Maria Khalife: My Life is My Message

Maria Khalife is an author, coach, inspirational producer and host of TV and radio programs.

Maria Khalife is a renown, international businesswoman. Beginning in the hospitality industry, with a strong passion for business development, Khalifé developed the first and only Arabic cooking magazine in the Middle East. The Soufra Daimeh Magazine was followed by an extremely popular television show of the same name. Her passion for food and her experience in the media field led her to develop and win international claim for over 70 cookbooks. Two of them – Middle Eastern Cookbook & The Mezze Cookbook have won many awards for their sumptuous and delicious recipes and the beautiful artwork inside each of them.

Positioning herself as Lebanon’s Paradigm Shift Visionary to create peace, strength, and prosperity for citizens in the country to which she was born, and then to augment the same mission in the next country, and the next, Khalifé is currently participating internationally in these laudable efforts.

The Story of Maria Khalife

Life is a glorious, entrancing mystery to be solved and the path it weaves has long fascinated me. I am a question-asker, a prober for Truth. This tendency to ask questions stirs things up in me and in the others, I ask, and I see the whole process as good, true, and essential for individual unfoldment.

Your life and my life have its hills and its valleys. When I’m in the valley, I long for the hilltop. When I’m on the hilltop in full sunlight, I slide back into the valley. We’ve been promised that “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain,” so my observation from either valley or hilltop feels justified.

When I’ve observed individuals making it through difficult situations where there appear lots of hills and valleys, something inside my heart of hearts rejoices, and never did it beat so strongly as when I discovered Mohandas Gandhi.

Gandhi’s life was his message. His beginning was inauspicious. He was a somewhat shy young lad, a trait that eventually caused his career as an attorney to fail. He was raised in the Indian religion of Jain that advocates non-violence towards all, working toward divine consciousness and liberation, conquering inner enemies, and achieving the state of Supreme Being. It’s quite a goal to achieve in one’s lifetime, and his accomplishment became the driving force for motivating me along the same lines.

His behaviors sang to my heart as Most Real, Most Honest, and Most Truthful. His standards I made my own. I wanted my life to be a living message to those around me.

Gandhi used his life experiences to create his famous Satyagraha (devotion to the truth), or non-violent protest which eventually led to India’s independence from foreign domination. These were small kernels of truth that bore an enormous output.

Why did this resonate so with me? I was born in Lebanon into a country during a time that was experiencing tourism and prosperity, economically strong and stable. To make a politically complex story simple, civil war erupted into my young life. It was terrifyingly frenetic, and my middle years were filled with fear and terror all around me. Hundreds of Lebanese towns and villages were bombed for a long series of years, culminating in Lebanon’s own violent implosion and civil war.

When you have a taste of peace, war simply will not do. When you have experienced that much destruction, violence, pain, suffering and injustice, early in your life, your memory is seriously impacted. I felt so deeply saddened about the wartime I lived through as a young girl. I frequently felt terrified, sad and vulnerable, and I wanted to change all of that for all the children and their parents who followed me.

The Lebanese civil war lasted from 1975 until 1990. Those years will always hold a tinge of sad injustice in my mind. I am eternally grateful that I survived it because of my intrinsically positive outlook and had become, by then, a young mother with hopes and dreams for her son, her life, her family and her business. Holding to Gandhi’s platform of non-cooperation, non-violence, and peacefulness, I adopted more of the details of his frame of mind and turned my back on the civil unrest in my country when I began to build my own success out of the rubble. I was determined to live a life of virtue – to lead by example so that my own life would be my message as was his.

Quietly but surely, I was educated and began to use my education to move in the direction of peace, success and happiness in my country of birth in order to replace my early childhood unfair, violent, and unjust memories with something much improved.

Gandhi’s life courses through my thoughts like a passionate dream that motivates me to take the next step for my own individual unfoldment. His example leads me to “walk toward any roar” that shows up. I never cease to be amazed at how many roaring fears are just pussy cat meows once I walk through them. Thank you, Mahatma. My life is my message.

I know that complete success and gratifying fulfillment is possible in this life if you keep taking that one, next, stately step. The way out of sadness, grief, injustice, unrest and a myriad of negative experiences is to just take one small step forward, and then the next one, and the next one. If you read Gandhi’s story, you’ll see it is peppered with both successes and failures. The failures always surprise me, because I see him as such a grand success. I guess we’re all like that a bit, don’t you think? I’ve tried to accomplish lots of things with some failures and some successes. Again, my life is my message.

