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Update and an Eyes Wide Open Love Letter

If you are new to Eyes Wide Open, you probably don’t know that it’s been way too long since I’ve posted to the blog.

But, it has.

And, if you’ve been with me a while, well hello again.

I would love to share with you where I’ve been, and what’s been happening behind the scenes here in the life of Ali/Alexis and Eyes Wide Open.

It seems that this is the time. So, hello, if you are new or hello again if you’ve been wondering.

About 18 months ago, I realized that it was time for a life and business uplevel and I was going to have to make some tough choices about what stayed, what went and where I focused my time, energy, attention and money (what I call our TEAM resources).

So, I applied my own Money Map work to my life and businesses (I often find that when we are stuck, doing our own work on ourselves is what produces the breakthrough) and it became clear from that process that I could not build two companies and be the leader I needed to be in order to do a great job with either one.

I was so resistant to letting go of either, but it was clear that if I wanted my life’s work to progress, I’d have to choose.

I know many of us are facing these decisions constantly.

How do I best use my TEAM resources to have the life and income I desire?

How do I focus on one without compromising the other?

What’s the highest and best use of me?

Are these questions that plague you constantly too?

If so, I’d love to share my process of discovery with you, in the hopes that it may help you discover more about yourself and help you to make more right-aligned choices about how to use your TEAM resources in service to the life you want to live.

If you’d like that, you’re in the right place. I’ll be emailing you more regularly sharing that process right here.

Watch for it.

And, in the meantime, if you’d like to re-presence for yourself what it means for you to have a life worth living, you may want to watch this guided meditation/video I made a few years ago.

Okay, more soon…

Ali Shanti/Alexis Neely Update March 2018 – Healing the Conflict

Integration. Ali Shanti and Alexis Neely. Absolute clarity about how these two seemingly vastly parts of me fit together in the world.

Finally. And, I wish it had been easier. While I no longer seem to have inner conflict around who I am, there does seem to be some residual external conflict I am working through.

And, given that this is just year 2 of what I imagine to be a 7-year cycle of full integration, that makes sense to me.

My massive inner conflict, created as a result of the conflict between my parents, and my dad’s unconscious hatred of the feminine, has played out over the course of my life.

Trying so hard to be the good, successful girl that my dad wanted me to be. Trying so hard to prove to myself that I was good enough and smart enough. Trying so hard to deny the parts of me that weren’t good and couldn’t be successful because of who and how my dad was.

By way of update for those of you who are new here, back in 2010 I discovered a core split in my understanding of who I was, and I began to figure out how to live into my truth.

Prior to that, I knew myself as Alexis Martin Neely, lawyer, mom, pursuing all the success, and having it. Million dollar businesses, TV, radio, best-selling book, kids in private school. You know, the whole thing. But quite unhappy. I knew there was something more, but I didn’t know what it was.

I had pursued all the measures of traditional success, one after the other, hitting my goals repeatedly. Every single one. All the gold stars. Only to get there, and feel empty and a knowing that something was missing.

I spent the next 7 years figuring out what that missing thing was. It has felt like a journey of a thousand years. And it was all happening publicly, on my blogs and on Facebook. In my businesses. On podcast interviews.

For someone who once identified as a 3 on the Enneagram (today I am much more sure I am a “4” with a strong “3” wing), it was extremely confronting. I had to face all of my deepest fears of being misunderstood and maligned. But, I couldn’t hide from it. I knew that everything I was seeing outside myself was a reflection of my own internal consciousness, and until I healed those parts within, I would simply keep seeing the external reflection of it again and again.

So I did the work. I embraced the part of myself that felt weird, and unacceptable. I lived Ali Shanti out loud. And I began to trust more and more that the people who got me were the people I wanted to work with and play with, and the people who didn’t, weren’t.

The biggest challenge along the way was wondering if I could both be a lawyer, and serve lawyers with my trainings and teachings, and be Ali Shanti.

I didn’t think so. In fact, I was sure I couldn’t. There was no way that lawyers would accept Ali Shanti. It turns out, though, that my own inner lawyer, Alexis Martin Neely, wasn’t accepting Ali Shanti. And, as soon as I resolved that, it would all begin to resolve outside of me as well.

Today, most of the lawyers I serve know me as both Ali Shanti and Alexis Neely. Many of them even refer to me as Ali. It wasn’t them rejecting me, it was me rejecting me.

Have you ever heard of pre-emptive rejection?

It’s a thing where instead of facing the risk of rejection from others, and the pain of abandonment, you reject first. It mostly comes up in the context of dating. But, apparently, I’ve been doing it my whole life.

