So Much Happier Blog
Where to Start?
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
In last week’s blog, I wrote about how during these strange times, you may be able to find space for some activities that will support your renewal even during all the uncertainty. You may be the only thing you have the power to change right now, but changing yourself can be very powerful—it can initiate change that ripples out and affects everything and everyone around you. If you’d like to do this, you may be wondering how best to figure out what to work on. Most of us have lots of emotions, thoughts, and beliefs left over from previous life events that could be benefitted by Tapping, so how do you know what you should work on today? As long as you don’t choose anything that seems too big or scary, there’s really no wrong answer, but here are a few ways you can land on something that will feel fulfilling to make some progress on right away:
Ask yourself what has been bothering you lately. If we give ourselves a moment, most of us can pretty easily rattle off the things we’re worried, scared, annoyed, angry, or frustrated about at any given time. This does fluctuate, sometimes based on identifiable triggers, and sometimes in ways that are more unconscious and mysterious. Your answer today may be quite different than it was last week. If it’s one big thing, you can Tap on that. If it’s a lot of things, you might want to try the Tap and Rant technique, in which you just Tap through all the points and just vent all of it and how you feel about it.
If you’re focusing on one thing, you can just notice the emotion that bothers you and how it affects your body as you Tap, being as specific as you can about all the sensations you feel. As you Tap, the intensity should come down. You may need to be patient depending on how intense it is, and do multiple rounds of Tapping to get results.
You can also work through an event using the Tell the Story technique, in which you narrate the story of something unpleasant that happened, starting from a neutral place before anything really bothered you, and as soon as you feel any emotion or physical discomfort whatsoever, you pause telling the story and Tap. If you can reduce those feelings to a low number (two or lower on a zero-to-ten scale), then you can resume telling the story and pause to Tap whenever you start to feel anything again at a later point in the story. Once you can tell the story start to finish without feeling much of anything, you’re done with that event!
You can simply scan your body for any discomfort. If you find anything that stands out, you can try Tapping as you voice the sensations. Often what happens as you do this is that the sensation will move and change. After each Tapping round, you can reassess and notice what you feel now. This is called the “Chasing the Pain” technique, and it’s considered one of the Gentle Techniques in EFT. You don’t have to know why you’re feeling the sensation, you just Tap and describe it and how it transforms until hopefully you no longer feel discomfort. How this can be pretty surprising and defy all logic, but often it really helps.
You can also use the Personal Peace Procedure, in which you make notes on a whole bunch of things that bother you, and just pick one each time you Tap to work on. Over time, you can work through them one by one, and you’ll find that even a few minutes a day helps you erase your emotional reactiveness to them and cross things off your list. Eventually you should notice that you feel better and have more energy. Some people like to brainstorm a long list, but that can be overwhelming. You might prefer to just make a short list, and then brainstorm a new one when you finish with those initial items. Trust me, there will always be more to work on!
Remember that as you go, it’s important to be honest about what you feel and not try to force it to change, particularly when it’s at the high end of the intensity scale. If you try to immediately talk yourself out of your feelings as you Tap so you can avoid them, you won’t get good results. It’s necessary to just admit to what’s true and let the Tapping organically change how you feel. Most of the time, it will start to do that naturally within a few rounds.
You may sometimes get stuck at a plateau with something you’re working on. If the intensity came down at all, feel free to call this a win and give yourself a break. You can always come back to it later for another attempt, and sometimes your system needs time to adjust and reveal all the benefits you created.
You may also find that if you’ve worked on something multiple times and you’re not getting anywhere, it’s time for some help. Some things are just tricky to work on, and getting an outside perspective from a practitioner can help you solve the mystery of what’s going on with the right questions and the use of some more advanced techniques.
I hope this helps you venture into more frequent Tapping that will help you survive and thrive in challenging times. What’s better than something you can do anytime, for free, that feels good and supports your short- and long-term balance? Not much in my book!
Buckle Down or Sound Off?
“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.”
One of the hardest balances to get right is the one between self-control/discipline and self-expression/creation. Both are powerful and necessary components of a happy, healthy life, but the balance for each person, as well as each moment, will be unique. Finding it requires constant observation, sensitivity, and adjustment as well as trial and error. Much can go wrong here, but harness both forces to your advantage, and everything you want will be within easier reach.
Self-control, the masculine energy-aligned side of this dichotomy, requires us to rein in impulse, breathe, and think twice before taking action. It also requires experiencing self-imposed discomfort in order to create long-term results, even when paying into a goal is the last thing we would prefer to do.
True self-expression, discipline’s opposite, requires the clarity of knowing who we are and what we have to give, and the courage to bring our unique message out into the world through word and action.
A successful, joyful life requires both the ability to build and apply our skills patiently over time, excluding distractions, AND the ability to exemplify our truth without distortion. Yet, how do we know when it’s time to express and create versus when it’s time to be patient, practice, and wait? This is something only you can answer, based on your goals and abilities, frustrating as that may seem. There are guidelines you can follow to assist you in making these decisions, though. Here are some considerations that may help you along the way as you constantly surf this balance:
Have you been procrastinating on something you know needs doing for you to reach your goals? It’s probably time for some discipline. Mark some time out on your calendar at your most productive time of day, get buy-in from anyone whose support you need, and then look for little ways to make your task fun. You don’t have to be all serious about your productive time. Can you play some fun music, take dance breaks, or plan a little celebration when your task is done?
Are you finding yourself bored and demoralized? It’s probably time for some self-expression. Ask yourself what you’d do if you had no time or money limitations, and see what does appeal to you. Maybe that’s just a day off for mental health, a leisurely meetup with friends, or maybe some time for a creative hobby, time outdoors, or a physical activity you enjoy that will get your blood and endorphins pumping. Whatever says “playtime” to you is where you’re headed
If your goals involve making something out of a fun or creative pursuit, you’ll need to make space for your work, and add the discipline to keep doing so, aa well as using that space and time well
If your effort will involve the discipline of long bouts of concentration, you’ll be better able to sustain them over time if you add in moments of self-expression time, like writing in a journal or talking to friends about your successes and challenges, even if these moments are not strictly necessary to your project
These are just a few quick thoughts about diagnosing what’s needed at any given moment, but once you start thinking about this balance, it will be easier to notice when it’s off kilter. As humans, we’re both social and growth oriented. If you ignore either dynamic, you’ll start to feel out of balance, frustrated, or listless. Hopefully this has given you a few ideas about how to break out of any ruts you’ve been finding yourself in so you can analyze your needs and move forward with more clarity and enthusiasm.
The Limits of Logic
“If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.”
