Soulful Healing

Sundays are one of my favorite days.  It’s a day to reconnect with friends, family, and Spirit.  Yes, even on this  Sunday when much of the U.S. is keenly tuned to their TVs for hours of football fun.  On a slight tangent, it’s awfully hard not to use the actual words for today’s big game, but that’s how trademarks work…  Check out this great article on CNET about blacklisted words.  At any rate, I’m not much of a football fan, but because I like rituals, I like today’s football game.  Sometimes I even watch it, but that’s really more for the commercials, the food, and the fun conversations with friends.  Rituals are important; they help us mark the passing of time and can give structure where none would exist otherwise.  Birthdays, holidays, ceremonies, anniversaries, days of remembrance, rites of passage.  All these are important to satisfy the very human desire for order, but they also are a way to help us be more mindful.  Mindful of who we are, mindful of our past, mindful of where we would like to go from here, mindful of the people and places that nurture us.  

So in the interest of having a restful day, I am listing here some of my past articles on relaxation, rejuvenation, and reflection.  Whatever your ritual is today, I hope you enjoy it and bring some of that joy into the rest of your week.  Be well!
– Reconnecting with your Soul
– Time Out
– Emotional Balance
– Make Rest a Priority
– Coping with Stress

Hi everyone!  I’m so glad to be back here at my computer, typing away on this blog.  I hadn’t intended to take two weeks off from blogging, but my health had other plans.  I’ve been fighting off a couple of bugs and needed time to rest and recuperate.  When I wasn’t sleeping or otherwise resting in the past two weeks, I spent a good amount of time with my plants.  Nurturing the growth of plants and flowers is a wonderful way to develop our own healthy habits.  Since I’m based in Los Angeles, many of my mindfulness and healing suggestions are centered around the challenges of urban living.

I grew up in a small town, where there is plenty of land and space and trees and other green stuff.  My parents still have an extensive garden with seasonal vegetables, fresh herbs, and shockingly colorful flowers.  So I grew up appreciating green spaces and that sticks with me today, even in the urban landscape around me (just last night, I saw wild clover growing around a tree near a favorite restaurant and got excited!).  Having a lush garden can be difficult in the high density housing most of us in urban places occupy.  Unless, that is, you happen to be lucky to have a house with a good chunk of land (and that’s hard to come by even in this low real estate market).

Regardless of how much land surrounds your current residence, you can still keep a few plants around to help lift your mood.  I have several potted plants, some for indoors and others for outdoors, including a small herb garden.  If you enjoy cooking, fresh herbs are really the bee’s knees.  They taste more vibrant than the dried kind you’ll find at the grocery stores and, with the right amounts of water & love &  sunshine, they are endlessly renewable.  You can stop spending $3 each for a plastic box with two sprigs of thyme in it, and either buy a few herb plants or grow your own from seed.  And think of how great it will be next time you need parsley to flavor a dish and don’t have to buy a huge bunch of it, most of which will go to waste.  Growing your own herbs is more affordable, better for your taste buds, and will add that spark of new life to your kitchen or patio.

If fresh herbs aren’t your thing and the idea of growing things is intimidating, you might try getting some succulent plants (think cactus) that don’t need a lot of water or hardy, tropical plants that are hard to kill even if you ignore them for weeks.  Go to your favorite nursery (not the baby’s room…  the place where they grow and sell green things) and ask what kinds of plants might be good for your lifestyle.  There are also lots of “kits” these days where you can get a pot, soil, starter plant, and instructions all in one.  There are also ingenious indoor gardening set-ups that can have you growing even things like tomatoes right in your own kitchen.

Lastly, if you want to hone your gardening skills but don’t have the space for it, you might check out a local community garden.  These gardens that are tended to by any group of people are a great way to develop new friendships, preserve open space in increasingly urban communities, and be able to grow your own food even when you live in a small apartment.  Community gardens also help educate children about where food really comes from and they often help low-income communities and food banks improve access to fresh, healthy, affordable fruits and vegetables.  To learn more about community gardens in your area, check out the following resources:
– Los Angeles Community Garden Council
— American Community Gardening Association
— Capital District Community Gardens (upstate New York)
— GardenWeb

Here’s to your health and wellness!  Happy gardening!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on this three-part series on self-reflection.  In Self-Reflection, Part 1, I go over the various benefits of engaging in a self-reflective practice.  In Self-Reflection, Part 2, I share some ideas for bringing more reflective experiences into your life.  Here, in the third and final installment, I’d like to discuss some of the signs that one might be doing too much self-reflection.  It’s all about balance, as we are forever dancing between seemingly opposing concepts.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Like so many helpful practices we can use to further our personal growth, self-reflection has many benefits.  There does come a time, though, when it may be too much.  Remember the myth of Narcissus?  He fell in love with his own reflection and wasted away.  This kind of self-obsession is possible for us, with the symbolic shriveling of our other relationships.  Remember in all of this that your relationship with yourself is not the only relationship you have.  Relationships must be nurtured in order to thrive.  Be careful to balance your self-relationship with those social connections that help you to be a whole person, giving to each relationship what it needs to be sustained.

