Let's Talk About Words

A few months ago, my friend, Joao, told me about a great experience he and his husband had, and he felt like I too would enjoy it. I am very spiritual, and love to meditate and feel close to God and the universe, but I have never attended this type of retreat before. I have been on a day retreat and even chaperoned my daughter’s confirmation retreat overnight, but this one was a whole weekend. It was called “Manifesting your Desires” and was lead by  Elias Patras . It was an amazing, transformational and unexplainable experience.  These are the 3 things I learned on the retreat: 1.     I have a lot of beliefs that are limiting my ability to achieve my dreams. As we conducted a variety of exercises to uncover what was blocking us from reaching our desires, a pattern of unconscious beliefs emerged. Before this retreat, I never would have thought that I felt this way. One of our tasks was to create a nature vision board to help understand our dreams and to be...

After years of writing and revisions, I am done with my third book. Suppression is… A futuristic novel set in 2135. Twenty-four year old Peyton lives with her parents and her brother, Parker, in one of the few civilizations remaining and thriving in what is left of America after everything and everyone was almost obliterated by war. She is growing up during a period of time when humankind is making major advances in communicating with one another and even traveling through thought. When she meets Dallas, an artist, she begins to discover truths about life that surprise her, and she has to choose between the predictable life that she has planned or take a risk and choose the unknown. # SuppressionBook   You can learn more about my books  HERE And follow me on Twitter  Susan on Twitter Or read more positive thoughts  Looking For The Good

 Every evening before bed, I reflect on my day, and pick one thing I am grateful for that specific day. It is simple and takes only a few minutes. My items of gratitude are not big sweeping things that happened usually. My goal this March is to look at life with a lens of gratitude so that my life is framed in positivity and good. I write a weekly blog for ChicagoNow called  Looking For The Good  if you want to read more.

Read more at http://www.chicagonow.com/look-good/2017/12/what-is-advent/

A year ago, I was working two jobs in order to pay my bills and was just barely able to make my ends meet. I don’t live an extravagant life, but it was difficult to provide a home for my three college age daughters once the child support ended. That could be another article on the challenges of being a single mother though since after my divorce, the four of us lived in two-bedroom apartment for the next eleven years. Today though I want to explore the decision to put everything you own into a storage space and ask another person for help. Eight months ago, I put all of my belonging in a storage unit and moved in with my mother. Before I was able to get a second job, I got into debt simply by charging groceries and miscellaneous other necessities. I was so grateful when I found a part time job to supplement my fulltime job; however it didn’t take much time before I began to spiral into despair, seeing no end in sight to this new life that gave me little time for writing, hiking, pa...

Riding Waves is a book about learning to navigate the joys and trials of growing up, falling in love and going to college. When Harper's relationship with Dan starts taking her down a path she doesn't like, she will have to make some hard choices. Can Harper ride the waves of life or will they take her under? Excerpt: July 2011     The sun feels warm on my shoulder as Ashley and I play tennis on the street in front of my house. We have been best friends since the sixth grade, and we just graduated from high school this year. I see a car coming so we stop playing for a minute to see if it is coming this way. As the car gets closer, we realize that it is her parent’s car, and that her brother Dan is driving. I wonder why he is here and if Ashley has to go home? Or maybe he is here to see my brother, Jake? Even though, I am seventeen and she’s already eighteen, neither of us have our own cars. We were too lazy to ride our bikes to the tennis courts today so that’s why we...