I talk a lot about emotions in these blogs (mostly because they constitute a maligned and often forcibly ignored area of human functioning), but since there’s a highly symbiotic relationship between thoughts and emotions, it’s important to note the role of the mind in working on emotions. I remember the first time I encountered the assertion that thoughts come before and cause emotions. It was an intriguing idea, and one that I have found to be mostly true in practice.
It’s not always this simple—for example, when you lose a loved one, what causes pain is mostly the thought of separation from that person, and possibly thoughts about what seems left undone between you, but there can be a very physical component. Physical touch creates soothing, “happy” chemicals to be produced in the body. If this was someone you lived in close proximity with, the loss of daily physical touch as well as the ease of access to a supportive relationship can also be powerful factors in how you feel.
Even so, the mind does have a great deal of useful power that can be harnessed when your goal is to clear old emotions from your system and stop generating so many of the “difficult” emotions that result from our minds engaging in negative thought loops. For instance, if you decide to watch for and consciously stop yourself from indulging when you notice that you’re harping on negative, destructive, or hostile thoughts, you’ll notice two things: One, that this is way harder than you thought it would be, and two, that when you do this throughout the day, you do actually feel better and have more energy.
Note that the goal is not to stop feeling emotions—they serve useful purposes, the most obvious of which is to jolt us, in a way that’s difficult to ignore, into noticing when a situation needs our attention. When anger rises in response to a situation, this generally tells us that we perceive an injustice or threat here that we need to get ready for or find a way to right once it has occurred. We may need to apply strategy, communication skills that need to be practiced, and set boundaries or enforce them. This is another place where the mind can kick in and help. Its job is not to “silence” the emotion, but to assist in the creation of a strategy once you’ve understood what the emotion has to say. The mind can remember past strategies that worked for you and others, as well as the Tapping techniques that you can use to deescalate your emotional responses once you no longer need them as signposts!
It is also not the mind’s job to “figure out” the emotions and what they mean. If you try to stand distant from your emotions and never engage them, your mind will try to solve everything on its own. This is partly because this is what it does—it always thinks it knows best—and partly because we’ve been taught to rely heavily on it. In most developed countries, the value of the mind is emphasized over all other parts of the self; mental intelligence and computations, logical, linear thinking, and precise memory are prized as the highest and best abilities to which humans should aspire. While the mind is immensely powerful, as my partner Andrew likes to put it, it’s not the right tool for every job! It can be great at processing a vast amount of information and distilling it down to a useful result using the filters you have in place. You may be aware of many of these filters, such as the values and beliefs you would use as examples of what’s important to you. There are also filters of which you are less aware—those held in place by your subconscious because of events and messages you don’t even remember. The mind uses its power within this framework. As with a computer, when you don’t like its results, you need to consider the underlying code, and the limitations of the system.
Only by entering the world of symbol and engaging with our emotions can we access their most comprehensive messages in ways that are suited to us. When we allow ourselves to actually feel our emotions, we can find connections to past events that would not have been evident through pure logic. We might suddenly perceive how a current situation feels the way it does because of something that happened in childhood that felt very similar. Realizing this gives us a chance to do the work of healing old trauma so that it doesn’t have to dictate our future. It allows us to think through the ways in which this situation, and we ourselves, are not the same as the past situation and person. The “past you” probably didn’t have the knowledge, experience, and resources at her fingertips that you now have.
Once you feel vividly what would need to change for you to handle your current situation better, the mind can help you hone the plan to create space for the healing you need, and fill in gaps in your resources. It helps to give it very specific tasks, though! Instead of asking an extremely open-ended question like, “How can I get what I want,” it may work better to add conditions, such as, “How can I get my money back from this chronic cheater in a way that will succeed but still allow me to feel good about myself and stay out of trouble with the law?” If you ask an open-ended question, the mind will usually spit out an answer very quickly, but it’s likely to be a bad solution that may leave you feeling judged and cornered. Even if you did add conditions, you may need to keep adding new ones when you see the flaws in what your mind initially suggests.
By identifying the valuable, unique function of the emotions, and knowing the limits of the mind in comprehending them and their non-linear messages, we clarify what is needed in each moment. Is this a time for checking in with the emotions about what is needed in a deep sense, or is this just a time to add conditions in order to refine a plan? Try to notice the difference this week and see if this clarifies your tasks.
I Can't Even
“You are responsible for the energy that you create for yourself, and you’re responsible for the energy that you bring to others.”
Often, the reasons we don’t make progress toward our biggest goals boil down to overwhelm. When life seems like it’s all just too much, we tend to shut down as soon as we think about taking action. When it seems like there are always way too many things to do in a finite number of hours each day, when change comes at you so fast it’s hard to prioritize strategically, when you’re under stress and chronically exhausted, you’re probably operating in a state of overwhelm. You feel stuck and confused, and optimism is hard to generate. This is not a powerful place from which to get things done.
Having just gone through a period of very low energy (I was scheduled to the max and got sick three times in short succession because I was determined to keep my commitments and rest later) I was reminded that the most basic level of countering overwhelm requires adequate physical energy. I remembered that the definition of energy in my high school biology class was paraphrased as “the ability to do work.” As a human, that ability requires other things too, but the physical energy part can’t be skipped. After my busy period wrapped up, it was a couple of weeks before I really felt alert, awake and alive again. In those weeks, I got tired early in the day, had less available willpower, greater challenges in finding my natural positivity and resourcefulness, and generally felt a total lack of desire to be productive. As soon as I had gotten some high-quality rest and allowed myself to recover, all of that started to improve. Moving my body helped to boost it all too, once I had the energy to do that. But it was so clear to me that without our own vital energy to pour into our projects, our goals are toast.
Nurturing your energy, therefore, should be primary in your quest for the things you want out of life! The pace of change is often far slower than we want it to be, so you probably won’t be able to create anything truly significant in a flame of short-term overwork. You’ll need to maintain a longer, slower burn in most cases. That means you’ll need to attend to these aspects of creating and maintaining adequate energy to do work:
Physical needs. Nutrition is key here. Sure, you can run your body on nothing but doughnuts, but this is going to short you of everything except a sugar high and subsequent crashes, and subsequent long-term breakdown. You need to work on gravitating to adequate amounts of lean proteins for your level of daily activity, plus plenty of veggies and some fruits throughout the day for all the rejuvenating micronutrients they offer. As much as possible of your diet should be certified organic so you’re not taking in unnecessary pesticides, hormones, and other toxins. If the multiplicity of conflicting views on what you should be eating has left you confused, consider consulting a nutritionist who shares your most important values around food. This can yield huge gains for decades to come.
