Monthly Archives: September 2021

Quick Paths to Higher Spiritual Connections

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By African American Books Author Denise Turney

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Higher spiritual connections are the gateway to clarity, guidance, peace and joy. Tap into your higher Self and you could gain instant guidance, and conviction, about a critical decision. You also might become aware of how your help comes from inside of the real you. The scripture where Jesus, the Christ, said, “the kingdom of God is within you,” comes to mind. This scripture is from Luke 17:21.

Finding Time for Higher Spiritual Connections

Clearly, that does not refer to the body. It’s a fact. There’s so much to be gained from finding your higher Self and getting spiritually connected. More peace, deeper sleep, increased energy, right perceptions, hope, safety and love are among the gains.

But if you’re like millions of people, finding the time to quiet your mind may seem like an impossible task. It’s understandable. After all, your time may be filled with the demands of a full-time job, commuting, housekeeping, parenting, nurturing friendships and marriage.

That alone is enough to stop someone who’s brave. In fact, it can feel like pressure just to think about finding your higher Self when you consider all of the other activities that you have to complete. Yet, a strong spiritual connection has no replacement.

Rewards of Strong Higher Spiritual Connections

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There’s nothing you can do to replace the connection. Furthermore, you won’t feel your best without a strong spiritual connection. To find time to quiet your mind so you can communicate with your higher Self, turn off the television and sit still for 15 minutes. Depending on your mind discipline, you could set a time when you will not worry or try to figure out future events.

Again, the latter calls for a level of mind discipline. If you’ve been practicing awareness and living honestly (with your inner self), this could help tremendously. These additional techniques can work even if you’re struggling to get stronger as it regards your mind discipline (more about that later).

Find one to three places in your home where you will sit with a clear mind for at least 15 minutes in the morning and another 15 minutes in the evening. You could also still as soon as you wake. Simply sit up in bed and quiet your mind. Should thoughts start to fill your mind, try turning head, focusing your attention on a spot on the wall, and see if the thoughts clear out. Yes. It’s that simple.

Reaching Your Higher Self

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If that doesn’t work, watch the thoughts and say, “I seem to be thinking about (fill in the blank).” For example, you might say (depending on what’s occupying your mind), “I seem to be thinking about the commute to work” or “I seem to be thinking about what I’m going to eat for breakfast.”

Watch the thoughts pass as if you were watching clouds float across the sky. As a tip, this action is helpful in working through fear based thoughts, including repetitive thoughts that generate fear.

Here are several other actions that you could take to start reaching your higher Self:

Pray for guidance. Yet, don’t just utter words. Actually, pray a sincere prayer. You should feel when you’re being sincere in your request.

Say out loud, “I leave this instant and the future in the hands of God.” Or, you could say, “I leave this instant and the future in the hands of the Creator.” This and other guidance is found in the book, A Course In Miracles.

More Ways to Connect with Your Higher Self

Read the scriptures. As a tip, ask for guidance from the Holy Spirit before you start reading scriptures. Not only have words from the original scriptures been changed (and more than once), as humans, we may not ever have fully understood the scriptures. So, stay open for guidance.

Journal about what you’re thinking or feeling, especially if you feel “out of sorts” or not like your normal self. I’ve experienced this for weeks, sometimes months, before a major life change.

Get outside and go for a walk. It could be as simple as walking around your neighborhood. Of course, walk in safe areas and during daylight. Nature offers such blessings! Simply being outside gives you a burst of natural vitamin D which helps with mood. Ideas may also surface while you’re walking outside.

Easy Path to Higher Spiritual Connections

Listen to relaxing deep meditation tapes. You can do this while you’re working on a project, writing on that next blockbuster novel, putting away groceries or doing the laundry.

Soak in a warm bubble bath before you go to bed. Just close your eyes, let your shoulders loosen and sink beneath the warm, soothing water and relax.

Write a letter to someone you fear. Let what’s causing you to hold onto the fear come up, then let it go. Keep in mind that you don’t have to mail the letter. The point is to clear your mind. However, if the fear is connected to a wrong you committed and you know that you should apologize to allow the other person to go free from the experience, follow your higher Self. Apologize if you know that you should apologize.