Once my career in the hospitality and culinary world had been established www.SoufraDaimeh.com, I found myself drawn to the self-improvement movement and began to educate myself there. This has been a thrilling, difficult, and demanding path.

Because of this – shall we say – left-handed turn in my life, you find me where I am today: the Founder of Change Coaching Institute and the leader of Be the Change Coaching Training. It’s set up in the model of Gandhi, my hero: “Be the Change you wish to see in the world.” I work continuously to make my life my message and my graduate students are a positive example of how Being the Change revolutionizes one’s life.

When you work on your own life’s unfoldment, and you discover something wonderful that works, due to your intrinsic nature of goodness and truth, you feel motivated to tell someone else the good that you’ve discovered. I am the same as you. I want my country – and the surrounding countries of the Middle East – to enjoy peace, the peace that is inside my own heart. If you’d like to be a part of my “bringing peace to the Middle East team,” you can take the Peace Vow here.

What has gone on for centuries in our country is nothing more than a war of ideas. It will only be won by the changing of ideas, one individual at a time. I founded the Change Coaching Institute to disseminate a new mindset, a new way of thinking, a new revolution. This revolution will be hard fought and won within each individual and not on a battlefield, at the end of a gun, or under a bombed-out home or car. This revolution is just as challenging, just as frightening, and just as demanding as the demands of war.

Mark Reinfeld – Vegan Fusion

I know this because I’m living this inner revolution, just as I lived through the demands of war. I know that I am a survivor. I am asking you to understand a bit more about external war vs. war in your own mental environment because then you can take what you learn within yourself and win the war that is going on inside yourself. You can destroy the less-than feelings: the sadness, the grief, the shock, the sense of injustice, and then your life will become the message to those in your experience and it will spread out to many others.

During war, a number of driving principles are at work to make the war successful. I share them with you in order to bring objectivity to something that was very subjective in my own experience and I’m confident in yours as well. I know that you have all had experiences that could become stories in a book about these principles. I apologize for stirring this up inside of you, but I confidently believe that if you can become more objective about it, you will find some peaceful resolution, and that is my fondest wish for you. I also know that letting those old memories stay inside uncorrected serves nothing good.

Gandhi said: “A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.” Let’s do that!

My life has been lived to embody his dream that I have made my own. If it’s your calling, I wish you patient perseverance, assiduous effort, and the success that will follow. Take it from me: crafting a life that serves as an example is worth every effort that goes into it.

I am alive. Therefore, I am Life Itself, because it’s only Life can live. I believe this is true of you as well. Each feels the Law of Life working within us; it is urging us upward and on. As we are led by the spirit of light into more and more truth, our vision broadens, and we come into a clearer realization of what it means to live truth as our greatest teachers have. There is great comfort and joy in knowing that we, too, share in the process of resurrection, and are capable of attaining to the glory of a perfected understanding.

The Principles Behind Waging War	How The Principle Works During Wartime	How The Principle Works In Your Mentality
Confusion	Make it so that those warred upon don’t know which way to turn	Mental confusion leaves you uncertain about your Self and your decision-making ability
Demoralization	Make it so that those warred upon do not want to fight	You are too discouraged to take action to move forward
Disabling	Remove capability from those warred upon	You feel incapable of solving your own problems
Discipline	Make sure all troops are trained and will obey	Without order inside your mind, you cannot exert your authority
Division	Divide those warred upon and diminish their strength to conquer	Kill single-mindedness through lack of focus and no results happen
Distraction	Fight on many fronts to make them look in all directions at once	If disrupted or diverted, you become confused and cannot take action
Fear	Make it so that those being fought do not want to fight with you	When frightened, you worry, are concerned, live in terror. You cannot assert for yourself when afraid.
Generosity	Be kind to those being warred upon so that they are kind in return	Excessive kindness to others will divert you from your own life goals
Intelligence	Whoever has the greatest understanding will win the war	Whoever has the greatest understanding will succeed in life
Overwhelm	Show and use the greatest amount of force	Feeling engulfed or crushed by outside influences causes withdrawal, hiding, and can lead to suicide
Provocation	Provoke them to anger. They will become impetuous and unwise.	If others can find where you park your goat, they will come and get it frequently. If you are centered in your Self, they can never goad or irritate you.
Sacrifice	Spend any amount to succeed	How much of yourself are you willing to commit to success?
Seamlessness	Show no areas of weakness. Show only strength	Show no areas of weakness. Show only strength. These words work for both war and inside you equally.
Speed	Be quicker than those being fought are. React quickly.	If you react quickly to whatever appears to be handled in your life, you will never have unaddressed issues and you will escalate success.