Midlife Fairy Godmother Enterprises (sm) Newsletter

Midlife Renewal Magic For Second Half Bliss
Transforming Midlife Challenges Into Catalysts For Rebirth And Renewal

Welcome to the September 2004 Issue of the Midlife Fairy Godmothers Online Newsletter. Tips, tools, and treasures for self aware, fun loving midlife women who are ready to become their own fairy godmothers and move past obstacles to second half bliss.

If you wish to unsubscribe, you can do so by clicking here:
mailto: Dinah@Midlifefairygodmothers.com?subject=unsubscribe

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Contents Of This Issue:
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A Personal Note And Update From Dinah

Article Of The Month: Who Am I Now?

Website Of The Month: http://www.soulfulliving.com is a popular internet community and award-winning web magazine, devoted to personal and spiritual growth, featuring articles from over 250 best-selling authors and experts, an open journal, prayer boards, bookstore, and a gift store. You can find my article "Let Enchantment Be Your Guide For Getting Unstuck In Midlife" (August/September 2004) by clicking http://www.soulfulliving.com/enchantment_be_guide.htm Valerie is a huge inspiration (by example) to many women for doing what you love and being successful.

Let's Talk - Midlife Fairy Godmothers Community Call: These calls are free* (except for long distance charges) and are held on the second Tuesday of every month from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Eastern time. (See below for info on this call)

"Who Am I Now?" Four Week Midlife Renewal Magic Tele-class: If the article below and the one in soulfulliving.com strikes a cord with you, you can embark on an amazing adventure of self discovery that will make you fall in love with life all over again. (See below for details)

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Note From Dinah - Midlife Fairy Godmother
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After I sent out the last newsletter about our inner Cinderella archetype, Jennifer Louden - The Comfort Queen http://www.comfortqueen.com wrote an article in her newsletter with the title "Hiding In The Cinders". It starts out, "Cinderella is not the archetype that springs to mind when one meets me. I'm feisty, sturdy, rambunctious, more a terrier than a Siamese cat. Hiding, hanging back, or waiting to be rescued is not what I do. Or at least I thought so........"

I was overjoyed at her insights. Yes!! I thought to myself. This the kind of radical self honesty and insights that are so crucial for women to recognize in order to achieve second half bliss!! I contacted her right away to express my excitement about the synchronous articles. Please check the article out in her July newsletter at the above web site.

On another note, you will be receiving issues of this newsletter at various times throughout the year. Sometimes you will receive two in one month, sometimes none. I am giving myself creative license to follow my inspiration! My inner fairy godmother gave me permission to blow off self imposed rules and regulations. Yea!!!! My inner evil stepmother and stepsisters (inner critics) are appalled!!!!

Daina Puodziunas - "DINAH - Midlife Fairy Godmother"

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Article Of The Month
~ Who Am I Now?~
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So often we are stuck, lack energy, and can't get ourselves motivated in midlife because we don't know what we want. And how can we find out what we want if we don't know who we are, what's meaningful and valuable to us? We've gone through many changes and life experiences once we get to midlife! We are different now then we were when we were 20.

Still, many of us assume something is going wrong when we're stuck, but it serves us well to question those assumptions. Often enough, we can't move forward because there is no spark, no juice, no passion for life. We haven't accessed the magic in life for ourselves from deep within. I'm not talking about the usual self - assessments you can find out there (although they can certainly add to your self - discovery). I'm talking about going within and finding the heart and soul of who you are.

Many of us have been through years of therapy and self improvement programs, and I believe this is an important step in healing ourselves. But what if we have dropped our baggage, forgiven ourselves and others, done our cleansing rituals, gotten in touch with our anger and our sadness, but we still can't move forward? We can spend a lifetime continuing to assume that we need more healing and fixing because we are so stuck, lack energy and inspiration, and continue to find ourselves in dramas. This can put women on a self healing track that never ends!

