The Book-Creation Hacks Are Life Happiness Hacks, too

Creativity is a powerful guide to transformational change.  I’ve been writing for publication since way before the Berlin Wall fell, before Bill Clinton was elected President, even, and I blush to confess, the thrill never goes away.  My latest baby is just as much of a thrill as the second; 101 Stress-Busters for Energy, Joy and Healthy Longevity will hit Amazon and everywhere outside of Ashland, Oregon [we’ve got it already], at the end of January. Nothing is ever as soul-stirringly wonderful as seeing your name in big letters ON THE COVER OF A BOOK for the first time.  When the Library of Congress asked for a copy, I drove to D.C. so I could see how many Representatives and Senators had checked it out.  Answer: 12. Oh. My. God.

Lying collapsed in my usual post-creation heap, it occurred to me that the Best Practices for writing a quality book is strikingly similar to Best Practices for living your quality life. 

1.       Know what the end goal is: what outcome do you want for your readers; what outcome do you want for yourself, either on a business or personal level?  Keep these answers on a card or a sheet of paper whenever you sit down to work on your project.

Keeping an eye on the prize, a reminder of the ultimate goal, helps keep you from being swayed by the emotion of the moment, or someone who has “hooked” an unresolved childhood issue that you are not consciously aware of (needing attention; needing to show you’re best; needing to be appreciated; needing to have more income that anyone else in your social orbit, etc.).

2.       Have a project plan with checkpoints.  Have a chapter by chapter plan.

You know in your business life that checkpoints are vital to spurring effective action. They give you a clear idea of where the project is on the road to completion.  They give you accountability.  Don’t over-plan to avoid having to actually write, but do make sure that you have a step-by-step plan with specific checkpoints. 

In books, it’s a chapter or a page.  In other aspects of your life, what are the checkpoints?  When I bought my fixer-upper, I started with a list of serious problems.  I started checking them off and then I made a list of the remodels that I would need to have the floorplan work for a healing center, a family home and a separate pet area.  Not everything was clear from the start.  The amount of money and renovation I would need to turn the garage into the Hobby House, heated and cooled with moderate amounts of $$, was not clear to me when I started.  In fairness, I could have anticipated more of it, but the first two lists were so overwhelming, I very sensibly put the garage into the Much, Much Later category and didn’t give it another thought for two years. 

3.       Have a reward that you really want for completing every checkpoint, with extra rewards for completing on time.

You know this works.  You do it with your customers – reward the behavior you want.  Well, darling, your human brain works just like theirs.  So get those rewards prepared.  Want to lose weight?  Virtue ain’t its own reward, not in the first 30 days.  Have non-food rewards.  I, for example, will do nearly anything for a $100 Amazon gift card that I can use to bankroll my video habit.  I also salivate over, and will finish a chapter for or eat kale for, smaller rewards.  We all have things we want.  Don’t let yourself have them until you hit a checkpoint and see how your foot-dragging around clearing out the garage disappears. 

4.       You’re not writing a book; that’s a terrifying concept.  You are writing one chapter.  When you’re really tired and want to quit, but you’ve made the choice to push on to some checkpoint, then you are just writing this one page.  Just one page.  You can do that. 

You’re not losing 35 pounds.  You are cataloging all your calories for today, and doing a 10 minute intensive cardio routine on the DVD from the library.  Do both of those things and you can have a lavender tub soak (or Grantchester episode) tonight.  Do it for a week and you can go to a Sounders game.  Small steps get you to the finish line; grandiose plans flop in 6 weeks.

5.       If you get a brainstorm, something that really takes control of your brain and makes you want to shout “Yes! Yes! Yes!” to the uncaring walls or silent moon, write your brainstorm down in as much detail as you can, then take a deep breath and look at item #1.  Does this storm make the end goal or outcome work better?  Or does this storm point to a different outcome?  Take another 5 deep breaths [yes, it’s Tool #2-1 from my book; keep reading].  Perhaps meditate or do a card reading or ask Sarasvati or another incarnation of the great I AM for advice.  Do you really want this new outcome more than the old outcome?

I had an original chapter plan and I had a different title, because I had a different end goal.  Then I had a brainstorm that took my breath away and the book is entirely different.  When you are tempted away from a life goal, the same procedure keeps you on the best path for you.  Instead of following blindly when your limbic system gets hijacked by someone who touches an unhealed childhood wound or an unexamined childhood dream, you stop, get your pre-frontal cortex (your thinking, logical, clear-sighted brain) to give you a 2^nd opinion and let the two opinions become reconciled into a clear-headed decision, something that you will be proud to own for the rest of your life.  If everyone did this, the marketplace would be a very different place because most sales ploys rely on manipulating and amplifying the “I’m not good enough” beliefs hidden deep inside us.  If we had our PFC’s integrated with every limbic system business decision, we sellers couldn’t hid our lack of steak behind a smokescreen of sizzle.

Some of my changed life goals over the years have included dumping losing business ventures instead of “refusing to quit,” an emotional stance that caused several entrepreneurs that I know to lose house as well as business in the dot-com crash and then more in the Great Recession.  “I’m Not A Quitter” is a limbic system response, based on “quitter” shaming from childhood or adulthood, and not a clear-headed choice based on receivables, cash flow and the local and national economy. 

Every once in a while, I really, really want to do something, and no matter how hard I try, with all the skills of a transformation coach and healer, I cannot fathom why.  If it’s not dangerous to me, emotionally, physically or in any other way I can see, and it isn’t taking my life on a new and destructive path, I let myself do it.  I let myself say “Yes, I’m a spiritual healer,” when I didn’t consider myself one, just because someone I really respected asked me to – and stepped into a completely new income stream, and an additional self-definition.  It’s also why I climbed a mountain and then jumped – with the guy who actually knew how to fly the dang thing.  I knew the physical laws that allow lift and I had my will updated before the honeymoon trip, so there I was, for a millisecond, falling straight downward off a mountain.  And then lift kicked in and away we soared, high above Queenstown, New Zealand, soaring with dragons as I had always dreamed. 

6.       Self-care every day, no matter the deadlines, is your lifeline.  If you don’t eat healthy, exercise and take time to rest and recuperate, you will NOT create a quality product.  I know, Handel wrote the Messiah in six weeks, but let’s be real: He was a genius, he had been thinking about something like it for months, and he had a servant to make him healthy meals and remind him to take his daily constitutional.  This is the Magic Formula for a healthy life, too.

