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The Ultimate Identity Theft Coypright © 2012 by Maxine Jones The trademarks for Stretch Your Wings and Fly and Transits of the Soul are owned by author Maxine Jones. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author except for the inclusion of quotes in a review.
Cherry Tree Publishing PO Box 450962 Atlanta, Georgia 31145 http://www.maxinejonesandassociates.com
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Contents Introduction ................................................................................ Page i Chapter One: The Pain............................................................ Page 1 Chapter Two: The Thief.......................................................... Page 5 Chapter Three: Magic Wand or an Old Stick: Using Magic and Miracles to Plug into Your Destiny............................................. Page 8 Chapter Four: Hints, Nudges or a Shove: Do You Trust Your Intuition?.............................................Page 18 Chapter Five: Are you On Your True Path?...................Page 29 Chapter Six: To Be Or Not To Be: Are You Connected to Your Authentic Self? .................Page 42 Conclusion .................................................................................Page 55 About the Author ....................................................................Page 58
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Introduction
Why ask for the moon when you can have the stars? — Bette Davis in Now Voyager There are milestones in our lives, and although they happen at different ages for each of us, and for different reasons, they make us sit up and take notice of just where we are and where we’re going. For me, turning 50 was one of those milestones. It made me realize that, at this halfway point in my life, I still had a great deal more I wanted to accomplish. Maybe you have also had some event that stopped you in your tracks and forced you to really look at your life. A time when you questioned who you were and where your life was headed. That wake-‐up call was an opportunity for you to take total responsibility for all aspects of yourself and to recognize the enormous assets you already have within you, assets that are innately yours — your magnificent self. This book shows you not only how to recognize those assets but also how to activate and direct them. Another experience that made me re-‐examine and re-‐evaluate my life was watching my father struggle with Alzheimer’s disease before his passing in 2006. I called on all elements within me to move through that experience with understanding, grace, enlightenment and compassion.
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Living through that life experience forced me to develop a deeper sense of self-‐sufficiency, something I now recognize was a gift. I’d like to share with you the insights and techniques of this gift so you, too, can be physically, emotionally and spiritually empowered as you face challenging times. Did you know that you are your own central processing center? You already have within you total responsibility for the ultimate design — and control — of your life. It was there at your birth. Imagine what it would feel like to wake up every single morning and know you already have the ability to generate everything you desire for optimum abundance, health, happiness and fulfillment. The talent to do it is absolutely there; it just got slightly derailed by life. This book will show you how to optimize and enhance the quality of your life as it was meant to be lived. And once you have completed this process, you will be a magnet for magnificent joy, happiness, health and wealth, using your personal abilities and talents in ways that align with your greatest spiritual principles. You will finally be in alignment with your own destiny. You will discover your true self, your ultimate freedom. For 30 years, I have mentored and coached individuals and organizations on ways to engage their innate talents and abilities, to be and do what they were born to express, using many of the techniques shown in this book. And my goal in writing this is to share my insights and knowledge so you, too, can connect with and further develop your own distinctive expression of self and be who you were meant to be all along. So where do we start? Let’s begin with something we’ve all shared: The Pain.
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Chapter One: The Pain I’m not on track. I’ve missed my turn. I need GPS. I’m lost! Are you truly living or merely surviving? Fulfilled and complete or just “hanging in there?” All human beings have an ego. And the ego’s job is to make sure we survive, right? Survival always comes first — always! We come here and learn the rules of survival — the collective agreements that ensure not only our own individual survival, but the survival of our species. Because I said so. That’s just the way things are. We’ve always done it this way. These are all language of social agreements that we follow without question. They give us safe harbor in this vast unknown that we all inhabit. But in learning and accepting these agreements, how much of ourselves are we giving away? Or, worse, ignoring, not even knowing it exists? If you don’t have the opportunities or tools to step into your truth and the potential of what you were created to be, if you just leave it all to chance or living life the way others tell you to live it, what eventually happens? Exactly. You run out of time. You no longer have the time to answer that inner calling that says, Life is more. There’s more to me than this. I do matter. I do have a greater purpose. I am empowered. I am my own authority. There really is a greater reason for everything. I want to be free.