High school. I was sure I had no friends. I was outcast by the other girls.  And, while it was true, some people didn’t like me, looking back I don’t think it was actually everyone who hated me. But I created that reality. I pre-emptively rejected everyone before they could reject me.

It created a very lonely existence.

Well, it turns out, I was pre-emptively rejecting myself. My Ali part was rejecting my Alexis part was rejecting my Ali part. Yes, lots of self-hatred going on in there.

The good news is, I’m not doing that anymore.

I broke the cycle of that a few years ago when I was in Costa Rica on a permaculture farm. I wondered why I didn’t just live there all the time. It would be so great. The warmth, and the ocean, and so much deliciousness growing everywhere. Why would I ever leave?

I went through a full death process in that consideration. I even considered faking my own death so my kids could get the insurance money and be taken care of while I gave it all up. Obviously, I reached the conclusion that I couldn’t/wouldn’t do that.

But, through it I got to see that some part of me wanted to die. AND, some part of me wanted to live.

So I began to ask myself the question, if I was to fake my own death, what would live on? What parts of me did I want to keep?

In that process, I found my heart. I remembered who I am. I embraced my inner lawyer, and my inner hippie, and my priestess, and my business woman. I remembered all the parts of myself that I love and found the way that they actually all want the same thing.

All of my parts love my kids.
All of my parts want to serve.
All of my parts love the work I do for lawyers.
All of my parts love the work I do with families and business owners who need a lawyer, but want a lawyer who can truly meet them in all of their parts.
All of my parts love the dream of a world that works for everyone.

And, all of my parts are equally afraid.

What I discovered is that I (the big “I” in here that is the One who is watching it all and writing all of this) can hold all of my parts through what’s scary. I don’t need to reject any of it. I don’t need to perpetuate the conflict. I can be with what’s here and love it all.

So, I’m writing a book about this journey because I think there may be others out there in the world living in internal conflict, as I have. And, I’m about to relaunch a website around Family Wealth that has been waiting for me to come around and remember what I’m here to do. And, I’m continuing to co-steward the Starhouse transition project so that we have a place where world leaders can come and do the healing/integration work that will be critical to the rebirthing of humanity.

And, that’s my update for March 2018. <3

 

 

Clarity Comes After You Commit (How I’m Acquiring a $5.2M Retreat Center Post-Bankruptcy) – Ali Shanti

Since my birthday this past November, a huge amount of magic has happened and I’m ready to share it with you.

There’s both a lesson and an invitation here for you.

If you want to read more than I’ve shared here, you can begin here.

If you’ve been here a while, you’ve watched the ups and downs of my journey with some degree of up close and personal.

If you haven’t, you can review the history by starting here, and then going here, and then finally spend a little time on the blog here.

And, if you want to read about the backlash I’ve received along the way, just google my name. It’s all there in living color.

It would have been so easy to give up at any point along the way, and believe that I had screwed it all up beyond the point of no return, and I should just hide out in my bed until the end of my days.

But, all along, I kept trusting my heart, knowing that while it appeared that I was making wrong choices from the outside, I was simply taking the road less traveled and facing the resistance each step of the way, in service to something far greater than even I could necessarily see, at any point.

I’ll be writing far more about the journey over the coming months.

But today, I want to share with you the culmination of many years of commitment to trusting that my heart knew what was right, and if I could keep listening to her, I would be guided to the clarity I needed to understand the purpose of it all.

This past week, I signed the paperwork to “acquire” a very special land in Boulder, known as the Starhouse.

Clarity Comes After You Commit
Starhouse in Boulder Image by Pacha

I put “acquire” in quotes because this land cannot truly be owned, at least not in the traditional sense.

She was created for the purpose of being the connection point between heaven and earth, supporting those of us who are here to remember why we are here, what is ours to do, and how to do it.

Anyone that has tried to come in and acquire this land for any other purpose over the past 7 years it has been on the market has been unable to close the deal.

I could feel that the land herself was blocking each transaction. I know that may sound crazy, but it’s true. And for one reason or another, one buyer after another dropped out.

Two years ago, I began working with the current owners to have a better understanding of what they needed (this is the core of my work around “Enough” and the Money Map) in order to transition this land to her next stewards.

And to understand what the land herself wanted.

I watched many potential purchasers come and go, some of them had great ideas, plans and visions. And it became clear to me over that process that each one, despite the best intentions were overlooking something integral to the transition.

They were unwilling to commit without being able to see exactly how they would profit from the transaction.

While some of them could see the huge potential on the land, they could not get their minds to align with the reality that they would have to make a full commitment to this land before being able to see exactly how the land would support them.

