Some days...

When it all seems too much.  When nothing makes sense...when there isn't a solution in sight.

Some days, the only thing that makes sense...
is that you just gotta dance...

Baby Steps...

Photo Credit:  www.awakened-living.blogspot.com

"A baby would never learn how to walk if he gave up after his first fall."  ~Louise Haye, "You Can Heal Your Life"   (By the way, Louise's book is a game changer.  I HIGHLY recommend it if you haven't read it yet.  Mine goes with me about every place I go.)

I am continually amazed as I watch my little Iain growing up.  I sit in amazement as he learns how to crawl, pull himself up on things and not long from now, walk.   He is so determined and focused on the task at hand.  He is so present.   He doesn't look at the other side of the room for things to move toward either.   The "must haves" that he wants are always right in front of him and so in the moment.   His current passions are anything that works something electronic.   He LOVES the XBox remote, the tv remote, our laptops and our phones.   I truly believe that kids come "cable ready" these days....straight out of the womb!  He also has no judgement of himself.  He just goes for what he wants and if it gets hidden from his sight (*snicker*) then he moves on to something else that he wants.   He barely even gets frustrated when he falls and doesn't make it to his destination.   He just keeps re-focusing and refining his approach.  It is truly a magnificent thing to watch!

Along those lines, I have noticed this great little quirk of mine lately.  Whenever I am feeling frustrated or down, I get this wild hair and I think..."Today is the day I become the new me!"    I write all these great goals and plans down, (I go to the bank like an adult!) and get myself all ready.   "Alright, Erin, today, you are going to incorporate every single one of the life changes that you need to make.  So far, you have 18 written down.   Sweet!   This ought to be easy!"    

I will give you three guesses on what happens (two of them don't count).  The next day I attempt to incorporate all my wonderful changes into my life.   For a couple of days, I even get a number of them completed but undoubtedly, life comes waltzing by and cuts right in on my wonderful dance of perfection that I had planned for myself.  

Then comes even more "self-chatter".    "What happened?   Why didn't you stick with it?  You must not want to be happy.  You must not want to change badly enough.   Well, I guess you will just have to be what you are.  Maybe we will try again next month, then again, maybe not.   You aren't cut out for this."   And I truly feel worse than I did before I even started the plans.  

Sound familiar?  

So, how do you change your life?  How do you take all that awesome motivation and hone it a bit to really work--long term--for you?

Here are some tips I have gathered that will help you along the way.  

Realize that you are good enough RIGHT now

It truly is a wonderful thing to want to improve on yourself but the energy you hold and that surrounds your want to do this is what will make or break your "self improvement" experience.   Be watchful of making changes to yourself because you can't stand who you are in the moment.   You won't get very far.   Instead, make plans and develop habits when you are feeling great!   Sounds backwards, doesn't it?   I promise that you will get MUCH more bang for your buck if you do this one small thing.   The energy you hold when you make the changes will create success or failure.  If you are thinking about how messed up your life is or how much you need to be different, you will just get more of the same.  And it doesn't matter how cool your new planner or your "THE NEW ME" Excel spreadsheet is.  

Start small and take baby steps

This is no way you can change your whole life's habits in a week.  It isn't possible and trying to do so gets almost nothing accomplished.   Instead, start small.  VERY small.   Write all that you want down but then only take 1-3 items and slowly incorporate them into your life.  This is how you will start to see success and you will start to feel good about what you are doing.  Little by little, you will start to build what you want and see the fruits of your patience.

Allow yourself to make mistakes

Get it through your head that it is not going to go exactly like you have it on paper.   Tell yourself that in the beginning and you will feel much better when you do miss a day of exercise or you happen to slip up on one of your goals.   This is key to relieving yourself of the guilt.   My husband taught me this.   He told me..."Getting down on yourself when you slip up is the quickest way to NEVER reach your goal."      
Say to yourself...."I don't need to get this perfect.  I just need to stay focused on what I want.  I probably will miss a day.  But I do like this.  I do enjoy it and I would like to continue it when I can."  