Let me connect you to a world of solutions.  While you’re waiting to buy your copy of 101 Stress Busters, take action to make 2017 the year when you knock some of your pain-points out of your life forever!  A free Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch, a real session) will give you tools that you can use to knock at least one of those “pains” out of the park – forever.   Do you like to Do It Yourself?  My blog and free classes are the place to start.  Are you ready for your major Pain Points to – poof! – be gone?  Sign up for a Getting Unstuck session (free, not a sales pitch), and watch one of them disappear.  Then sign up for a comprehensive program and ditch the big ones, too.  Do you like to learn from classes?  Comprehensive beta classes will be launching in January.  Sign up to be a beta-tester.  At www.soaringdragon.biz, it’s all about solutions, not hype!  You deserve more than quick-fixes that won’t last. Link to me and let me connect you to a world where problems get solved - forever!    

Trying to Pull a Fast One a Century Ago, Bites the Conniving Sneaks in the Butt – A Lesson for Us All, Every One.

Donald Trump is touring the country on a self-proclaimed Victory Lap, telling audiences that when he is President, they will be able to say Merry Christmas to each other instead of the let’s-include-all-Americans Happy Holidays greeting. His real message is that religious Christians have been oppressed and suppressed by the insistence on recognizing that Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and atheists are Americans too, and deserve courtesy and respect. Absurd. Everyone modifies their message for who they are talking to, from Presidents on down.

But the whole “Keep Christ in Christmas” movement forgets one supremely important – and instructive – point and that is: There are two completely separate holidays being celebrated on the same day and having the same name! There is, of course, the religious holiday and there is the secular holiday.

Let’s start with some facts about the religious holiday. The earliest Christians knew that Jesus was born in the last week of March or the first week of April, the two week lambing season when “shepherds are keeping watch over their flocks by night.” Nearly everyone knows that. For the 1st hundred years, the “birthday” was a solemn spiritual day, with prayers and (in some venues) fasting. Nearly everyone doesn’t know that Jesus’ Birthday was moved to December 25 because that was Mithras’ Birthday; this occurred as Christianity was becoming an empire-building political force, and co-opting existing faiths, through the coercion of Roman legions if need be, was the major proselytizing tool. Christians violently suppressed every other faith they came in contact with during that first millennium. My ancestors had been creating bonfires for Yule (Dec 21st) and getting blind drunk for eight days to two weeks. Along with excessive eating of yummy, unhealthy things and bringing fir trees indoors, which they continued to do when their rulers saw the power-advantages of going along and becoming nominally Christian.

So if you want to have a religious holiday, go to church services, don’t buy any presents or send any cards, don’t decorate the house or get a tree, stay indoors for 24 hours and pray. No TV, no matter who is playing who. Breathe, and pray. Silently or in your family group. For unto us a child is born. Pray.

That’s the religious holiday.

So how on Earth did we end up with another, completely separate holiday, completely (by law) secular and with the same dang name??? It’s an insane situation. The secular holiday should be moved to December 24 or 26th and called Winterfest or something. Or Jesus’ Birthday should be moved to spring. He might end up having a birthday and a death day very close to each other, which has a very satisfying symmetry, doesn’t it? The two holidays aren’t impossible to separate. The Unitarian Caroling group I’m part of sings lustily and enthusiastically at the mall for hours, providing outreach to people who’ve never met a Unitarian, and sticking strictly to the Frosty the Snowman genre of songs, of which there are a plethora. Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire has nothing whatever to do with a Middle Eastern guy/god who preached that all people are brothers and sisters, but it is a lovely

paean to the glories of winter in northern latitudes.

So, how did we end up in this silly mess?

We are experiencing the inevitable – absolutely inevitable – result of trying to pull a fast one. Every single time you connive and cheat, the result is going to be very, very bad for you. Call it karma, call it divine retribution, call it the human inability to see past the immediate goal that you want very much to the logical result of pulling that scam. Whatever your ideology is, the result is the same. Steal and you are going to get screwed. It may take a while but it will happen.

A century ago, just before the turn of the last century as I recall, a group of passionately Christian Congressmen with total contempt for the foundational American principle of separation of church and state, and every American’s right to live in a secular democracy, not a theocracy, got together and hatched a plan to circumvent the establishment clause of the US Constitution. As Phase 1 of a stealth plan to turn our beloved country into a Christians-only playground, they proposed a bill for a new national holiday. They wanted to make Christmas a national holiday, with mandated day off from work (or overtime pay) for all those good Christian folk who, until then, had to work on that supremely holy day. [As I still have to with my religious holidays, or take a personal day off, as is proper in a secular democracy where faith is a personal, not national, choice.] They also hoped that making that religious holiday a national holiday would be followed by making Easter and all other Christian holidays national holidays as well. [That was too much for the rest of Congress to swallow – and the Supreme Court, as conservative as it was, would never have gone along.]

They managed to pull their Christmas absurdity with a preamble stating that Christmas was a national family holiday, when families gathered and solidified their bonds – good for the country, appeals to patriotism, are you hearing the Amens yet? – and persons of all conditions and creeds bought presents and trees – appeals to business greed! – and so, a national celebration should be enshrined as a legal holiday. That had just enough stealth-verbiage to get through and get past the Supremes.

So – the reason religious Christians had their religious holiday turned into a market-economy extravaganza is that a bunch of religious zealots tried to violate the establishment clause. As a result of which, by law, their holiday was hijacked by the secular celebration. How we cope? Some people celebrate both holidays. Some people celebrate only the secular holiday. Jews took the insignificant Chanukkah and turned it into a major holiday so that their kids would have something to get, and get presents for, while all their friends are celebrating secular Christmas. They didn’t have to. “Christmas,” by law, belongs to all of us – trees, songs, lights, drinking and eating, being with family or being depressed because we don’t have family, decorating the house and lights, lights, Lights

.

So go ahead and celebrate the secular holiday. It belongs to you! And make a solemn vow, on December 25th and every day of the year that follows, to NOT take an ethical shortcut to your heart’s desire. It may take a hundred and twenty years to come home to roost, but it will. If you think you got away with it, it’s just your failure to perceive how the earthquake your ethics-shortcut set off will bring some aspect of your life tumbling down, down the temporal road. Play fair and you’ll never have the personal equivalent of this Christmas mess in your life.

Happy Holidays! Merry Secular Christmas to all!

Stress Busting - and Having FUN!

I’ve never done this before in my life: 240 pages, written, rewritten, edited and polished in a little over 6 weeks.  Georg F. Handel did his Messiah in about that long, but he was a genius.  Oh. My. God.  The newborn 101 Stress Busters for Energy, Joy and Healthy Longevity is on its way now to bookstores, Amazon and me.  As I contemplate this blank page, I feel like a battery that is completely devoid of charge.  Yet, thinking about this amazing experience, I can feel psychic energy sparkling through my exhausted soul, and suddenly I’m a bit less exhausted.  Just enough to pick up my fingers and pour my soul out on the page.

