Living a cultivated life is a process and can never be done wrong. We are ever-evolving if we have set personal growth as an intention in our life, even when we can see no evidence of growth and transformaton. Like the growth of our physical body through childhood, or the opening of a subtle spring bloom, the shift in us is often imperceptable. It is gradual, but steady if we maintain our intention.

One practice that has helped me tremendously is to begin the day with a short meditation that supports my intentional path of cultivation. During this meditation, I calm my mind by breathing in deeply, all the way into my belly, three or four times and allow my mind to focus on the area around my heart and visualize a light there, first as a pinpoint of light, then growing larger and brighter until it fills my entire body. I concsiously relax each part of my body from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet. Then I bring thought in the form of a simple question. I ask “How do I want to feel at the end of today?” Do I want to feel satisfied, happy, content, kind, loved and loving,competent….The answer becomes my intention for the day  and I go through the day with this intention in mind, asking myself, will this bring me “kindness,”  for example, today before a think, speak or act.

This process helps support us on our path to a new way of living. If we begin each day with an intention, this serves as a roadmap for our day and how we will live it. It supports us to be present in our lives today, now, rather than living in the past or the future. When we begin the day knowing how we want to feel at the end of the day, we have an anchor and we feel grounded in ourself, we become inner referring rather than seeking external validation which we cannot control and in the end is meaningless. How we approach and live the days of our lives are a choice we have the power to make and lean on throughout our day.

The Seeker’s Guide, Elizabeth Lesser

Original Blessing, Matthew Fox

Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search for the Soul of Kindness, Marc Ian Barasch

Dark Side of the Light Chasers, Debbie Ford

Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge within, Byron Brown

You have taken step one and have assessed both your current levels of satisfaction and the amount of energy you devote to each area of life. Now you are ready to consider what your ideal life would look like. Take a look at each category separately and really think about what your ideal would be. The sky is the limit here. Really go for it as you begin to make a list of what your ideal might look like in, say, health & wellness. Make a list. So under health & wellness, I would list  healthy weight, cardiovascular health, healthy diet, regular exercise that is fun. After you make your list, go back over it and ask yourself what qualities you seek. In other words, what qualities would I gain if I obtained my ideal health & wellness. I would gain the qualities confidence, energy, enthusiasm and an over-all feeling of well-being.

Next, ask yourself these questions and journal about the answers:

1. How would you ideally want your time and energy distributed differently among these areas?

2. What would it take for you to feel like you were functioning at a 10 in each area?

3. What thought or belief would you have to give up in order to have a balanced life?

This step is not intended to be completed in one sitting. It takes some time to process the information you excavated from within and integrate that into action. Take one life area a day until you’ve completed the process. Don’t worry, you can’t do it wrong unluss you don’t do it at all. And even then, it’s not wrong, you aren’t wrong. It’s a choice you made for now. You can come back to it, but put in on your calendar so you won’t use “I forgot” as an excuse not to re-visit your work.

Take a deep breath and begin. The hardest step to take is always the first step.

We are well into the second month of 2010. By now, most of us can crank out “2010″ without a thought or a strike-through when we write the date, but how many of us have created some new habits that will support our dreams for 2010? Often, the larger question is, where do I begin? Without knowing where to begin, the chances are good that we never will and another year of mediocrity will be in the works as we remain on auto-pilot with our behaviors.

Fear not! Here’s a quick little exercise that will assist you in determining where to start. Think of it as a short diagnostic test.

1. Draw a large circle on a piece of 8.5 x 11 paper and divide it into 8  pie shaped pieces of equal size. Inside each wedge, label them as follows: Money & Finances, Health & Wellness, Primary Relationship, Family & Friends, Spiritual Development, Home & Surroundings, Fun & Leisure, and finally, Work & Career.

2. Rate each area of your life on a scale of 1-5, 5 being the highest, indicating your current level of satisfaction. Think of your experiences and achievements in each area as you rate it.

3. Look over them again and evaluate the percentage of your time that you spend developing each area  of the circle. Your total allotment for all eight areas should equal 100%.

4. Look over each area once more and evaluate the amount of energy, positive or negative, you devote to each area. For example, I may spend 80% of my energy worrying about my health or body, but only 5% on actually taking actions that will improve my level of satisfaction in that area.

Check back for what to do next, Step 2, in my next blog.

Good Luck!

We all go through troublesome times. That’s part of life if you are a human. And it’s not the times that are the trouble, but more what we make them mean about us, how we interpret times,  that create trouble in our lives.

For example, if we make a mistake, we can give ourselves a break, make a correction and move on. Conversely, we can confuse our actions with our identity and believe that WE are a mistake.

I’ve got a newsflash here that can change your life. Let yourself off the hook! Forgive yourself for being human. The only person in the world who expects you to be perfect is YOU. Stop it!

The biggest culprit in self-sabbotage is an unforgiving spirit toward ourselves. Once we start down the road of self-flagellation, it’s the beginning of a deep spiral until we are at the bottom of an abyss. When we are in such a deep hole, it’s difficult to know how to get out. Sometimes we stay stuck there for a long time, perhaps even years. The way out is forgiveness. Forgive, but don’t forget how desparate it feels to be alone in our own self-constructed prison.

