What Motivates You?

Happy Monday, Women of Essence! I have a few questions I want you to think about. If you can’t answer right away, I’m going to share a few insights that will assist you on your journey to “knowing.”

What motivates you? What is it that wakes you up in the mornings and keep you company throughout your days, only to follow you to sleep again when your head hits the pillow at night?

What is that something you love so much you’d do it for free and without fanfare? If you can answer these questions with absolute certainty, honestly and with clarity; maybe, just maybe, you’re ready to accept the path leading to your awakening, where you are allowing your authentic awareness to emerge.

When you are in awareness, you listen to the core of your heart center that houses your true self. You become more in-tuned to your intuitive self and to your spiritual calling. If you are passionate and impassioned about something that leans heavy on your mind and heart, you instinctively know that God is the driver and you are the passenger; ready for him to guide your steps to do good works. If you are a seeker of truth, you know that your passion and purpose can be many and you have to be open to his grace for these things to come to fruition. You must be patient and do the work you’re being called to do. Do not rush to define your purpose. It is usually through your passion that your purpose will reveal itself.

At eleven years old, I knew that I wanted to be a voice for those I call the “underdog.” At the time, because I was so young, I had no foundation on which to build my impassioned stance. I knew I wanted to help people who seemed forgotten and of little consequence. My worldview was small, but I could recognize that people were hurting and not being heard. I felt something had to be done.

As a young mom and nurse, I widened my advocacy for the underdog to include women, children and the elderly, with whom I felt the bond of humanity; the children who were being bullied at schools and abused by their parents in their homes. Elderly patients in hospitals and nursing homes whose dignity gets lost as their voices often go unheard and their names become associated by numbers outside of their hospital rooms; for women who can not recognize their own power, strength and value above the noise of mainstream America, their unconcerned spouses, demanding and insensitive employers and their own lack of love for self-for humane issues that oftentimes fall by the wayside.

In my advocacy for others, I sometimes forgot to come up for air, but in 2015, I finally did something I’m proud of, other than being mother to my children( tops all). I completed my book for empowering the voice in women. Unleash Your Pearls, is currently at the publishers and I’m hoping for a summer release.

I called a longtime friend and early mentor of mine to share the good news. This woman encouraged me when I was discouraged, fed me foods that took me back home to my mama’s house (warm memories) and gave me books to read on the subject of writing and how to obtain an agent. She’s in her 70s now. When I told her about the book, she let go of a long breath and said, “praise the lord, Clara, it’s been a long time coming, but I always knew you would write a book.”

I’ve come full circle with this book, in answer to a calling decades long…that urgency to carry the gauntlet of change; to mentor and champion other women to empower their speak and stand up for the underdog is unwavering as it passes into the hands of a generation of women who step into their calling with obedience, grace and the spirit of the ancestors. And that feels right.

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love”~ Rumi

Thanks for connecting and for staying true to who you are. You make the world a better place by becoming your best self.  Always treat yourself special.