Exercise. Your body wants and needs to move for optimal energy, balance, sleep, moods, and overall health. You don’t need to overdo it to see and feel results. Find something you don’t mind doing, even if you don’t love it—just do something.
Sleep. If you’re not getting enough, you’re trying to pursue excellence while mentally and physically impaired, and you’re leaving huge areas of your own capacity out of reach. Do what you can to set aside more time for sleep and solve problems you have with it. There may be periods of your life when you won’t get much sleep (such as the first year of a new child’s life), in which case you’ll need to minimize other goals to some extent if you want the process toward them to be something other than a disheartening struggle.
Emotional needs. It’s pretty hard to find the energy to knuckle down and get to work if you’re immobilized by fear, anxiety, grief, or other emotions. These are not just distractions, they’re sources of important information that can actually help you find a deeper sense of purpose and maintain a strong sense of self and what’s right for you. Tapping to the rescue! Of course there are other options that can be of help, but I’ve never found anything more efficient than EFT to help move, illuminate, and clear emotions.
Mental needs. The mind functions best in balance with all of your other parts, so bonus—your work in the other areas helps here too. We’re also learning that meditation helps the brain to function better. Being able to calm your mind gives it space to function without the unnecessary din of wild, reactive thinking. If sitting still and trying to get quiet internally feels too challenging, you can start with moving meditations like walking and repeating a rhythmic mantra, or spending some time every day consciously listening to and enjoying some soothing music. Tapping can help calm your thoughts too, and I consider it to be another type of moving meditation. Just sayin’.
Spiritual/Values-Based Needs. Humans are naturally social animals with a desire to participate in efforts larger than themselves. If you are not finding a way to do this in some way that feels appropriate and inspiring to you, then you’re disconnected from one of the greatest motivational engines you could ever harness. This doesn’t have to show up in a standard-looking religious or spiritual manner for you, but it does need to express what you consider to be your highest values, the best of who you are and want to be. As with exercise, baby steps are fine, just start something and see where the inspiration takes you.
Look, I know this is a lot to balance, and that’s why life is such a challenge. It’s ok to admit that! Working toward and constantly correcting this balance for yourself is a lifelong process of learning, and not something you ever achieve and put behind you. If you want to sustain the energy you’ll need to accomplish your goals, though, it’s the stuff of your daily assignment. Go forth and be energetic!
Your Line in the Sand
“Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.”
Most people know that it’s supposedly a good thing to set up appropriate boundaries in relationships, but setting them, and more importantly policing them, can seem like a bewildering process in which all targets are constantly moving. Becoming comfortable with communicating your boundaries ultimately takes self-knowledge and confidence, as well as discipline and faith. This can all seem like a pretty tall order! Since every one of us is different, we can learn from each other, but mastery only comes with practice in listening to our inner indicators on how much is too much of anything. Our emotions are a huge portion of these indicators, and we ignore them at our peril. If we don’t receive and act on their messages, relationships crumble. The pursuit of balance within relationships may be laborious work, but the creation of it is an essential element of any real peace and happiness.
A lot of people who are empathetic find it difficult to say no, either because they’re afraid of conflict, or because they just prefer to make others happy whenever possible because it’s more fulfilling—a noble goal. Of course, too much investment in making others happy (needing positive outcomes too much) usually ends up yielding annoyance in you and everyone around you. Neediness is not much fun to experience from any angle. If you need an outcome that is not within your control, your happiness will always be at the mercy of others and of fate, and you will always feel like a victim to some extent. On the other hand, when someone comes at you with a great deal of need about something, you might feel an overwhelming sense that they are trying to manipulate you, or that if you say no you’ll be proving that you’re a bad person…after all, this person NEEDS something you might be able to give or contribute to. The values fostered by one’s religious and cultural influences can amplify the discomfort by teaching us that we should always give to someone in need. Yet, obviously, one person can never be all things to all people, especially on a planet with billions of other people on it. It would be possible to very quickly over-give to the point of the annihilation of your energy and physical resources, which would not be at all helpful to anyone in the long run. This is what setting boundaries is all about.
I read an interesting article once about Mother Teresa that revealed her personal struggles. Despite being a massively inspiring presence on the world stage, demonstrating selfless love and compassion in the extreme for the poor and needy over a lifetime of religious service, and cutting a truly saintly figure, she apparently quietly battled depression for decades. Now, there can obviously be many contributing factors when someone is affected by clinical depression, including chemical issues that may be independent of the effects of mental, emotional, and spiritual life experiences. However, there is a growing understanding that, most often, there are strong experiential factors that go into creating someone’s depression. I personally don’t find it at all surprising that someone who worked tirelessly amid the most unfortunate people, in the most poverty-stricken areas, having taken personal vows of poverty and service, might have gotten pretty burned out emotionally from seeing all that suffering. I have to wonder if she took breaks. I wonder if she had sympathetic friends to laugh with sometimes to keep from constantly and solely mourning over what she saw on a daily basis. I wonder if she sought the help she needed. Even someone saintly is still in a human body, having a human experience, and subject to human emotions that need to be managed.
Most of us are not so saintly. We’re just normal humans living our lives and trying to make something good come of them. I’m not saying that we can’t do great things, but first, I think we need to understand the importance of sustaining ourselves. We need to learn how to operate our bodies sensibly so that we have a chance at health and stable moods. We need to learn to observe and learn from our experiences so that we can gain enough maturity to go beyond merely surviving. We need to learn that both caring for ourselves and caring for others are necessary if we want to be powerful sources of good. And we need to learn that without bringing rejuvenating and joyful experiences into our everyday experience, we will quickly become depleted, desperate, and even dangerous individuals.
When you can successfully cultivate your own overall balance, then it becomes easier to understand how much you can give to others before you need to retreat and renew. It becomes easier to notice which kinds of service to others are so much fun that you can happily do them all day long, and which kinds you come to dread because your strengths and weaknesses make you unsuitable for them. From a place of balance, it’s easier to admit what kind of tool you are and where you can be of most use rather than trying to prove that you can do absolutely whatever is asked of you at all times. And it’s easier to notice when something is making you uncomfortable because it’s going against your most important personal values, which will drain you very quickly every time.
Here are some recommendations for growing your capacity to set and insist on the honoring of your personal boundaries:
Learn to pay close attention to your emotions. They are one of your best indicators of how much you can currently handle. You can practice stretching your comfort zone over time, but if you do too much too fast without building in recovery, you’re likely to fold.
Make working on the quality of your nutrition, sleep, and exercise a non-negotiable part of every day. No two days are the same, so you’ll always be adjusting, and there’s no need to be a perfectionist, just don’t ignore these basics.
