My mother has been in a skilled nursing center for three years. It was the one place she swore she would never go. It was the only promise she ever asked me make. Twenty or so years ago, she asked me to please help her stay at home as long as possible if she should live a long life. And while I know I did that, it does not make it any easier to watch her mentality slip away.

To say that I experience occasional guilt is an understatement. It is a toxic, senseless and useless emotion and I know it, but still, I have my moments of wishing things were different, wishing that I could control the situation and making myself wrong because I can’t.

Having said all of that, I need to make it clear that my mother is in a fine facility and she receives excellent care. Even she understands that she would not have lived long had she remained at home. My mother appears to be mostly happy and content and has enjoyed the last three years of her life more than any time since she became wheel chair bound. These are my emotions and my perceptions about the aging process of my mother, not hers.

I think that somewhere, all wrapped up in my guilt response, lies fear, anxiety, loss, helplessness and dread. I fear my own mortality, I am anxious about my future, I mourn the loss of my mother, I feel helpless to change the situation and helpless because, I too, may very well follow in her footsteps and I experience the sense of dread that this brings with it.

I have self-righteously proclaimed that I would rather die than be in my mother’s situation. I have stood firm in my conviction, however unexpressed, that her life serves no purpose, that I can sugar coat it all I we want, but ultimately the elderly are warehoused and waiting to die. From my own egoic perspective, this is mostly true in general, regardless how humanely the elderly are cared for.

As I process all of this information and emotion, it occurs to me that my mother does more than wait to die. She lives on gracefully and graciously so that I can learn a few lessons. The first lesson she has taught me is that from cradle to grave there really is a separation of the personality we adopt and who we really are. To watch her personality ebb and flow like one long tide has offered me a rare opportunity to consider what really matters in life. I’ve been able to witness first hand what remains and what fades away as she is less and less affected by her environment and more and more by her mind.  I’ve seen both the question and the answer around what really composes reality. Another lesson I have learned from my mother’s aging process is that acceptance is key, resistance to what is remains fruitless and none of us can truly know what the next moment holds for us.

In my self-righteousness, I judged my mother’s life to be unworthy of living. From the place of an open heart and mind, I can see that, perhaps, the last days, months and years of our lives are not lived for what we can receive and experience, but rather what we can give and leave behind.

From that perspective, I would be willing to be in my mother’s situation if that is what it took for my daughters and others to learn a little more about the power of their lives. I believe that each one of us is on a unique journey and part of that journey is to learn to give and receive with love. As a mother, I have said more than once that I would die for my children, but suddenly the question has become, am I willing to live for them?

That’s the lesson of Mamma Mia.

I was personally introduced to the concepts of mental mastery in the 1960s when my mother brought home the book, Cyco-psybernetics, by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. This book is still in print today, but has been added to with the aid of a personal friend of Dr. Maltz’ who worked with him while he was still alive. A quick view of the web site reveals that the concepts and names have been sold to some new guru type who dresses in what appears to be silk pajamas (actually Eastern garb because he is a martial arts champion). The information is still there but it has to be excavated from all the flashing bright red and blue text and pop-up windows that want to capture your email address and screams out, “But wait! There’s more!”

In the original book, Maltz, a plastic surgeon, develops his theory of mental mastery after noticing no change in his patients even after they had their offending physical features, that was the cause of their unhappiness, corrected. Their minds about who they were in the world and what was possible for them remain unchanged at some basic level. He decuced that transformation is possible only within the mind.

When I read the book, as a child, it made perfect sense to me. I somehow knew innately that I, alone, had the power to create my life and that I was no one’s victim. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had plenty of “poor me” moments along the way, but with the mental training I learned early in life, I have never had to be stuck there for very long. I am definitely a glass-is-half-full kind of girl, and I’m glad of it, but I never forget that it is always a choice I make.

There really are no limits to what the average person can achieve once the concepts of mind mastery are fully understood. And, I’m not saying it’s because of some mumbo-jumbo wishful thinking. I believe it is because when we take responsibility for our thoughts, our emotions, our dreams and our goals, we create a direct and focused way of being in the world. We are less controlled by fear and more compelled by faith. We take more actions and we achieve more of what we want.

And there’s another significant component of mind mastery: be open to everything and attached to nothing. We can move forward with clear focus toward what we want to achieve, but still remain open to the possibilities that spring up around us along the way. Sometimes these possibilities would not have come to us any other way than when we were on a path toward some goal. Being open to other opportunities is a powerful way to change your mind and your life.

Being attached to nothing, goes right along side being open. Being open means not being attached to any particular outcome. Stephen Covey says to “begin with the end in mind,” and I think that’s a great concept, but I offer one caveat, don’t be rigid about what the end might look like. When we establish a rigid idea of how an outcome will look, we actually limit all other possibilities, not because they aren’t available, but because we don’t see them. They are not what we are looking for, so they pass us by. Being unattached to the outcome opens an entire new realm of potential possibilities for us.

For Example, I decided I wanted to leave the corporate world and educate myself for a new career. I did this by going through coaches training. I was paired up with another student from Guatemala for training and integration of the coaching principles for an entire semester. This meant we had to work together live via Skype twice a week. As the training went on, I was assigned other partners for each new semester. I had a vision of what my coaching business would look like and worked toward that goal, but I never thought about exactly how it would evolve over time. I did the work to prepare, but I was not attached to the outcome.

Good thing, too, because in my small mind I could not think BIG enough! If it had been up to me, I would have created something small, but because I opened up to all possibilities, my friend from Guatemala is now my business partner and we are bringing our particular style of coaching together to coach corporate executives in Guatemala City. I would not have even known to put such an idea on my radar if I thought I knew what was possible for me around coaching.

There is so much potential available to each of us, but it requires the faith to admit the fact that we just don’t know what the future hods for us. We have to gather the courage that comes from mind mastery to take the leap of faith, understanding the the end is not the point. It is the beautiful journey that is worthy of our faith.