"Once you become aware of a thought that is limiting you in one way or another, you then have the power to change it."
The thoughts and beliefs we have about ourselves and the world around us create our reality. That reality is the matrix in which we make choices that affect our life and our level of joy every day. Through her compelling personal stories, humor, and the vulnerable nature in which she shares pieces of her own life, Christine Sopa guides you on a journey of selfdiscovery where you will learn to use the power of your thoughts to achieve joy in an ever-changing world.
Many of us have come to a point in our lives where we know we can look back but never go back. At this point, it is imperative to be able to see the bigger picture of your life, to understand that you deserve and have the power to create the world around you as you want it to be and that guidance is available to all of us every step of the way. All we have to do is learn how to listen.
On this journey of self-exploration, you will learn to understand what barriers keep you from overcoming your deepest fears, how to use your emotions as a guide in making choices, and finally understand why you make the choices you do in your life.
Choosing the Life You Were Born to Live gives away the secret to believing in yourself, how to make choices that will honor your highest path in life and why life shows up the way it does. If you are ready to transform your life once and for all, then this is the journey for you!

Choosing the Life You Were Born to Live

Balboa Press

Contents

Preface....................................................xvChapter 1: Have You Found Joy?.............................1Chapter 2: The Battle for Your Mind........................5Chapter 3: Overcoming Limiting Beliefs.....................17Chapter 4: The Power of Choice.............................33Chapter 5: Believe in Yourself.............................37Chapter 6: Believe in Your Path............................53Chapter 7: Listening to Clues..............................79Chapter 8: Your Hidden Gifts...............................89Chapter 9: Mastering Your Emotions.........................97Chapter 10: You Are Not Alone..............................109Chapter 11: Action Steps to Joy............................117Epilogue...................................................133Acknowledgments............................................137

Chapter One

"Just in case you ever feel its absence ... .know happiness always returns."

Something's wrong ... we feel it ... we know it ... we're not happy ... we're not fulfilled—or perhaps we think we're happy, but our body, through sickness, tells us something else.

Most of us know when we are unhappy, most of us know that we're not fulfilled; maybe we have some comforts—a family, a career—and yet we sense that's not enough, there must be more.

The Ancient Egyptians believed that when we die and are at the gates of heaven, we are asked two questions:

1. Have you found joy in your life?

2. Has your life brought joy to others?

I have noticed that the majority of people immediately know the answer to the first question. This, of course, depends on the ease in which they have lived their life thus far. The second question tends to be a little more challenging. How do we know if we have brought joy to someone else? Is it based on whether or not they like us? Is it based on whether we made them smile? Would we have had to change their lives in some positive way by something profound we said or did? Many of us then start to question our own state of joy at this point. Have I really found joy? Is joy the same as happiness? Then the ultimate question comes: Is joy what God is looking for us to experience?

Although this may sound fairly simple, many people have a very hard time finding joy in their lives. We get caught up in work, family, and household responsibilities, caring for aging parents, financial obligations, and the list goes on and on. Before we know it, our lives are running us and we are just along for the ride. We start feeling as a prisoner in our own lives. A life in which we consciously created every step of the way with things we swore we wanted. Fears get in the way and we begin to allow those fears, not our dreams, to dictate the direction of our lives. It is through the experiences we have in our lives which we learn our greatest lessons.

As adults, we learn in three principal ways:

• Impact moments, which are events that happen outside of us that jolt us into a specific realization that changes our lives somehow. September 11th was an impact moment for many of us—whether we experienced this event by actually physically being there, watching it on television, or knowing someone who was directly impacted by this event. This event sticks out in memory because it triggered a deep emotional cord in many people that caused them to change their thinking and possibly their behaviors about our country, the people who live here, and most importantly, their individual personal life stories. Many have never been the same since this impact moment occurred.

• Discovery moments, which I jokingly call "V8 moments" (imagine yourself hitting the palm of your hand on your forehead) which are self-discovery moments that happen for no apparent reason and just seem to hit you out of the blue. A friend of mine, who suffered with alcoholism his whole life, one day woke up, drank his usual bottle of liquor for breakfast and as he went to get dressed and tie his shoes, his distended liver kept getting in the way and preventing him from bending over; it hit him then that he was going to die soon if he did not change his behaviors. He immediately made a phone call and was in an AA meeting that afternoon.

• Spaced Repetition is the one over which we have the most control. Here's how the human brain works: If we hear, see, or experience something over and over again, it gets recorded due to that repetition. Our brain says, "Hey, this must be important because it keeps coming up! I better remember it!" The brain does this regardless of whether the experience is good or bad. We are all very familiar with this one because this is how all of us learned our times tables and it is the main reason why most of us over 40 can recite by heart what is on a Big Mac! Affirmations are a form of spaced repetition. Telling your mind over and over again what you choose for it to believe will eventually (with the fuel of truly feeling and believing it) reframe that belief. Choosing what runs through our minds is one of the most powerful tools we have for transformation. In order to do this, we need to have a basic understanding of how the mind works.

Chapter Two

"Whatever thoughts, beliefs, opinions, theories, or dogmas you write, engrave, or impress on your subconscious mind, you will experience them as the objective manifestation of circumstances, conditions and events. What you write on the inside, you will experience on the outside." ~Joseph Murphy, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind

YOUR CONSCIOUS AND SUBCONSCIOUS MIND

The mind is powerful. Depending on your experiences, you can choose to overuse your mind, ignore it completely, or learn to find a delicate balance of using your mind as a tool as your heart leads the way. We have only just recently tapped into approximately 10 percent of how the mind actually works. That means we don't know about 90 percent of the functions of our mind! The mind is basically divided into sections. For the purposes of our discussion here, we are going to discuss two of them: the conscious and the subconscious.

Your conscious mind is your filter. It is your center of choice. It is that part of your brain that has the ability to choose whether to accept or reject any bit of information that enters your awareness. Let's say I gave you a compliment and you choose to reject this compliment, mentally saying to yourself, "I know that is not true, she is just saying that to be nice." That choice (or thought) then travels to the subconscious mind. Now here is the rub: The subconscious mind can only ACCEPT the information it gets from the conscious mind. It does NOT have the ability to choose! It assumes that what you choose in your conscious mind is what you want. Your subconscious mind cannot decipher between what you want or don't want, what is good or bad, right or wrong, happy or sad, positive or negative, etc. It assumes that what enters from your conscious mind is the truth. So now, this thought of rejection has entered the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind expresses itself mainly through your behaviors. Over 90 percent of your behaviors come directly from this part of the mind! (Scary thought for some of us!) How does this rejection thought then express...