Three Wise Women

3 Characteristics for a successful life are:

• Having a vision of how we want to live our life,
  

  Joy Goddess

• finding what really fulfills us and ignites our passion,
• expanding our skills and capacities

Three very special women have helped me to find my vision and passion and to live it. They continue to help me expand my skills and capacity and to navigate the road blocks I find along the way. I count them as my very best friends, even though I have never met them. That is not to ignore the friends, family and other resources that have also helped greatly, but these three are outstanding companions in my life.

Without my three wise women, Sanaya Roman, Janet Attwood and Sasha Xarrian, I would not be sitting here writing these words to you today. I wouldn’t have written 2 children’s books, made videos or created this and other websites. I wouldn’t have left a demanding job, with just a deep belief that there had to be a better way to live. I wouldn’t have attended workshops and researched and co written Life Manual, which became my bible for finding my way through the old beliefs and attitudes that blocked my progress to having and living my dreams.

Important as it is to heal the past, to improve our relationships, success and happiness in the present, we also need to have a very clear picture of how we want our future to be. We need to find and choose a future that works for us, for our own unique skills and essence. As the old song says;

“You’ve got to have a dream, if you don’t have a dream,

how you gonna have a dream come true.”

If you have read my life story on this site, you will know that working with Psychology of Vision and writing Life Manual was my route to change and heal my life and its dilemmas. In moving my life forward, these three wise women have been my constant guide, inspiration and motivation.

Sanaya Roman – Living with Joy

I am surprised to discover Sanaya has been in my life for nearly 20 years now.   She came to me through her book ‘Living with Joy‘.  Reading it now, I am surprised at how little of her writing I really understood when I first came across it. Nowadays it all completely makes sense. In the years between I have found her guide to living in joy really works, has taken me to places I only had an inkling of in earlier years.

Initially, it did challenge me, for although   I have deep beliefs in our spiritual nature, I am a pragmatic soul, and guides … Sanaya’s is called Orin … do not figure in my beliefs! Whether Orin is a guide or a part of Sanaya’s being, makes no difference to the book, and I only mention it here so that those of you who are equally challenged by spiritual concepts, can get past the judgements to embrace the text.

In my post Middle Aged Undergraduate years, I knew that I wanted to write a book on Personal Development. It seemed crazy, and I didn’t see how it was possible, but personal development was my passion, and I felt, even then, that I had something to say about it. However, with a small child at home, going off to earn some money seemed the most important task right then.

I never lost that inner inkling that we can make our living from doing what we love. When I lost sight of living in joy, I would return to the book, and it always lifted both my spirits and my vision. It can be so important when we feel our dreams are crazy (and most of the world would tell us they are), to find someone who not only holds that view, but has proved it through their own practical experience.

Sanaya tells us in this book that we can live joyfully, love ourselves and feel great self esteem and self confidence. Long before The Secret became popular in the personal development world, Sanaya/Orin wrote of Gratitude and the Law of Increase. More importantly, she speaks to the uniqueness in each of us, and the way that our skills, talents and experience are perfect for what we want to do, and in that process we make our best contribution to the world.

Janet and Chris Attwood

The final chapter of Sanaya’s Living with Joy, is ‘Recognizing Your Life Purpose – What Are You Here To Do?’. That is where Janet and Chris Attwood came into my life 5 years ago, I had achieved my dream by writing Life Manual, and it seemed that my life’s purpose had been fulfilled. I didn’t have a clue about where to go next, and in my darker “Life is What Happens …” time, I felt very confused about the future.I began to take some new routes, but they were not true for me, didn’t bring me joy and fulfillment. Thank goodness, a friend that I shared my dissatisfaction with, recommended that I take Janet Attwood’s Passion Test.

The Passion Test is stunning. It makes it possible and simple for everyone to discover their unique passions and dreams. Even if we can’t see a way forward, getting clear about our passions, and taking the first steps that we can see, begins our journey to living our most purposeful life. Once we know that dream, or in the case of The Passion Test, five dreams, we can begin our journey towards the goals that are our unique passions, and then we discover our true life purpose.

Janet and Chris Attwood now train people to help others find their passion, and offer a great deal of insights and support on their HealthyWealthyn’Wise website. You can even start the process of finding your passions by taking the online Passion Test.

From women living in homeless shelters to the wildly successful Jack Canfield of Chicken Soup fame, Janet has helped so many people to clarify their inner wishes and goals. Reviewing and resetting our passions from time to time is also very important, as we move forward discovering more about our unique skills and dreams. Jack Canfield found he wasn’t taking any actions on his 5th most important goal, and rushed off to do so immediately, knowing that we need to act on our wishes to bring them into being.

