MEANINGFUL FREEDOM: AN EVOLUTION

MEANINGFUL FREEDOM: AN EVOLUTION

I still remember the day I left my corporate job as an international marketer for a large company. As I held a box containing my personal items, I said my last goodbyes to my friends and co-workers, to my office of five years, and even to the job title I worked so hard to earn. I remember driving back home and all of these birds dancing together in front of my car, as if the Universe was singing a song of freedom with me. I felt so free, so light, like I had left behind the weight of the responsibility of working for a large corporation, the weight of the title and the layers of business suit. Right then, I thought: “I AM FINALLY FREE!” There were so many emotions: a sense of nostalgia, a sense of peace, a sense of excitement for the unknown. It was a big step for me, a step that took 15 years to happen, that came after many experiences of working for large corporations. Many countries were traveled, cultures experienced, teams built and friends made. And, there were also so many challenges.
Suddenly, it was just me; my name was no longer associated with a company, title or routine. I told my husband I wasn’t going to work for couple of weeks, and I didn’t. I played until playing actually became boring. Freedom almost became a job, and after a few weeks, I asked myself, “What do I do with this freedom? Inner-guilt began to set in, and it led me to create a vision for my company, a mission, a website and a product. 
Years have passed, and I have learned that freedom is actually a state of being, a humbleness to the vastness of the Universe, a joy for the simple yet most profound of human experiences, like a smile, a hug, a sensual touch.
Freedom is a choice; for me; it’s learning that just as I left that day my corporate job and became free of that job responsibility, I can make that choice every day. The choice is mine to have the universe sing a song with me. I can choose to be authentic, to love myself unconditionally in areas in my life where I don’t have all of it together, to be open new doors to life’s opportunities, and even to constantly reinvent myself. 
Freedom is an evolutionary process. For me, it’s been an evolution that’s meant to be shared with others. Living my life in a constant state of freedom is far more complex than putting a resignation letter, and its complexity exists in the simplicity of the little choices and big choices that require courage to keep moving into a state of freedom. 
I knew others who left their corporate jobs, too. They told me that my actions inspired them and I was very surprised. I really didn’t expected that at all; I honestly didn’t realize that my choice for freedom could inspire others to do the same. Now I aspire to live a life of meaningful freedom because I know that with freedom comes the responsibility of choice. Every day, I ask myself why am I doing what am I doing. What drives me? And I have to evolve from a singular freedom to a freedom for the village, for the world. Yes, it starts with me, with you, with us.
I am free. I am living in a state of meaningful freedom. I am constantly evolving to using my freedom purposefully as my GIFT to the world—a creative GIFT that’s meant to be shared with and inspire others. I thank God for the GIFT of freedom I have been given as my birth right.
A lot of what was behind my reason for staying at my corporate job so long was outside approval. That was the “why no” side of the argument. But what about my own inner approval? I wanted a family, I wanted flexibility, I wanted freedom of self-expression and all of these really mattered to me. I only moved to “why yes” when I stopped listening to the voices of others, after realizing why it mattered to me. When I stopped listening to the invisible voices of the “others,” my own voice started to become clearer, and I was finally ready to listen. Just one change of perspective, literally moving from one chair to the next, from a place of “why no” to one of “why yes,” I had an immediate transformation. And you know what? It still happens to me every day in some aspects of my life, from the small choices like where am I going to invest my time in this week, to with whom I am going to partner?
Sure, there are days when I think, “I should just go back to corporate, it will be easier. I’d have a paycheck and insurance plan.” So what’s the reason I continue working on what I am building? In my freedom journey, the reason I still say yes to it all is because the “it” really matters: sharing stories, doing what we were born to do, honoring the work we love, and living in a constant state of flow and joy. Self-expression matters.

Where can you start to experience meaningful freedom? By getting in touch with the essence of who you really are: What is so natural to you that you hardly notice? Is there something you’ve wanted to do for many years and haven’t done yet? Create your own path forward, and I will meet you on that path. Begin your own evolution.

Virginia Nava Hieger is the author of Your Unique Gift: Finding Life’s Unique Gift Proposition and Meaningful Freedom: Finding Freedom Through Wholeness, two books aimed at empowering women on a journey of self-discovery, authenticity, wholeness and personal freedom. As a Transformative Power® guide, she believes each one of us has our own source of inner strength and that we simply need the tools to reconnect with it to let our light shine back out into the world. Visit her site at www.thetransformativepower.com. For a free ebook, email virginianava@thetransformativepower.com.

