“don’t borrow trouble from the future”

famous quote from my grandma

Cheryl Richardson is good, has had many books published and has been on Oprah.

But she still doesn’t have anything on my grandma, my original life coach.

a simple idea that has helped me immensely

Whenever I start something you might say I get a bit carried away, and so when I got interested in coaching, I started reading a lot of books by coaches. And last time I was at my version of shopping nirvana: the best Trader Joe’s in Washington state which just happens to be right next to a very pedestrian but excellently stocked discount/remainder bookstore, I scored the audiobook version of Cheryl Richardson’s Take Time for Your Life. It had some good stuff and a bit of schlock, as one would expect, but it had one brilliant gem of a simple idea:

If it’s not an absolute yes, it’s a no.

For anyone who has tendencies to indecisive procrastination like me*, this was a revelation. So simple. And it works in so many situations – saving me time, saving me money, saving me from unnecessary stress. I use it all the time now when I’m feeling uncertainty about a decision – I will ask myself, “Is this an absolute yes?”

No more pieces of clothing in my closet that I’ll never wear. No more agreeing to put on professional development workshops that I don’t care to. No more hanging onto things that are cluttering my house. No more going skiing with my husband and then being miserable the whole time cause it’s cold and windy and then blaming him the whole way down for dragging me up the mountain when it was clearly my choice to go.

Not that that last one has ever happened.

(*For those of you familiar with Meyers-Briggs, I’m an ENFP)

rituals instead of resolutions

New Year’s Day has always been associated with the particular act of making resolutions. Resolution comes from the Latin resolvere, which means to untie. And this is how many people use their resolutions – as a time to set a goal to break a bad habit. You know the ones. They are narrow goals that are all about STOP! They take the form of “I will stop eating junk food.” “I will stop smoking.”, etc. These are limiting because there is no new state – no possibilty. We know from the research that we are not motivated by negativity or fear, but we are motivated by connecting to what we really want our lives to be.

Instead of doing the same old resolution thing this year, why not come up with a ritual that speaks to you, touches your emotions (which we know is necessary for change to happen) and allows for space, grace and possibility.

I’ve gathered some ideas here – maybe some of these will provide ingredients for your own New Year’s ritual.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, describes how she brought home what she learned about the importance of ritual in Indonesia (transcribed from an interview with CBC Tapestry):

The Indonesians are the ones who get, “When in doubt, make a ritual. And when there isn’t one, make one up that suits you.” …

When you create a ritual, often in Bali they involve burning, smoke, offering up flowers or letting something loose into the sea, you know, you let go of something, you let go of your own sense of doership, you let go of your own sense of “I gotta manage this, I gotta fix this.” You give it away. You send it up in smoke, you send it up in prayer, you send it into the water and you come away, regardless of what you might believe about whether God responds to your request, there is no doubt that you come away calmer.

I did a massive New Years’ ritual this year with my best friend, Jennifer, here in Philadelphia, who is a yoga instructor. And we got together the week before New Year’s and we wrote intentions and we cleaned the house and we did cleanses. And then on New Years’ morning we got up really early and we walked down to a pond and we hung these little homemade bird feeders in the trees- you know, little pine cones filled with peanut butter and bird seed, and each bird seed had been put there as a prayer and an intention so the birds could take it and fly it to heaven. And you know, it’s all like voodoo, woodoo, goodee stuff, but let me tell you how euphoric that day was – and, you know, coming home feeling like I’m participating in destiny here, you know, I’m making an offering, I’m letting things go, I’m wishing for things, and it’s a wonderful way to begin New Years Day, instead of, you know, hung over.

And from Jen Lemen: A Little Ritual for Letting Go of Fear and Other Things That Weigh You Down

Andrea at Superhero Journal makes lists of what she is grateful for and what she intends to create in her life in the next year.

Another popular alternative is creating a life theme or choosing a word for the year.

And emdot and her friends created prayer flags for their words. (If you like this idea, Liz sells lovely prayer flags in her Etsy shop with pockets for your intentions.)

Me, I’m going to do a little combination of things – I’m not sure exactly what it will look like yet, but I’m going for a walk down by the river to think about it and see what inspires me.

music to my ears

A few female musicians I’ve stumbled upon lately who are worth a listen:

Christine Kane – can’t even remember how I found her, but she’s got some mojo

Britt Sawdon – cousin of my friend Jill

Rhonda Stakich - download her songs Mixed Up and Dream free here.

Deb Talan – I finally relented and looked her up on itunes after Liz mentioned her a gajillion times on her blog. So yeah, she’s half of The Weepies, which, I know, I know, everyone has heard of but me. And they have a song called Painting by Chagall.

Awesome.

body language

I’ve taken a couple workshops with bodyworker Thomas Meyers. I did the foundation workshop in Anatomy Trains and then did another workshop with him through the Pilates Association of Canada on how to read bodies. I found them both incredibly worthwhile.  Thomas has a way of talking about the body that makes you think about it in a fresh way. But even better than that, the way he talks about the body also makes you think of many other things in a fresh way. He is a systems thinker – and his insights into the body as a system can apply to any system.

Meyers emphasizes that any change to a dimension of the system is a change to the whole system.  If you open it in one dimension, it opens in all dimensions.  For example, as I wrote about earlier, yoga is about creating space, and if you create this space properly (without tightening another part of the body as you do it) in one area of the body, the whole body experiences a new spaciousness.