The power of having a vision for your life, starts well before goal setting and time management. Knowing what you truly want, is like being attached to piece of elastic that unerringly pulls your life forward. This is so much more powerful than starting at the ground zero of now, and trying to plan a route. Our wildest dreams and wishes need creative input all the way through the process. Often we can only see the next few steps ahead of us. We need to be alive to possibilities and opportunities, to follow our inspirations and intuitions, for achieving an extraordinary self-fulfilled life is a creative process.

Sasha Xarrian

Wanting to expand the limits of my horizons, to discover and experience all the powers that are available to us,  is where Sasha Xarrian came into my life. Having healed the past and started the journey to my dreams and wishes, I wanted to know just how far we can go.

The Secret has opened up to many of us, the possibilities of our creative or manifesting powers. It was no surprise that many of the proponents then back tracked, and there have been many versions of what is missing from The Secret to make it work. Sasha has been making her own experiment in creating  or manifesting the things she wants to have in her life for many years.

I rarely read a book straight through, but couldn’t put down her story, Outrageous Mastery. Raised as a Mormon, Sasha tells how she believed that she could have anything she wanted, and so she did. That was what her faith taught her, but it came along with the belief that she could only have it because she was aMormon, a special person, one of God’s chosen ones. When she left the Mormon Faith, she found that her belief system in her own powers collapsed at the same time. Her struggle and her search for the truth, and her wish to help others make it,  has led to her programme Outrageous Mastery. From the early exercises, I learned so much more about myself. I not only understood more deeply, what is important to me, but gained more faith in my ability to manifest. Finding the fears and the lack of faith that block my path, is to me very important. Like Sasha, if we have capacity for creating here on earth, then I want to know and develop those powers too.

Sasha’s deep honesty about her struggles and challenges is very refreshing, as most ‘gurus’ of personal development rarely speak of their darker moments. I find that whenever I am facing fear or discouragement, Sasha is there, with exercises that help me to work through what is coming up for healing for me.

For any one who has found their marriage crashing around them and struggled with raising children alone (in Sasha’s story, seven) her story is very honestly written, the struggles and the triumphs.  Women who have experienced the deep pain, guilt  and confusion that leaving a religious path brings in its wake will resonate strongly with Sasha. It means rewriting our beliefs map all over again, and the levels of guilt that are used to keep people on track in religion or any strong belief system can be very damaging.

I always think a wonderful example of the power of guilt is Jung Chang writing in The Wild Swans of the first moments she thought that maybe Chairman Mao was wrong. She quickly backed out of a place that felt so guilt stricken, when even for one moment, she began to think there might be failings in the person or the system. Jung Chang even betrayed her parents whom she loved deeply, believing the system must be the truth, and must be the route to follow in every way. Letting go of our guilt, which we are often carrying deep in our subconscious is another of Sasha’s themes.

Full circle – Sanaya again

Sanaya Roman has come back into my life even more strongly recently. I find once again that Sanaya stregthens and extends my own conclusions and life vision, We are The World, which I shared on this site. Her book,  Spiritual Growth, Being Your Higher Self, is dated 1989, so I have taken a circuitous route … but I needed to take that route for myself to see the vision. I think in earlier years, I would have found it harder to believe … not just from my own viewpoint, but also because Sanaya is undoubtedly ahead of her time, riding the crest of the wave and leading the way in personal development.

Further proof of that is that Sanaya wrote and published Creating Money: Attracting Abundance in 1988, with Duane Packer. This was long before The Secret brought attracting abundance to common consciousness. Again, the light of true insight shines from her work. As this is a very recent acquisition, I will review it in more detail later, but from my reading so far, it seems to be The Secret made sensible.

From my experience reading and researching so many books and programmes over the years, these authors are the ones that have made a huge  difference. As personal development has evolved over the years, many books and ideas appeared and disappeared again. Some motivated and uplifted for a short time, but these authors,  remain at the cutting edge of truly useful personal development for vision and change.  Janet Attwood and Sanaya Roman have helped millions of people to find their way and achieve their visions too. Sasha Xarrian, is newer to the field, but is already having an affect around the world, and I believe will have an extraordinary affect. Each of their books, in differing ways is about ‘doing’, not just reading, and include exercises that provide insights into where we are and show ‘how to’ take the next steps.

Coming Soon

There are some other books that have been very important to me too, for example Susan Jeffers  vital book ‘Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway‘. But these are books that inspired a moment, changed a habit, rather than being life long companions. I will review these in a future post.

I wish you every success and all happiness on your journey. Don’t hesitate to post suggestions or comments, or you can contact me by email: christine@wisewomenonline.net