Author: opreacarmen75

Comfort on difficult days, smiles when sadness intrudes, rainbows to follow the clouds, laughter to kiss your lips, sunsets to warm your heart, hugs when spirits sag, beauty for your eyes to see, friendships to brighten your being, faith so that you can believe, confidence for when you doubt, courage to know yourself, patience to accept the truth. Love to complete your life. Carmen Monica

Every day is unique, not because the sun rises when the moon falls asleep, but because we get a new chance to say thank you to those special people in our lives. Life is meant to be lived surrounded by grace and miracles. They, the wonders, happen every day. Look at flowers blooming, at breeze cooling our fever, at clouds dancing in the sky, at sea kissing our toes. Every breath we take is a miracle and a gift, and so often we forget to consider today the most important day in our lives. We always plan for tomorrow, hoping and praying it will come.

But what about today? What amazing things did we accomplish today? Are we going to call a friend we haven’t seen or spoken to in ages? Are we going to read that beautiful book waiting on a dusty shelf for the right time? Is there a right time or maybe it is just our brain’s perception? Every morning brings new avenues to discover our inner self, a world waiting to be found among the beats of our heart. Most of us choose to ignore the song so beautifully sung by the chords of our soul. We shut it off before it even starts, so the tune dies. Have you ever wondered why the song started in the first place? Maybe it wants to spread a message, a warning that we are just travelers through this world.

We should spend more time enjoying the little things in life, talking to our loved ones, and giving thanks for everything good or bad that came our way. We learn something new from everything, we become sturdier and rise above expectations. We should never forget that life is nothing but a dream, so we should enjoy today for tomorrow is not promised.

Love,

Carmen Monica

I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I’ve become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. This is why I changed.

I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me. So, I changed.

I do not get along with those who do not know how to give a compliment or a word of encouragement. I no longer spend a single minute on those who lie or want to manipulate. This is why I changed.

Have you ever thought that you can celebrate your authentic style through the clothes you wear? You can think about this as another form of art and since it is art, you need to nurture it. Style happens when you discover your strengths and you use them. A personal style flourishes when you understand that you don’t need as many clothes, jewelry, or makeup as you once thought you did because you have something called attitude.

Today remind yourself that you are an artist and in searching for your style you will uncover your signature look. Your style, grand or simple, should not only show taste, but also intelligence. Style is a blending of what you wear and who you are. Experiment to find out what works for you and what doesn’t then adopt the style that works for you, regardless of what everyone else is wearing. Like everything else, trends in fashion change. But style doesn’t.

Love,

Carmen Monica

Sometimes we feel trapped inside our own emotions and wonder if we will ever make it out alive. And somewhere between what we survived and who we became, we find ourselves exactly where we were meant to be. Caught in a dream world we create, we begin to love the journey and to find comfort in the quiet corners of our wildest dreams.

Some say that people don’t change. But sometimes they do. People weren’t always this way. Even if we don’t change the entire world, we can change the part we play in it. And we can affect the people we share it with. Even a wounded butterfly can still fly. Whether something was meant to be or meant to leave didn’t matter as much anymore. People can soak up the sun, kiss the breeze and can fly regardless.

Love,

Carmen Monica

What if, for just a moment, you’ll have the opportunity to peer into a fortune ball and saw that you’re never going to meet the One. I know that you’ve been dreaming for a while to meet someone to curl up at the end the day, who would take care of you when you got sick and listen to your stories every evening after work.  But what if you knew with certainty that you’d never meet that person. What would you change about your life?

Love inspires our most significant changes. But what if love is not in the cards for you. What would you do? What would your option be? Would you focus heavier on your career? Would you invest in yourself and push yourself to go into more vacations, to travel further outside your comfort zone? Would you spend more time loving your family if you knew that they would be the only people who would be with you at the end of your life? Would you show up more often and share a little more of your life?

I think that for some never finding love would be a game-changer while others would see it as ultimate liberation. Opportunities open when the fear of ending up alone disappears. You would be able to live anywhere you want. You could go back to school for that degree you always wanted, you could climb the corporate ladder.

Sometimes, love holds us back in ways we don’t even realize. One thing we should do is stop waiting around for someone else to show up and change our lives. In the end, you’re going to be the person who gets up off the floor every time you get knocked down and hold your hand every time you’re broken. You have to appreciate everything you bring into your life because the irony is that you are more attractive when you’re not worried about who you’re attracting. Start living your life confidently, freely, and without restraint, and you will emit energy that will change not only your destiny but the lives of the ones around you also.