Allow yourself to change your mind

I read an article once that really changed my thinking on this.  It said when you start a new habit, to give yourself a time frame of how long you are going to TRY it for.   That sounded ridiculous to me.  All my changes needed to be permanent.   But this really works!   

Tell yourself that you are going to try to incorporate your said habit for 30 days.  That is it.   At the end of the 30 days, you will reevaluate it and ask yourself if you LIKE it.   You will feel around for if it is working for you.   

This takes the stress off of feeling like you have to do anything.  You are just trying it out.  It may work, it may not.   It builds confidence and most importantly, empowerment.  Without that, you won't stick to much for long.   

Do what is good for you

Just because someone told you or you probably have convinced yourself that this goal is what you NEED to be doing...does not mean that is true.   Let me repeat that in a different way.  YOU MIGHT BE WRONG ABOUT THIS BEING A GOOD THING FOR YOU.   Crazy, isn't it?   This one was a huge ah-ha for me.
An example:   I used to LOVE doing a certain high intensity exercise DVD.  It worked me out great and I felt great after doing it.  I started doing it again recently and I noticed that it wasn't working for me.  My joints were taking a beating and I was feeling horrible after.   (this is even after I really gave it a good shot).   So, I looked again at what I wanted my outcome to be and I realized that my goal really had changed.  I didn't just want to lose weight anymore.  I wanted to get healthy, calm my mind, and tone my body.   This old DVD wasn't going to do all that...in fact, it was stressing my body out so much, I think I was going the wrong direction.  

Be the one you want to make proud

I have really just started to get this but when I did, a whole new world opened up for me.   The power in making yourself proud is so amazing and motivating in itself.   As I let go of needing anyone else's approval, magic seems to happen.   I flow so freely and I get things done in lightning speed!   I hold on to things I want to do more because I know how happy it makes me.  There isn't any waiting or hoping for someone else to hand me my approval...I already have it!  

Basically, just trust yourself and make changes with love wrapped in your intentions and it will make all the difference in the world.  

I will leave you with this clip as a reminder...well, actually just to give you a laugh.  
I LOVE this show!  

Be The Change...

Close your eyes for a moment.   Look at the people in your life that might be frustrating you right now.

How do you see them?
How do you see your nagging children that won't let you have a moment's peace?
How do you see that friend that you thought was there for you and hasn't been lately?
How do you see that neighbor that won't mow their lawn and their lovely dandelion seeds are floating over to your lawn each day?
How do you see your significant other that maybe didn't give you the attention you thought you were needing?
How do you see the lady at the grocery store that runs up and cuts in front of you to be first in line?

So, let's try this.   Look at the situation and those people once again but this time, just for a minute, try to get a glimpse of them as your inner self might see them.

How would you look at the "mistakes" they might make if you could only see them with love?  
How do they look when you take YOU or your own want for approval, love and respect out of the equation?
What might have been their motive?  Is there something going on in their life too?  Were they thinking of themselves (much like you)?

When we stop for a moment to put on a different pair of glasses to see the world, we end up seeing a different picture.   I am not saying that you have to condone anything.   But think for a minute what you are accomplishing by being frustrated or angry at these aggravations.   Not much, right?  Well, besides getting to feel lousy!

Let's look again at those frustrating situations...
Maybe you might see your children as truly loving the time they spend with you and possibly needing some guidance from you.
You might see that friend going through a particularly difficult time as well and possibly staying back because they just don't feel like they could be the friend that they wanted to be to you.
You might get a glimpse of the neighbor who is so frustrated with his job and bills that mowing his lawn might be the last thing he could think of or get motivated to do.
And there is your significant other who is needing love as much as you need it at the moment and just innocently missed your signal.
And that famous lady at the grocery store.   If you watch, she might run out to her car where her ill child is waiting for her and the medicine/food she ran in to get "real quick".

In my experience, there are always two sides to each story and if you start to purposely look for the good and start to deliberately focus those that "hurt" you in the most beautiful light possible, a change will come.   Your heart will heal and you would be surprised what might happen in theirs as well.