Techniques to Gain Higher Spiritual Connections

Each of these techniques can help you gain mind discipline. Simply make three techniques a part of your daily routine. Another action that you could perform is repeating, “I place this instant and the future in the hands of the Creator” every 30 minutes. See if you don’t start to let go.

Allowing your mind to calm requires discipline. Why? In this world, you’ll have to engage in techniques that help you to calm your mind and connect with your higher Self on a daily basis. In fact, you may have to engage in effective techniques several times a day.

The rewards are amazing. While you’re doing this, also practice self-awareness. This calls for honesty. For example, if you’re feeling fear or jealousy (a type of fear), admit that to yourself while also only loving yourself. Then, ask for guidance from your higher Self to let the fear go. If you keep joy, peace and love as your goals and you stay open to guidance from the Creator, you’ll be amazed at how your life in this physical experience turns out. I’m rooting for you!

7 Easy Ways to Open Love Pathways

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By Books Author Denise Turney

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Love is so deep and vast, so all encompassing, it’s impossible to describe love. It’s in all that lives. Ask someone what love feels like and you might hear words like: freedom, power, warm, inviting, comforting, dependable, limitless, eternal and good. Everything alive is touched by love. Babies rest in love. When babies coo and smile, it’s as if they are within love’s embrace. Yet, you can get lost in this world’s maze and need to find ways to open love pathways.

What’s Blocking Love Pathways

As babies, trusting love seems natural. It’s easy to rest secure in open love pathways as infants. Then, we get older. We experience disappointments. Fear based emotions like jealousy, hopelessness, anger, disgust and sorrow start to jab at us, maybe filling our days. Before long, we start to perceive love as evasive, hard to find, reserved for a select few, weak, painful and undependable.

Yet, we still want love, and we always will. We know that we need love to thrive, to live, but we’re scared.

It’s this fear that can block us from not only seeing but also receiving love’s blessings. If you’ve been hiding from love and want to stop, check out these seven ways to open love flows:

  • Raise your hands, lift your head toward the ceiling and say, “Thank you!” when you wake in the morning. This single act can shift you into a healthy mood and set your day on a positive course. Furthermore, if you’ve been in the habit of feeling angry or frustrated as soon as your feet hit the floor, this could create a new pattern that you may appreciate for years.
  • Play music that you love at least once a day. For example, you could listen to smooth jazz while you go for a walk or bike ride. Or you could listen to relaxing music while you enjoy a soothing bubble bath at the end of the day. Another place to listen to relaxing music that you appreciate is in the car. You could turn on your favorite music while driving to and from the grocery store or while running errands. See if you don’t feel better.

Techniques to Open Love Pathways

  • And this brings up another technique. Get outside and move. If you don’t like to exercise, tell yourself that you’re taking a stress relieving walk. See the experience differently.
  • Eat a healthy diet that agrees with your system. Also, pay attention to how your body feels when you eat sugary foods or when you consume too much protein. After all, the aim is to love yourself.
  • Practice awareness. Actually, observe emotions and thoughts that you experience. Slow down and notice what those emotions and thoughts are linked to. Ways to move through upsetting emotions and thoughts include journaling, painting, talking with a friend, writing yourself a letter and getting out in nature and seeing what surfaces. Also, pay attention to what surfaces in your dream world.
  • Meditate. Simply sit still and focus on your breathing. As simple as it sounds, meditating is a good way to calm racing thoughts. And it’s a good way to reduce and eliminate stress.
  • Say “I love you” to yourself and one other person each day. While you’re doing this, make sure to visit or speak with a friend once a week. In today’s online age, it’s important to nurture in-person relationships.

Stay Open to Abundant Happiness and Love

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To keep love flows open, incorporate these techniques into your daily routines. After all, experiences in this world can jab at the brightest day. You may have experienced this numerous times. At the start of the day, you feel excited, hopeful, empowered and relaxed.