Full commitment precedes clarity.

I want to repeat this again here because it’s the number one lesson I’ve gained from this entire experience …

Full commitment precedes clarity.

About three months ago, I realized that what Starhouse was asking for was my full commitment without the full clarity of how I would make it all happen.

And, what Starhouse was asking for was for David and Lila (the current owners/stewards) to make a full commitment without the full clarity of how it would all happen.

So, I felt the fear, and said yes to doing it anyway. I committed. Ring on the finger, “I have no idea how I am doing this, but I am doing it and giving it everything I have” commitment.

In the process, David and Lila agreed to finance the sale, effectively no money down to give me plenty of time to raise what we would need, which none of us had anticipated at the time of our mutual commitment.

And we signed the first stage legal documents and had a big engagement party to celebrate last Thursday night.

Since the moment of my commitment, the most magical, synchronistic, I wouldn’t believe it if I wasn’t getting to watch it ringside events have occurred.

The exact right people have shown up, moment by moment. The money I’ve needed at each step of the way has shown up, moment by moment.

The creative ideas and visions that I had years ago, but had long forgotten or put on the shelf (to be done twenty years from now, I thought), are coming back alive, and ready to be made manifest.

Things I said I would NEVER do (because I was too scared, frankly) are being called forth from and through me.

Each step of the way I am being reminded that commitment precedes clarity.

And it is so often our waiting to know exactly how something will happen that keeps the first step from being taken.

Please let this message be an inspiration to you to stop waiting for full clarity of how something will happen and to dive into your commitment of what you Desire to create in this world.

Allow your Desire to lead you into the space that’s necessary for the magic to happen to support your dreams.

Yes, magic is possible. When your life is aligned with all of Life, the Universe conspires to provide everything you need.

There will be a stewardship circle coming together, made up of people who desire to commit their time, energy, attention and money to this land in service to Her as well as to their own personal evolution.

It will include support from me and the other founder’s circle members, as well as from the land Herself, so you can see your own dreams of a new relationship with yourself, with others, with work, and money, and business and the planet be realized.

If you have an inner knowing that you belong to the Starhouse land, or if you have a sense that it is time for you to belong to sacred land, please let me know. Send an email to [email protected]. We should talk.

So much more to come.

With so much love,

Ali

How to Make Right-Aligned Choices to Use Your TEAM Resources by Ali Shanti

As promised, I am sharing with you my own personal process of how I make choices about how to best use my time, energy, attention and money (TEAM) resources in service to you making your own right-aligned choices so you can have a life worth living.

I am LOVING your responses and reminded of why I desire to allocate some of my TEAM resources to writing to you. I feel so nourished by your replies and reflections. Thank you!

If you’ve missed the first two posts in the series, you can catch up on them here on my blog.

Here’s why this is so important to me…

I believe when we’ve all made right-aligned choices, we will come into harmony with ourselves, each other and the planet.

And to me that equals sustainability.

So the first thing I want to share with you about my process is a noticing around where I get off track.

I tend to make poor choices about the use of my TEAM resources when I am unaware of my motivations.

When that’s the case, I am driven by subconscious, mostly hidden even from me, patterns and stories created by my past experiences instead of by conscious, creative, heart-centered choices about the kind of life I want to have and the world I want to live in.

As  a result, instead of experiencing the outcomes I want, I experience the outcomes that are a natural extension of those past stories and experiences.

An infinite loop of repeating patterns. Can you say STUCK?!?

Do you know the feeling?

When I am stuck, I can’t seem to see a way out.

Every choice seems to lead back to the same outcomes.

For me, that usually looks like two businesses, stuck at around $1.5mm of revenue, way too busy, making good money, but not keeping very much of it and not really feeling as if I’m getting anywhere.

Now for some of you reading this, you’re going to think “I’d love to be stuck there!”

And, yes, it’s not a bad place to be stuck, but stuck is stuck is stuck. And, it’s all relative.

That’s a key thing to remember so you don’t get stuck in comparison despair (a place I often get stuck myself) and think that you can’t have the life you want because you have less than me, or haven’t gotten to where I am in my life and businesses.

Remember, I started off with no special resources or skills. Came from a family with all sorts of issues and problems. And, used the coping strategies that I learned growing up with the family I did to create what I now have.

And, I’ve even let it all go, filed bankruptcy and rebuilt again from the space of nothing.

We can all create anything we desire from wherever we are, when we are willing to see where we are creating our stuck points and make  different, conscious choices.

If you do find yourself looking at my stuck place and feeling jealousy, envy or judgment, simply notice that and see it as a pointer to more of what you might want for yourself.