We can always find more things to heal. But if you feel that you have done enough work on yourself and find yourself stuck in midlife, it's time to consider the possibility that you have not discovered your own identity and what makes you come alive.

This is happening to so many of the women that I talk to. In a nutshell, a void has been created and nothing is there to fill it. We know what we DON'T want, but we haven't identified what we DO want - what's important, meaningful, interesting, fun, exciting, enticing, delicious, gratifying, enlivening to us.

So much of who we are has been created by the world around us in the first half of our lives. We don't have our own identity because we haven't created it yet! We haven't put much conscious effort into discovering who we are and what we love. I really do believe that a lot of depression that is so common these days could be eliminated if we began to educate ourselves on what makes us come alive.

In his book, "The Four Agreements," Don Miguel Ruiz states that we all live in our own reality bubble, or bubble of awareness. That is our identity bubble, and during the first half of our lives it was created mostly by our reactions to the world around us. If we don't have a solid identity bubble created by us, we will have one created by others automatically. It will include all of those things that are important to others as well as who we are in relation to others. This is why the quest for the "authentic self" has become so popular these days. We have discovered that we don't know who we are!

When we don't have our own identity, we aren't plugged into the juice of life! Not only that, we are easily influenced. Our energy goes everywhere and out to everyone. We can't set priorities because we don't have a way of gauging what they are. We end up just moving through life, doing the same things, in the same old way. Our life force keeps draining out of us and we are headed down a path of loss and decline.

In midlife, we have the enchanting opportunity to create a conscious identity based on who WE are and what is important to US. This will plug us in to the magic, the juice, the spark of life and has been known to bring about longevity, healing, and divine fulfillment for second half bliss.

It took a major illness to wake me up to the fact that I lost myself in the world. I realized that, not only did I lose my identity, but that I never really had one to begin with! I didn't know who I was without my roles in relation to others as mom, partner, friend, business owner. I was having a full blown identity crisis. It was then that I discovered how uncomfortable it is for many women to focus on themselves and their passions. How guilty and selfish most of us feel. My friend Shantih and I talk about how we have to go through a phase of feeling "naughty" when we are learning how to become our own fairy godmothers. It's such an exciting and delicious feeling! We both have a strong rebel side which adores this.

A big part of my healing was discovering the concept of a healthy ego. For baby boomers who immersed ourselves in Eastern religion and esoteric thought, this is a strange thing indeed. We spent so many years trying to obliterate the ego, we never considered the concept of a healthy one. Well, the time has come!

Great, you say....Let's go! But when I ask women to begin to identify what makes them come alive, there is often silence followed by, "I don't know". They go blank and get frustrated. For most of our lives we did what had to be done and didn't bother thinking about alternative lives because we never expected to be free enough to have a choice. This is the Cinderella archetype active in our lives. So the Midlife Fairy Godmother has to come along with some promptings.

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Midlife Fairy Godmother's "Midlife Renewal Magic"
5 Steps To Discover Who You Are Now

1. Accessing your enchanted memory: Remember some of the things you loved to do at different times in your life. What did you like to do at age five, at ten, at fifteen, etc? Write what pops into your mind that you liked to do at each of those ages. Don't censor your responses. These can be simple things like: "I liked to read and walk on the beach at twenty." I always use a guided inner journey because that gets us out of our heads and into our hearts and bodies. Evoking your inner child is often extremely helpful, too. Setting the mood is also important! Put on music, light a candle. This is your time of re-enchantment.

2. Accessing your enchanted present: Get a large sheet of paper or poster board. Cover every square inch of it with everything you can think of that you enjoy. List the little things. Here are some of mine: "I love to sip my tea and feel the soft breeze caressing my skin while I watch the sunset from my deck." "I love to rock in my hammock and recall what it felt like when my great grandmother used to rock me in a swing on the front porch." Ohhh, that is so delicious!!