Then, a number of unwanted experiences occur (e.g. traffic jams, disagreements, late appointments, weather storms, coffee burns) and, before you know it, you’ve shifted from feeling excited, hopeful, empowered and relaxed to feeling emotionally fatigued, frustrated, unable to get the day that you want and tense. The shift can happen in seconds.

That’s why it’s beneficial to incorporate self-love techniques into each day. Doing so, helps to keep you balanced and positioned to continue recognizing and receiving love flows. Even more, it may have a positive impact on the people who you live and work with.

Say Yes to Love

Other ways to stay open to love are to read articles and books that encourage you to love. Listening to deep meditation tapes that focus on the power of love is another way to stay open. Spending time with people you know love you is a real gem. But that means you may have to exit from the lives of people who are abusive toward you.

And that means saying good-bye to people who abuse you emotionally, psychologically, financially or physically. After all, accepting abuse is another way to abuse yourself. It’s another way to block love. Admittedly, turning toward love and away from abuse, especially when abuse comes from people who have been a part of your life for years, may not be easy.

You Deserve to Thrive in Open Love Pathways

To ease that pressure, exchange your image for the abuser’s. In other words, instead of seeing the abuser cursing you, see yourself engaging in that behavior against yourself. Then, ask yourself if it’s a good way to show yourself that you’re loved.

Be honest. If the answer is ‘no’, it’s time for a healthy good-bye. And yes. You may miss those people whose lives you exit. But, as you continue to practice daily self-love techniques, you can realize more and more that you did the right thing. After all, the more you love yourself and others, the stronger you become.

The same applies to putting yourself in position to be loved. And it’s this that opening to love pathways is about. Put yourself in position to receive and give love. Then, watch how you feel, think and perceive life. See if you don’t open to more goodness, experiencing an inwardly rich life.

Live Free and Open to Avoid Getting Stuck in Ruts

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By African American Books Author Denise Turney

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Freedom and love must be semi-twins, because freedom feels good like love. Live free and with an open mind and you could avoid getting stuck in ruts. It sounds easy, but few pull it off. School schedules, work routines, family patterns and internal cycles drag you down after a while, sneak up on you slow and easy. Yet, to thrive you have to discover ways to avoid getting stuck in ruts.

Getting Out of Ruts

It’s odd how the goals you set to graduate with a degree, land a job, buy a home and start a family are the very goals that slowly pull you into routines that work their way into ruts. Although you might not admit it, you’ve created obligations that are forcing you to stick to routines. There’s the mortgage, credit card bills, artistic contracts and student loans. Today, it’s hard to believe that each of these responsibilities came offering greater freedom, not hard routines.

You thought taking on thousands of dollars in student loan debt would open doors to high paying jobs, respect and satisfaction. But that’s not what happened. One debt led to another idea for how to pay that debt off, got you into more debt. Now, is the time to break free.

There’s only one way out — freedom. To get free of ruts, you could:

  • Insert small changes into your day (e.g. get up 20 minutes earlier, shower in the morning instead of at night, grow your own tomatoes)
  • Pay double the minimum due on credit cards (while not making any other credit card purchases)
  • Listen to a different music genre
  • Rent out the basement in your house to pay your mortgage off 10 years early
  • Start writing on that new movie script

Explore Your Passion for Freedom to Avoid Getting Stuck in Ruts

Despite your passion for freedom, don’t be surprised if a part of you balks at the idea. After all, as much as you hate getting stuck in ruts, there’s something about routine that feels comfortable, safe. This is why it’s best to avoid getting stuck in ruts from the start.

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Check out these ways that you may find easy as it regards personal freedom. However, you should know that you’re going to have to practice self-awareness for these actions to work:

  • Write in a journal to become aware of repetitive thoughts and patterns that you’re drifting into.
  • Pay attention to your dreams, exploring symbols and situations that keep popping up in your dreams.
  • Enter outdoor adventure challenges that take you out of your routines for one to two months. There are nature challenges that come with expert protections (e.g. medical crews, experienced survivalist teams) that are life changing.
  • Pray for guidance from your higher Self. Follow the inner guidance that you receive.