Two hundred and forty pages, most of which is about creativity.  There are preliminary chapters about fun ways to breathe and meditate and walk and exercise, and there is a chapter on making plans and making sure that you execute on them – so important! - but the bulk of the tome is page after page, tool after tool, that takes you out of your worry mind, away from the tunnel-vision that stress creates and into the realms of divinity.  After all, in the beliefs of most faith traditions, there is a deity who creates the world from the raw materials at hand.   The Bible creation story, and the Babylonian Tiamat story that it cribbed from, involves breath and clay soil and the transformation of dead nothingness into glorious somethingness.  God is God because he, she or it brings forth life.  God is the Creator in Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, the Norse pantheon and most animisms.  [Buddhism is the only major faith that doesn’t have a creator being.]  There is nothing that so closely mimics the divine as this simple path of creating something with your own hands and your own soul.

What flows through your mind and what frisson of excitement flows through your body when you first behold the works of YOUR hand?  Regardless of how imperfect it may be – and when you do anything for the first time, it won’t be the Pieta, so if you are perennially in the humor to tear yourself down, plenty of scope for it – it is creation.  It is beautiful in the same way that all newborn babies are beautiful.  The awe that overcomes you when you see the results of your work, the vision and the execution of your heart, your soul and your spirit resembles nothing else on Earth.  Even the transcendence you experience on the mountain top, or sitting on the rim of the Grand Canyon, or driving down a road three feet away from a live bison isn’t the same awe as the awe of true creation.

Creation of any kind, whether it is a vegetable bed or an oil painting, puts you in a mental and emotional place that transforms your physical body as well.  The adrenal stress cascade stops or slows.  Your heart stops laboring.  Neurons remain intact and new ones are created from neural stem cells; your memory improves and the clarity of logic sharpens.  Your kidneys stop laboring; your immune system, especially the T-attack cells and the Natural Killer cells that go after cancer as well as outside invaders, generates its full complement of soldiers, ready to protect you from killers within and without.  Chronic inflammation quietens.   The chemicals that scratch the walls of your arteries and allow plaque to attach become fewer and far between.  All over your body, from your skin to your bones and everywhere in between, the deadly effects of stress are muted.

Time spent in a creative fog is time that exists outside of the normal minute-by-minute “real time” that we are all used to.  The first time you can put aside your OMG, I’m Doing It Wrong, I Know I’m Doing It Wrong thoughts and really deep-end in the process, narrow your thoughts and focus to simply what you are doing, you will sink deep into the Time Without Time.  Time simply ceases to exist as a reality. 

And the act of creation doesn’t seem to even involve you.  People have reported feeling as if a power took control of their voice, their typing hands or the hand holding the brush or the glue pot while the Real Me just watched.  They are absolutely right, if the Real You is your thinking, planning, analyzing Pre-Frontal Cortex, the part of you most active when you are consciously, logically trying to “figure something out.”  In order to create, you need to let your PFC step back [“take a nap,” in a hypnotherapy journey] and let the part of you that knows how to play and that knows the real agendas and the real goals of your heart take over.  This is the part of you that passionately wants to express those agendas and goals – dreams – in whatever medium you allow.  Let the real Real You come out to play, and to express to you what is truly Real, and you will have a gold mine of Truth about yourself and how you truly perceive your world and your life.

I’m not immune from the glorious results of allowing Truth to flow.  I thought my new book 101 Stress Busters for Energy, Joy and Healthy Longevity was about health through blunting the deadly ravages of stress, and it is.  But if you look at the page count, and at the chapters that flowed out of me like a mighty stream, it is the power and glory of a life spent creating that the book is really about.  My subconscious was so insistent on this book that I bumped my planned 2017 releases to accommodate it, and I worked at a fever pitch to finish it, rewrite it, polish it, edit it and produce it in 6 exhausted weeks.  I mean, stress causes a lot of the problems that my work erases, but still – why?  Now, looking at the finished product in printed form, I know why.  My soul wanted your soul to create, and it produced a 240-page how-to guide to all the forms of joy that would fit into 101 tools, and still leave some space for breathing, meditation and the importance of moving. 

Want to learn more?  Come visit me at www.soaringdragon.biz or check out my Facebook group Healing Minds, Healing Bodies and join my monthly (or whenever I get around to it) newsletter.  I offer free and low-cost classes on Learnitlive.com as well as a free Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch) for entrepreneurs who want to wake up every morning, do their self-care and then execute, execute, execute all day long, no wasted time, for the maximum income and greatest joy.  I also invite anyone who thinks they’re “not creative” to call me or buy 101 Stress Busters, and I invite people who’ve had traumas in their lives, to know that the impact on their lives today can be ended - permanently.

The Most Wonderful Mistake of My Life...

I’m going to say a word and I want you to respond with the first words that come to mind.  Ready?

Ready…  set… MISTAKE

Now, if your mistake is a real ethical failure on your part – you betrayed your spouse’s trust, you cheated or lied in some other way – do the Ready…. Set again.  This article is for the merely boneheaded, not  for times when you betrayed your own soul.  [Forgiving the Unforgiveable by Flannigan is the way to go on this serious stuff.]

Did you immediately think about a mistake from your past?  Of course you did.  Know that If you remember it as a mistake, you haven’t forgiven yourself for it.  If it popped into your mind, it has been, in its own teensy or not-so-teensy little way, dragging you away from having compassion for yourself. 

I’ve been working on the self-compassion issue with clients this year, as I see it as the cornerstone of most of the rest of what I do.  For all the “Oh, I wish I had taken the other road” times of life, you end up with better choices in future if we do the deep work with me that gets you to wrap yourself in compassionate forgiveness and move on.

I’ve just been pole-axed by a blinding “aha!” that I have to share.  I KNOW you all that at least one of these “mistakes” from the past.

So come with me on a journey.  I’m teaching a class and answering a question about some subject-specific vocabulary – and I realize that I am explaining the Latin roots of the word, which entirely explains its function.  Everyone is amazingly impressed.  And the staggering reality hits me:  I have been a whiz at science terminology, including human anatomy [taught it at the college level for years], and a whiz at English vocabulary AND IT’S ALL BECAUSE I STUDIED LATIN IN HIGH SCHOOL.

Latin??  Yup.  Latin. 

No, I wasn’t at seminary. 

I dug in my heels and refused to listen to guidance counselors or any other adult who tried to tell me that I needed at least 3 years of a foreign language to get into college.  [Turns out they were right as far as that goes.  My two years of German got me the snooty-disdain treatment from some colleges.]

What in hades was going on with me?  Just me picking an unusual form of adolescent rebellion?