If saying no is hard for you, practice, practice, practice. Start with strangers if that’s easier. When you can execute a simple, cheerful “No thank you” response to random requests at will (when appropriate), you can start replicating that in higher-stakes relationships through more practice.
When your “no” affects others, it will be appropriate to give a short explanation, compassionate to both yourself and the other, about why this is your answer. Still, firmness is your goal. Being honest about what you can actually handle will serve everyone better than your saying yes and then collapsing midstream.
Cultivate friends with whom you can discuss the confusing situations that arise in life. No one should have to go it alone, and seeking other viewpoints can often help us make far better decisions than we could have arrived at alone.
Keep in mind that in order to have the space to give what you most want to, you have to keep yourself from always being so full up that you just can’t take on one more opportunity, no matter how perfect a match it seems for you.
Know that while you must take responsibility for yourself and your own actions because you’re the only one who can, you can’t take responsibility for everyone and everything else. Not knowing your boundaries amounts to hubris. Everyone else has a part to play too, so let them, and encourage them to seek their own balance.
Celebrate often both what you are able to give to others, and the ways in which you give to yourself. Allow yourself time to rest and play, then do it all again.
Becoming Your Own Ultimate Pit Crew
“Genius is the ability to renew one’s emotions in daily experience.”
The world is filled with a whole lot of stuff that I bet you think is not ideal, to say the least. Things you can’t stand, things that make no sense, things that are unjust, stupid, and hurtful to you. How do I know? Because it’s the same for all of us. We live on a planet of incredible diversity, conflicting forces, and even chaos. The upside is that we have a lot of opportunity to experience an astonishing range of experiences. The downside is that many of those will not be pleasant.
One of the greatest challenges of coping with such variety and unpleasantness is in preserving your energy in the face of all the friction between you and the world around you. Experiencing continual conflict can be, and often is, exhausting for many of the people I work with. Feeling chronically depleted is demoralizing, and life can seem to devolve into nothing but a disappointing slog if we don’t find ways to preserve and rejuvenate our energy. We all want to feel alive, vital, and enthusiastic about life. How do we get there when we’re challenged so often?
Here are a few of my essential tips for preserving your vital life energy for the things and people you care about most:
Address your emotional realities before they snowball into giant, flashing, wailing signs that you need to pay attention. Suppressing emotion uses a ton of energy that is far better used elsewhere. Allow yourself to consider what that emotion is there to tell you, and then take steps to allow yourself to resolve the emotion for the time being (hint: Tap!) Note that this NOT the last time you’ll feel this emotion, because you will inevitable get off balance again! That’s life. But being able to calm yourself, get the message, and heal so you can move on is priceless. Finally, make new plans about changing the situation that gave rise to the emotion, or your reaction to it, in some way. This is how progress happens—through human beings exhibiting the courage to make new decisions and try new things.
Think about your thoughts, the stories you tell yourself, and start noticing the ways in which the ones you think most often aren’t serving you. You can change these. Perhaps not overnight, but more quickly than you might think once you decide to become aware of them and start working to consciously shift them. Our thoughts feed us constant, powerful messages about what’s possible for us. If you allow your stories to be of a negative and limiting variety, it will be difficult to find the energy to make good decisions and take effective action. Tapping can be a tremendous help here too in speeding the process of changing beliefs that have been created by your life experience.
Take care of your physical needs. Sleep, move your body, and keep working toward a more nutritious and less junk-foodie diet. There’s no way around these if you want sustained energy, vitality, and stable moods (which, all together, increase your capacity for achievement and living your greatness). Period.
Get clear on what’s important and most inspiring to you, and remind yourself of these priorities daily. If your life doesn’t feel meaningful, you’ll struggle with energy as surely as if you were sleeping and eating poorly. Humans are designed to express their talents and preferences in constructive ways. If you don’t, you won’t be able to muster enthusiasm for life.
Most of these actions don’t take a lot of time, just some thought and planning. You must carve out time for all of them regularly, though. As soon as you start dropping the ball on these, you’re starting a downward spiral that makes it extremely difficult to meet life’s many challenges with the grace under pressure that helps you preserve choices and create the best results. What we want is to be in a zone in which challenge doesn’t feel like a major assault, just the normal friction (from which you know how to recover) of living life in a world not entirely of your making. With some daily attention to these essentials, this is firmly within your grasp.
Keeping Hold of Your Heart
“The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.”
Despite the fact that this world gives us access to greater technological advances and opportunities for cooperation and success than ever before in known history, it's also true that it can be an incredibly hard place to live. We all have to keep so many plates spinning at all times, and we're often stretched very thin; so is everyone else. This plus an exploding world population, increased levels of pollution, lower-quality food than what was generally available a few generations ago, etc. etc., can make for a pressure cooker of an experience. Without a steady, committed daily practice of some sort of calming modality such as meditation, mindful breathing, prayer, gratitude journaling, or Tapping, you're likely to be building layers upon layers of stress into your mind and body that will add up to lots of unhappy, unhealthy days.
I'll just take this opportunity to remind you that physical exercise is also a key element in the construction of a life that works. It helps you naturally bust stress and feel happier, it helps your body's overall health in so many ways that you probably already know about, and it keeps you strong and limber so you can enjoy using your body all throughout your days. Sleep is also incredibly important. You know I'm going to keep reminding you about all these things! If you're not minding your body, mind, and spirit each day, you're not living your best life, and I want the absolute best for you. But more than all these, and less possible by far without them, we long for creativity—the creation of new ideas, solutions, and artistic expressions. We might want to create them or just observe and appreciate them, but either way they bring a great deal of zest to life that creates enthusiasm and energy. Therefore, whether you consider yourself a creative person or not, I urge you to find ways to bring more creativity into your routines.
If you're not currently in creation mode, get out there (or stay in!) and consume some creativity that others are offering for your enjoyment. Keep in mind, though, that when you do this, you go on a ride of sorts that someone else has designed. You have a great deal of choice in the kinds of experiences you can elect in this realm, so you should think and choose wisely. Decide what kind of ride would be most helpful to you at this moment. Do you want something thrilling and death-defying to wake you up and add some excitement to your day? Something sweet that will restore your faith in humanity? Something about people who have risen to challenge to become the best in themselves? Something that just makes you laugh until your belly hurts? I personally don't go after experiences based on horror, as I find these to be the opposite of energizing for me, but we're all different. Experiment to find the kinds of experiences you really enjoy riding along for, and then allow yourself to enjoy them regularly. These journeys can be musical, they can involve films or stand-up comedy, visual art, culinary adventures, documentaries, Ted talks or other educational lectures, books, whatever you'd like to try this week. But keeping new experiences rolling in helps keep you from becoming stale or retreating into a smaller life experience than you could be having. Why not avail yourself of everything you have access to?
