Carmen Monica Oprea

I learned…

…that not everything happening is a random process. Everything happens for a reason, and that reason is not always grandiose, but necessary to our growth.

…that every situation is a lesson, and every person you meet is a teacher. I learned not to judge anyone and anything.

…that everything you give comes back to you because life functions on the principle of cause and effect.

…that to be strong means to forgive, to forget, and to offer goodness and love. When others attack you, don’t act the same way, but ignore and know that their attitude has nothing to do with you, but with their frustrations. Your attitude creates a state of peace and discomfort, and that you can avoid the discomfort by choosing to ignore and be positive.

…that resentments, hate, anger are useless, and they only bring suffering and sadness.

I learned that by accepting life for what it is, you get peace.

I found out that nobody and nothing can make you suffer, but your own expectations make you suffer. That’s why when you offer something, or you do something, don’t expect something in return, but offer everything unconditionally.

I learned that the past is just a lesson and nothing else. That it doesn’t exist anymore and you must leave it behind but keep the lessons you’ve learned and the beautiful memories you’ve formed. I learned that if you insist on living in the past, you only make yourself suffer by recalling those negative feelings that are useless to your present and future.

I learned that your happiness depends on you. Nobody can make you happy. You hold the door to your happiness. I learned that happiness is not permanent, but it is composed of happy moments, those tiny unimportant things in our lives.

I learned that happiness can’t exist without sadness and that both are necessary.

I learned that you can’t see the goodness and the beauty surrounding you or in the ones around you if you don’t feel them and you don’t offer them. I learned that your life reflects what you feel inside. That’s why you must nourish the love and the goodness inside you. Only when you offer love and goodness, you can get them returned to you.

I learned that we are creators of our lives, of our happiness, and that our peace depends on our attitude about life and how we think about life. It’s that simple.

I learned that life is beautiful if you are prepared to see it this way.

Love,

Carmen Monica

We need to be able to spend time alone to rest and recoup if we don’t want to suffer from what the psychologists call “privacy deprivation syndrome.” These symptoms include increased resentment, mood swings, fatigue, and depression. I bet it sounds familiar. Does is sound grim? Well, it is. When it happens, we struggle to get up from bed every morning only to fall into bed so emotionally depleted that we can’t sleep well at night. When we reach this point, the littlest thing can set us off, bring tears and irritabilities. Soon our work and our personal relationships begin to suffer because we never have time to refresh our feelings, to filter them, and let them settle down.

Unfortunately, for many of us, it is only when we get sick that we allow ourselves the luxury of time and space alone. If you find yourself looking forward to regular dates with a hot water bottle and Nyquil, then it is time to find the time alone to recharge because there is a better path. For example, finding a hobby is a wonderful way to start freeing ourselves creatively. Pursuing a hobby warms up our talents and illuminates our natural inclinations. By doing this, we are bringing more fun into our lives, and the opportunity to free our spirit from the rigid rules society imposes.

Love,

Carmen Monica

Everyone has tried spending time alone in the early morning or late at night when the rest of the house is asleep. My hour of solitude is during my lunch break. I use it for solo excursions to a library, an old church, or a public garden. It is the time when I am contemplative and think of what I want to achieve in life and how to get those results. I think of the past and the current friends, of the people who passed through my life and at the reasons why they are not in it.

It is of vital importance to have some quality time alone at home, at least two nights, no matter how busy I am. Deliberately seeking solitude may seem selfish but it is not. Solitude is necessary for my creative spirit to develop and flourish as are sleep and food for my body to survive. There is a certain quality of being alone that is incredibly precious. I must find the delicate balance between my deepest personal passions and my commitment to family, friends, and work.

To keep my inner harmony, it is essential for me to have at least an hour’s worth of solitude and to defend my soul against all distractions. I had to be inventive. I decided to retire an hour earlier than the others in the house, and read, and relax in bed.

If you are juggling family, home responsibilities, and an outside job, claim two hours as your own. Allow yourself to enjoy solitude.