Not really.  What I did was fall in love with a guy who had died nearly two millennia earlier.  That’s right.  I was crazy-mad in love with Hannibal of Carthage and all things Punic.  In addition to book after book on Carthaginian culture and the 2^nd Punic War, I also insisted on learning ancient Punic and Latin.  I couldn’t find any Punic classes anywhere but graduate schools, which weren’t available to a 15 year old, however nerdy, but my school did have a classics track with Latin language.  So there I labored for two years, slogging through the Gallic mud with Gaius Julius and his castra ponere and castra movere.  [Caesar was constantly pitching camp and then moving camp and leaving two cohorts behind to guard the impedimenta, the baggage train.]  I would have committed total academic suicide and taken a 3^rd year of Latin but instead of military Latin they switched to Ovid’s love poems.  Yuk.  So I trundled off to German, and my self-study Russian.

Of course I consciously knew, through all the decades of my life since high school, that the Latin study had made so much of English and science much, much easier for me than it was for my cohort, but it wasn’t until today that I understood down to my elemental DNA that Latin had been a very good choice, a valuable choice and NOT A MISTAKE AT ALL.  Really, truly, madly, it wasn’t a mistake.  It smoothed my path to my eventual career.   It enriched my class this week. 

It was such a small thing, but watching that judgment dissolve away to nothingness, to be replaced by shining sunlight, reminds me yet again that even the most positive of us, even someone like me who is dedicated to blasting through others’ barriers and bringing them more productivity, more happiness, more of whatever matters most to them, is carrying a Marley’s chain of regrets. 

Today I let one of them go, with a laugh.  God bless Latin.  And bless all of your mistakes that you have not yet realized were not so bad after all, and all of your non-mistakes that have smoothed your way through life in ways you’ve never realized or acknowledged.  Pour gentle compassion on them, hug the younger you that made those choices. 

And I still love Hannibal and all things Punic…..

..........

Want to clear away the boulders that are standing in the way of your goals?  When Hannibal’s army was stopped on an Alpine pass by a big boulder, he had his men build a large bonfire and when the stone was very hot, they poured vinegar on it.  The stone cracked into smaller pieces that could be moved, and the elephants, horses and soldiers could get back on their way to destiny.  I can blast away your boulders, too!  Sign up for a FREE Getting Unstuck session to get your transformation started. Victoria@soaringdragon.biz.   www.soaringdragon.biz

Healthy Female Body Image - and Healthy Female Bodies

Harriet Brown (Missed Images, October 2016, Prevention Magazine, prevention.com) fell into a common error:  she discovered that she’d been doing something to harm her kids and decided the only solution was to go to the opposite extreme.  Specifically, she’s spent years criticizing her body in truly unhealthy ways, in front of her kids.  She’s stopped that.  Good.  

Now listen to her list of what the rest of the world has to do: no mentioning of weight, calories or carbs, ever.  Those of us who are determined to stop being victims of the nationwide-epidemic of overweight – a very serious health hazard, personally and for our country! – can’t even mention our weight loss and strengthening victories, much less celebrate them!   If we congratulate each other on vegetable-eating and subsequent weight loss, talk about recipes, talk about yoga and water aerobics, about losing fat and putting on muscle, then we are “trash-talking” our bodies.  We cannot discuss these health facts and victories with our kids or with each other – ever, in any way.   

Any factual information about the health hazards of obesity are equivalent to body-hating.  What other pressing problems could we solve if we stop thinking about improving our health by reducing our fat, the author asks?  More important than a strong, healthy body and the self-care that precludes stress-eating?  Health is the #1 most pressing issue in your or anyone else’s life.  What does it profit a woman to save the rainforest and die young herself of preventable disease?  We women have been modelling THAT kind of devaluing ourselves for way too long.

The cure for trash-talking isn’t a gag rule.  We can't switch from shaming each other for our unhealthy bodies to trying to make ourselves feel better by shaming those who are trying to improve their health - or ours.  

What this author should have said is that she used to refer to herself in self-loathing terms, now she is self-loving.  She now tells herself that she completely loves and respects her physical self AND she is charting exercise, calories, carbs and meditation every day so she can nourish and care for her physical self in the best possible way, during the making-muscles, losing fat transformation period and on into maintenance of her healthy, vibrant body.  

Insisting that all body types are equally worthy of LOVE is right on.  Saying that all body shapes are equally HEALTHY is utter nonsense.

Want Intense Joy, even Bliss? You don't need drugs... or even other people....

One of the broadest roads to mental, emotional, physical and spiritual strength is the creative arts, and I just came across a wonderful quote.....

Vincent Van Gogh: "If you hear a voice within you saying "You can't paint!", then by all means, paint - and that voice will be silenced."

Amen, brother. If I had a dollar for every client who has shied away from creativity because of the fear of criticism/perceived failure, I would be sitting on a beach in Tahiti for two months every year.....

When I tell people I paint, they assume that I am beloved by hundreds of fans, who eagerly buy my stuff. Nope. I create stuff that I either love and hang up or decide "Nah, that doesn't warm my heart" and throw it out or paint over it. Who cares? It's the process of doing art that is the fun, that processes all the frustrations or joys of the day, week, life, into - something that has never existed before.

You will never be so close to utter bliss in any other context, as when you are overcome by transcendence - that out-of-yourself feeling you get when you are the presence of beauty so intense it makes your teeth ache and tears form, or when you behold your newborn child, or when you hold another form of creation in your hands. Sometimes what comes out of me and onto the page poleaxes me to the point where I can hardly breathe. *I* created that. And it is a Something that has never existed before. It came out of my consciousness and took form on the written page,or the collection of paints or the juxtaposition of images torn from magazines and added to by ink and colored pencil,

Until you do this, and do it regularly enough that you can get past your fears and start to feel transcendence, you will never really understand what the Biblical authors (and the original Babylonian authors) meant when they imagined the Creator looking on its handiwork and proclaiming it Good. Not an artistic judgment, that. No, Good meant that undefinable feeling you get when you look on something and it is just 100% just-the-way-it-is harmonious and Right, in an ineffable way that only your soul and the soul of the universe understands.

Get some cheap watercolors ($3.99, I swear to you) and play. Buy craft-quality acrylics for $1.50 each. Create. You deserve to feel so good you cry. Then make another appointment with yourself and do it again.

I can make your day 15 minutes longer - or more! Don't believe me? Read on.....

I'm a big fan of yoga (fun), walking with my dog (see photo) and yard work (not so much, but it gets me sweating).  

But who doesn't dream of making time for all that lovely exercise that our bodies crave, by lengthening the day?  Oh, please, please, please, great spirits of the astronomical, can't you slow down the Earth's rotation and give us a longer day?  