More Ways to Avoid Getting Stuck in Ruts

  • Talk with people who have taken smart risks in areas that you want to explore.
  • Celebrate a time when you took a smart risk and failed. Acknowledge your courage, actions and what you learned from the experience. Remember that every experience teaches. So, there really is no failure, especially when you take what you learned and grow.
  • Return to a hobby (e.g. woodcutting, painting, dancing) that you love, but abandoned because you got so caught up in routines that you convinced yourself that you didn’t have time to enjoy engaging in the hobby.
  • Pay off debts to empower yourself with a debt free lifestyle. To do this, look at your bank statements for the last six months. See what you can carve out. Avoid making new debts, and watch your savings grow.
  • Take nature walks. It’s amazing what being out in nature does to routines and the drive to live free.

Say Goodbye To Safety Illusions

Routines may feel safe. Yet, a part of you wants freedom, not routines and ruts. With routines, you know what’s coming a lot of the time. If today mimics yesterday and you know that you made it through yesterday, routines can lend the confidence that you’ll get through today. You’ll get through another day. Before you know it, each day is starting to look and feel the same.

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That’s when boredom starts to set in. It’s because you abandoned your live free and stay free commitment. And, somewhere along the way, you knew exactly what you were doing, what you were setting yourself up for.

Regardless of how many people this has happened to, you don’t have to stay on this path. It starts with daily choices. For instance, you might cook eggs differently for breakfast. Or you might drive a different route to your friend’s house. Wearing a different pair of shoes or styling your hair differently are other ways to avoid slipping into ruts.

Practice Awareness to Avoid Getting Stuck in Ruts

More importantly, when you feel bored, uninspired or flat, check your routines. See if your day consist of routines and patterns that you’ve been engaging in for a year or longer. Without being aware, you could be wearing the same clothes on the same days of the week, styling your hair the same day after day for two years or longer and eating at the same diner for lunch for five years.

Add a job that you don’t love to this list of routines and it’s no wonder that you feel like you’re in a rut. Your day is filled with routines you no longer want to engage in. Practice awareness and catch yourself early, before you’re deep in ruts.

Live Free

But you can’t just practice awareness, you have to be honest with yourself. Admit when you don’t feel like you’re living in freedom and do something about it. Stir your courage, and shift. Try new things on a daily basis. Just do something new, something different each day.

Admittedly, it’s a risk. You won’t be able to predict outcomes. But isn’t that the fun part of what it means to live free? Not knowing how all choices will unwind can be liberating. And, when you think about it, financial debt, ridged routines and destructive relationships has never gotten you what you really want.

All the money, all the routines and all the work in the world has never gotten you freedom. So, consider taking smart risks. Make daily choices that support  debt free living. Start early, so that it becomes a lifestyle. Then, freedom, joy and what you love may start to lead you, offering you the types of emotional, financial and mental debt free lifestyle choices that you’ve been seeking.

Repurpose Marketing Content to Attract Readers and Sell More Books

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By Books Author Denise Turney

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Eager to save time as a book promoter? Repurpose the marketing content at your website. In addition to saving time, when you repurpose marketing content, you attract readers using at least two data forms. Learn how to turn blog articles and other content into videos, posters, postcards, interviews, quizzes and press releases to sell more books.

Mapping Out Your Online Book Marketing Plan to Sell More Books

Let’s look at what makes an online book marketing plan, particularly the process of scheduling marketing content development and distribution. During this review, keep your goal top of mind. Your aim is to sell more books.

The below schedule is a general scheduling example. As you focus on selling more books, you’ll add specific actions to your content schedule. Pay attention to how many of the below steps use content you’ve already created.