When utilizing self-reflection as a strategy for personal development, an important distinction to make is between the little “s” self and the big “S” Self.  By little “s” self, I mean the ego, while the big “S” Self represents the Soul. The ego is a tricky character.  Its voice can be whiny and entitled and demanding.  The ego wants what it wants and wants it NOW!  And when the ego’s demands on the rest of your psyche don’t work, it can resort subtle, insidious messages of maintaining the status quo.  It can be challenging to differentiate the voice of the ego from the other aspects of your Self.  Usually, the ego wants anything that is immediately pleasurable and rejects that which requires any effort to achieve.  So as you embark on your chosen self-reflective practices, watch out for a few ego reactions, such as tantrum-like thoughts & emotions, as well as prideful, entitled ones.  The ego may try to trick you into self-obsession, as well.  Anything to keep things exactly as they are!  But the whole idea of self-reflection is to grow and learn, not maintain the status quo, right?

Soulful Self-Reflection

Obsessing over your thoughts, feelings, and actions will not be helpful for you or anyone else in your life.  The idea behind soulful self-reflection is to set aside a specific time to make your observations, then let… them… go…  Release your judgments, worries, and plans over the things you have noticed and allow your Soul to do the rest.  There is so very much about your experience that your mind cannot figure out.  This is where the Soul/Source/God/Higher Power/Great Spirit/I AM comes in.  Trust that just engaging in the process of reflection has done what it is supposed to do:  slow you down, clear out the clutter, and make room in your psyche for your Soul to do its mysterious work.  There’s a reason why some of the best advice we can get is to “sleep on it”.

If you do the best work you can do on the conscious level to sort through the gobbledy-gook of your thoughts and feelings, well, that just needs to be good enough, doesn’t it?  The rest can be sorted out on deeper levels that take time and mystery and the willingness to embrace the unknowable.  And I am certain that there is a hefty part of all of us that is not fully knowable by anyone, at least not by the small percentage of our brains that we are typically using.  A good friend of mine once told me (and I have since shared this with many more friends and colleagues), “Some things you can’t know until you know them.”  Have faith, dear ones.  I believe you will one day have the answers you are looking for.  As for the questions that can’t be answered…  I hope you will learn to trust your Soul.

In closing, I’d like to leave you with a quote that gives me encouragement when my mind is working overtime to understand the magical mystery of this life.  Thanks for reading and enjoy…

“…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” ~~ Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903, in Letters to a Young Poet

Do you ever notice yourself mindlessly fidgeting with things during the day?  Maybe twirling your hair, running a finger along an object, tapping a pencil?  These are perfect opportunities to add some mindfulness to your day.  Here’s how to take advantage of the random fidgeting:

1)  First, notice that you are fidgeting with something.  Simply note this without judgment (if judgment arises, “Sheesh, there I go again…” work on releasing that thought)
2)  Exhale fully and inhale deeply, noticing the thoughts, feelings, and sensations accompanying your behavior and current situation
3)  Continue the whatever movement you just noticed yourself engaging in, but with your full attention and awareness.  If you are running your thumb on a shirt button, for example, describe to yourself everything you can notice about the button.  Is it hot or cold?  Does it have a texture?  Are there threads running through it? 
4)  Enjoy your now mindful moment!

Of course, this exercise is not beneficial in all situations.  I might not recommend this in the middle of an important meeting or while driving on the highway, as your attention will be on your pencil/button/necklace and not on the tasks at hand.  However, if you find a moment where it makes sense to practice this, feel free!  Thanks for reading and be well!

I’m not talking about the kind of self-reflection you see in the mirror every morning     Self-reflection is really just about taking the time to reflect on you…  your actions, your thoughts, your feelings, your experiences.  Our minds are always working as we sort through all the things we experience each day.  We tend to focus most on our interactions with others; thinking, feeling, and doing in reaction to something someone else has said or done.  It is equally, if not more, important to spend time reflecting on our interactions with our Self.  Here is my first entry in a three-part series on why self-reflecting is good for the soul and how to achieve the most from whatever self-reflective practice you choose.

Why Reflect?
I like to think of self-reflection as an exercise in “taking inventory” on oneself.   If we don’t examine our own thoughts, feelings, motivations, and subsequent actions, how do we really know what’s true and what isn’t?  We encounter so many people, events, tasks, noises, demands, and stuff in every moment that if we are not careful, we start to think we are defined by all that extraneous “junk”.  Reflecting on these things helps us to:

1)  Remember who we really are
2) Figure out our priorities
3) Determine next steps to take or actions to stop taking
4) Identify our feelings to figure out which ones have important information for us and which are just reactions to old baggage
5)  Sort through our thoughts to determine which ones are helpful to our greater purpose and which ones aren’t
6)  Clear our minds for another day full of “stuff”

These six benefits of self-reflection are important to us in that they allow us to re-connect  to our deepest sense of well-being.  We can be reminded that we are not defined by the stressors and obligations and worries and overwhelming tasks that fill our days.  I’m not saying it’s easy to remember our bright shiny undamaged soul in the midst of a stress storm, but self-reflection can make it a little easier on you the next time a storm like that hits.