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There is a part of you that says, Maybe sometime, after I’m finished with school, when the kids are grown, when I’m done paying the bills, when I’ve helped my loved ones who are sick or aging, when I get the perfect job, when I save enough money. On and on it goes. Well, guess what? Life happens. That’s its job. There will always and constantly be issues. If you’re a responsible person, you take actions to fix things. But they never totally get fixed, do they? Or they just keep coming at you. It’s overwhelming. You feel like it’s pounding on you and you alone. You’re struggling and feeling constantly sabotaged, and yet no matter how hard you try, you get the same old results. You begin to wonder when you get to start living your life. Remember that movie “Groundhog Day”? The same day gets repeated over and over. Is that what your life has become? Don’t you want more than that? What part of you did you put aside or lose touch with while you were busy reacting to life? I hear a lot of people say, “Oh, I can’t do that. I’ve tried a hundred ways! I’ve tried everything, but it still doesn’t work.” Well, no, you haven’t tried everything. Let me show you some things I’ll bet you haven’t tried. As I said, your ego is here, first and foremost, to make sure you survive. But you’ve given it more authority than it was ever intended to have. It can get in the way of you living your full potential. This book gives you four ways to get back on track to responding to that part of you that you put aside all this time. That part that is filled with dreams, magnificence, magic, freedom, extraordinary possibilities and joy. That part that the wondering child within you
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remembers, that gives you the power to be you and live your life. Your real self. And once you get to know that real self, once you start to access other parts of you that you’ve never had a relationship with, never communicated with, had no clue were even there except in a far-‐away memory, you’ll truly be able to connect your dreams into your everyday life. We all get messages from within but don’t know how to apply them or even what they’re about, because they are always partial. Hints, nudges, bits and pieces of information. This book helps you bridge the gap between the life you’ve been living and what you know deep inside, what was buried over time in disappointments, discouragement and confusion, what was called “impractical,” “crazy” or “out there.” We’re going to pick up that buried part of you, fluff it up a little bit, re-‐connect with it, clean up the mess and voilà! You’ll finally start to shine like a diamond. You will finally be free to be your true self and fulfill your destiny. We are amazing beings. But often it is a crisis that shows us that, a seeming coincidence that turns out to be a miracle. Permit that rising, exciting expectation that’s hidden inside you to come forward and help you accomplish wonders in times of need. What sits within you are gifts and gifts and gifts of brilliance that were run over, buried or left behind because of life circumstances. And that’s The Pain. The following four chapters contain short, fun quizzes to show you just what you do and do not know about yourself.
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• How magical are you? • Do you trust your intuition? • Are you on your true path? • How close are you to living as your authentic self?
Read on to learn just what The Thief, your ego, was created for and how it can get in the way of you knowing your true self.
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Chapter Two: The Thief Arianna Huffington has a great name for that inner critic that resides in all of us. She calls it “the obnoxious roommate.” It’s someone who definitely has a place in the household, yet you still wish it would really shut up! Or it’s the voice in the chorus that thinks it sounds lovely, so it sings louder than anyone else, but unfortunately off-‐key. It’s our ego. As human beings, we absolutely have to have an ego in order to function on Earth. But we’ve given it authority over a whole lot more than it was ever designed to handle. We’ve put it there, we’ve enshrined it in that position, so we don’t even recognize when it’s being inappropriate. We think, Well, that’s who’s supposed to be calling the shots, and whatever decision it makes is what is supposed to happen. But that’s not true at all. It isn’t that the ego is evil or needs to be obliterated; it just needs to be guided back to what it’s actually supposed to be doing, which is a much smaller role than we have assigned it. But what happens when we try to guide it back? It rebels. It will do just about anything to preserve its position, because it is convinced that it knows best. If you do anything that threatens that authority, it sees that as your taking action that will eventually harm you. Remember, the ego’s job is to make sure you survive. The extent to which it is prevented from exerting its influence is the extent to which you put yourself at risk for acting on what the ego considers faulty information – which is anything other than what it says.
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Let’s say you want to have an adventure, something you’ve never tried before. Will the ego let you? Maybe not. The ego maintains your comfort zone, and adventures and risk are about stepping outside of that. We all have demonstrable evidence that we can survive in our comfort zone. All that exists outside of it is suspicious, so we avoid it entirely. But you want to take the risk anyway, so you really have to find a way to deal with the warnings the ego keeps screaming at you. You tell it to shut up, you redirect it, misrepresent to it what you are doing, help it think that it’s within the comfort zone. There are many techniques, but basically you need to get yourself out of the direct obedience to that voice in your head, the obnoxious roommate that’s saying, Don’t do that, you can’t handle that, you don’t know what’ll happen. You may have thought the ego was the dispenser of wisdom resulting from logical observation of your life and any higher intuition. You thought it was the highest voice you could listen to, right? You thought it was really you. But you hadn’t yet made contact with your soul. Once you start working with the ego and understanding its place in your life and why it has that place, it’s much easier to deal with ego as a part of your human experience and not all of it. The ego is not evil, it’s not a villain, it’s not a saint, its not a hero. Its just part of life. As long as you ask the ego to do what it was designed to do and give it nourishment to do that, then it functions well like any other part of life. It’s still singing in the chorus, but it’s moved much closer to its actual place. Its volume blends much better with the rest of the chorus, the whole.