I came across this list of films that might foster empathy, according to the author, which I found interesting. If there's a quality you're trying to build into a strength, consuming supportive creative products can be a part of your practice toward that end. You can also poll people around you with different tastes to find a list of potential ideas. Even just a few minutes per day spent appreciating the product of someone's creativity can give you a tremendous life and remind you of what's good when there's a whole lot of chaos and madness around you. Find something to sample this week, and feel free to comment with some of your favorites below!
Indulge a Little
“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.”
This is a holiday week in the U.S. and I want to keep it simple, so today I'll just offer a thought or two about the benefits of enjoying the good things in life. Small indulgences can be a part of living a healthy, balanced life and enjoying the ride; life is hard enough without denying ourselves things that bring us joy. This could include putting down the to-do list long enough to watch the sunset, or savoring a glass of wine here and there. It could mean carving out time to read the kind of book made for a hammock and a summer afternoon. In this spirit, I'd like to pass on some positive facts about about my favorite treat, dark chocolate (and of course there may be positive health-related aspects to whatever your own preferred version of indulgence may be, as many things that relieve stress can be considered healthy). This article lays out some of the known boons of small amounts of high-quality chocolate on our health. Here's another article you might find interesting if chocolate is your vice of choice. Keep in mind that you can find bars made with honey, stevia, and other more healthful sweeteners than sugar if that's your concern! Have a wonderful week and enjoy some small indulgence that you love and can enjoy in moderation.
Getting Sane about Emotions
“If you don’t think your anxiety, depression, sadness and stress impact your physical health, think again. All of these emotions trigger chemical reactions in your body, which can lead to inflammation and a weakened immune system.”
While I posted something else somewhat like this not long ago, I think it bears repeating that we've been a bit culturally mesmerized by the idea of quick, easy solutions to life problems that deserve our full respect and attention. When we're in any kind of pain, it's so tempting to just silence that discomfort with a pill, a quick fix, a distraction, or by compartmentalizing around the pain. The sensations can be so frightening, and our mental habits so reactive, that we can't handle considering our options long enough to find a possible long-term solution. (I'm not saying that finding short-term relief is a bad thing at all, but using it as a way to numb out warning signals is maybe not the smartest thing to do over the long term.)
And after all, in the absence of good alternatives, this habit makes complete sense. Pain is no fun at all! It feels bad, it drains our energy and will and enthusiasm, it drops a roadblock in front of everything we want to be doing with our time, and we are certainly not taught any practical tools for dealing with it. Instead, we're often fed the line that pain and discomfort are just what it is to be human. Once you've got them, you better get used to them because you're not getting any younger, and you should just stop being such a whiney little baby about it! This attitude is a product of millennia of generations who had extremely limited life expectancy and little access to information about health and healing. The body/mind/spirit can often be astonishingly resilient, but solving any problem takes energy. We have to be willing to invest it. We also have to be willing to stubbornly hold to the belief that there may be solutions out there, even if they don't immediately present themselves. That takes mental discipline, which also takes energy to build.
I find that on the subject of emotional pain, we have very little guidance available, perhaps because emotions don't lend themselves to neat and tidy scientific study. In this article, we have an examination of the most common approach to addressing depression, specifically in the West. Unfortunately that approach tends to leave out much consideration of context, and tries to make an excess of any emotional state about a purely mechanistic chemical process. As a life coach, I find this particularly frustrating, because I find that no part of our lives exists as separate from the rest, and nothing is ever this simple. We tend to have all the same challenges/misconceptions around the other big, unpleasant human emotional experiences, including sadness, grief/loss, anxiety, fear, and anger. None of these exists in a vacuum, and there's usually at least some experiential reason for feeling them. For some, these experiences become more intense, but we can all recognize them as familiar; while the human experience is broad, it's not unique in its sensations. We all have all the basic emotions in common, and they all tend to be produced out of similar experiences. In my Tapping work with groups, I find that this realization actually tends to be quite reassuring for people. We often think we're much more isolated in our pain than we are, but it turns out that even in a small group, there will inevitably be a lot of crossover regarding what's on our minds. With honesty and the support of others, we can find ways forward that are a relief.
I do understand that everyone is unique, and bodies can sometimes malfunction such that someone has a tendency that needs constant intervention. I also know that it can be uncanny how when when we improve life situations that cause misery, physical symptoms can sometimes dramatically improve. Even finding ways to just release some stress and feel a bit better about something unpleasant that hasn't changed at all can help the body to inch toward healing itself. I hope that the way emotional difficulties are dealt with in the future evolves to include a broader, more wholistic approach that allows people more latitude to access multiple approaches. If each person could customize an overall plan that helped her/him to feel more supported and understood, I think our results would be drastically better. My contribution to being the change I wish to see in the world in this area has had to do with seeking out modalities that can gently bend a person's future toward greater balance, and sharing those publicly as best I can. If you feel so moved, I hope you'll do the same. The realm of emotions is one in which we drastically need improvements to become available as evidenced by the number of people acting out their pain with varying degrees of violence toward others. If we can normalize even the desire for people to find better long-term solutions, and start getting information out there about good work that's being done on such things, that will be the beginning of positive change.
Sniff, Cough, Blech
“‘Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.”
No matter how well you take care of yourself, there will be times when you get sick and need to take some time to recover. Modern life is a complex, high-speed high-wire balancing act with a lot of moving parts. Think about it—if you're moving around at all during the day and eating food you haven't produced yourself, then you're constantly coming into contact with various microbes from far-flung locations and all manner of influences that are potentially challenging to your system. Everyone is trying to get our attention for one reason or another, not to mention influence our behavior. We are asked to be more and do more than ever before. We're completely out of touch with natural rhythms because of the 24/7 opportunities technology has produced. We live in a world of high demands and we don't get enough high-quality rest, nutrition, and exercise unless we're really prioritizing our own high functioning. For many reasons, most of us aren't. But even if we are, being human means that sometimes plans go awry.
Which leads me to my main point. Getting sick is not a failing. Sure, it may point out to you some of the ways in which you need to up your game in the arena of your own care and feeding, but it doesn't necessarily mean that everything is out of balance, or that you should have been able to avert this. Our bodies have natural defense systems that respond when they come into contact with invaders, building up immunity to those microbes in the future, but this takes time, and sometimes we experience symptoms until this work is complete. In this case, your body is doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
Sometimes, as our bodies balance with the cacophony of daily influences, a clearing out becomes necessary. Perhaps some substance has accrued to unsustainable levels in the body, and needs to be expelled. This is sort of like spring cleaning, and though I'm not a health specialist of any formal kind, from my own observation, I think this happens to all of us sometimes. Our bodies do their very best to maintain health no matter what we put them through, and they use various tools and options to do that.