You must be the change that you want to see in the world.
~Mohandas Gandhi

By all means, paint.

I love it when you get centered on what you want and the universe just delivers like there is no tomorrow.  Seriously...it really is that easy.

Photo Credit:  Cyruspavel.com

A day or two ago, I read a blog post on Tiny Buddha by Cat Li Stevenson called "How to Let Go of Fear to Live Passionately and Authentically."  It gave a Gay Hendricks exercise that asks you to look at what 4 or 5 things do you truly want to say you accomplished as you lay on your deathbed.  I really took this serious as I could instantly see what a great way it was to do some awesome visualization for what you want.  A cardinal rule of creating your life deliberately is to visualize how you want things to be and ignore how they feel today in reality.  

So, I wrote quite a few things about what I wanted to be proud of.  The crucial component of this exercise is that it evoked so much feeling from me.  I could really see myself wanting to say I lived a life like this.   That I really did it...that I lived my life the way I wanted to.   My words were dripping with emotion and I felt SO high and happy after I did it, which is always an indication of aligning with who you really are.  I really did know what I wanted for my life.  Wow!

Now, this is the power of seeing your life as you want it...i.e. visualizing.  Within a couple of days, I have been utterly bombarded with the same message, same lesson, same answer basically from the universe.   It couldn't get any clearer...if I want to know how to get what I want, I need to just START.   Start now, stop waiting, stop planning, just start.   Begin...NOW.   Stop worrying about if I have done enough planning.  Stop worrying about it I have enough talent.  Stop telling myself that I might need more classes or schooling or money.  Stop worrying about old beliefs, stop reading more books on the subject, stop making schedules, stop writing lists of what I am going to do.  I have all the knowledge I need to have exactly what I want.  There is nothing stopping me.  STOP PLANNING MY LIFE and START TO LIVE IT.

Now, there is no mistaking what was said to me.  It was in every conversation I had.  EVERY one of them.   It was in every blog post or article I read.   ALL of them.  It was written all over everything.  I loved it.  I kept getting more and more information...and it just kept repeating the message I was supposed to (and did thankfully) hear.

One of the best quotes I "stumbled" upon was this...
“If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” ~ Vincent van Gogh

That hit me like a ton of bricks.   It is that simple.  Just do it!  Be the person you want to be.  Look any fear you have in the face and tell it (as my Grandma would say) to "Go eat dirt!"   There is nothing to fear but fear itself.   There is another good one!  Ha!

I feel invigorated.  I feel like something has clicked.  No more prep.  I am just going to live.   MAN, that feels great!!!!

Perfect video from "Newsies" that seems to sum it up nicely.
PS...I had a MAD crush on "Jack" back in the day.   Good lolly, he is just pretty!

The Pinwheel Offering

Photo Credit:  Pinwheelgirls.com

I went with Lilli on her field trip this morning.  One of the things the children got to do was make pinwheels.   They colored them with markers and were beyond excited to play with them once they got outside.   Once the field trip was over, Lilli wanted to ride the big, cool bus back with her class so I drove to her school to pick her back up.  She came running across the playground with all the other kids, all holding their pinwheels, grinning from ear to ear.

As her and I started making our trek to the vehicle, she said she wanted to go to McDonalds instead of eating lunch at daycare.  I told her not today as sometimes we get to do that and sometimes we don't.  Today, I would take her to daycare and she could eat there.

She started to throw a fit and was pretty mad about it.   I tried to distract her by not responding to her anger and asked if I could see her pinwheel.  She folded her arms and said "NO, I am not going to let you see my pinwheel because I am mad at you."   This didn't seem to frustrated me too bad.  I, after all, had seen a few fits in my day and knew my little six year old was just frustrated at the circumstances.  It had nothing to do with me or so my logical mind thought.  But apparently, my subconscious was hurt or thought some sort of wrong had been done to me in some way.  Lilli actually got over her anger fairly quickly and was trying to catch up to me (for some reason, my pace had quickened) and said, "Here Mom, you can see my pinwheel now."   I calmly told her "No thank you, I am fine dear."  