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Ready to connect more with soul and less with ego? In the next chapter, we’ll find out just how magical you are.
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Chapter 3: Magic Wand Or An Old Stick? Using Magic and Miracles to Plug into Your Destiny After being in Harry Potter, I believe a bit more in magic than I did before. – Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley), actor Believe in love. Believe in magic. Believe in Santa Claus. Believe in others. Believe in yourself. Believe in your dreams. If you don’t, who will?” – Jon Bon Jovi, musician Every time I go to a movie, it’s magic, no matter what the movie’s about. – Steven Spielberg, film director Magic. What images does that word bring up in you? Houdini? Hogwarts? Harry Potter? Abracadabra? All of the above? Of course. But magic can be expressed and experienced in many more ways than through sorcerers, magicians, enchanters and wizards. Or even movies. It can be present in your life every single day.
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About the Author Maxine Jones is an author and international personal and professional coach who specializes in uncovering the power of the soul to develop a person’s achievement, fulfillment and heart-‐centered success. Her life’s work is about helping people connect with the deepest part of themselves so they can transcend the ordinary struggle of life and participate in creating a greater world for us all. Since 1982, she has worked with individuals as well as large corporations, unlocking that hidden dialogue that changes a person’s life forever. Maxine started her career as a marketing/advertising executive at one of the largest firms in Chicago. In the late 1990s she worked with Fortune 100 companies to research the impact of gender-‐based physiological differences on organizations, leadership, performance and achievement. Through her seminars and retreats for executive clients, she enabled organizations to improve the contribution of women in the workplace. Leaving the corporate world to pursue a career better matched to her higher education and spirituality, she trained people in yoga, massage, health and wellness, and wilderness survival skills. She was appointed to study and teach Native American culture and selected as a Fulbright Scholarship candidate to work in secondary education in Tanzania. In Kenya, she participated in an ecological initiative with the Smithsonian Institution. She also initiated, developed and implemented a humanitarian project in Botswana.
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Maxine realized her special intuitive powers when she was a young child and communicated with an imaginary friend she later came to know was her soul. About this same time, she met an African elder who became her mentor. Raised by two highly educated parents, she was always encouraged to pursue her dreams. Her mother was a theologian, metaphysician and dietitian, her father an international transportation engineer. She trained for the Junior Olympics in gymnastics, earned state championship titles in swimming and diving, and became an avid tennis player. Today she is a certified scuba diver. Maxine is trained in nursing and holds a bachelor of science in psychology and a master’s in human resource development and education from DePaul University. She has delivered keynotes and led seminars and retreats on health and psychology to audiences as small as 30 and as large as 1,500. Today she delivers customized presentations, seminars and retreats on the power of the soul. Her books include Desperately Seeking Purpose: Uniting Generations in Global Consciousness and Stretch Your Wings and Fly: A Guide to Using the Power of Your Soul.
In the Author’s Words I am a writer, author and speaker and enjoy looking at life in new ways, asking the question “What if?…” My passion is to support our changing global consciousness by empowering one heart and soul at a time. I love my animals with all my heart: Boo Boo, my African Grey, a lovebird named Rascal, my magnificent Goldendoodle Diego, and an adorable Coton de Tulear CC (Christ Consciousness), a rare dog breed from Madagascar.
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As my wisdom emerges, I discover I can’t buy more time, so deep, heartfelt, committed relationships with all living things are most important to me. Those closest to me describe me as fun-loving, confident and sincere. I am an optimist with traditional values, yet liberal in my thinking. I take responsibility for my life experiences. Essentially happy, balanced, adventurous, affectionate and responsible, I am an explorer of new thought and love supporting others to be the best they can be.
Maxine at age 5 talking to the plants.
Maxine Jones PO Box 450962 Atlanta, GA 31145 770-934-3819 http://www.connectwithyoursoul.com