This being human is a guest house.
Every morning is a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness
Some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome, and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows
Who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture.
Still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
Go to the door laughing
And invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes
For each has been sent
As a guide from beyond.
— Rumi
Each day gives us a chance to start anew. We get to choose whether to learn from it or not; whether to embrace it and treat it as a gift or dismiss it in quiet desperation. What are you choosing?
Sometimes you get forced into change through no fault of your own. Although it is often scary, change can be an opportunity to finally do what you’ve always wanted, assuming you know what that is! How can you make the most of the changes you’re going through? How do you decide which changes will steer you in the right direction and which ones won’t?
You do it by creating a stable, internal point of reference – a clear picture in your mind of what you need to feel satisfied. To feel in control and actually be in control, you need to make choices based on your inner direction. The choices of the past have brought you to where you are now. If where you are now is not satisfactory, you can make new choices.
If you could be anything you wanted to be, what would that be?
If you don’t know, start by thinking about where your greatest pleasure is. Think about those times when you’ve been supremely happy, when you felt like you were your best self, when you felt “jazzed” and alive. Those times when you’ve felt a deep sense of satisfaction.
This may not be a quick exercise and it may not be easy but persevere. Make a list of 20 such experiences. Perhaps some of these were early on in your life. These parts of you may have been lost or hidden as you made your way through life perhaps taking on many of the expectations of others. Let these hidden gifts come out into the open and provide direction for positive change.
Which of these gifts would you like to use more fully in a new career?
Which ones do you need to express?
Where might these be needed?
How do you want to act on them?
Great ideas come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirrings of life and hope. Albert Camus
I remember the first time shin splints paid me a visit! It was my first morning in Sydney, Australia, after having just spent 24 hours on a plane flying in from Washington DC. The air was crisp and clear, the harbor was sparkling in the sunshine and I was jogging excitedly in one of my favorite areas of the city. It felt like I could run forever. But then I started feeling a pain in my shins and before long I was hobbling back to the hotel. If you’ve ever experienced shin splints, you know how that felt and what the next day was like!
What are shin splints?
Shin splints involve small tears in the muscle fibers or connective tissue along the tibia (the inner/larger leg bone of the lower leg). The pain resides over a long area. (Note that pain in a specific place may indicate a stress fracture of the bone rather than shin splints.) Shin splints may result from an imbalance between the strong muscles in the back of the leg and the weak muscles in the front of the leg. If in doubt about the injury, consult a physician.
The following are some ways to help prevent shin splints or recover from them:
* Check your shoes. Shoes should have good arch support and overall cushioning. Replace running and walking shoes every 400 to 500 miles or every six to eight months.
* Walk on your heels. This exercise will help you to build muscle in the front part of your lower leg. Take long steps until your shins begin to burn. Gradually increase the length of the time you can walk this way without feeling the burn. Do this daily.
* Ice cups. Freeze water in a paper cup, peel back the top, and moisten the ice with water and rub over the injury. Do this for five to seven minutes/four to six times a day.
* Switch exercises. Choose a low-impact activity while you are healing.
* Change exercise surfaces. Run or walk on a soft but level surface. The shin splints should improve within two weeks.
Think what a remarkable, unduplicatable, and miraculous thing it is to be you! Of all the people who have come and gone on the earth, since the beginning of time, not ONE of them is like YOU!
No one who has ever lived or is to come has had your combination of abilities, talents, appearance, friends, acquaintances, burdens, sorrows and opportunities. No one’s hair grows exactly the way yours does. No one’s finger prints are like yours. No one has the same combination of secret inside jokes and family expressions that you know. The few people who laugh at all the same things you do, don’t sneeze the way you do. No one prays about exactly the same concerns as you do. No one is loved by the same combination of people that love you – NO ONE! No one before, no one to come.
YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY UNIQUE!
Enjoy that uniqueness. You do not have to pretend in order to seem more like someone else. You weren’t meant to be like someone else. You do not have to lie to conceal the parts of you that are not like what you see in anyone else. You were meant to be different. Nowhere ever in all of history will the same things be going on in anyone’s mind, soul and spirit as are going on in yours right now. If you did not exist, there would be a hole in creation, a gap in history, something missing from the plan for humankind.
Treasure your uniqueness. It is a gift given only to you. Enjoy it and share it!