When you feel under the weather, it's a fine time to consider what you might do better in supporting your health and balance from the outside, as well as how your own stress levels and mental and emotional discord may have gotten out of control. Stress is now widely understood to be a major risk factor in not just immunity to day-to-day threats like the common cold, but also in more serious health conditions across the board. Look first to the classic trifecta of sleep, exercise, and good nutrition. During times of high demand, you might also want to think about supplementing with herbs such as adaptogens, which help your body to keep returning to balance no matter in which direction you tend to get off track, whether too yin or too yang, "too much" or "too little." It's always best to consult with a professional before trying this, as herbs are powerful, and not generally a one-size-fits-all solution. I'm fortunate to have a close friend who is an accomplished herbalist, but you can probably find someone good locally by checking online reviews for your own and nearby communities. You should also talk to your main health practitioner so that everyone advising you knows what's going on.
To me, it's excellent common sense, now that we know the pervasive corosiveness of stress to our long-term health, to get serious about dealing with it—not just when sick, but on a daily basis. That's why I suggest having a daily practice that addresses this area of your life. Everyone knows that you can't just exercise one time and feel great forever. I'm telling you that you also need to think about what an "emotional gym membership" would look like. Some people get a lot of mileage out of pure expression—talking things out with friends, writing in a journal, creating artwork in any number of media. While I agree that all of those are wonderful outlets, for me, the practice of regularly using EFT has added an exponentially more powerful dimension to the mix. It allows for faster, more complete processing of thoughts and emotions, and facilitates amazing new understanding of self and others in a way that's easier, more enjoyable, and more natural than anything else I've found. Whatever you find appealing, choose to use it more often and you'll most likely find your ability to relax, renew, and heal improving over time. The goal is not a perfect body (impossible) but one that can bounce back from times of higher demand with some measure of grace. When you support it with what it needs, you make that more possible, more probable, with every helpful action. So what will you do this week to build a better set of resources for your body and your long-term health?
Weaving Progress
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
For most of us, the human experience is complicated; everyone I know has a love/hate relationship with life on this planet, in that we have things that we absolutely love to do, see, and enjoy…but we also have serious issues with some of the mechanics of how things and people here behave. It takes a lot of effort to just go about one’s daily routine and take care of the items necessary to stay alive, and it can be extremely challenging at times (if not all the time) to find the space and energy to work and play the way we’d like to. We’ve all had the experience of having things humming along in some semblance of balance, only to have several difficult things happen at once to break the rhythm and call us into a whole bunch of activity we weren’t expecting and didn’t want. Devices break down. People close to us have urgent needs, disappoint us, or even pass away. World events change the course of our lives in ways that are frustrating at best or catastrophic at worst. It’s a lot to balance, to say the least.
In order to carve out more of what makes all the effort seem worth it to you, there are things you can be doing along the way to make it easier to weather the next bout of challenge. While your attention is being taken up by handling a crisis, the best you’re probably going to be able to do is to practice what you’ve already begun to establish, so these are things to have an eye on when your life is not at its most demanding. They are worth working at as a long game, and let’s face it, if you’re alive, you’re never finished with these. All of the factors that make up your life continually change, and there will always be a new balance to create, but the more skill you can build in each area, the more grace you’ll be able to draw from when you’re called upon to dig deep. Here are the basic areas in which you might choose to focus in order to make progress when you have capacity:
Internal resources. This is the world of factors that are more within your control, and it encompasses the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual:
· The quality of the food you eat, the sleep you allow yourself, the exercise you get regularly
· How well you express and manage your emotions, including through the use of tools such as Tapping/EFT
· How well you manage the thoughts, relationships, and situations that give rise to those emotions
· Your mental habits and discipline, and practices like meditation or journaling in which you grow in your understanding of and ability to manage your mind
· Your general beliefs about yourself and the world
· Your spiritual beliefs and practices
External resources, and your ability to handle interacting with them while maintaining your own equilibrium. These are the factors that are not within your control:
· Basic physics, the intrinsic properties of the world around us
· The beliefs and actions of singular people
· The opportunities available to you at any given time, your positioning in relationship to others and the whole
· World events that are a product of mass movements—these by definition don’t start or end with one person
The areas in which you choose to grow will define your life in many ways. You might choose to focus on an area in which you feel least functional in order to limit the lows you will experience going forward in that area. You also might, as discussed in last week’s blog, focus on putting more energy into an area where you’re already skilled and passionate while finding ways to cooperate with others so that you don’t need to become expert in the areas that are hardest for you. When you read through the bullets above, which areas seem most appropriate for your next round of efforts? If you’ve read this far, you’re most likely someone who likes to keep improving yourself and your life, so giving this some thought will probably open up ideas about progress that would excite you and strengthen your ability to handle future challenge while maintaining better balance and more of a sense of ease.
Particularly if you’re someone who is sensitive to and aware of the people and events around you, I don’t think life as a human ever becomes easy. One of the things that can be counted on is that your life never turns out exactly the way you expected. And yet, this is part of what makes life thrilling—the element of surprise, the constant interweaving of an array of complex factors that promotes endless possibility. That will not change no matter how much we wish it to, so what can you do to appreciate the overall tapestry and the colors you’re weaving into the whole? What can you do to turn up your ability to savor your everyday experience of the process and the beauty it offers?
Method or Madness
“It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.”
It’s that time of year when people’s fancy turns to self-improvement. Everyone’s doing it! We’ve indulged, we’ve rested, and enthusiasm for a fresh start is rising! There’s nothing at all wrong with this—in fact it can make life fun to take part in seasonal and societal shifts as they happen—and joining with others can help to reinforce your own commitment to positive change. If you want to jump on this bandwagon, here are just a few thoughts to help you add checks and balances to your process (not just for politics, people!) so that your decisions really suit your needs and purposes:
· It seems that, in January, physical fitness goals dominate the day. While improving your physical health and fitness is always a worthy goal, and one that supports pretty much everything else you probably want to do and experience, adding an aggressive exercise regimen is not the best place to start for everyone. You may be tempted to think that you have to go whole hog or nothing, but this kind of thinking gets a lot of people injured before the month is out. That will throw a monkey wrench into your momentum for sure. Try to keep any schemes for physical exercise moderate for your current level of fitness so that you’re not adding unsustainable stress to your body, and so that you don’t get stopped short before you can begin to solidify healthy new habits. This is one of those areas in which you will never be finished. There’s no such thing as “done.“ So don’t freak out and overdo, but do plan activities that will qualify as your next phase of achievement.
