changing experience. I thought of this woman whom I had
never met, who, more than thirty-five years before, had begun - one bulb at
a time - to bring her vision of beauty and joy to an obscure mountain
top. One bulb
at a time.

There was no other way to do it. One bulb at a
time. No
shortcuts - simply loving the slow process of planting. Loving the work as it unfolded.

Loving an achievement that grew so slowly and that bloomed for only
three weeks of each year.
Still, just planting one bulb at a time, year after year, had
changed the world.

This unknown woman had forever changed the world in which she
lived. She had created
something of ineffable magnificence, beauty, and inspiration.

The principle her daffodil garden taught is one of the greatest
principle of celebration: learning to move toward our goals and desires one step at a time - often just one baby-step at a time
- learning to love the doing, learning to use the accumulation of time.

When we multiply tiny pieces time with small increments of daily
effort, we too will find we can accomplish magnificent things. We can change the world.

“Carolyn,” I
said that morning on the top of the mountain as we left the haven of
daffodils, our minds and hearts still bathed and bemused by the splendors
we had seen, “it’s as though that remarkable woman has
needle-pointed the earth! Decorated it.
Just think of it, she planted every single bulb for more than thirty
years. One
bulb at a time! And that’s the only way this garden could be
created. Every individual bulb
had to be planted. There was no way of short-circuiting
that process. Five
acres of blooms. That
magnificent cascade of hyacinth! All, all, just one bulb at a
time.”

The thought of it filled my mind. I was suddenly overwhelmed with the
implications of what I had seen.
“It makes me sad in a way,” I admitted to Carolyn. “What might I have
accomplished if I had thought of a wonderful goal thirty-five years ago and
had worked away at it ‘one bulb at a time’ through all those
years. Just think what I might
have been able to achieve!”

My wise daughter put the car into gear and summed up the message of
the day in her direct way.
“Start tomorrow,” she said with the same knowing smile
she had worn for most of the morning.
Oh, profound wisdom!

It is pointless to think of the lost hours of yesterdays. The way to make learning a lesson a
celebration instead of a cause for regret is to only ask,

“How can I put this to use tomorrow?”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jaroldeen Asplund Edwards has a
bachelor’s degree in English literature from Brigham Young University. She has served in all the auxiliaries of her
church and served a mission with her husband in Johannasburg, South Africa, directing institutes and seminaries and teaching
in these programs. She is a
writer and speaker and has ten published books. She received the Distinguished
Emeritus Alumni Award. She is married to Weston Eyring Edwards, and they are the parents of twelve
children. The story of “The Daffodil
Principle” originally appeared nearly ten years ago in Jaroldeen Edwards’ book Celebration! Ten Principles of More Joyous Living, Deseret Books, Salt Lake City in 1995. It is
now available for the first time as an illustrated gift book, with artwork
by Anne Marie Oborn.

Information from http://7degrees.wordpress.com/2006/08/10/the-daffodil-principle/

My sincere thanks to Anna Campbell, who
sent me this beautiful story!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some questions to
ask yourself:

How can you apply
the Daffodil Principle to your life?

What in your life,
do you want to “start tomorrow”?

I hope that you
take the insightful lessons of the Daffodil Principle, step-by-step,
one-by-one, you can change your life…or even the world!

Empowering Regards,

Tonya Ramsey

(more…)

Accomplishing goals can be a daunting task; especially, when one has to overcome obstacles in order to reach the desired result. It is easy to identify external obstacles that block our goals. Yet, those are not the only obstacles that stand in the way. Often times we have internal obstacles that prevent us from following through on our goals.

Think about your goals and the course of action that you have taken to move towards them. Are you where you want to be? Have you accomplished your goals despite obstacles? If not, take a moment and think about what has held you back from your success. Are you justifying the lack of progress towards your goals on something external? What most people forget to consider is internal obstacles that prevent them from moving forward, often times it is a subtle, almost unknown to the conscious mind.

Not truly feeling you are worth your goals, or worth the time it takes to put into accomplishing your goals, often lies at the heart of unconscious self-sabotage. If you do not feel that you are worth your goals then all efforts are futile. Check in with yourself by doing a self-evaluations to see if you are the one that is indeed holding back your own progress. It can manifest itself as in many ways.

Procrastination: putting off action steps or things that need to be done, or tasks that you find unpleasant. Procrastination also puts undue stress and can lead to feelings of being overwhelmed on a person because eventually what is put off needs to be done, by that time tasks have piled up.

Indecision: not having a decisive action plan or going back and forth about your course of action. Indecision can lead to self-doubt in your abilities.

Acting as “Lone Ranger” or martyr: not asking for help when you need it, not utilizing resources that are available to you, not seeking out education that you need to.

Not saying “no” when you need to over commits yourself and does not leave time for you to work on your goals, it is important for you to put you and your goals first before considering other requests.

Not saying “yes” to opportunities that will lead you to your goals. Lack of self-confidence or self-esteem could lead you to pass on opportunities that would benefit you.

Tolerating conditions that are not conducive to your goals instead of changing them

Not being truthful with yourself or others

Overcoming self-sabotage can be difficult, that is why it is best to start with the source. Why are you procrastinating? Why do you not say “yes” or “no” at the times you need to? What are you not being honest about? When you find out the reason behind the behavior, you are on the way to overcoming your internal obstacles and will be able to get to working on your goals.

© Copyright 2007 Tonya Ramsey