-Virginia Nava Hieger

Connect with Virginia:

Website: www.thetransformativepower.com
Twitter Handle: transformativep
Linked In: Virginia Nava Hieger

Don’t box your GIFT—instead, wrap it in a bow of unlimited possibility

Don’t box your GIFT—instead, wrap it in a bow of unlimited possibility

We are taught to put things in boxes and to choose labels. We are constantly labeling ourselves, the world around us, and putting things into the various boxes of life.
Living with boxes and labels feels somehow comforting; it feels like this is the way to understand something, to comprehend it better. As I became a mother, I experienced even more of this phenomenon of labeling: Mother, working mother, single mother, stay-at-home mother, mompreneur, soccer mom, art mom. As I stepped out of the corporate world, I went from being an executive and corporate woman to being an entrepreneur and a solopreneur to being a mompreneur, a marketer, an author, an artist, a messenger, a cleaner, a dog walker, a wife, a writer, and a craft jewelry maker. 
The truth is, none of these boxes or labels truly fit me; it’s as though they simply become more confusing and less of who I truly am. Labels and boxes are limiting versus expansive; they shrink conversations, minimize our views of the world and others. We start forgetting who we really are. I started forgetting who I am, as I began associating myself with all of these labels, and then I suddenly had to live by all of them. 
As I grew as a mother, I realized there are no words in any vocabulary that truly describe my motherhood style. There’s no book that offers the right words to describe me. I am the author of my whole life, I am still actively writing the story, and the words are given to me and created by me along the way. 
I started realizing how much of my life, I had been so concerned about the box and the labels that I had forgotten was inside. I had forgotten to ask myself what it was that really wanted to be expressed through me.
A GIFT is indescribable. Beyond words, it grows and expands, and has a transformative nature all its own. It’s deeply humbling and so very warm; it makes your heart come alive at one of its deepest rhythms possible. Its unique feeling is even bigger than having butterflies in your stomach when you fall in love; it’s more like having a dove within, a beautiful white bird opening its wings wider and wider, and it comes from within. It’s a light that pours from inside, outward, the highest expression of your soul, where your body, mind and heart all come together to serve one and another. It is being and feeling alive. It is connecting with your deepest self, the end of the longing for something else, because right there, there it is. 
A GIFT is beyond words, it is expansive; just as you wrap it, it naturally unwraps itself as a constantly expanding game. As the Dalai Lama says, it is “a smile from within.” It doesn’t play by the rules because it is free from judgment, to be graceful and loving. It grows in depth with love, and it can see and feel beyond the world of boxes and labels into something deeper. It has a vision that is deeper that eyes can see, a heartbeat that continues to keep it alive, and it finds a vessel from which it can serve and share. It wants to feel an expansive community where each gift supports another, where the gift is honored and serves as an offering for the world, for humanity.
A GIFT is as big as the sky, as tall as tree, as beautiful as a bird’s song, as grounded as roots on earth, and as genuine as a child smile, it has many rhythms, like a symphony. It is both rooted and ethereal; it is magical. It is beyond normal understanding, and is only understood with the heart and spirit. It is shared by open and willing minds and hearts who seek to open the gift within who choose love and courage as a way of being.
A GIFT is your own art form, your own unique real self-expression; a genuine style that is in total alignment with yourself and is grounded in love, compassion and openness. It encompasses a fullness from spirit, and is a gift for you to both receive and to share.
A GIFT’s unique voice is your own. Giving a gift a voice is a way to share your story, your wisdom, and your learning; to honor and pay it forward to re-gift it for all humanity and future generations. We share the gift of our stories on our journeys and are serve as their vessels, their messengers. This is how we give back to our villages, tribes, and communities. When we move from knowledge to learning and then to sharing our learning with the world, that is when we shine light onto the paths of all gifts on the path. 
A GIFT of stories from our ancestors, and were given the words, art, creation, and imagination with which to lovingly serve as the continuing voice that breaks through the darkness of life. We each have within us inner wisdom, resources, value, and power that are aligned with a deep inner why or reason for being, and in this way we share our gifts beyond the labels and boxes created by the world, where others can hear our voices and find their own unique gift expression within. There, they can reunite, reconnect, reintegrate within the deepest sense of themselves. 
Being a GIFT has been the most humbling experience of my life. Sharing stories that richly illustrate my own gift journey continues to help me grow and expand. It’s given me the deepest experience of a human expression, and taught me to appreciate more, to stop more often and ask myself whether I am in the presence of a gift. Am I only looking at the label or the box? Am I sharing and expressing my gift? Am I having a gift conversation? Am I teaching from a gift place? It’s brought me to so many beautiful questions like these to reflect upon throughout my life and my journey.
May your GIFT journey be magical, beautiful, and beyond words. May you find the courage within yourself to receive your gift, and in that receiving, come to recognize that it wasn’t ever yours to keep. In truth, it belongs to humanity so that it can experience the depth within your heart, mind and soul in the spirit of love.