She instantly felt the change in my energy.  So did I.  She started to throw a fit again and scream at the top of her lungs that she NOW wanted me to have this pinwheel!  "I am offering it to you, please take it from me!"  I kept my cool the entire time but kept telling her no and that it was okay.  My words and tone were kind and loving but for some reason, I was NOT going to take that pinwheel.  I remember thinking that she needs to learn a small lesson here.  She needs to know that she cannot throw a fit and be mean to others and expect them to just come running back.  Who is with me here?  Makes perfect sense...right?  I wasn't being the least bit mean to her.  I was even asking her other questions trying to distract her and lighten the mood a bit.  But again, I was not going to take that pinwheel.

Well, she dug her heels in and was basically broken hearted.  She was screaming and crying and could not understand why I wouldn't take her pinwheel...her offering of peace.  I took her to daycare, all the while, the saga still continued.  We got inside and she kept asking and asking for me to take it.  Why wouldn't I take it?   She and I were both wondering now.  I gave her a big hug and a kiss and told her to have a wonderful day and sent her off to play.  She was still very upset.

I drove away and my mind started to question what had just happened.  Although, I had kept my cool and thought I had done the right thing, I started to wonder why I felt so horrible.  I didn't cave in.   I was also very kind and didn't get into any kind of confrontation with her.  I didn't try to force her into anything.  I was strong.  I was teaching my daughter a valuable lesson in my mind.  So, why was my heart so heavy?

I started to rub one of my inspiration rocks (it just happen to be laying in my car) as I drove back home and....it hit me.   I had just taught her that my love for her was conditional.   I had taught her that if she got mad at me or talked back or tried to hurt my feelings that I would, in turn, deny her love.  I would still be kind but I would not let her love me.  And then the tears started.   That was not what I wanted her to know...no wonder I felt so bad.  I know deep within me that what she believes in her heart will be how she lives her life.  Conditional love would never be a belief I wanted her to carry with her.  More importantly, it wasn't a belief that I wanted to have anymore either.

So, I sat in my driveway, as I had made it home by now, and wondered what would make me feel better.  This turmoil was in me and this conflict between her and I, however small it may seem, came up for a reason...it was a gift...they are always gifts.  This beautiful reason was here now to show me that this isn't who I was anymore.  I had read a thousand books on the subject of unconditional love but this was probably the most "in your face" moment I ever had with it.  It was there, laying in my lap, wondering what I was going to do with it now.

I went inside the house and couldn't even make it up my stairs.  The voices in my head said that she was already playing and had more than likely forgotten about it already.  I could go on with my day and maybe talk to her about it later.  I, after all, had many things to do.  But luckily, my inner being (who is really getting quite strong) took over.   I didn't feel good inside and that always means my previous actions had taken me in a direction unlike who I really am.   I wanted to feel better.

When I arrived back at her daycare, just a short 5 minutes later, I walked outside to where indeed she was playing happily.  I looked at her and just waved.  She screamed "Mom!" and ran over to me and we sat on the back steps.  She jumped up on my lap and I asked her if I could look at her pinwheel.   She smiled and handed it right to me.  She said "I am sorry I hurt your feelings."  I said "You can't ever hurt my feelings, baby.  It was my choice to feel hurt.   I need you to know that I love you whether I am angry or not.  Whatever you do, I never stop loving you."   Then, she and I tried to make her somewhat  dilapidated paper pinwheel turn and giggled at its uncooperative nature for a few more minutes.  I gave her a great big hug and kiss again and felt a lightness this time that was more beautiful than words can express.   She jumped down and ran to play and have a picnic with her friends.   I drove away knowing that she had just healed a part of me that I have been trying to for more years than I can remember.   My appreciation of her in my life will always be beyond explanation.

And now, I think I am going to go buy myself a pinwheel! 