3. Accessing your enchantment from what you hate: Ok, for those of you who are still blank, sometimes we're so accustomed to multi-tasking, getting things done, and biting the bullet that we need to find what we love from what we hate. Since most of us can easily identify what we don't like and don't want, we can discover who we are and what we want by coming in through the back door. Go ahead and make a list of all of the things that you hate in life: Paperwork, socializing with boring people, keeping books, being your own boss, working for someone else, regimentation, too much unstructured time, and so on. Next, write down their exact opposites. If you wrote "cleaning the house," write down what you would be doing if you didn't have to clean house ever again. If you hate socializing with boring people, what kind of people do you consider interesting and what would you be doing together?

4. Create your enchanted inner treasure map: Get another poster board, markers, and a variety of magazines. Take everything you have written, spread it all out, and allow yourself to gaze at it all and be inspired. Begin cutting out pictures, phrases, and words that capture your previous work. Fill in words with the markers. You will begin to see patterns emerge!! It's very exciting. This is an incredible tool for bypassing the judgmental mind (that evil stepmother and those stepsisters who reside there) and becoming your very own fairy godmother who is enchanted by your interests and delights. She delights in you and in your wishes, visions, and dreams.

5. Activate your treasure map: Hang the poster up by your bed for a month or two. Make it come alive by dwelling on it every now and then when inspired. I love to put on music and just let my eyes be guided to a point on the treasure map. It then begins to open up entire worlds for me. Allow it to teach you things, open up new fantasies, unlock your imprisoned splendor. These visual maps have been used by metaphysicians for ages. There is an immense amount of power in them. The law of attraction goes to work in the most amazing ways. A whole world of sailing was opened up to me, I won $500 from Publishers Clearing House, I identified my ideal business for the second half of my life, and as I've shared so often, they were instrumental in my physical/emotional/spiritual healing.

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Let's Talk - Special Monthly Community Call
Tuesday, September 14, 2004, 7:00 - 8:00 PM Eastern time ****************************************************************************

INTERESTED IN RE-DISCOVERING YOURSELF, BUT ARE UNFAMILIAR WITH TELE-CLASSES? JOIN THIS CALL! This will be a special call for any midlife woman interested in taking the above steps to re-discover herself in midlife. I will answer any questions about the four week tele-class and you will get a taste of the inner guided journeys I take women on to get to the heart and soul of their answers. The conference line number is: 1 413 370 0333 extension 485. For $2.19 you can get the whole hour if you dial 1010987 before the conference line number.

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"Who Am I Now?" Four Week Midlife Renewal Magic Tele-Class
 
Thursdays, October 7 - 28, 2004 from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Eastern time
 
$50.00 for all four weeks (class size limited to provide individual attention)

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DO YOU FIND SELF- ASSESSMENT TESTS BORING? DO YOU FEEL THEY MISS THE HEART AND SOUL OF WHO YOU ARE? WOULD YOU LOVE TO FIND NEW ZEST IN LIFE? DID YOU FIND YOURSELF IDENTIFYING WITH THE ABOVE ARTICLE?
This four week class will be a very focused journey into the heart and soul of who you are. I promise you a renewed zest for life or your money back! Ready to sign up now? Click here to register: mailto:Dinah@Midlifefairygodmothers.com?subject=teleclass  Please feel free to email or call me with any questions.

Enchantingly,

Daina Puodziunas - Just call me Dinah, Midlife Fairy Godmother
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  /_\   /_\    Midlife Fairy Godmother Enterprises (sm)-Midlife Magick ™ For Second Half Bliss
Providing tips, tools, and treasures for self aware, fun loving midlife women who are ready to move past obstacles to second half bliss.

Join the free Adventurers Club and receive a monthly newsletter, community calls, and much more:
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Web Address - http://www.MidlifeFairyGodmothers.com
Email - Dinah@MidlifeFairyGodmothers.com
Phone - 1 616 754 9672

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