You must stop looking for the One to spend the rest of your life with and start being the One and allow everybody else to come and search for you.

Love,

Carmen Monica

Patience is the quality that allows us to overcome the obstacles we face, both on the earthly path and on the spiritual path. It is closely linked to hope, the belief that we will be able to overcome the current obstacles and that the future will bring us good.

So, above all, patience implies a strong trust in our capabilities, and especially trust in the will of God, having the understanding that nothing in this universe is accidental! Love, Carmen Monica

A lot of clichés exist about forgiveness. You find them in every piece of advice, in every endorsed opinion, in blogs about letting go of the anger. You read them in quotes and stuck them on post-it notes to a wall. You know that there is no simple task to forgive and it seems like a gap exists between deciding to forgive and feeling peace.

Forgiveness is a vast land for those who crave justice, and the very thought of letting someone walk away free from what they’ve done makes you sick. You don’t want to wipe your hands clean. You want them to bear the weight of what they’ve done, not you. You want to see the scores evened. Sometimes, forgiveness seems like the ultimate betrayal, and you can’t give up the fight for justice after what had happened to you. The anger is burning inside and pumping toxicity throughout your system, but you know that you can’t let it go. The anger is as inseparable from you as your mind and heart.

But the thing about anger is that it doesn’t realize that the past is over and that the damage has been done. Anger is the refusal to heal because when you’re scared, you’re afraid of who you’ll be once the wounds close up and you have to go on living as the new you. Forgiveness is healthier because it brings peace, it brings release when you want the madness in your brain to quiet, but you can’t find a way to get there. Nobody tells you this about forgiveness: it’s not going to fix anything because it is not an eraser that wipes away the pain of what’s happened to you. It doesn’t undo the pain you’ve been living with and grant you immediate peace. Finding peace is a long and arduous battle.

Forgiveness means giving up hope for a different past. It means acknowledging that the past is over, the dust has settled, and the destruction left can never be reconstructed. There is no magic solution to the harm that’s been caused, but you still have to live. Forgiveness means restoring your peace. Forgiveness doesn’t mean to make amends with who hurt you; it doesn’t mean befriending them, sympathizing with them or validating what they’ve done to you. It’s just accepting that they had left a mark on you, and that, for better or worse, the mark is your burden to bear. It means that you’re done waiting for the ones who broke you to come and put you back together. It’s you who decides to heal your wounds and to move forward.

Forgiveness isn’t about letting the injustice reign. It’s about creating your justice, your destiny, reinventing yourself. It’s about getting back on your feet and deciding that the rest of your life isn’t going to be unhappy because of what happened to you. It means walking bravely into the future with every scar you’ve incurred along the way. Forgiveness means that what happened to you won’t define you any longer. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that you give up your power, but it means that you’re finally taking it all back.

Love,

Carmen Monica

Make your own decisions, stand on your own two feet, pull yourself together after you fell. You have to continually look for a way to carve your own path in life, to do what you want. You shouldn’t be afraid to go solo and to trust yourself.

Love fiercely, terribly, beautifully and thoroughly with a passion that sickens, consumes. Become a knot of emotions that twists your feelings, throws you upside-down. But don’t also forget to be kind, compassionate, understanding.  Allow yourself to give love because everything else you’ve been brainwashed to believe you need you already have.

Take care of yourself even if that might suggest an entirely different life than the one you thought you would have. Only you can figure it out because no book and no one else can advise you what to do.

Learn to survive because life is about surviving the best way you know how.

Love,

Carmen Monica

Once the truth awakens in your heart, you’ll never be the same person. It’s taken me more than forty years to come to this awareness, but I haven’t been the same woman since I did.

Nowadays, we are programmed continuously to be someone else and not ourselves. This is why we are so terribly confused about whom we should be. There are days when we are creative, articulate, accomplished and funny, but some days we don’t see ourselves this way. We are all hard on ourselves because we don’t only want to be other people, but we want to be perfect versions of them.

Let me tell you about a woman I know. When her first book was published, instead of congratulating herself for producing such a beautiful book after years of effort, she was on the edge of madness because she had used the wrong verb in a sentence. Instead of celebrating her achievement, she robbed herself of this joy.

We should strive to be the first-rate version of ourselves because our best is always good enough. Only God is perfect.

Love,

Carmen Monica