Not possible, thank goodness, or we'd all die for celestial mechanical reasons I'd be glad to bore you with [just ask], but isn't it a great fantasy??

Fortunately, we don't have to.  We don't really need more time, and in our saner moments we do know that.  What we need to clearer priorities and the strength to stick to them.  Kids and spouses can do more, if we are willing to draw on our ancestral courage and make that shift happen, and not be distracted by the hooting and hollering and "I hate you"s.  Many things just don't need to happen at all, which means courage again to face up to peers, family and the parental voices in our heads.  Courage is more valuable to your life than diamonds, or hours more in the day, and you know that, too, at the wise core of your soul, down below all the noise and rumpus of emotions and fears.

Priorities....

I like to try out new exercise options and so I picked up the Women's Health Big Book of 15 Minute Workouts.  Some of them are strictly for the 20-something crowd, but many of them look interesting, done straight or modified for my aged and decrepit body.  Before the workouts, the book features a list of time-wasters that you could eliminate, to get more time for your workouts - and for Reiki, meditation, tapping, art and the rest of the stress-elimination protocols I teach my clients.  

Here are my favorites:
* Turn off Facebook.  Set a timer, give yourself 10 minutes a day and then TURN IT OFF.

*  Say NO to what is not on your priority list.  If everything is critical, then your decision-making is seriously askew (a stress symptom), or you need additional help from your probably-not helpless family members.

*  Do one thing at a time.  Scientific studies have proven over and over again that you can rapidly-switch your attention from one thing to another if we are talking about mindless chores - laundry or vacuuming, or with my cooking style, cooking - but if you are doing something substantive, give it your undivided attention!  You actually spend less total time if you do something with all your attention and then move on to the next thing.  If you don't believe it, test it out - fairly - and see what happens, for three days minimum. 

*  Make cleanliness and order a priority, so you don't waste time trying to find things.  Put things in the same place all the time.  Put up a key hook and always put the keys there.  Put your glasses in the same place.  Keep your office or bill-paying area organized.  Do your bookkeeping and filing every month.  Clean the house once/month.

I have my fridge organized, and used to go ballistic if hubby puts things on the wrong shelf. Then I decided to do a test.  He did his usual higgledy-piggledy and got 3 seconds to glance in the fridge and list what was there.  I got an organized fridge and the same 3 seconds.  Then we switched.  He saw that HE was faster with an organized fridge too.  His cooking improved because he could tell at a glance what raw materials he had available. That's why he puts food on the right shelf just like I do.  Right, honey?  Honey?  

But don't be a neatnik.  Understand that too much cleanliness is like too much dieting - a desperate attempt to control SOMEthing.  Channel those urges into art or journaling.  Take one of my classes and get super-good at identifying your real needs before you start vacuuming under the bed.  [I put my beds directly on the floor.  Nothing to vacuum, whoopie!]

* Spend less time on cheap, unimportant purchases and decisions.  Some people are naturally decisive (Myers-Briggs J types).  My first husband and I went to purchase a new washer one day.  I scanned all the options, narrowed it down to two, then one, slapped my hand down and summoned a sales rep with a "This one."  While hubby was still thinking about the first model he came across.  I had a clear idea of my criteria before we got there, then I laser-focused on the criteria list, and done.  12.5 minutes, according to former hubby.  And that included the time spent asking "Where are the washers?"  Myers-Briggs P types need to consider this tip.  Some decisions are important enough to deserve protracted decision-making.  Darling hubby #2 and I spent two years meticulously researching and finding our ideal future retirement location.  For a P, making a commitment to one course of action, and leaving all the rest behind, is less than comfortable.  Practice zipping through unimportant decisions.  Become the cheetah, who focuses exclusively on the impalas, then one impala in particular, with laser intensity.  Enjoy the sunset some other time.

*  Put it in your calendar.  This is a gotta-have for anyone who wants to accomplish anything.  Your priorities are in your calendar.  If they aren't there, they don't really matter to you - whatever you say. 

*  Use that timer for other black holes, those astronomical phenomena that suck in every bit of matter and energy that comes close to them.  You know what you waste time on.  Use that time to rest!  Or exercise, which gives you more energy and burns up the cortisol that makes you feel tired.

*  Set out your exercise clothes, or always keep them in the same place, near the front door.  You set out your next-day clothes before you go to sleep, right?  I actually have two set of clothes - the stuff I'm going to sweat in and the stuff I am going to meet clients in.  No decisions to make the next day, just jump into one and then the other.  Or keep them in the dining room, like one of my clients does, because she works at home and seeing them during breakfast reminds her of her commitment to her health, her family, her income and everything else that first and foremost depends on her health.

Doesn't that all sound eminently logical?? Sure it does.  Now pick ONE item on that list and do it every day, every single day, for a week.  Then add another one.....

Contact Victoria Leo for a FREE Getting Unstuck session at victoria@soaringdragon.biz, or visit www.soaringdragon.biz. 

Joy in the Midst of Sweat and Trees and Irises

Close your eyes and visualize "joy." 

Did you think about vacations or chore-free, work-free time?  X-rated subject matter?  

Most of us do.  After all, if you have too much work and chores and responsibility, you DO need respite from it.  You can - and I and my clients do - carve out time in the day to meditate, exercise, Reiki, pray - whatever your daily practice of Self-Care includes.


Of course, there is another road, one that we rarely choose.  So let's take a stroll down the Road Less Traveled By and see - it might make all the difference....

My husband took a week of "vacation" time and has been at my healing center in Ashland Oregon, getting megadoses of healing work, enjoying time for art  - and spending 4-5 hours/day in heavy landscape improvement (planting trees and bulbs) and repair.

I was out there with him, of course, mowing lawn, collecting acorns and running to the hardware store for more poles, deer netting and whatnots, along with backup vocals on the tree-planting.

*I* was feeling pretty sorry for myself, truth to tell.  Five hours/day is a 2nd shift, and you all know how much fun that is!  Parents, raise your hand and sound off.  Two-job wage-earners or job+college folks, groan in unison.

But Rick wasn't going down that road.

"I love working on THIS earth," he said, leaning on a shovel for a short rest-break.  "When I do THIS work, I am working for myself, for my future."


Working for myself, for my future.  Isn't that what everyone who is working hard on a degree or certificate is doing?  Isn't that what everyone who is earning a living, and maybe going the extra mile for a promotion is doing?  Isn't that what we entrepreneurs are doing?  

If we take a long, slow deep breath, close our eyes and talk it over with our spiritual guides or inner wisdom, won't we hear the same Truth?  

All this work, all these "chores" are labor for myself, for my future.  And who doesn't want a happy future?


