Master Key Experience Lesson 27: Breathing My Way Through Fear, Stress, Loss

This past week I’ve successfully moved through seven tough days following an unexpected and life-changing loss. In all the decades of my life I’ve never managed to let go of something so dramatic and so emotionally exhausting so quickly. Not only that, but because I’m newly clear about my purpose in life, I was able to move forward quickly as well. I even quickly realized with joy that I’ll be getting back 10-15 hours a week instead of pouring them into service for an organization that turned out not to have layers of leadership with the moral integrity I had thought they had. Win. Win. Win.

What was my unjust loss? How can what I learned help you?

It’s probably a lot like loss you, too, have had to deal with–maybe lots of them in this time of high divorce and even massive political estrangement. We humans strive for cooperation in all kinds of organizations we navigate, don’t we? Families, work, neighborhoods, sports, clubs, and more. Isn’t it your experience, too, that there always seems to be a conflict somewhere in them–differences of opinion that lead to major or minor disagreements when communications break down? After all, there are at least 16 personality types who see things initially only through their particular perspective. Even in faith communities where people profess to love God and one another as themselves, human dramas and conflicts abound. And we often accept what’s going on. We don’t rock the boat when we don’t know what to do to make things better, and thereby enable what’s going on. We think about situations only in passing, especially when it hasn’t become a personal crisis.

This week my way to make things better was not to allow my life and energy to support any longer an organization that puts profit above people when I personally became aware of it. I lost an almost-19-year membership.

Since May of 2002 I’ve been an active part of an international business networking organization. I’ve served in every role of local leadership in my chapter over these 19 years and as Area Director for 10 chapters for several years before having to step back because of years of recovery needed after a car accident. I deeply love my chapter colleagues, and together we have worked hard to grow each of our businesses as well as the chapter. In this tough Covid year of zoom sessions I served as Secretary-Treasurer. As with so many during this time, personal crises, business overload, and faulty communication finally caught up with the President and VP, and they both unexpectedly put their memberships on hold 24 hours before our next meeting! That left me to pick up the pieces, rally us to keep going forward, and facilitate our strategic plans to replace them. I dropped other things in my life, stepped up to the challenge, and had my colleague’s full support when the Chapter Director could not be with us. Days went by. Then on a late Friday afternoon, I was notified that because it IS a for-profit franchise, not a democracy, 3 franchise admins had decided to take over the chapter. Without visiting our chapter nor talking with any of us, they appointed all new leadership and cancelled the leadership contracts/remuneration of two of us without the due process required in the organization’s rules. I was unjustly made the scapegoat and accused of things that simply are not true–and they had no proof. Yet I was asked to continue those 10-15 hours a week of service for the good of the chapter!

The pre-MKE Shirley would have taken it, believing that staying after being unjustly treated would be for the good of the chapter members who matter to me the most anyway. I didn’t want to leave colleagues in the lurch as others had left us. But MKE taught me to spend serious think time. MKE has me affirming my Definite Major Purpose multiple times a day–a vision of what my life is about in detail, including the people who will walk with me. MKE has helped me include practices and habits in my life that held me in confident steadiness all week. As I sat to think, the power of clearly seeing my future hit me in a way I’d not realized before. I had not realized consciously up till that point that I had not mentioned this networking group specifically in my DMP! I understood clearly what MKE has shown me science for–that my subconscious had apparently already known somehow that this organization could not be part of my future with its lack of integrity about the decent care for its people, due process, and profit over people. My focusing on every other thing in my DMP slowly is readjusting my reality and my vibration to support only what I AM focusing on. What a gift! Had this not happened the way it had, I would likely have gone on thinking that all was well, not rocking the boat. As it is, most of those business networking colleagues will continue to be in my circle, and those without integrity will not.

BREATHE Through Fear, Stress, and Loss

At the same time all this was going on in my thinking, I was gifted with the lesson for this week. Not only did it explain more about why proper daily thinking and our purpose is so crucial for our futures. We were also given two ways to breathe to increase well-being and more adequately deal with fear. I feared the loss; this helped me let go of the fear and reframe the loss as a gift. [Fear has been a big focus for me during the MKE…see how I worked on it here.] This breathing technique is great for stress as well–which I had in super abundance this past week. See Charles Haanel, Lesson 27, Paragraphs 29-32.

29. You will be interested in knowing how to accomplish this. Reason will not help you at all, because fear is a
    subconscious thought, a product of the emotion. There must then be some other way.
30. The way is to awaken the solar plexus. Get it into action. If you have practiced deep breathing, then you can expand
    the abdomen to the limit. That is the first thing to do. Hold this breath for a second or two, then still holding it draw in
    more air and carry it to the upper chest and draw in the abdomen.
31. This effort flushes the face red. Hold this breath also for a second or two and then, still holding your breath, deflate
    the chest and expand the abdomen again. Do not exhale this breath at all, but, still holding it, alternately expand the
    abdomen and chest rapidly some four or five times. Then exhale. The fear is gone.
32. If fear does not leave you at once, repeat the process until it does. It will not be long before you are feeling entirely
    normal. Why? Because in the first place, this breathing effort concentrated at the pit of the stomach affects the great
    ganglion of the sympathetic nervous system lying exactly opposite. This is the solar plexus, which largely governs
    circulation.

Not only that, but toward the end of the lesson in Paragraph 38, Haanel suggests this. It was the perfect thing to help in a time of deep deep grieving at loss, and the emotionally draining weeping that accompanied it for me.

38. If you are tired, if you wish to conquer fatigue, then stand still wherever you may be with your feet holding all your
    weight. Inhale deeply and raise the body to the tip of the toes with the hands stretched above the head and the fingers
    pointed upward. Bring your hands together above the head, inhaling slowly and exhaling violently. Repeat this exercise
    three times. It will only take a minute or two and you will feel more refreshed then you would if you took a nap. In time, you
    will be able to overcome the tendency to fatigue.

So I write this full of gratitude that this past October through March I had been open-minded enough to accept a scholarship for the six-month MASTER KEY EXPERIENCE guided by Mark and Davene Januszewski and their team. The insights from the course lessons, the habits of thought and action I had put in place, the Definite Major Purpose I crafted with my guide, the MasterMind alliance, and even this week’s Lesson in the MKE Continuation gave me the underpinning to not just survive but to thrive. As Nicole Sikora says in her blog illustrated beautifully with the words “Create Your Own Universe of Happiness,” love yourself more by increasing your self-love and motivation!

I invite you to check out the Master Key Experience to see how it might help you as well. I am thrilled to have found a way NOT TO DO DRAMA!!! Go to the upper right hand corner and sign up to start the same way I started–with a Mindshift that you will experience with a 7-DAY MENTAL DIET. I’ll keep with you, sharing other insights with you when you’re on my email list. Thank you!