And so it is in life. If you create space in one part of your life, which could be as simple as decluttering or as big as quitting a job (or as in my case, just taking a leave), that sense of spaciousness expands through the rest of your life. I think this is the part of my  experience of eating better when I have a clean, tidy house.

Or to put it another way, I wrote this in my journal a long time ago -  noted  it as being a quote from Deepockets Deepak Chopra while being interviewed on a CBC radio show (my husband calls this Yoda-speak):

Change that one thing by which changing everything else changes.

forgiveness

Have you heard about The Forgiveness Project?

Today, Katy Hutchison was speaking at the school I teach at. Powerful, blow-me-away kind of stuff.  What an example of the power of forgiveness. I can’t even imagine forgiving my husband’s killer. I’d like to think I’m capable of it, but I don’t know if I am.

I am still working on  forgiving someone who did something very hurtful to me. Or am I? Maybe I’ve just accepted what happened and accepted that I’m probably not ever going to be able to forgive them.

And would you really be surprised if I gave you a book recommendation on the topic of forgiveness?  I thought not.

fais do do

I’m not just imagining it – my desire for more sleep in the winter can be traced back to my ancestors:

But the French seem to have been particularly sleepy. They “hibernated” even in temperate zones. In Burgundy, after the wine harvest, the workers burned the vine stocks, repaired their tools and left the land to the wolves. A civil servant who investigated the region’s economic activity in 1844 found that he was almost the only living presence in the landscape: “These vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.”

Sounds heavenly right about now.

poem

The Rider

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

-Naomi Shihab Nye

Love the ee cummings reference in the last line.

Oh, and Saskatchewan won The Grey Cup.

alignment, part deux

Tuesday’s post about synchronicity, dharma, Grace or what you will, was titled “alignment” and someone emailed me to ask why. Well- I had a longer post in mind and never got around to the part that had to do with alignment. Which turned out to be a good thing, cause Kimberly left a comment that just gave me more fodder for the topic.

In the style of yoga I practice, alignment is of paramount importance. Alignment in this case meaning the joints, bones and the spine are in a productive relationship with each other. BKS Iyengar initiated this emphasis on alignment in yoga when he discovered through his own practice that proper alignment allowed the energy of the body to flow freely, whereas improper positioning caused energy blockages. Outwardly, we can observe an ease of movement when the body is in alignment.

I use this same idea when thinking about life. I think of those Grace-experiences as a result of being in alignment – when your talents, your spirit and your desires are in a productive relationship with each other. As a result, the energy flows freely in your life and there is a sense of ease to moving forward and accomplishing your dreams.

The other thing that alignment gives you is space. One of my favourite yoga teachers, Ramanand Patel, once said at a workshop, “Yoga is all about creating space.”  Space is necessary for movement to occur. The tendency is to collapse as we age – we actually become shorter due to compression of spinal discs and loss of space in the joints. As the body loses the space, it loses the ability to change, to move, and becomes stiff or “frozen”.

And so it is with life.  If you are out of alignment you become too contracted. You lose the openness, the space that allows you to move. Richard Wiseman in the article to which Kimberly linked, put it this way:

The harder they looked, the less they saw.  And so it is with luck – unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else.  They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends.  They look through newspapers determined to find certain type of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs.  Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

Or from a slightly different angle, life coach Laura Berman Fortgang writes in her book Now What?

Too much focus on one thing makes your vision so narrow that you miss the peripheral clues that are trying to reach you. When you believe that you (and only you) can ultimately control an outcome, you lose the tremendous asset to any dream – the mysterious power of life wanting to be on your side and provide unexpected opportunities.

See, I still want to leave room for a little magic, despite Richard Wiseman’s excellent studies. How else do you explain this – when I was visiting New York this summer I had lunch with some friends, including Kimberly. After lunch, we parted and went our separate ways. About an hour later, my husband and I were in Grand Central Station trying to figure out how to get to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I was commenting that I wished I had had more time to visit with my friends. The place was packed with people, and suddenly I hear a familiar voice. It was Kimberly. She had gone shopping after we parted and now here she was, right beside me. So we had dinner together and had a really good visit that made my trip to NYC even better.  You can call it chance, but I like to think it was meant to be.

appreciation

Many of the blog posts I read today had some take on the theme of gratitude, what with it being Yanksgiving (that’s Canadian for American Thanksgiving) tomorrow and all.

And it reminded me of something I read in What Happy Women Know by Dan Baker:

Psychologist Sonja Lyobomirsky, PhD, at the University of California, Riverside, suggests keeping a daily diary in which you write down things for which you are thankful.  Although she uses the term gratitude, I am more inclined to use appreciation. To me, gratitude involves a feeling of obligation, which is fine, but appreciation is much simpler and every bit as powerful.

I consider appreciation the highest order of love because there are no strings attached. When you walk in to look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, you stand in awe, as other do watching the sun set on the Santa Catalina mountains. Appreciation is the highest emotional experience. It is sufficient unto itself, and it’s what I suggest you go looking for – everyday things in your life you can appreciate, from the first snowfall in  Vermont to the first smile of your newborn baby, from the gentle breeze you feel through the window after a vigorous yoga practice to the delight on a child’s face as she learns to ride a two-wheeler.

It’s a subtle difference, but one I like.

The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.
-Dalai Lama

Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends!

 ETA: As usual, Andrea puts it beautifully.