One way to support yourself in this practice is to look yourself in the mirror and say, “I forgive you for……” Another powerful action step is to write a letter of forgiveness to yourself. Seriously. There is magical transformational power in the simple act of self-forgiveness.

Forgive yourself. Who are you NOT to forgive yourself? And never forget that you hold the key to your freedom.

I just had the experience of watching a family meet the newest member of their family a few moments ago. It was moving for me to witness the celebration of a new life. This particular hospital plays a lullaby over the intercom each time a baby is born. As I hear it now, I am grateful it is not for our baby,

I began this blog in late August, while stationed at the hospital where my daughter was trying to keep her remaining twin daughter in utero long enough to give her a fighting chance at life. We lost her identical twin sister at 19 weeks, after an intra-uteran surgical procedure in an attempt to save the girls, Harper and Reese.

The girls developed a rare disorder of the placenta that can only occur in identical twins, It is know as twin to twin transfusion syndrome, or TTTS. In very lay terms, that means that they share vascular connections in which one baby becomes the “donor” and the other baby becomes the “recipient. The donor baby does not receive enough blood to develop properly and the recipient baby has too much fluid, which causes congestive heart failure.

We lost the donor baby, Harper, in the early hours after the surgery and were told of the risks to Reese as she continued to develop. Through love and prayers and a blanket of positive energy, my daughter was able to postpone birth of both babies until 25 weeks. My surviving granddaughter weight 1 pound, 12 ounces when she was born on Septmember 10. Her due date was December 23.

It has been a long road for her mother and father, but they have shown nothing but courage and hope and faith. Courage to face so many obstacles during their first prenancy, hope that all woud be as it should be and faith that little Harper is exactly where she is supposed to be.

Reese got to come home right before Chrismas on her due date and has continued to thrive and grow. There is no feeling like watching her grow and improve daily and observing her journey has taught me that if she can make it through all of her obstables as a tiny micro-preemie baby, I have no excuses. I can do anything.

If you are curious about TTTS they have a foundation and a website:http://tttsfoundation.org

and if you have a friend or loved one who has recently been diagnosed with twins, make certain they know if there is one  placenta. This is a significat indicator of the syndrome, and if diagnosed early enough, there is hope to save both babies.

Our little angel, Harper, is my constant reminder to get the word out about TTTS.

For some of us, there is an unwritten rule, a standard code of conduct, if you will, that prevents us from admitting when we are wrong. In the face of a question or accusation, usually our first instinct is to go on the defensive. Generally speaking, most conflicts we have with others occurs when we are both trying to be right. Following our unstated code of conduct, we defend our postitions even when to do so is not in our own best interest.

Our position can be one that makes us miserable and unhappy, but we cling to it because of our desperate need to be right. The cost of this behavior is pretty simple to identify. Our addiction to being right denies us joy, peace, contentment, happy relationships and fulfillment. That’s a hefty price to pay for unhappiness. But, for a brief moment, we get to feel self-righteous and superior, even if we are all alone.

What do you think would be possible if you could simply admit that you are wrong when you are? Would the sky fall? Would the world stop turning? Would you die? No, no and no.

Defending a position at all costs is a dead end road. But it is good for some things. It’s a safe bet that this behavior will lead you to indulgence in all of your favorite excuses and will keep you stuck.

An unwillingness to admit when we are wrong does not serve us if we want to grow and transform our lives. We use all of our valuable energy to hold onto this old behavior and have none left to cultivate new behaviors and perspectives that will set us free from a painful past.

Take time to notice what your need to be right costs you in terms of energy, relationships, peace of mind and happiness.  Think of something that you’ve been fighting to be right about and consider letting go. Be willing to see how you contributed to the situation and take responsibility for it.

After all, would you rather be right or be happy?

I’ve got a great way to create an instant shift in the way we experience life. Take the week off! I don’t mean being absent from work, family, friends or other aspects of our daily life.

What would be possible if for just one week, we stopped listening to our negative internal dialog? What if we took the week off from making ourselves and others wrong? What would be possible if everything going on around us is merely “interesting?”

Beating ourselves up mentally and emotionally is a habit that is seriously self-limiting. Often, the current of our internal dialog is so powerful that we give up on ourselves, others, life in general and we just exist in a fog of monotonous lack of self-awareness. We live a life of nothing special.

Take this week off! Here’s an assignment. Take a few quiet minutes and write down all of the negative things you can think of about yourself, all the ways you make yourself wrong, all the ways you feel like a failure. Then, look over the list in a detatched way. Take the “Hmm, this is interesting,” approach.

Next do two things. One,  reframe the negative as a positive, for example “I’m lazy” might be reframed as “I know how to relax.” Step two is to imagine yourself saying these internal judgements to your child. Think about it. Would you ever tell your child or anyone else’s that they are fat and lazy or stupid and clumsy?

The fact is that many of us would treat a stranger on the street more kindly than we treat ourselves. We would have more compasion and understanding at the very least. Yet, we treat ourselves in some very heartless ways.