No one can reach out to others in the same way that you can. No one can speak your words. No one can convey your meanings. No one can comfort with your kind of comfort. No one can bring your kind of understanding to another person. No one can be cheerful and lighthearted and joyous in your way. No one can smile your smile. No one else can bring the whole unique impact of you to another human being.
Share your uniqueness. Let it be free to flow out among your family and friends and people you meet in the rush and clutter of living wherever you are. That gift of yourself was given you to enjoy and share. Give yourself away! See it! Receive it! Let it tickle you! Let it inform you and nudge you and inspire you!
YOU ARE UNIQUE!
~Author Unknown~
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Are you interested in discovering your uniqueness? Through coaching and with tools such as The Passion Test™, I can guide you through the process. It’s an eye-opening and fun experience! You can contact me via my website athttp://www.blueprints4change.com
When I was first asked to do some lectures on getting better sleep in order to be more productive, my first thought was “How many people are going to attend this?” Did I get a surprise! This turned out to be a popular topic, particularly for the more mature audiences.
If you’re a typical Baby Boomer, you may be finding that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get the amount of sleep that you need. This can be due to health issues, medications or as a normal part of aging. Not to mention the snoring of a spouse!
As we age, the various sleep stages are affected. The deeper stages are reduced and replaced with more of the lighter stages of sleep. In addition, sounds and interruptions are more likely to awaken us. Have you ever felt as if you could be awakened by a mouse tiptoeing through the room? Another aspect is that sleep tends to be spread more across the 24-hour cycle rather than just at night.
What to do?
Here are some simple tips for getting a better night’s sleep:
Create a healthy sleep environment.
— Keep your bedroom for s** and sleeping. Get rid of the piles of magazines and books, the treadmill, the TV and discussions about bills and other negative topics.
— Make sure your bedroom is well ventilated and at a comfortable temperature. The optimum temperature is 60-65 degrees F.
— Consider keeping pets out of the bedroom. Did you know that 21% of dogs snore!
— Hide the clock and the night light. Even a small amount of light will affect your body’s production of the sleep hormone.
— Use blackout curtains or blinds. If you can see your hand when you hold it up in front of your face, it isn’t dark enough.
Keep a regular sleep/wake schedule. Try not to vary it by more than one hour. Be light-wise. Avoid excess light before bedtime but expose yourself to bright light within 5 minutes of waking. Avoid stimulants (coffee, nicotine, colas) late in the day. Don’t drink alcohol before bed. It may help you fall asleep but will wake you up later on when it’s being metabolized by the body. Don’t exercise or eat heavily before bed. Don’t nap after 3:00pm. It may undermine your nighttime rest.
Numerous studies have been done around the topic of whether we actually need less sleep as we age. A recent UK study seems to indicate that this is in fact the case. So if you’re sleeping less than 8 hours a night, it may just be a natural consequence of aging.
Do you often complain that you need more sleep? A 2002 sleep survey done by the National Sleep Foundation showed that almost 74% of Americans do not get enough sleep at night. Before Edison invented the light bulb, people slept for about 10 hours, on average. That number is now 6 hours!
Without adequate periods of rest for physical and mental repair, you may not be able to function at your peak. Here are some of the short-term consequences of not getting enough sleep:
Decreased daytime alertness
Impaired memory and cognitive ability, the ability to think and process information
More than double the risk of sustaining an occupational injury
Impaired immune system
Stressed relationships & poor quality of life
Over the long term you may be faced with:
High blood pressure
Heart attack or heart failure
Stroke
Weight Gain
Depression and other mood disorders
Mental impairment
Increased mortality risk
Relationship problems
Diabetes
The amount of sleep you need depends on many factors, including physical activity, emotional issues, diet and of course, age. Infants need 16 hours a day; teenagers – 9 hours on average; most adults – 7 to 8 hours and women in the first 3 months of pregnancy often need several more hours of sleep than usual.
Our internal body clock governs our daily or circadian rhythm – telling us when to wake up and when to feel sleepy. In future posts I will give you some solutions for insomnia but right now you might want to visit an interesting site that allows you to do a very short test, the results of which produce a chart showing your natural sleeping and waking pattern over a 24-hour period. If you’re finding it difficult to get enough sleep, it could be that your natural body clock is at odds with your routine.
Do you find you are forgetting things more often? Those car keys that just disappeared again! The grocery list that’s probably still on the kitchen table! The eyeglasses you’re sure you left next to the bookcase!
