SCENE Miami

You’ll never move forward until you take a step away from the past

Let me give you a New Year message: Believe in yourself, because no one ever achieved anything significant without believing in himself and no one ever will! Believe in yourself powerfully, especially when there is no reason left to believe in yourself because the ultimate bottom is the best place to start a big rise!

May the New Year bring you new grace, new gladness and new glory

Any new beginning is forged from the shards of the past, not from the abandonment of the past Maybe it’s an issue of being unable or unwilling to realize that we can actually impact things sufficiently to change things, rather than seeing ourselves as being exiled to some distant side line of life where we can do nothing more than sheepishly root for a life that’s far too far away to touch

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes Life has no remote , so wake up and change it

In this new year, may you have a deep understanding of your true value and worth, an absolute faith in your unlimited potential, peace of mind in the midst of uncertainty, the confidence to let go when you need to, acceptance to replace your resistance, gratitude to open your heart, the strength to meet your challenges, great love to replace your fear, forgiveness and compassion for those who offend you, clear sight to see your best and true path, hope to dispel obscurity, the conviction to make your dreams come true, meaningful and rewarding synchronicities, dear friends who truly know and love you, a childlike trust in the benevolence of the universe, the humility to remain teachable, the wisdom to fully embrace your life exactly as it is, the understanding that every soul has its own course to follow, the discernment to recognize your own unique inner voice of truth, and the courage to learn to be still

I feel sorry for people who maintain relationships and friendships detrimental to their mental health. Everyone is guilty of it at one time or another- but the idea is to strive to be your best; right? So, meanwhile why are so many people faking it? Security? Fear of loneliness? Fears of independence? Fears of being self ? Or just the idea that you can make someone change?

Regardless of the justifications you give & treat yourself to I hope all of you - "New Year -New Me Types" strive for self care , honest and pure friendships and relationships based of love- and not based off the fake realities of your mind. These delusions of what you hope for instead of what's there, where you and your puppet show master focus more on everyone else and less on self. To change the world you must start within. But you must first Be Honest with yourself.

My new year started a few months ago-- and it was the best choice I ever made- and I hope your recreations are progressive and successful in The New Year Let the dawn of the New Year’s first day be the beginning of a new era with an invisible Almighty’s blessings showered on everyone to be always true to their own first version

Every tomorrow is an outcome of what I do today, and the beauty of it all is that today is happening all the time On Behalf Of The Entire Team At SCENE Chicago I Wish You All A Happy New Year!!!

DL Banks Founder SCENE Chicago

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves,

“Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

True Matter

Growth is often the parent or the child of pain.

Maturity is when your world opens up and you realize that you are not the center of it. We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations. Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see. Man’s growth is held back by his surrender to other people’s expectation that he remain the person he was when they met him. Most adults are adults all over except between their ears. Don't allow others to direct your ethical resolutions, rather navigate with your own moral compass so you can see the beacon of your own conscious.

Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts; most especially, the ability, despite our grief and losses, to courageously inhabit the past the present and the future all at once. You stop being a child when you realize the world isn't here to cater to your wants and needs.

Cynicism is the dark side of maturity. As you travel the journey of life, you just wish it was easy to appreciate relationships before it ends rather than worrying about when they will. We often betray our arrogance or immaturity by asserting that we will never do something bad that we are capable of doing. It’s never what stands around us. Rather, it’s always what resides within us. People's sense of self worth is pivotal to their ability to look clearly at the hurt they've caused. The more solid one's sense of self regard, the more likely that that person can feel empathy and compassion for the hurt party, and apologize from an authentic center. It takes immaturity to be hurt by the fact that someone does not trust you. The mature person searches for solutions to the problems that the immature person just complains about. Arrogance is full with perception of perfection, while maturity always has room for understanding and improvement.

Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see. I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them. The great measure of human maturation is the increasing understanding that we move through life in the blink of an eye; that we are not long with the privilege of having eyes to see, ears to hear, a voice with which to speak and arms to put round a loved one; that we are simply passing through. The pursuit of happiness is one of the most common symptoms of intellectual immaturity. We do not mature with age. We mature with the setbacks that we face in life. If by growing up you mean allowing the adult within me to abandon the child within me, I have no interest in such a horrid proposition. If instead you mean to let each enhance the other at the exclusion of neither, I have every interest.

If you erased your past mistakes, you could purge your regrets with them, but you’d also wipe any lessons learned and any subsequent maturity gained. Don’t regret the minefields you stepped into, just try and learn not to step into the same one twice. Finding yourself takes concentrating the Mind and freeing the Soul. Finding what is takes freeing the Mind and concentrating the Soul. Growing up is a hard business, and it is a heart business. The true indicator that I love myself is that I choose to love others above myself. If I rise above what people do to me and consistently strive to be the ‘bigger man’ despite the cost to me, I will never become what I dislike in others.

Trials don't come to take what you have, they come to supply you with what you lack.

If life is the greatest gift of all then death is its most grateful recipient.

Old words are reborn with new faces. We all want to break our orbits, float like a satellite gone wild in space, run the risk of disintegration. We all want to take our lives in our own hands and hurl them out among the stars. Change is the end of something you know and the beginning of something else that you don't know. Something new that holds opportunities. That's how things are these days: everything must move aside to make room for the new, all the time. Whether you are continuing along the same path or at the beginning of something new, you can always start afresh in your mind, heart, openness and attitude. Creativity isn’t finding something new. It is rearranging what you already know into a new mold

Old formulas don’t give new solutions.Everyone has that moment I think, the moment when something so momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there. Don't keep forever on the public road, going only where others have gone. People tend to resist a change into something new and different. But after it's succeeded, they easily say that the change is a must. Every new moment holds a greater potential than the last. Explore it. Living in new shapes, reshapes our thinking.

There was rarely an obvious branching point in a person's life. People changed slowly, over time. You didn't take one step, then find yourself in a completely new location. You first took a little step off the path to avoid some rocks. For a while, you walked alongside the path, but then you wandered out a little way to step on softer soil. Then you stopped paying attention as you drifted farther and farther away. Finally, wondering why the signs on the roadway hadn't led you better. The old resists the new one. Change hurts is the reason. Nothing new or innovative is created without a stretch of the imagination. Reach your goals by reaching for the sky with some brain stretches of the imagination every day. The darkness that follows a sunset is never so dark that it can change the inevitability of a sunrise.

The depth of life is found in the breadth of living. Once you reach deeper and deeper into your reality, you approach closer and closer its surreal essence. I wonder the world desperate to find the edge of myself.Existence is an art.By expanding your views, you expand your reality. Sometimes you look around the world, to see the dazzling walls and showering fountains of it, and feel like that today is the end and beginning at the same time. That's the moment you discover something new of yourself. That's love, cause and life. Just please understand that everyone is going through a rough time as well. Even if they are hiding behind money or a simple smile. We are all continuously stumbling as we go about our lives. If we had perfect lives we'd all be perfect people. Only thing we can learn to do is endure or we will not be happy and happiness is the closest thing to perfect.

Your ideas have legs and just as they run through your head, they could be running through someone else's head and it's just a matter of who gets to the finish line first. Nothing is new under the sun so act on your ideas. You will never get to a new place by walking an old path.

It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy.