The Anne Report, Driving the Roads Less Traveled, reminds us that one way to slow down our pace is to enjoy the lesser-traveled roads. The Main article, Your Relationships Are Your Teacher, shows how our relationships help us heal our various wounds. The Healthy Living article, Tic-tac-toe Relationships, talks about ways that we may jeopardize relationships by making them win or lose situations for one or the other of the partners involved. The Anne Talk, Down With Ego Driven Suffering, reminds us that we CAN have ease in our lives. The Featured Product This Month highlights Anne's fifth book, The Living Book. Click to read What is EZosophy? Click to join Anne's Abundance Affirmations. Click for Shareables From Anne.

The EZ Mantra: "Everything can be EZ or at least EZier." -- Anne Sermons Gillis

Living EZosophy, January 22, 2019
Published Weekly on Tuesday Mornings

Phone: 713.922.0242
Email: anne@annegillis.com

Anne's Websites:

  The Anne Report

Driving the Roads Less Traveled

Dear ,

Recently, on our drive home from South Carolina, Google maps directed us on some roads less traveled in Georgia. Many of them were two lanes. When I was young, there were few freeways or four-lane roads. It felt cozy riding the narrow roads, as if I was retracing my childhood.

We usually want to take the fastest route when we travel. It's understandable, when we are under a time crunch, but sometimes it's fun to go out of the way. Many drives are labeled the scenic route by the state, and while I rarely drive when we go on trips, I do drive in my small city. Small is relative, because we have more than 100,000 people living in The Woodlands. I choose the back roads when I travel. My route to yoga takes me down a two-lane road. I love the drive.

My friend, Dawn Mitchell, posted this on her LinkedIn feed, "You are exhausted physically and spiritually because the pace created by this system is for machines, not a magical and divine human being. You are enough; rest." It seems that our highways and our do more attitudes reflect a sorrowful wound in the collective fabric of our souls. They cause a drivenness we can no longer ignore. We must slow down our pace. We must take the two-lane roads, because when we do, everything can be EZier and EZier.

  Main Article

Your Relationships Are Your Teacher

Relationships are the playing field from which we learn love and goodness. Without these indispensable basic elements, relationships are cold and dark. They imprison us in pain or limitations. Loveless relationships are full of competition, a relentless drive to get something, or the need to be right and prove the other wrong. Unhealed wounds are the source of punishment when the other friend, child, or partner does not meet one's unmet baby needs! Revenge on one's parents is taken out in the relationship.

Gina Lake puts in succinctly when she says, "What interferes with expressing love is the tendency to be absorbed in your mind and thoughts about yourself and what you want and need, rather than about how you might express love."

The loveless relationship is not a pretty scene; however, relationships founded in lack, pain, power, and struggle have the potential to come alive through love. It is in the awakening to our true nature that love flourishes. Love surfaces when we surrender the egoic mind. Once we stop demanding the form love must take, we are free to become what we really are – love incarnate. This loves shines away the darkness in our relationship, and even the darkest corner becomes a welcome potential to strengthen love. Focusing on love awakens deep compassion, and it is this compassion that allows us to see our partner, friend, or family member clearly. We cease to identify them with their actions and define them through their Essence.

Truly, the quality our relationships is dependent on our relationship to Source. When we know who we are and make a conscious effort to be the space for love to live, everything changes.

Are you ready for the change? How can you live love?

• Don't try to be right. Just drop the conversation that keeps love at bay. This is a game called right – wrong, and it is designed to thwart intimacy.
• Really listen to what your friend or partner is saying.
• Heal your thoughts about your parents. Unhealed parental wounds not only show up in your relationships, they show up as your relationships. Acknowledge what your parents did to you. It's not about blame. If a parent runs over a child with an automobile, it's unintentional, but the child is hurt none the less. Truly acknowledge what happened, then forgive your parents, and drop it.
• Pray for your friend or partner. Wish the best for him or her. Don't try to coerce the Universe into getting more love or attention from your partner. Radiate your love toward your partner.
• See yourself as whole and lovable when you are with your friend. Be aware of your self-talk. Experience your lovability; drink in the ever-present, omnipresent love available. Keep your mind clean.

Relationships can be thought of as a spiritual pilgrimage. You enter with high expectations, stumble and fall, then discover things about yourself that would be hidden if you were alone. When you can see the wounds, you can heal them, and finally you can share love from the deepest places. If you can't go to India and see a guru and you desire the rigorous teaching of a master, just turn to your relationships. They are your guru. If you open your heart and let them, they will lead you to love, and with love as your guide, everything is EZier and EZier.