Email me at victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com for a FREE Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch).  You deserve to start working on your future today!

Want the Fast Track to Getting What You Want??

Playing with my cats earlier today….

Orono (a Maine Coon, natch) knows how to play Bat At the Cat Toy. She has lots of fun leaping and pouncing, and she knows that the fun is prolonged when she simply “counts coup” on her enemy, leaving the toy available for an immediate new game. The challenge is in the doing.

Gabriel, alas, finds the subtleties of Orono’s strategy perplexing. For him, the name of the game is catch that bird-substitute, hold onto it with jaws of steel, give it a neck bite and drag it off one’s lair and gloat over your victory. I have seen him shake his head – a feline ploy to help snap the prey’s neck. Sigh. His insistence on refusing to catch and release means that every time he catches the toy I have to wrestle it away from him before any of us can have any more fun. (If I don’t wrestle it away, he shreds it in too-authentic predator style.) He cannot hold on to his gettings lightly. He doesn’t share anything; he treats every treat as though it will be his last. He never lets go. He does not believe that if he lets go that he will ever get another shred of prosperity again. All evidence to the contrary will not shake him.

We all know people like Gabe. They snatch. They hold on to their possessions and the people in their lives with a death grip. That approach, they think, at the deepest, unrational limbic system where humans make most of their decisions, will allow them to be financially, professionally and in all other ways happy.

Funny thing is – exactly the opposite is true. Avoiding extremes of fiscal extravagance and unconsciousness, of course, if you keep a light hand on the reins of your life, you can feel nuances and changing circumstances and have a much better chance of staying on the sunny side of the street. When you are desperately trying to control someone or something, your hands get hard and insensitive; you can’t feel the nuances any more. Batting at your fun (or your sorrows) allows more fun to come in to your life. Desperately grabbing onto every shred of fun and refusing to allow the positive energy to circulate in the world guarantees that less fun will come your way – you are a dead end and energy wants to circulate.    

If that’s too fanciful, here’s the more concrete version: if you touch all the things and people who come your way with a light touch (not grabbing like Gabe), if you are not desperate to get the business or convince someone of something, if you are not convinced that you can manifest any and every outcome your desires can conjure, you invite people to come closer. Open, welcoming arms, open minds and communication without needing a particular outcome is more likely to give you what you really need, in a day/week/month/year/life. If you stop trying to manifest and just go about your work in the world, stopping to say “thank you” for whatever shows up, whether you label it as “Good [I got what I want]” or “Bad [I didn’t get what I want],” then you have the magic formula for a happy life.  Regardless of whether you got the million-dollar income or the wonderful spouse, you will be centered, content, happy, with dozens of friends who just adore you, because you are life-giving sun, pouring joy into everyone else from your own limitless supply.

Another fish will be along in the universe’s own perfect time.  

Go to Soaring Dragon. 

How to Make Changes; How to Vanquish Fear... Brene Brown and Eleanor Roosevelt

An excerpt from my 2017 book, Red State, Blue Heart, a memoir of my years in North Carolina….

HE WAS ENORMOUS!! THE SIZE OF AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER!! Well, maybe a pocket battleship. He came at me with vicious intent, a blow glancing off my skull and then he landed on my computer keyboard just as I hit the Publish buttom for my last night’s blog. I screamed (of course).  He attacked again and I screamed again, remembering to cover my mouth this time. He landed on the keyboard again.  The rational part of my brain (not doing much at the moment) would like you to know that he looked almost exactly like a (slightly) smaller version of the Shadows on Babylon 5, and I have my ex-husband the entomologist’s voice in my head telling me that most bugs are female, so I should say “she.”  

Notwithstanding the fact that she was the size of a house, I draped a towel over her and got her out the back door, but not without several false-starts and enough blood-curdling screams to bring my neighbors running. [Nice to know I have backup when I need it – god bless Southerners!]  So – what’s the point here, besides don’t invite me to a restaurant to eat chocolate-covered multi-legged creatures?

1) There are a lot more bugs in the moist and humid Southland than in the dry climates I live in now, and some of them are ENORMOUS and using all of their persistence and brain power 24/7 trying to get into my home to terrorize me. [I also need to work on my paranoid tendencies, yup.] Native Southerners have been laughing (mostly good-naturedly) at me for over three years. Laughing at one’s neighbors did not end with Jane Austen in 1815. It’s still good, clean fun in the 21st century. Y’all in non-southland states who are laughing at me right now – quess what? As global warming continues, the bugs are moving northward. Ah-ha!

2) fears are frequently not in proportion to the actual threat. Oh, yes, this is the big one. It’s fun to laugh at people who have exaggerated fear-responses to bugs and wasps, but the reality is that all of us have exaggerated fear responses to something – and it is usually more social/interactional than related to bugs and snakes and mousies, oh my. I work with people in career transition, people who want better health and vitality, and people in other kinds of transitions, many of whom stall part of the way through their way to where they say they want to go. Lots of reasons on the surface. They all add up to – at some point, fear takes over and no amount of encouragement or inspiration from others can counteract that internally-generated fear. My terror when confronted by a non-woman-eating insect is ludicrous.

When I look around me, I see all of us running away from little bugs who loom enormous in size and power, in our imaginations. Our brains are wired to respond to fear, as a way to keep us alive in a predator-filled environment. In today’s world, it is primarily social “death” we fear, an interpersonal attack, with words expressing judgment, condemnation or contempt. We unleash these weapons on each other to show how powerful we are [not realizing that it actually demonstrates just the opposite, to someone who has a strong sense of their own power], or to [benevolently] try to protect each other from what we see as dangers [because, of course, they are all-knowing and all-wise, godlike in their own perceptions and 100% know what the future will bring], or for gain [promotions, a date, you name it].

Most of what we are afraid of is not really the size of an aircraft carrier. So, what “bugs” have you been afraid of? Sure, you’re not screaming loudly enough to bring the neighbors running.  Maybe you have been shutting yourself down before you ever really consider certain options. Maybe you let them start to surface before you thrust them away, unconsidered.

A big source of fear in our lives is What Will [People in general or a Specific Person] Think? None of us like to admit that we crave approval, but nearly everyone does nonetheless. We hold ourselves back from achievement to avoid being criticized. We hold ourselves back from the possible failures that would propel us light-years ahead in personal growth, because we are afraid of the I Told You So and the amorphous Feeling Like A Fool. Well, I am here to tell you that actually acting like a “fool” is the least foolish thing you will ever do in your life.

It’s sometimes painful, when you are walking a pristine path without a trail, but it is in those moments that you are most truly alive, most truly in touch with the DNA and the person you were born to be.  Lots of people think my bug freakouts are funny; some consider them shocking, and try to induce shame in me for being so "weak," because I am "so strong and capable the rest of the time."