One of the best ways to get unstuck is to come into clarity around what you truly want.

And I find one of the best ways for me to do that is noticing where I am judging or jealous of what someone else has!

For others of you reading this, you’ve far surpassed my stuck place and you’ve got more money, more time freedom, and yet you’re still finding yourself stuck, repeating the same patterns again and again and again and feeling unfulfilled.

That’s the first key, noticing where you are stuck.

And beginning to notice where you keep getting to the exact same place, over and over and over again.

Because from that noticing, you can begin to look at the choices that lead you to that place repeatedly.

So, back to what gets me stuck in this same place again and again and again. I get stuck when I make decisions from fear.

I get stuck when I don’t own my true desires. I get stuck when I choose my next course of action based on what people will think of me, rather than based on what I truly want.

I get stuck when I’m a perfectionist. And a control freak. And when I don’t trust people because I’ve been burned in the past.

I get stuck when I let comparison despair get me down. And when I forget my vision.

I get stuck whenever I blame anyone else for my results.

Now that I see where I get stuck, I can shift it.

Tomorrow, I’ll share with you how that works so you can begin to notice where you get stuck and shift your stuck places too.

Feel free to comment and let me know where your stuck place is. Where you keep getting to again and again and don’t seem to be able to move beyond.

Together, we can create something new. And, ultimately, be the change we want to see in the world.

Talk again tomorrow.

I’m not perfect and I think this will still help

Yesterday I wrote to you that I would be sharing with you about where I’ve been and how I’ve learned to make choices about how best to use my time, energy, attention and money (TEAM) resources in support of a life worth living.

So, here we go…

Now, the first thing for you to know is that I am far from perfect.

I’m sure you already knew that.

And I am not sharing my process with you so that you come to make the same choices I’ve made, or even in the same way I’ve made mine.

But, instead, to give you some insight into HOW I make my choices so you can begin your own process of self discovery and make the right choices for you.

I’m just back from the Landmark Forum, which I attended a few weeks ago for the first time, and while I was there I was reminded of the power of sharing.

When I heard other people share their experiences, it gave me more insight and clarity into my own subconscious and I got to know myself more.

So, I’m sharing this here with you in service to you getting to know yourself more.

Because for me, that’s what it’s all about – you, me, all of us making choices about how we use our TEAM resources in the highest and best way for each of us, consciously, instead of by default or as a result of deeply patterned/conditioned beliefs that continuously have us creating lives not worth living.

Okay, so that’s what’s happening here and why I’m sharing with you.

So before I fully get started into my process, would you share with me about where you are with your own use of your TEAM (time, energy, attention and money) resources?

I’m curious.

What do you struggle with when it comes to your use of your TEAM resources?

Is it the time, energy, attention part? The money part? Both?

Or, do you have it all handled? If you do, I’d love to hear that too.

Hearing where you are helps me know what part of my process is most useful to share, and what is just my own desire for catharsis.

Update and an Eyes Wide Open Love Letter

If you are new to Eyes Wide Open, you probably don’t know that it’s been way too long since I’ve posted to the blog.

But, it has.

And, if you’ve been with me a while, well hello again.

I would love to share with you where I’ve been, and what’s been happening behind the scenes here in the life of Ali/Alexis and Eyes Wide Open.

It seems that this is the time. So, hello, if you are new or hello again if you’ve been wondering.

About 18 months ago, I realized that it was time for a life and business uplevel and I was going to have to make some tough choices about what stayed, what went and where I focused my time, energy, attention and money (what I call our TEAM resources).

So, I applied my own Money Map work to my life and businesses (I often find that when we are stuck, doing our own work on ourselves is what produces the breakthrough) and it became clear from that process that I could not build two companies and be the leader I needed to be in order to do a great job with either one.

I was so resistant to letting go of either, but it was clear that if I wanted my life’s work to progress, I’d have to choose.

I know many of us are facing these decisions constantly.

How do I best use my TEAM resources to have the life and income I desire?

How do I focus on one without compromising the other?

What’s the highest and best use of me?

Are these questions that plague you constantly too?

If so, I’d love to share my process of discovery with you, in the hopes that it may help you discover more about yourself and help you to make more right-aligned choices about how to use your TEAM resources in service to the life you want to live.

If you’d like that, you’re in the right place. I’ll be emailing you more regularly sharing that process right here.

Watch for it.

And, in the meantime, if you’d like to re-presence for yourself what it means for you to have a life worth living, you may want to watch this guided meditation/video I made a few years ago.

Okay, more soon…