by Charles McAlpine | Aug 3, 2014 | Blog
OMG! I can’t believe how intense the last two weeks of July were! I couldn’t even write about it last week because of being in the grips of fear and truthfully.., a bit of shock! Storm Wisdom had it’s worst two weeks of sales EVER! When I say ever… I mean even compared to the first two weeks we were open and hardly anyone even knew we existed. We were busier then! It was scary. Of course when a cycle begins, you are not necessarily aware that something new has started. So one day where you have less than $20 in sales, you can shrug it off and assume it is some weird anomaly. After a week of questionable activity.., “shrugging it off” is a lot harder (at least for me!) You begin to question everything. As you know, you can’t run a brick and mortar business with no sales. No sales means no payroll, no rent, no utilities, etc… You get the picture! AND… Something similar was happening at home! It felt like our livelihood was being threatened! Yuck… I don’t even like thinking about it. And amongst all this, there was a definite pattern of bad communications. Not what was being communicated during this time, but old conversations, agreements or understandings were falling apart. What seemed clear six months ago was now a muddled mess. Once again for both Fito and me. It was a dark time. And of course, if you consider yourself a spiritual magician and student of life, then you have to look at these blocks, challenges, ebbs or whatever, to determine what the...
by Charles McAlpine | Aug 3, 2014 | Blog
OMG! I can’t believe how intense the last two weeks of July were! I couldn’t even write about it last week because of being in the grips of fear and truthfully.., a bit of shock! Storm Wisdom had it’s worst two weeks of sales EVER! When I say ever… I mean even compared to the first two weeks we were open and hardly anyone even knew we existed. We were busier then! It was scary. Of course when a cycle begins, you are not necessarily aware that something new has started. So one day where you have less than $20 in sales, you can shrug it off and assume it is some weird anomaly. After a week of questionable activity.., “shrugging it off” is a lot harder (at least for me!) You begin to question everything. As you know, you can’t run a brick and mortar business with no sales. No sales means no payroll, no rent, no utilities, etc… You get the picture! AND… Something similar was happening at home! It felt like our livelihood was being threatened! Yuck… I don’t even like thinking about it. And amongst all this, there was a definite pattern of bad communications. Not what was being communicated during this time, but old conversations, agreements or understandings were falling apart. What seemed clear six months ago was now a muddled mess. Once again for both Fito and me. It was a dark time. And of course, if you consider yourself a spiritual magician and student of life, then you have to look at these blocks, challenges, ebbs or whatever, to determine what the...
by Charles McAlpine | Apr 20, 2014 | Blog
News flash! Being “strong” is not defined by the ability to suppress our emotions and appear as if everything is perfect, when our world is falling apart! There is no “right way” to handle the complex situations that confront us on a regular basis. It doesn’t matter what the ad on television promises, there are situations that will be difficult and challenging to handle. We are human and we will experience emotions. There are emotions that are uplifting and expansive, some that are neutral, and some that are heavy and constricting. The game of life is not about seeing how many of the latter we can avoid. It is about developing the emotional fluency to dance with ANY emotion that we encounter along the way! And BTW… We will encounter them all throughout the course of our lifetime. Somehow we seem to have reached a time in our evolution where the emotions such as sadness, disappointment, fear, anger, loneliness, despair, humiliation and rage are to be avoided at all costs. That somehow if we are “hanging out” with any of these emotions, there is something wrong and we need to fix them (fix ourselves) as soon as possible. Put a smile on your face… think positive thoughts! However, this can end up being emotional and spiritual blackmail! You see, it is one thing to have the fluency and awareness to lift yourself from a constricting emotion. It is quite another to try and pretend it doesn’t exist or matter! When we try to cover it up or hide these emotions, it is easy to start judging them (and ourselves)...