· For that matter, try to keep any resolution for change to a moderate scheme. We’re often taught that in order to get anything worthwhile done, we need to decide what to accomplish and how, and then thoroughly ignore thoughts, feelings, and life circumstances that might make adhering to the plan difficult. This is the best thinking of two thousand years of male-energy-dominant thinking, and while it has its merits, it also exposes us to unnecessary likelihoods of stress, burnout, unhappiness that results from an unbalanced approach to life, and shame if we fail in a pursuit that was woefully unrealistic to begin with. I’m not saying that no one should take on big goals, but we need to make sure we’re thinking about fitting new items into the context of a whole life with multiple demands. We need to think about building in flexibility, and appropriate moments for reconsideration when circumstances change, so that we can stay in the game for the long haul as life throws distractions our way.
· Just because someone you know or read about is taking on something that sounds interesting or inspiring, that doesn’t mean you need to take on the same. Focus. Really think about what you feel called to learn and grow into this year. There is such a thing as right timing. Events and repetitive pain points in your life may be pointing to certain areas in which it would really behoove you to acquire new skills. Spend a few minutes noting whether there has been a recurring situation in your life lately that you could handle better if you just noticed and addressed your part in it. This might be a more appropriate focus for your energies than climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, or what have you.
· No one is in a better position than you to decide what’s the right next step for your goals and your life. Of course, it can be helpful to talk through decisions like this with someone supportive, but make sure you don’t turn to someone who has strong agendas of their own for you who might limit your sense of possibility. It’s fine to give important people in your life input on the choice and timing of your projects, but it helps to start with your own opinions about what would be ideal for you before beginning any negotiations of this kind. A great deal of your own power flows from following your heart about who you want to be and what you want to strive for in this life. Don’t abdicate your opportunity to get clear on your own desires and intuition about you.
I hope this helps you to make good decisions for the year ahead. Whatever you do or don’t decide to pursue in 2017, I wish you a happy, healthy year filled with blessings and challenges worthy of you.
It's a...Bunny Suit?
“Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.”
For the next few weeks, I plan to keep my posts on the shorter side because I know that most people who read my blog are probably very busy this month! This week, I’ll just write a few words about the dynamics of giving and receiving, since gifts are on many people’s minds at the moment.
Giving and receiving graciously are skills, arts, even, that have been prized in diverse cultures throughout history. The most respected people in any culture have tended to be those able to strike a good balance between the two. Giving in effective ways necessitates being in a position to give. This requires a person to care for herself enough to have more than is necessary, whether the giving involves material goods or just time, love, and energy. It also requires having the willingness to give, which is built on emotional, mental, and spiritual management of the self. If you are fearful for your own survival, whether or not those fears are founded, you will be unwilling to give; this may be an emotional problem. Failure to manage your fears has immobilized you. If you believe that others are selfish takers who will never give back to you, you may worry that giving anything will establish a pattern that will suck you dry; this can be a spiritual/philosophical issue. If you are not willing to look for the commonalities that bind us, and the good in human nature, you will never trust others, and will not be able to create deep connections in which you can give and receive in satisfying ways. If you are constantly keeping score of who has given what, this may be a mental/ego problem. If you think that giving must always be equal based on your own personal values, which are invisible to others unless you share them, then it’s easy to work yourself into a frenzy of resentment when people close to you are just doing the best they can with the information they have.
The ability and willingness to give is a deeply ingrained cultural imperative. On some level we know that someone who doesn’t give to others is dangerous; during the eons in which almost everyone lived in small tribes or villages, every person had to pull his weight in order for the group to have the best chances of survival in a hostile environment. If you were able but not willing to give, you might have been ostracized for your selfishness, which would have made it extremely difficult for you to remain alive at all. While modern life may not operate the same way, your life will still be more difficult if you don’t find a way to be seen as an equal member of any group to which you want to belong. If you cannot give in a balanced way, you yourself may become known as a mooch! This might not threaten your survival, but it surely will threaten the health of your relationships.
The willingness to receive is also of great importance to the health of your personal relationships. Receiving what others are trying to give to you from a good-hearted place shows them that you accept and appreciate them and their efforts. If you can’t, people will come to see you as snobby or downright cruel. We’ve all received gifts that don’t excite us, but without the ability to affirm the effort and care that went in the arrangement of the gift, you will alienate others by rudely dashing their hopes of pleasing you. The trick is to put aside expectations and to attempt to see what is offered to you as an expression of love, or the desire to be loved. The person giving deserves to be treated with respect and to receive your thanks, if only for the thought! We’ve all been given a gift at some point that seems ugly or even downright insulting, but the giver may have genuinely thought it was a good one! You may also have found that lapses in your own graciousness don’t look or feel good in the rear view mirror—I know I have, and I’ve wished I could take those moments back. You’re allowed to hint to those who don’t understand what you like, and become practiced in the art of re-gifting anything you don’t love to someone else or to charity, but keeping your reactions in check when receiving is an important life skill that is worth working on no matter what the skill of the givers in your sphere. Your graciousness will, over time, earn the respect of others and make you more comfortable in all situations.
So what does balanced giving and receiving look like? A gift can be anything that shows you thought of and about the needs and desires of another person. It can be remembering what they enjoy, attempting to offer comfort when it’s clearly needed, or connecting them with something that furthers a goal they’ve expressed. Being someone who takes others into account and tries to make their lives better is part of being a respected giver. Also, your ability to share what you have in material ways is part of the picture in that others do notice what you have versus what you give, and what that says about how you value them. Of course it’s also important not to over-give, because when you do, you’ll begin to resent others. That’s no good for anyone, and only you can be the barometer of your own capacities. Giving can be a wonderfully rewarding part of life. It should feel good. If it doesn’t, it may be because you’re feeling manipulated or not valuing yourself enough to keep your giving in balance. Balanced receiving means not always being the one giving more. Some people define themselves by their ability to give. That’s not healthy either, and denying others the ability to give to you will genuinely disappoint the good-hearted people in your life. Try to appreciate the circle of giving and receiving in your life as a whole. If it feels out of balance, you can work on that, but know that the receiving aspect may not always be satisfied by those you would like to provide it. You don’t get to decree what people give. That choice is up to them. But you do deserve to get what you need and desire from your relationships, so if you’re not getting it, you can work on making some new friends.
Are you someone who receives graciously? Do you give thoughtful gifts based on what the person you’re giving to actually wants and needs? What have you’re your favorite gifts to receive and why? Things to think about as you navigate this holiday season.