Do it…take the week off!

I couldn’t sleep last night, so I turned on what I thought would be mind-numbing television. I landed on the program “intervention.” I’ve seen it before, but something about the people featured last night seemed all too familiar.  It was their pain, their deep emotional pain.

I’ve experienced deep emotional pain many times. Because of this, I often work with those who are in emotional pain. There is something in having lived the experience that helps me help others and that helps me.

What I’ve learned is that the pain we feel won’t kill us, but our strategies for coping and avoiding our pain has lethal potential. Drug and alcohol use and abuse are not uncommon strategies and we all know by now that drugs and alcohol can kill us, or if not, destroy our lifestyle and relationships to the point that we are at risk of no longer wanting to live.

But what if we choose a coping strategy that is intangible? What if we create default behaviors, beliefs and thoughts that may help us avoid experiencing pain directly,but actually keeps us in some other form of those feelings we are trying so hard to avoid?

Denial, arrogance, victimization or anger are just a few of the ways we can find to cope. If I had to choose one that I see most often and the one that causes the most suffering, I would have to say it is that of victimization. Once we become victims of anything or anyone, we have abdicated responsibility for our lives and give up all of our own power. Making ourselves a victim hurts and is guaranteed to keep us stuck in our own personal hell. There’s no other way to say it.

The good news is the victim mentality truly is “all in our head” and we have the power and responsibility to change our minds any time we want to do so. There is no master manipulator who is placing disempowering thoughts in our minds. We do this to ourselves.

Being a victim is also a great excuse to never try, to never take personal responsibility for the condition we find ourselves in. As long as “it” is someone else’s fault, we can simmer in our own self-righteousness until we cook our own goose, to use an old phrase. We remain, poor us…if only…

It’s not a crime or shameful to experience dark emotions such as grief, sadness, vulnerability, shame, anger or hopelessness. These are all a part of our human experience. We, alone, to the best of my knowledge, are the only creatures who are imbued with the unique ability to experience emotions. We may not like feeling them, but it is inherent to our species. We will feel pain, we can count on it. It may be uncomfortable, but we will not die.

When a moment of darkness falls over me, I like to close my eyes and visualize floating in the ocean, just off shore, just beyond the break water. The waves come, but as I relax and do not resist them, they raise me up on the backs of their swells and roll beneath me on their way to shore.

There will always be the rise and fall of our emotions. That’s what it means to be human. It’s what we do with them that determines the lives we live. We have emotions, but we are NOT our emotions. Intervene on your own behalf the next time you feel about to be over-taken by your emotions. Close your eyes and surrender to your experience. Trust me, you’ll live to talk about it.

In life, we all find ourselves in situations that we’d probably choose to avoid if we could. We think things that are unthinkable. We resist our reality, deny that we have any choice over the life we find ourselves living and we totally deny the parts of ourselves that we reject, instead, projecting them onto others in the form of judgment and blame.  When ever we can look at someone and say, for example, “My mother is selfish, insensitive, arrogant and ignorant,” we are passing a judgment and projecting.

Following Jung’s theory of the Shadow, this indicates aspects of our own persality that we just can’t accept. We possess these qualities, but we make them wrong and deny them, using incredible amounts of energy to resist them and keep them hidden away from ourselves and others. The problem with resistance is that it virtually guarantees that we will create more of whatever it is that we resist. It’s like a universal law of some kind. It’s something we should all be taught in third grade, like multiplication. I didn’t coin the phrase, “What you resist, persists,” or “What you can’t be with won’t let you be,” but they sum it up in an annoyingly trite but true way.

I was crocheting some baby socks for my newest granddaughter a few days ago and working with very fine, delicate and twisted yarn. I’d pull and untangle a little at a time, enough to make the next few rows. Then, I’d get to the knots again, and push and pull here and there, trying to loosen the knot just enough to keep crocheting a few more rows. It was difficult to discern which fragile string I should pull to loosen the knot. Push, pull and wiggle this one, wiggle that one…maddening! The more I pulled on the knot, the tighter it became. The tighter it became, the more stuck I was in the process. I repeated this process over several days, even thinking about starting at the loose end of the yarn and winding into a ball, in other words dealing with it, but, of course I didn’t do that! That would be actually dealing with the dang thing.

Eventually, I had to admit that the more I pulled on or resisted the fact that there was a knot in my yarn the more it drove me crazy and kept me from moving forward with something I actually enjoy doing, creating something for someone I love. I finally accepted the fact that I was going to have to stop trying to push past this knot and deal with it. As long as I resisted it, it existed and really annoyed me. As long as I couldn’t be with it and deal with it, it wouldn’t let me be. And with all the power of my humanity, I managed to project onto the yarn! It was stupid, flimsy, stubborn, stuck, hard to work with….hmmmmm.

It was a process to loosen the knots and look at the problem through the eyes of acceptance, but there would be no forward motion until I did. As I worked through the tedium of the process, I realized that this knot was actually a gift. It gave me the inspiration for this blog and what I think is a great analogy.

We always have the choice to let go of our resistance and embrace the unembracable. Now, that’s a thought worth thinking.