As Brene Brown would say, “Nonsense!” 

As Eleanor Roosevelt tells us, you gain courage from every time you stop to look fear in the face and don’t back down.  After a while, you can’t be frightened by anything.  You tell yourself, “Well, I lived through these horrors, I can live through the next thing that comes along.”  Eleanor conquered her extreme shyness and became a wonderful public speaker and fearless advocate for the powerless, one scary confrontation at a time.  Some of them turned out to be tiny insects when she confronted them, other fears stemmed from real danger.  But she built her courage muscles, step by step, and so can you.  And so can I. 

Your homework assignment for next week: 1) consider some of your fears as possible bugs, annoying but not life-threatening, 2) come running if your neighbors scream, and 3) put up plastic sheeting on your windows. It not only cuts heat/cooling losses and lowers your fuel bill, but it also keeps the damn wasps out.

Contact me for your FREE Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch).  Victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com

Creativity to Boost Your Sleep!

My regular readers know how enthusiastic I am about creativity.  My class on using Creativity to Cleanse and Clear Specific Chakras (on learnitlive.com) is a big hit.  I use specific creative exercises whose action is to clear blockages in a specific chakra.  It's been a happy all-day class and I recently experimented with dividing it into chunks of a chakra or two, for people who digest big changes slowly.  I also include specific creative activities in all my really powerful transformation programs. 

Why?  Do I just like the idea of the whole world painting, drawing, coloring, making things with wood and cardboard, building kits, making mosaics and collages, and on and on?  

No, I'm not really addicted to paint.  I'm addicted to alleviating suffering.  Getting into your unconscious mind is the fastest, most powerful route to ending problems.  [I also use thinking-oriented, cognitive-behavioral techniques, but they only work if you already have an accurate idea of what really is the problem, and that is NOT usually the case.  My entrepreneur friends, you don't just need a tutorial on the new magical marketing tool in order to instantly have a million-dollar business.  Nope.]  

And how do you get into your unconscious mind when you don't have me in person or via video to guide you?  One way is deep meditation.  Another is listening to a journey with Belleruth Naperstek.  And another is to get yourself engrossed in color, shapes and the feel of creation in your hands.  My friends, you will never feel so close to god-like powers as you do when you step back from a work you created and realize the spine-tingling awe of "I MADE that.  From nothingness."  When you look at something you did and you feel deep into your DNA that you LIKE it - and you love yourself.  When you look at something you made with your own two hands (or whatever you have), and you feel deep in your DNA, "OMG, NOW I understand why I have always had trouble with taking charge, swimming, speaking in public, being praised, failing to excel at anything I try, ."

THAT moment of either pure joy or transcendent enlightenment is the real purpose of a consistent creativity practice.

So what about sleep?

After you have taken warm milk and melatonin, you turn off your blue light electronics, you have a bed that is not too hot or too cold, and you have made sure that you weren't arguing about politics or other aggravating topics for the two hours prior to bedtime, if you still can't sleep, start reiki-ing yourself.  Don't know reiki?  How about tapping?  Meditation of the Ommm and breathe style.

And if you haven't learned any of that, after you made a note for tomorrow AM to go to www.soaringreiki.biz and sign up to learn, then it's time to get up and pull out the pencils.  [Painting at midnight requires you to wash your brushes.  If you live with people who will be disturbed, go the colored pencils on quality paper route.  Same effect!]  Breathe deeply.  Close your eyes, call on your spirit guides, your goddess guides and helpers [another class at learnitlive.com, very powerful and fun.], or your Wise Adult, take a walk at the beach, or along a forest trail, and tell them all about it.  Then start to draw, without waking up your conscious mind at all.  Just let your "feelings" guide you to colors, shapes, and effects.  I have glitter glue sticks, animal eyes and all kinds of magazines, for pictures.  Whatever hair-brained idea pops into my mind, I breathe deep to make sure I'm not thinking, and then I let myself do it.  The results can be quite extraordinary!

When the emotional energy is discharged in a good cry or some creative arts, you'll be able to sleep.  Sometimes I take a few minutes to write down the insights into my journal for later cogitating as well as feeling.  But with the emotional burden lifted, I drift away.  

Bliss.....

Great news for humanity! bad news for the super-bugs!!

Great news for the fight against unnecessary use of antibiotics and anti-bacterial products that are wiping out the benign dudes and allowing super-bugs, immune to all known drugs, to evolve!

A couple of days ago in the USA: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)  has banned anti-bacterial soaps and related products. Turns out they don't keep you any healthier than plain soap and water, scrubbed energetically!  And they help make antibiotics useless against real enemies. 

So hooray for one small step of progress. If you've been using anti-bacterials, don't buy any more. Get some lavender-scented soap instead - lavender is pure bliss in any form!

What Happens Inside Your Body When You Get Flu Shot - And How to Boost Your Immune System In Fall/Winter

I got a flu shot today, as I do every year.  You should, too.

Some folks are afraid of side-effects.  The CDC reports that 90+% of the side-effects are rashes or swellings at the injection site.  So let’s all take a deep breath together.  I get a rash if I wear wool.  My husband was stung by a yellow-jacket while gardening last weekend and had a rash and a swelling.  The rashes and swelling with shots of all kinds go down in 24 hours, as his bee sting did.  Not exactly a major medical emergency. 

My sister swears that the one time she got a flu shot, she came down with flu, so therefore the flu shot must have given her flu.  Lots of people think this.  Reality: dead viruses can’t hurt you, and the viruses being injected into you are DEAD.  Sis is falling into the “if two things happen together, one thing must have caused another” fallacy.  Two things happening is a correlation; they happen together.  But correlation is not causality.  I sneezed just as I switched on my TV and the tube blew out, so I was convinced that sneezing caused the blow out.  [I was very young.  Have compassion.]  That’s ridiculous, yes, but so is dead viruses making you sick.

Truth is, there is a danger involved in flu shots, but it’s not the danger Sis is worrying about.  The real danger is that injecting dead viruses into my body gets my body focused on fighting this collection of three dead invaders [the most likely influenza variants to crop up this season] AT THE EXACT SAME TIME that there is a high probability that other viruses and bacteria – the whole soup of bugs that are circulating during the winter “flu season” – are also attacking you.  If the timing is just right, your immune system is focusing on building protection against a future invasion by the three deadly flus and another bug just happens to invade when your protection squad is not paying attention.  It can waltz in without being detected until it’s too late!  Now if you are used to thinking logically, you will ask: what is the mathematical probability that the timing will be exactly right to allow that second bug to invade just when your immune system is focusing on preparing its defense against the deadlier potential threat?  Not very high.  But you roll the dice every year over the span of a long life, and the probability that it will happen eventually gets high.  And unlikely events DO happen.  Sis won the virus jackpot on her very first outing.  But she’s still making a foolish choice. 