Photo Credit: Shutterstock 

Walk-In Closets

As a woman, I have always dreamed of a walk-in closet.  You know the ones that have built-in lighting and drawers that open with the push of a button and oh yes, the angels sing whenever you open the doors.   I recently obtained two fairly large closets in my new master bedroom and that alone was enough to send me into happy land for weeks.  

As I pondered reasons why it seems that a bigger closet is always on a woman’s wish list, I remembered the vast space it offers, all the choices and the ability to look at every single thing you own and pick the perfect thing that fits you just right.  My last closet was a bit small, to say the least.  My clothes were scrunched in so tight that they basically pressed themselves.    

Our closets are just like our minds to me.  Inside our heads, there is a full array of different colors, various lengths and numerous styles of thoughts to choose from.  Some thoughts we haven’t put on in 10 years and could probably send to an antique clothing shop.   Some we bought and stored away, never to be worn but the once.   Some are like our favorite, comfy pair of jeans-always there, beckoning for us to slip them on and chill out.  

Our minds can often be confusing and cluttered as well.   No order to speak of and in dire need of some sort of “cleaning out” session.   Because of the confusion, we often resort back to those same 5-6 thoughts that we are so used to.  Some times we will keep thinking them even though they don’t really fit anymore or they have a tear or hole in them.   We will hold them, almost obsessively, because we remember the moment we bought into them or the event we first thought them at.  

I suggest that we remember that in our minds there actually is that amazing and huge walk in closet that we always dreamed of.  It is already built right there in that beautiful little head of ours.    We can walk in, anytime and pick any single thought we want.  

Did I mention that we have an unlimited budget to spend any time we want on new thoughts?   We can select the absolute best, the most luxurious, and the finest made thoughts we could imagine to fill this closet of ours.   We can fill its racks and drawers up over and over again with whatever we choose.   

However, as curators of this magnificent closet, it is also our privilege to release and get rid of the old and tattered thoughts.  To pull them out, take a look and say goodbye forever.  

Take a moment today and see if there are any thoughts that you have been recycling for way too many years now.  See if you can set them in the throw-away pile.  While you are at it, go shopping for some brand-new, amazing ones.  I promise, people will notice the new look and so will you. 

Wishing you the courage to always challenge unhappiness,

Erin

Our Beautiful Storms

Nature has a way of mimicking what we feel in life.  As we received some incremental weather last night, I thought of the similarities in how our emotions play out.   Often in our lives, we see an emotional storm brewing and we pray that it won't come.   We feel the winds of change start to race against the landscape and we feel like they could easily blow us over.   Often, we are even surprised by this emotional storm.  We may have been experiencing some great feeling weather just days before.   And as we start to feel the changes coming and start to get a sense of what might come to pass, we feel an old, familiar anxiety creep in.

Almost inevitably, the storm hits and sometimes, it hits hard.   What were once dry roads along our journey feel slippery with ice and snow now.   We knew it was coming and now that this new cold environment is here, it feels awkward in a way.  We have to use tools to sift through the snow to keep at our regular lives.  Nothing seems as easy or as familiar as what once was.

But this morning, I saw this storm in a completely different way.   I saw it's beauty, its absolute utter beauty.   Yes, it is colder and everything is frozen but maybe that old environment needed a fresh blanket of snow, full of sparkles and grandeur.  

As I stared at the trees in my backyard and saw the inches of precipitation stacked on their branches, I felt a quiet peace come over me knowing that this storm had not truly ruined my backyard.  If anything, it enhanced its beauty.  Such is the storms of our lives.   Our negative anticipation and our anxiety filled shock are always worse than what actually happens.   We always make it through and afterward, we have a beautiful scene to behold.  

So, my remembering today is about enjoying my emotional storms in their entirety.   Enjoying the build up, not listening to others who are dreading theirs, watching the beauty in each moment as it comes, realizing that it is never as bad as I could make it with my thoughts, and most important, realizing that the relief is coming.   In fact, it is already here if I stay present with what I am in.