Alanis Morissette is a magnificent singer with a gazillion awards and records sold.  She resolved to really go for her dreams.  When we asked her what helped her break through to achieve her incredible stardom, she said it was having compassion for herself. I find her honest transparency deeply refreshing, and her insights and wisdom for someone so young (28 at the time), wonderfully encouraging.

I had 2 weeks to finish the Power Within to make it to air.  The third hour of the Women of Wisdom & Power trilogy and I hated it. It needed to be better than just good. So I’m flipping stations and come across Alanis, who was sheer brilliance.  It turns out she was performing at the Air Canada Center in a few days and we miraculously got an interview with her right before she went on stage. With so little time, we got in the zone. It was sublime.  This woman comes up to me from her entourage after the interview and says that was the best interview she had ever seen Alanis do. And I asked her who she was, and she said, “I’m only her Mother”.  A beautiful and gracious woman just like her daughter.

“So I would take the painful experiences in my life and transmute them into opportunities, transmute them into gifts.”

Significant Quotes that inspired me and I hope they will inspire you too.

My energy, I think, is best served in focusing on myself and taking responsibility for my own actions and my responses, and my own ability or inability to resolve conflicts.  I’ve always believed that the micro is the macro, that what is happening in my living room is a model version of what can be extrapolated into the larger world and the larger context.

The aspiration to be as transparent as I possibly could be, having felt the effects of having hidden parts of myself or cut off parts of myself, feeling depressed, feeling sick, feeling stunted and half of who I was - quickly realizing that the more transparent I was the more empowered I was, the more peaceful I was, and the more communicative I was.  I feel that there’s a direct relationship between my throat chakra opening up and my communicating, and my physical health and my peace of mind.    

Some of what has fueled me have been things that have been incredibly painful.  If I had issues when I was younger with being invisible,  it was painful but it catapulted me ultimately into wanting to be in the public eye and be very visible.  Or if I had issues with feeling stupid or power-less,  it fueled me to try to be the opposite.  So seeing the gifts in the difficult times in my life has been an amazing way to transmute that energy and turn it into an opportunity for myself. 

It does takes a certain amount of courage, in my experience it has, to question the inner dialogue that is happening that says that I am anything less than holy and anything less than beautiful and anything less than pure spirit. There are many voices in there that I listen to sometimes, and aspire not to listen to very much and transmute, and I think  a big turning point for me over the last couple of years as well has been integrating all parts of myself.  For a long time I was of the understanding that angry was not something that I was allowed to be as a human being, and specifically as a woman.  

That anger was not something that I was allowed to express, because it was bad somehow.  And upon having embraced that aspect of myself and expressed it in a way that felt really good – specifically through art and music,   I realized that there were millions of different parts of myself that I’d not embraced, that I’d been equally pushing away, and that it was in the embracing of those parts of myself and in the integration of those parts of myself that I felt whole and full and great.  So my aspiration turned from trying to be perfect to ultimately trying to be whole.  So focusing so much more over the last few years on what it is that I am being, rather than what I am doing, has changed everything for me.