Stay tuned next week for strategies for self-reflection, in Part 2 of this series.  Thanks for reading and, as always, be well!

Ahhhh, multi-tasking…  The bane of the modern age.  Whether you work at home or a bustling office, you are no doubt frequently called upon to multi-task:  working on one project, the phone rings, someone asks you for something, you need an answer from someone else, you’re hungry and start eating while doing five other things.  No wonder so many of us have a hard time sitting still!  We have no idea what to do with ourselves unless our toes are tapping or keyboards are clacking.

I often hear friends and colleagues say that they “just have ADHD” and can’t do one thing at a time.  My guess is that most do not actually have ADHD (unless of course that has been properly diagnosed by a clinician), but are instead suffering from our cultural phenomenon of too much at once.  While multi-tasking seems to be a sensible solution to having a lot to get done, I propose a better way.  Doing many things at once means you have several incomplete tasks all going at the same time, so where in there is room to see any one thing to its full completion?

In your daily life this week, try the following:

1)  Select one task and choose to mindfully start & fully finish it.

2)  When your mind wanders to all your other tasks, keep bringing your attention back to the task at hand until you are finished with it.

3)  If someone interrupts you with a question or task, try gently explaining that you are working on something else and let them know when you expect to be available.  You may need to practice other mindfulness skills if the person in question is a demanding boss or hungry child or someone with a true emergency!

4)  Allow yourself to move on to the next task only when the previous one is done or you reach an impasse that cannot be quickly resolved (as with test taking, sometimes it’s better to skip something and come back to it when you’ve had time to think).

Enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes with truly completing each item on your to-do list this week!

We often hear the phrase “time out” in reference to the well-known parenting technique.  But here, I’d like to explore the use of time out for ourselves.  In the midst of our busy lives, we go from task to thought to conversation to activity…  lather, rinse, repeat.  This leaves us with little time to reflect on our experiences.  And aren’t we grateful for that much of the time?  Keeping ourselves busy can in fact serve some short-term purposes, such as avoiding attending to the  constant chatter in our minds, dealing with unpleasant feelings, or even simply staying entertained.  Yet we humans are not the best judges of what will make us feel truly better in the long term (I confess that I had the TV on when I first started to write this, but had to turn it off because it was distracting me!).  Our first instinct is often to cover over the challenging stuff, hoping that it will go away if we ignore it long enough.  Not so.

We are so used to perpetual distraction that when we sit down and get quiet, the noise inside the mind is deafening and completely overwhelming.  It’s enough to scare you right back into the land of incessant movement!!  I often hear people say, “But I can’t sit still/meditate/do yoga because it makes me feel more anxious.”  That statement resonates with many people’s experiences in beginning a contemplative practice, including my own.  Taking time out for yourself can be challenging at first, especially if you are accustomed to the constant twirling & spinning of modern life.  Our culture says more is better and we often unwittingly buy in to that notion.  But as you gain skill and experience in tolerating, accepting, and letting go of your bustling and buzzing, it does get easier.  And at some point in that journey, you find the calm, quiet center of your Soul.  Like any skill, it takes time to develop.

Let me be clear, I am not recommending that you leave your life and responsibilities to go live in a hillside monastery (oh, but that idea is tempting sometimes, right?!).  Quite the opposite in fact, I believe there is so much for all of us to gain by taking some time out and then continuing with our daily tasks more in touch with our bright, shiny Soul.   This could be five minutes of stillness in the middle of a busy day, writing your intentions for the day or week in a journal, taking time to pray, or observing and mentally describing your thoughts and sensations during a typical daily task.  Anything that prompts you to reflect on your Self and your surroundings can be considered a contemplative practice and will guide you in knowing your Self more deeply.  Years ago, I participated in AmeriCorps and from that I have my first conscious memory of being taught how reflection is key to learning & growing.  When we do not take time to reflect, we risk doing things the way we’ve always done them, effective or not.

If you are just beginning your journey into self-contemplation and have been discouraged by the crushing chatter of your own mind, fear not.  Stick with it, as the only way to grow is to keep at it.  Our children are not the only ones that benefit from a time out now and then!  Give yourself a chance to turn your attention inside for a moment and reflect on what you find there.  You will no doubt wade into all kinds of wild and interesting things inside that mind of yours.  Shine a loving light among the darkness and the cobwebs.  You just might stumble upon a real treasure.