  • Monday – Rewrite five existing blog posts, adding SEO phrases into the posts. As a tip, type phrases related to your book’s focal areas into Google. Examples include science fiction games, romantic mystery for retirees and novels with the best travel destinations. See how many search results come up for the phrases. Scroll down the search results and check the “People also ask” section in Google. These could become new blog article titles or article headings for repurposed content.
  • Tuesday – Develop scripts for social media videos that cover a month of video production. Use re-written book descriptions to fill-out the video content. After you write the social media video scripts, write a description for each video. Plug two to three SEO phrases that surfaced during your Monday work.
  • Wednesday – Shoot a month of social media video content. You’ll be working with lighting, sound and background branding materials. For example, you might shoot videos in front of your company logo. Depending on how long the videos are, this could take four or more hours.

More Ways to Sell More Books

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  • Thursday – Start writing content for your next four weekly literary newsletters. Include a video in each newsletter. Also, add a feature interview in each newsletter. And incorporate coupons and product/service discounts into the literary newsletter. To make your newsletter robust, fill it with data, price discounts, part of a rewritten blog article, etc. that book lovers appreciate. Use crisp subject lines, the type of subject lines that stir emotion, to encourage newsletter opens and reads, a step that can help you sell more books.
  • Friday – Schedule social media marketing feeds. To save time, use an automated social media posts scheduler like Hootsuite, Vistaprint, Buffer, etc. While scheduling social media posts, add a mix of videos, quotes, information on upcoming events, feature interviews, newsletter releases, etc. To bring social media marketing posts alive, embed not-to-be-ignored pictures into the posts. Images and videos attract book lovers, helping you to sell more books.

That’s just a start. Keep reading to discover ways to maximize your online and offline marketing efforts without spending a lot of time.

How to Repurpose Existing Marketing Content

This is where repurposing your existing marketing content really comes into play. To sell more books without investing an hour or more a day into your marketing efforts:

  • Add quotes to images on your author website and distribute as flyers on social media. You’ve seen those posts on social media, the ones with flowers, a sunrise, a woman climbing a mountain, etc. that are topped with a motivational quote. This time, let the quote come from a blog post, press release or interview that already exist at your website.
  • Place existing book covers on drinking mugs and t-shirts and sell those at your author website. Another thing you could do to sell more books is to use this swag as giveaways.
  • Upload products designed with your book covers to Etsy, Pinterest, etc. to attract readers and sell more books. Make sure your author website URL is on each product.
  • Edit book marketing videos into short snippets. Upload the snippets to TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
  • Distribute existing marketing videos across a range of video platforms. For example, you could distribute your marketing videos to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook Live, iHeart Radio, Google, Apple, Spotify, etc.

Organic Ways to Repurpose Marketing Content and Sell More Books

  • Build marketing videos into mobile holiday catalogs, sharing the videos on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. As with other ways to repurpose material to sell more books, the most you’ll generally do is edit, cut and paste existing marketing material.
  • Use published blog articles to create free e-books. Add your author website URL to the bottom of each page of the e-book. Also, add a page that list all of your titles to the back of the e-book. You could sell more books by simply showcasing your titles to more readers.
  • Create bookmarks and branded calendars that include snippets from your published blog articles.
  • Develop speaking presentations and trade show brochures using material from your literary newsletters, press releases and book descriptions.

To keep content at your author website fresh, re-write 10 blog articles a month, starting with older blog posts. As with your other marketing efforts, be consistent. In addition to repurposing marketing content, create new videos and blog articles. It’s an effective way to attract new readers and build relationships with these readers which, in turn, helps to sell more books.

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Implementing Your Book Marketing Content Plan

Building out your online book marketing plan takes time. If you’re pressed for time, you could hire an experienced marketing writer to create content for you. And, of course, you can repurpose your existing content.

Stay on track with a marketing calendar. For instance, you could start with the daily schedule presented earlier in this blog post. Then, plug in article titles, SEO phrases, image quotes and video script topics. Also, add due dates, getting clear about when you’ll complete action items.

Keep going. And stay open. Be flexible. Take free online book marketing courses from people who actually sell hundreds of books a year. Over the course of a year, you’ll find areas in your marketing plan that you need to tweak. Take advantage of new technologies, saving time and making it easier for you to attract readers and sell more books.