  Quotes

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  Abundance Affirmations

Click to Join Anne's Facebook Group

This group is a place to post uplifting affirmations and thoughts about prosperity and abundant living. Let's create a right relationship with money so that we feel comfortable about money. Let's use money as it's meant to be used, and not as a way to accumulate power or to fill a void. We don't need money to buy more stuff. We need it to create a world that works for everyone. We want to cast off old beliefs of lack and reclaim our natural state of abundance.

Special Announcement

Miracles in the Mountains Presents: Miracles, Scribes, and Mystics, a conference based on A Course in Miracles, Oct. 11-14, 2019. Join Miracles Productions at the beautiful Art of Living Retreat Center, Boone, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, during the peak of the glorious "Autumn Leaf" season! Early bird special through March, 2019.

  Shareables From Anne

The World's Best Weight Loss Secret

Thought Freedom

40 Days to Abundance

Anne's Conscious Carols

  Featured Product This Month

Suppose someone told you that you could change your life radically, for the better, if you spent just three minutes a day doing inner work? Would you believe it? Maybe not, but wouldn't it be worth an investment of three minutes a day to try it?

The Living Book offers just this. Devote three minutes a day to this process and your life will become a living testimony to the seed principle. A tiny seed can grow into a mighty tree, but it must be planted. Plant your daily seed for three short minutes and notice both subtle and miraculous changes in your life. In addition to the daily practice, one can use the process when they are stumped or afraid or angry. This process transforms anger into love. When we plant seeds of light into our thoughts and emotional bodies, we move into higher frequencies of well-being.

The Living Book, by Anne Sermons Gillis. Paperback $4.95 plus $3.00 shipping. PDF Download $0.99. Kindle Book $2.99.

  What is EZosophy?

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NOTE: If viewing this on a cell phone, be sure to scroll right to see the other column.

  Healthy Living

Tic-tac-toe Relationships

Have you ever played Tic-tac-toe? If so, you know that the only way to win is if one person makes a mistake. If each player is astute, the game will end in a tie.

Unfortunately, people often conduct their relationships as if they are playing Tic-tac-toe. Each transaction or interaction between the two is an attempt to win an unspoken game. When one person makes a mistake, the other wins by pointing out their partner's error. When there's no winner in the emotional Tic-tac-toe game, their interaction ends in a stalemate. It's not a satisfying way to conduct a relationship. Tic-tac-toe relationships can be very dramatic, even boring, and they offer little toward being good relationships.

Relationships are basically the foundation of our lives. They influence us so much that the ultimate punishment for prisoners is solitary confinement. The lack of human contact can drive people crazy.

So how can we connect better to our family and partners, if we want to stop playing Tic-tac-toe with them?

• Forget the idea that your partner is predictable. My husband never reconnects my laptop after he's used it. One day I was thinking about going to the downstairs computer and thought: "It won't be connected." Then I had another thought: "Let's use some get out of the box thinking. Jim loves to reconnect the computer. He enjoys plugging it in and attaching the mouse." When I later went downstairs, the computer was plugged in, ready to go. Not only did I get what I wanted, the positive thoughts I had about him made our relationship better. Thinking that someone is never going to do a thing the way we like it done is detrimental to the relationship.
• Brag about your partner to others. When we brag about our partners, the one who is most helped is ourselves. It points our mind toward appreciation rather than toward depreciation.
• Never tell yourself or others that you are trapped. If we stay in a relationship, yet tell ourselves we are trapped, the belief creates animosity or hopelessness. We can either get out or change the way we look at the situation. It's for the best. (This does not apply to people who are literally trapped in very abusive situations. This advice is for people who are in reasonably sane relationships!)

These three simple ideas are powerful. They can turn the rudder of our lives. It doesn't take much to move our lives in a better direction. Life on the move is what we need. We want a dynamism in our relationships with ourselves and others that supports everyone's highest good. Let's get out of the predictable Tic-tac-toe game of life, the one influenced by mistaken assumptions, and set our intentions and attention on creating better relationships, because when we do, everything can be EZier and EZier.

If you have any healthy living tips for the newsletter, send them to me at anne@annegillis.com.

  Anne Talk

Down With Ego Driven Suffering

Anne's video, Down With Ego Driven Suffering, reminds us that we CAN have EASE in our lives. Time: 5:04

  Anne Art

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  Anne's Schedule

All times here are Central Time
unless otherwise specified.

Sunday, January 27, 2019
10:30 AM: "Wisdom"
Unity of the Bay Area
1911 Hwy. 3 South
League City, TX 77573

Saturday, February 16, 2019
10 AM-12 Noon
"Evolution of the Higher Consciousness: An In-Depth Study of H. P. Blavatsky's Teachings," chapter one review, by Anne.
Houston Lodge, Theosophical Society
1525 Heights Blvd. Houston, TX
Donation basis

Contact Anne to book your event:
713.922.0242 or anne@annegillis.com.