Be open to the unexpected.

Love,

Carmen Monica

Sometimes you experience times of frustrations in your life. You believe you’re on track, trusting God and yourself, yet things don’t work out. You have false starts and stops. The door refuses to swing wide open. You may wonder if God has abandoned you, or doesn’t care. You may not understand where you’re going, or what your direction is. Then one day everything is revealed: the reason you didn’t get what you wanted was because God had something much better planned for you.

Imagine that you decide to make some changes in your living situation. You have lived in the city, and now you want to live in the country, on a lake. You find a small, lake house that isn’t the home of your dreams, but after selling your city house, you will be able to have money to remodel the new house. You wait for your city house to sell and it doesn’t sell. You have times of patience and impatience. Some days you trust God and others you can’t figure out why God makes you wait so long and doesn’t let you move on with your plan.

One day, a neighbor comes to visit you, and he tells you that he is selling his house because he is moving. His house is your dream home. The neighbor offers you the first option on purchasing his home. Two months later, you sell your city house and the small lake home. A short time later you move into the home of your dreams.

Sometimes, all it takes is patience to wait for the right things to come to you at the right time. You must trust that what is meant to be yours will belong to you if you are patient enough to accept that God has a plan for you and your life and he will always give you what you seek at the right moment.

Love,

Carmen Monica

The time has flown. It has actually been an insanely busy couple of months. I had a lot of things to do in my house, I had a rewrite to do on a book, I decided to weed some things out in my house and get rid of some furniture, and with one thing and another, I haven’t stopped for the past weeks. I have another rewrite to do. I do many, many rewrites before a book finally gets published. It takes a couple of years from when I write a book until it gets into your hands.

Aside from writing, and responding to family matters, I try setting time aside for what makes me happy. Yesterday, I went to the theatre, watched Disney’s Little Mermaid, and wondered why people stopped believing in fairy tales? It is true that if I look around, the sights are not very encouraging, but I tell myself that if I cease to believe in the power of love, all will be lost. When people love each other, distance becomes just a word. We like a lot a people we meet during our lifetime, but we don’t love them all. We don’t have to spend every second together to feel we belong to something greater than one. Distance is a way of proving that what we feel is real, testing our resilience to the outside temptations.

My new book, Unveiled Secrets, is a testimony of one woman’s tenacity in finding her husband and another one’s determination to distance herself from the man who stole her heart and reinvent herself while she gets in touch with her heritage. Look for it in a couple of months!

So, it’s back to the grind for me now, time to get back to work. I’ll be hunkering down with the keyboard for the next several weeks!!!

Lots of love,

Carmen Monica

Tell yourself that you are lovable.

Even when people haven’t been there for you, or when people haven’t shown love to you in ways that made sense, or just because relationships have been unsuccessful doesn’t mean that you’re unlovable.

You’ve had lessons to learn and sometimes, those experiences have hurt. It takes time to release the pain and open your heart to love. You are afraid that you will be hurt again. But it is important to take a chance and assume that everything will work out in the end, just as it has been intended since the beginning. You must believe that things meant to happen will happen anyway, that people will come and go from your life, that you will always remember the way they had treated you, the way they had made you feel when you were around them. Just because we can’t see them doesn’t mean they had forgotten about us, that they love us any less than they had loved us when they were around. If there were love then, it will always be love in their thoughts and hearts. Nobody can take love away. Love stays with us, grows with us, becomes part of us. It is in every cell, in every breath we take and in every step we make. Lovable people have a glow no one can destroy just because they are pushed aside. Lovable people find other peoples to love, and help, and lift when they need to be lifted. Lovable people will always remain lovely because they had been born with an aura of mystery that no one can ever understand, and they will always want to be touched by it.

Keep in mind that you are lovable and that you are loved. You must go back through the layers of fear and hurt until you discover the exuberant and delightful child that was, and still is, in you.