As we age, our memory seems to fail more often. Researchers point to the erosion of the white matter pathways in our brains as the reason. This impairs communication between different areas of the brain.
For a fun exercise try this short-term memory test (slightly modified) developed by the Memory Assessment Clinic in Maryland.
Read through this list just once, and only once, and concentrate on each word. Then look away and have a pen and paper handy.
Here’s the list:
Onions
Potatoes
Milk
Blueberries
Peanuts
Shrimp
Carrots
Mayonnaise
Oregano
Cucumber
Papaya
Noodles
Ham
Crackers
Cottage Cheese
Now write down as many of the foods as you can remember on your sheet of paper.
How many did you remember?
The average person ages 18-39 can remember ten items. From ages 40-59, nine items; from ages 60-69, eight items and for 70 and older, seven items.
If you scored low for your age, there are MANY books and articles available on increasing your memory power. I would give you some names now, but I have forgotten them!
PS If you find you are being forgetful because your life is one big clutter and you are unfocused and distracted, a tool you might want to try is EFT. For more information check out the EFT World Summit starting tomorrow.
We can choose to be responsible for our lives … or not! There is a great deal of power in knowing that it’s up to us. If we don’t like the way our life is, we can choose to change it! There is always a choice although it may not seem so at times. Even doing nothing is a choice.
To illustrate, imagine for a moment, that you are driving down a road (in your shiny new car) in your neighborhood and:
There is a deep pothole on your side of the road … you drive in … you choose to get angry and feel helpless … it isn’t your fault (they should do something about the roads!) … it takes a lot of effort to get your car out.
OR
There is a deep pothole on your side of the road but your mind is on other things … you drive in, not believing you’ve done it again … you choose to feel even more angry and helpless … it still isn’t your fault (they still haven’t fixed the road!) … again it takes a lot of effort to get your car out.
OR
There is a deep pothole on your side of the road … you see it but drive in through force of habit … you know where you are … you choose to realize it is your fault … you get out very quickly.
OR
There is a deep pothole on your side of the road … you choose to drive around it.
OR
You choose to drive down another street.
We are not controlled by outside events, as difficult as that may be to believe when we are faced with desperate situations. We always have a choice as to how we feel and the action we take. Are you blaming others for your choices or taking responsibility for your own choices?
Choose your thoughts wisely; they become words.
Choose your words wisely; they become actions.
Choose your actions wisely; they become habits.
Choose your habits wisely; they become character.
Choose your character wisely, it becomes your future!
Mary (not her real name) came to me because she couldn’t seem to lose weight (at least not more than 10lbs at any one time) no matter what she tried and she had tried most of the diets and products on the market.
What Mary didn’t realize was that food was not the real issue. The “culprit” was the emotional baggage she carried around the issue of being thin. Her programmed beliefs were contributing to her holding onto stored energy (fat):
I don’t deserve to be happy with my body
My weight holds me back from earning more
My weight keeps me from making life changes
I want someone to love me as I am and THEN I will lose weight
Other family members are overweight and so that is my fate
My size allows me to avoid certain sports, hobbies or events
I avoid some social situations because of my weight
If I stopped eating ice cream, pastries etc, it would be like losing a friend
My weight allows me to be passive, to hold back …etc, etc.
Every diet she had ever tried was an outside job. She was supposed to shape up and act right externally: eat the low-fat foods, exercise more, and drink copious amounts of water. What she needed was an inside job – an energetic approach to getting rid of the stored energy. Or in other words, EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques).
EFT is a simple, easy-to-learn form of energy psychology (or acupuncture without the needles) that you can use to gain freedom from emotional and physical issues that hold you back from success in those things that are important to you.
You can learn more about this innovative technique by attending the FREE EFT World Summit. It starts this Monday, April 20, so you might want to register for this virtual online event right away. The process is being used and endorsed by some of the major players in the health and personal development industry like Jack Canfield, Bob Proctor, Joe Vitale and Bob Doyle, featured teachers from The Secret…and Dr. Joseph Mercola, Bruce Lipton, Dr. Norm Shealy
The organizers of the EFT World Summit have put together an amazing event featuring 9 consecutive days of FREE presentations from some of the top experts and Masters of EFT in the world. So join us and register now.
… oh yes, if you are wondering about whether it worked for Mary, after 12 weeks she had lost 30lbs and was well on the way to achieving her goals.
Self Development | admin | 
April 25, 2009 6:23 pm | 
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