So, how about some basic info on how your immune system works?  Sounds good to me!

Your “immune system” is a collection of systems and processes that are all focused on 1) detecting, and then 2) fighting off, invasions of your body.  Your mouth, nose, eyes, lungs, digestive system and urinary/vaginal/anal openings are the most likely entry points, so you have the most defenders there.  Your “detection” defense consists of sentinel B and T cells who are constantly patrolling these high-risk areas, as well as all through the rest of your body, in case some miscreant gets past the border sentinels.  One type of T sentinel, the NK cells, also check your own cells for problems, eliminating most cancers before they are larger than a few cells.  [When they get confused and decide that your own body organ is an invader, you get auto-immune diseases.]  Detection is the weakest part of the system.  Far too many invaders manage to fake out or elude the sentinel B and T’s and establish a beachhead.  If you are a military history fan, you know that the first 24 hours of D-Day were critical.  Once the Allies had a beachhead and could land tanks and artillery, the war’s outcome was not in doubt.  In the same way, you want your sentinel cells to be numerous enough and smart enough to smash all the invaders before they start to settle in and proliferate.  [My programs use hypnotherapy, reiki and other tools to help your sentinels to keep their numbers up AND to be smart about taking out cancer and leaving healthy tissue alone.  Call or email for a FREE Getting Unstuck session.]

When a sentinel cell detects an invader, it alerts the major ground forces, the attack cells.  B sentinels alert their own B attack cells, who inform the T sentinel and attack cells.  At this point, a major reproductive move starts, as your major ground forces attempt to assemble an army large enough to take the invaders out.  BUT – this takes too much time, usually!  If the bug makes a beachhead, you are going to get sick.  If your attack cells can reproduce fast enough, it will be a quick, light illness.  [If they nip it before it even gets started, you won’t even know you were invaded.  Maybe you’re tired for 24 hours but don’t know why.  Now you know why.]  If your attack cells don’t get alerted soon enough or they are vastly outnumbered by the invaders, you’ll be down for the count.  Four days or four weeks sicker than a hound-dog in July. 

Swelling at the site of the injection just means that your sentinel cells noticed that your body has been invaded by the dead flu viruses, it alerted the B and T attack cells, who are starting to mount a defense.  This is a good thing!  Swelling, redness, fever and pain are the “cardinal signs” that your attack cells are fighting off an invasion, and many doctors are now suggesting that adults allow a moderate fever to remain.  [Virus replication is inhibited at higher temperatures.  If you fight your immune system and bring a low-moderate fever down, you are helping the invader and foiling your body’s defense strategy.] 

The sentinels tell the attack cells exactly what to look for.  The attack cells kill all the invading dead viruses AND manufacture memory cells who remember the exact configuration of the proteins that define those invading viruses.  This is why vaccination protected George Washington’s army from being decimated by smallpox, and it protects you and your children from death as well.  Those memory sentinels ID the invaders immediately and marshal a very strong defense from the attack cells.  With a vaccine, you have a massive army on your side in hours instead of the usual days.  Your attack cells have an excellent chance of wiping out the invasion before you even know it’s under way.  That 24 hours of tired and you dodged the measles, meningitis or pertussis bullet. 

It also explains why your baby and child needs as much protection as possible, as soon as possible, because their sentinel cells are not very clever yet.  Those sentinel cells can easily detect and the attack cells can do their thing, and create lifetime immunity [or long-term, as the case may be] memory cells for several diseases at once.  Sure they can.  

You wouldn’t want to be vaccinating your kid against pertussis when they are actively fighting off a measles invasion, but if everyone vaccinates, then there IS no measles virus floating around.  And keeping our herd immunity high is a matter of life and death – literally – for the adults and children with compromised immune systems who lack sufficient sentinels and attack cells and whose B and T’s can’t even handle the invasion of dead viruses and bacteria very well.  To protect them, we all have to make sure that we eradicate the childhood killer diseases, by not allowing them any hosts to take over.  I am old enough to know the terror my parents had to endure, because the killing and crippling diseases had no cure and, most importantly, no prevention.  

I deeply, passionately, don’t want us to return to those dreadful days.  I just returned from a vacation in Alaska and was reminded that the first Iditarod was literally a race against death.  Diphtheria had hit Nome and if treatment wasn’t received in 10 days, the whole town would be infected and most would die.  Death had Nome in its sights.  The serum did arrive in time, everyone was treated and the death rate was low.  But other towns that did not have the Alaska railroad and dedicated teams of dogs just died. 

Can you imagine that?  Because of modern vaccination, we are not a nation of sobbing parents, burying child after child, utterly helpless to prevent death.  Children aren’t growing up without their parents, who also died in droves of what is now preventable through vaccination.

Flu does kill, but not as many as diphtheria, pertussis or measles.  But I want to give my immune system every advantage, so I am building memory cells as I write this, and they will circulate at a high level for 3 months, protecting me for the start of the season.  I hope that you will give your hard-working sentinels the leg up that they need as well.

And what else can you do to help boost the number of sentinels circulating in your major entry points? 

Ø  Sleep.  The more you sleep, the more B and T cells you have.  Forget taking a supplement.  Sleep.

Ø  Reduce stress.  Take breath breaks.  Learn and practice Reiki and/or tapping (EFT).  Meditate.  Get out of your car and take transit, so you can snooze, do stress reduction and read calming philosophical literature or watch cute kitten videos.  I know someone who reads her Bible every day on the bus.  Someone else reiki’s and snoozes for his 2-hours-each-way commute.  Exercise every day.  You can do it.

Stress lowers your number of B and T sentinels, so you lose that precious time to zap the invaders before they get a beachhead.  It lowers the numbers of your B and T attack cells so you have less of an army to throw at the invaders when you finally detect them.  Take one of my serious stress zapping classes. 

And for heaven’s sake, don’t be a selfish schmuck and come to work sick and spread your damn germs to everyone else!  Stay in bed, give your attack team a chance to win the war quickly.  Why do you think you have all those fancy e-gadgets anyway?  If you aren’t allowed to work from home, take 7 hours of intense stress reduction and see how quickly you get better, and how much smarter you are when you DO go back.  My immune system has a lot to deal with during flu season.  I don’t need you adding millions of viral particles into our shared air with every sneeze, no matter how well covered. 

So:  get a flu shot.  Start reducing stress to as low as possible.  You’ll be reducing your chances of illness as well!

And call or email victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com for a FREE Getting Unstuck session to get you started... www.soaringdragon.biz