Love,

Carmen Monica

By holding on to the past through guilt, longing, denial, and resentment, I discovered that I wasted time that could have been used to transform today and tomorrow. I used to feel guilty about things that had happened, things I had done or other people had done to me. Although I had made amends for most everything, the guilt ran deep. Everything became my fault, and I could never let it go. I was in denial about many things and held on to anger for weeks. Sometimes, I tried to forget my past, but I couldn’t stop and sort it. My past was like a fog that surrounded me, and I couldn’t shake it off. I think I was scared to let it go, afraid of today, afraid of tomorrow.

I’ve been recovering for weeks, and I’m learning I can’t forget the past. I need to heal from it. I need to feel and let go of any feelings I still have, especially anger. I had to start with stopping to blame myself for aching events that took place, and trust that everything had happened on schedule, and truly all is good. I’ve learned to stop regretting and to start being grateful. I’ve learned to see my past compassionately, trusting that God was in control, even then.

I’m still healing from some of the worst things that could happen to anyone. I’ve made peace with myself about these issues, and I’m able to see how those things helped form my character and developed finer points in my personality. We can’t control our past, but we can transform it by allowing ourselves to heal from it and by accepting it with love for ourselves and others.

Love,

Carmen Monica

Loosen up and enjoy life!

You don’t have to be somber and serious, reflective and critical, so bound up within yourselves and the constraints others or yourselves placed around you.

Life is not a funeral service. Have fun with life. Participate in it. Experiment. Take a risk. Be spontaneous. Do not always be concerned about doing the appropriate thing, or about doing it right. Do not always be worried about what others will think or say. What they think and say are their issues, not yours. Do not be afraid of making a mistake. Do not be so fearful and proper. Do not inhibit yourself so much.

You were created fully human. You were given emotions, desires, hopes, dreams, and feelings. There is an alive, excited, fun-loving child in you somewhere! Let it come out! Let it have some fun not for just a few hours on a Saturday night. Bring it with us, let it help us enjoy this gift of being alive, being fully human, and being who we are!

There are so many rules, so much shame you’ve lived with. It isn’t necessary. Don’t worry! You will learn your lessons when necessary. You will begin enjoying and experience your whole self and trust yourselves.

Have some fun! Loosen a bit. Break a few rules.

Much love,

Carmen Monica

This is what we must do. We don’t have to do two things at once, but one thing done in peace. We should do one task at a time. We should experience one feeling at a time. We should live one day at a time. We must face one problem at a time. We should take one step at a time. We should feel one pleasure at a time.

To do one thing at a time, we must relax. We must let go of urgency and begin something new with calm. We should take one thing at a time and see how everything will work out.

We should remember that we are free to be who we are, to listen to and to trust . We are free to listen to the gentle, loving words whispered to and through each of us. Just remember that life happens one day at a time.

Love,

Carmen Monica

Many of us are faced with the issues of whether we can trust another person again and if we can trust our judgment. Sometimes the slip-ups we have can cost us our sanity, and we can’t afford to make similar mistakes. Many of us have trusted people who deceived, abused and manipulated us because we trusted them. Perhaps, we have found these people charming, kind, even decent. But there was always a small voice saying “No, something is wrong.” Or maybe we have been comfortable trusting that person, and we were shocked when we found our instincts were wrong.

These issues may reverberate through our lives for years, shaking our trust in others. But what is worst is that our trust in ourselves has been shattered. How was it possible to feel so right and be such a total mistake? Then, you wonder how can you ever trust your selection process again when it showed itself to be so faulty?

Maybe we will never have the answers. But it is important to make “mistakes” to learn critical lessons that we wouldn’t have learned another way. We can’t let our past to interfere with our ability to trust ourselves. We can’t afford to live in distress. If we are taking wrong decisions in business or in love, we may never learn how to choose what’s right for us.

The most important thing we can do is to improve. To learn from our errors. Slowly, in increments, our relationships improve. Our business choices improve. Our decisions about how to handle certain situations with friends improve. We benefit from our mistakes. We benefit from our past. And even if we made mistakes, we had to make them in order to learn along the way.

Love,

Carmen Monica