Walking the High Wire
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
With an estimated 7.4 billion people on the planet in 2016, it can seem as though there can be nothing new under the sun, and yet new discoveries are made every day. New songs are written, paintings made, books completed, gizmos prototyped, with every passing day. Humans are a busy lot! This is possible because genetically, there has never been anyone identical to you in history. We’re all intrinsically unique, and with so many moving parts, both concrete and intangible—hopes and desires, likes and dislikes, talents and challenges; physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual progress and happenings. Every day is a kaleidoscope of your interacting elements, which never cease to run through their individual cycles; yet those cycles are all timed differently, and rarely align in the same way because of the complexity of the model. To a certain extent, in trying to maintain our balance with all of our parts, we’re all trying to slog our way across a high wire bucking in a high wind.
One of the great challenges in life is that, because of our uniqueness, no one can create a formula for living that is perfect for more than one person. We can share our wins and losses with each other, and we can offer the wisdom we feel we’ve acquired, but sometimes others won’t even be able to hear the messages we’re sending let alone duplicate our successes and failures. We must all tinker with the models that have been passed down to us if our greatest possible success and happiness is what we’re after. And there’s a sort of catch-22 at play, in that we have to be in a reasonably balanced state in order to make good decisions for ourselves, but without making “good” decisions that suit our needs, it’s hard to find balance. We start by making decisions that others have told us are good, but whether they will suit our uniqueness and get us where we want to go is always the question.
When how we operate, or what we want, is sufficiently different from those around us, whether in one way or in many, we may feel particularly bewildered about what to do. Maintaining some semblance of balance is a lifelong endeavor, and there is no “done,” but it’s even harder when you’re young or when you’re striking out in new directions. Luckily, in this age of information, we have access to guidance from sources well outside our own communities, and that can be incredibly helpful in broadening our horizons. You still have to put advice into practice and try it out for yourself, and you need the patience to do this over time, as every day is different. For instance, sometimes your first attempt at something will be disastrous, but with practice you realize its merit. I once watched a fellow participant in a meditation class, a first-timer, have a full-on meltdown because she was so frightened by the prospect of confronting her internal world in silence. As soon as she tried to do it, she panicked and essentially ran screaming from the exercise. In this case, I don’t know whether she ever tried again, but I do know that many people who initially find meditation to be extremely challenging learn to love some form of it with experimentation and practice. And when I first tried EFT/Tapping, I was not even sure that I felt anything at all, but after several practice sessions, I became more and more astonished with its efficacy and usefulness. I just had to put it into practice and experiment with it for myself.
I wish I had all the answers and could make everything easier for everyone, but that’s a tall order! I’ll just have to offer some ideas here for constructing your own tool kit for navigating your own personal high wire:
· Start simply. Address your physical needs first: Eat the highest-quality food you can get your hands on, including plenty of vegetables and fruits grown with the fewest and least possible pesticides (poison to you and me); avoid refined sugars and other empty calories, in other words those foods lacking in nutrition; aim for 7+ hours of sleep per night, and try adjusting up and down to see what works best for you; get some form of exercise on a regular basis—find a way to move your body and sweat at least a little. These items form the basis of any life lived in some semblance of balance. You can’t skip them, nor can anyone who wants to remain alive in a physical body, so when you’re out of sorts, come back to these first, always.
· Ask yourself what your mental and emotional states are generally like, and spend some time noticing. Find daily practices that support healthy attitudes and emotional expression. I’ve written other blogs on these issues that you may want to check out, but in short, meditate, do affirmations about your values and your intentions, talk to supportive friends and family, write in a journal, read books about people who inspire you, use EFT or hypnosis recordings, attend meetings of like-minded others; adding a spiritual component to any of these is even better, whatever your tradition of choice might be.
· Take a look at the overall shape of your life. Are you doing work you like, are you making enough money to meet your needs, are your relationships supportive and satisfying, are there activities you look forward to experiencing when you wake up in the morning? When you answer no, think about baby steps you could take to move toward situations you’d like better. If you’re stuck, ask for help or find it in a library or online. Choose a small step to make and put your plan in motion. It’s ok if you can’t see the whole path to your destination. Just do something. Every time you make an attempt, you learn and grow.
· Do you feel a sense of purpose in life? If not, it will be hard to stay engaged in life, let alone feel inspired; look for clues in the things you loved to do as a child, in the achievements you feel best about as you think back over your life, and in the kinds of things that move you deeply in movies and books. If you suddenly had all the money in the world, and you had a year off to rest and travel and regroup, what do you think you could do all day and not get tired of? (This can take some serious imagination if you’re someone who has lived with a lot of obligations or who is chronically exhausted, but it can also be a lot of fun, and is worth trying.) You can start with a very basic idea like wanting to “help people,” “motivate others,” or “clean up messes,” and then think about your favorite skills to use to see what might be up your alley. If you love to cook, you might find that helping others could combine with that so that you envision starting a catering company that donates a percentage of meals to those in need. If you feel satisfied by cleaning up messes, and your favorite skills are in information technology, you might be able to work as a consultant to people and companies who need to get organized in the digital space. This can take effort to think through, but having a purpose that feels important and expressive of who you are is an essential component in maintaining your energy levels and your commitment to persisting in the face of difficulty, which we all face every day!
Creating and maintaining good functional balance is never going to be easy, especially in today’s fast-paced world, but if you yearn for a better life, this is unavoidable work. If you can become fascinated with the process of learning about what you need and what is key for you, that is the best solution. If you make some noticeable progress in your overall balance, your success stories will likely drive you as you continue learning and experimenting with new ideas. No one knows you as well as you know you, so trust your hunches, and try not to freak out if something you try goes badly. After all, every day is different. If you try the same thing on a different day, you might find that you get a different result. Keep reminding yourself that this is work that feeds everything you’re able to do and become, and it’s worth a great deal of effort. Over time, your ability to maintain balance will build naturally if you keep at it. Confused? Go back to basics, and as you do this repeatedly, you’ll build helpful habits that make greater flexibility and creativity possible. Celebrate your successes, learn from both success and failure, and just keep inching along that wire.
Interview with The Feng Shui Guy
“Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.”
Ariel Joseph Towne, The Feng Shui Guy
Have you ever been curious about Feng Shui? You're in luck! I sat down with Ariel Joseph Towne, a.k.a. The Feng Shui Guy, to talk about this ancient art form: What it is, how he came to know it, and how it can help to create balance in your life. Our lively conversation ranged over topics such as how he helps people support good sleep, his secrets on fostering synchronicity, the dynamic connection between inner and outer work, and the importance of inner quiet and gratitude. Be sure to check out his Web site for more information about his books and coaching services.