Virginia Nava Hieger is the author of Your Unique Gift: Finding Life’s Unique Gift Proposition and Meaningful Freedom: Finding Freedom Through Wholeness, two books aimed at empowering women on a journey of self-discovery, authenticity, wholeness and personal freedom. As a Transformative Power® guide, she believes each one of us has our own source of inner strength and that we simply need the tools to reconnect with it to let our light shine back out into the world. Visit her site at www.thetransformativepower.com. For a free ebook, email virginianava@thetransformativepower.com.

- Virginia Nava Hieger

Connect with Virginia:

Website: www.thetransformativepower.com
Twitter Handle: transformativep
Linked In: Virginia Nava Hieger

FREEDOM AND UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

FREEDOM AND UNCONDITIONAL LOVE 

What would we do differently if we were driven by unconditional love? How differently might we serve? What if how people perceived us didn’t matter? What if criticism or praise could be seen as simply feedback?
I recently listed my inner critic concerns and after I did the list I noticed a trend: lack of love, fear of what others will think, their reactions or rejections, and it was a really liberating moment for me. I was liberated in less than 10 minutes, because I realized that what I do isn’t driven by the outside, it is driven by my inner truth. All of these concerns weren’t in alignment with my truth. I realized that I am already loved just as I am, and that if I shifted my perspective about every one of my concerns, my life could change in an instant.
In this moment, I realized something else – that freedom and unconditional love are best friends, co-partners in life, and that unconditional love comes when we are able to see our circumstances, lessons, and growth processes from the eyes of compassion instead of judgment. When we can see our lives from compassion, we are truly liberated – and in that moment, the lessons we were supposed to learn become available to us and even more available to others.
Being a CEO of my own company has been one of the major GIFTs I have ever had. Being in charge of my company has made available to me my major strengths and resilience, on top of all the inner work that is available for me to create. I can no longer look around and find someone else responsible for my mistakes or shortcomings; the only one to look at is myself in the mirror, and there I always see who has ownership for everything. At the beginning of my journey, there were areas I didn’t like to see there, so I tried to hide from myself. As I matured, I realized that I needed to see my whole self, not just a snapshot of myself. I needed to embrace myself fully without judgment. When I do this, I am open to renewing myself.
Loving myself is the most important life objective for me and my life, business and clients, because when I love myself I am free to learn and innovate. When I am willing to fail, I am free to see others with compassion, to connect to the Divine Love available to support me and sustain me along the way. I am free to fly, to share fully versus partially; and most of all, to be human. I am liberated from my own inner critic to keep moving forward and to continue accepting life. I am free to be a GIFT to the world and be of service to others because I have shifted from my cloudy view to a more authentic inner view. Love and compassion give me the courage to expand beyond my own self-imposed limitations.
I invite you to recognize how many things you aren’t doing because you are seeking external feedback or praise. If you’re avoiding something, ask yourself how this is serving you. And how is it serving others?
Writing books taught me that life lessons are meant to be shared with others, and I am amazed and humbled when someone shares the impact the books I have written have made in their lives. This feedback helps me realize that there is a direct IMPACT on me when I don’t share with others, because just as something can be really liberating for me, it may be for others as well. I have come to realize that loving oneself isn’t selfish at all. To the contrary, it is valuable and even necessary for the communities we live in. It brings a new energy to the work we do and the reasons why we do what we do. The quality of my work changes by the energy it’s been created with, when I create with love vs. apprehension or fear I can feel the difference.
Your story matters, your lessons matter; share them from a space of inner love, and quiet your inner critic with a prayer:

I accept my Divine GIFT, for the service of the world. God, I surrender myself to your divine aid, for you are my protector, my council and my courage and strength.
Please show me the way, send me your divine angels and archangels to sustain me so that I may share this GIFT with the world.
God, you are my wings. In you I put my trust. I open my heart to your guidance; surround me with your strength and unconditional love.
Because I am infinitely loved by you, always and forever, I will remember that rejection is only an illusion. And so it is.

Virginia Nava Hieger is the author of Your Unique Gift: Finding Life’s Unique Gift Proposition and Meaningful Freedom: Finding Freedom Through Wholeness, two books aimed at empowering women on a journey of self-discovery, authenticity, wholeness and personal freedom. As a Transformative Power® coach, she believes each one of us has our own source of inner strength and that we simply need the tools to reconnect with it to let our light shine back out into the world. Visit her site at www.thetransformativepower.com. For a free copy of an ebook, email virginianava@thetransformativepower.com. 

- Virginia Nava Hieger

Connect with Virginia:

Website: www.thetransformativepower.com
Twitter Handle: transformativep
Linked In: Virginia Nava Hieger

Freedom And Alignment

Freedom And Alignment

We all have different themes for our life stories. A strong theme for me has been freedom: I am attracted to freedom stories, to activists and people who express themselves authentically. And I’m also deeply attracted to real love stories!
But what, really, is freedom? In my own life, I’ve found that it is alignment. The times in my life when I wasn’t free was because I was out of alignment with the truth of who I am.
When I was five years old, I learned about freedom in a moment of truth. My best friend, Adriana, had gotten a really short haircut. Now, at that time my hair was long and I loved it; I played with it, wore a ponytail, two ponytails or braids. One day, I came home and told my mom I wanted a short haircut. My mom looked into my eyes and asked, “Why? How did you come up with this idea?” She finally figured out that I was influenced by my friend’s haircut. So, she asked, “Are you sure?” “Yes,” I said. Then she said, “I think you’re just doing this because your friend cut her hair. Are you sure you want to do this? You know it takes time to grow back, right?” I put my hands on my waist, looked her straight in the eyes and said, defiantly, “Yes!” So, my grandma came home and cut my hair. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I cried and cried. I was so upset. It was one of my first experiences of giving away my freedom of choice. What I really wanted was to be liked, to fit in. I convinced myself I wanted something I really didn’t want it and I faced the consequences. My mom’s wisdom made it perfectly clear that I was not a victim of anything but my own choice.
Twenty-five years later, I was in a similar situation at a corporate firm, where I was just as affected by others to change myself. I started wearing khakis to work when I had never liked them before, shopped at new stores, and went to a salon for highlights. I have always worn my hair naturally, and there I was with a woman with over-bleached hair who was about to do my highlights. My body tensed, but just like when I was a child, I had already made my decision so I went ahead and did it, of course, the same thing happened: I came home and cried. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. I was starting to lose myself, first with clothes, then with highlights. Everyone at the office was thrilled with my new look, but I felt out of alignment with myself. I realized that this company wasn’t in alignment with me and I was trying so hard to fit in that I had even changed my hair. It’s still painful to remember, yet I learned something really valuable both times: freedom comes from a choice, and I needed to create some tools to ask myself what I really wanted.
First, I had to decide how much I was willing to compromise in order to fit in. My inner compass (or constellations, as I like to call them) said hair was now something I could choose for myself. And then, along with what I call my “guiding lights,” I created my first mantra: “Meaningful freedom is having the courage to be authentic about where I am being inauthentic.” This has helped me to understand the difference of what is in alignment with who I am and what is not, and gives me the courage to do uphold it, because the moment you begin to compromise on small things, you’ll start losing yourself in many. What at first may seem like a small, superficial change can actually lead you on a path away from your true self. Learn to pay attention to your inner truth and to what is inside and outside of your inner alignment.
Freedom is being in alignment, living in truth. Pay attention to your alignment with small choices, as these choices will create your pathway.
There is a GIFT behind these experiences of fitting in. It’s a GIFT of freedom, of values, of guiding lights. It is in the discomfort that often comes when we feel how much it matters to live in alignment with who we are, with our own self-expression. We are different, and each of us has unique areas of self-expression. Each of us has our own language; learn yours and send love and gratitude to the lessons along the way.
My hair has given me deep lessons about freedom. I’ve learned to ask myself why am I doing what I am doing and how much of my life is being lived in the freedom of being who I am, in my own truth. I’ve learned to honor and follow my own inner wisdom, to have the courage to travel my own path, and listen to the whispers, grateful for their lessons of love.

Virginia Nava Hieger is the author of Your Unique Gift: Finding Life’s Unique Gift Proposition and Meaningful Freedom: Finding Freedom Through Wholeness, two books aimed at empowering women on a journey of self-discovery, authenticity, wholeness and personal freedom. As a Transformative Power® guide, she believes each one of us has our own source of inner strength and that we simply need the tools to reconnect with it to let our light shine back out into the world. Visit her site at www.thetransformativepower.com. For a free ebook, email virginianava@thetransformativepower.com.

- Virginia Hieger

Connect with Virginia:

Website: www.thetransformativepower.com
Twitter Handle: transformativep
Linked In: Virginia Nava Hieger