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. 

Seek Happiness, yes! Insist on character and integrity in yourself, yes! They go together, yes, yes!!

 Character, integrity and self-control: Starting to look kind of attractive, actually

Do more of what makes you happy.  It’s so easy for this to become a joke, an invitation to self-indulgence and hedonistic indifference.  I was struck this week at how American culture has shifted from character values that I grew up with.  A woman that I gifted with a $100 piece of exercise equipment complained to the Facebook group admin because the equipment didn’t fit under her bed.  Oh, waaah.  [I mistook the vendor and posted it wrong, then corrected it.  Hint: the originally-described equipment wouldn’t have fit under her bed, either.  And since when am I or anyone else responsible for something fitting under your bed?  Bring it back or otherwise deal with it.]  

How I was raised: if someone gives you something as a gift, the ONLY acceptable response is “Thank you.”  Then shut up, completely, permanently and forever.  Even if it’s the wrong size, the color is horrible and it doesn’t fit under your bed.  You don’t pretend to be grateful to the gifter’s face and then spew complaints to an authority-figure third party or the rest of the family or Facebook Friend cohort behind your gifter’s back. 

People used to think less of you for that kind of weasely behavior.  No more.  And maybe that’s a mistake.  Maybe we want to take our culture back in the direction of character.  Maybe we want to embrace actions of integrity – like talking TO people, not ABOUT people.  Maybe we want to deal with it a bit more and whine a lot less.

I know that after the Great Recession, in which I and millions of other Americans lost our shirts, with a weak, contingent-labor-loving employment paradigm, and about 1% of the previous level of economic and emotional safety, a lot of us are very, very frightened, to our cores.  Frightened of outcomes that would be unthinkable in any other advanced First World country, like living on the street.  And when people are scared, and know that they have no power to get back at their oppressors, they look for the nearest easy, weak target for their rage.  They find that easy, weak target in people less able than themselves – people who are financially struggling even more (and can’t fight back effectively), who are disabled, who are a minority color or religion or culture.  Or even just the nice people like me who are kind, generous and not as sly and political as they are.

What if we all just collectively cut it out?

Do more POSITIVE THINGS that make you happy.  Color with your kids, then put them to bed early and relax with a book for an hour.  Make nice with your neighbors who like you kids and will supervise their homework while you go to the gym, listen to Taylor Swift and improve your health.   Find the “free museum” day and take yourself off for a date with joy.  As the frustrations of the day build up, stop, take five deep, slow breaths and visualize tropical paradises or some of your life’s happy memories.  You have them, you know you do! 

Do this enough times and you won’t come home ready to spew lies and vitriol on your fellow-travelers through the travails of life.

Do more of what makes you genuinely happy.  Kicking the dog – or your fellow struggling humanity – will never do it.  My mother taught me to have courage and be kind a half-century before Disney turned it into a cliché.  Do more of that – and you will be happy.  

Having trouble being happy?  Call for a FREE Getting Unstuck session!  No sales pitch, a free roadmap to how to make life less fraught and more fun.  You deserve to be happy....

Call 253-203-6676 or email victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com.   www.soaringdragon.biz

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Soar With Dragons to Genuine Joy (part 2)

In the first part of this exploration, I recommended learning new things, exploring creating things and slowing down to the point where you can actually experience the world you live in.  Today I want to look at some examples of joy that came to me like a bolt from the heavens - unplanned, unexpected and amazing.

It was almost two decades ago, and a Russian colleague was visiting Silicon Valley to share best practices on the use of technology in education.  At that time, I was director of a university extension program in network management. [Too true.  Before I saw the light and switched to healing minds and bodies, I used to teach network engineering.  My first published book, by Prentice-Hall was titled Networking and Data Communications and was the first readable tutorial on LAN technology ever published.  For your homework assignment, research how long ago that was and DON’T TELL ANYONE!]

I was in a major-league funk, not whining about anything, just much more subdued than usual, in a serious crisis of confidence.  He noticed that I wasn’t my usual sunny self, nagged me to tell him why, and I gave him the 20-words-or-less version of What Wasn’t Working in My Life.  I’ll never forget his words, because they not only brought me out of my funk, they have sustained me for two decades.  He said, “Remember: you are the beloved child of God.”

Not so extraordinary, you say?  Well, consider this: I don’t think he believes in God.  I know I don’t and never did.  While I’m a very spiritual and religious person, my faith doesn’t have a First Cause (God/Creator being).  The universe follows laws and arose however Stephen Hawking and his colleagues say it does and did.  We Buddhists don’t care.  Religion is about ethics, conscience, love, honor, transcendence and the meaning of our human lives, all the things that chemistry and physics and biology can’t create experiments to study.  But what my colleague was saying wasn’t about the simplistic definition of God as creator being.  He meant God as a word that equals “the spirit of love that animates the universe,” which the Upanishads, humanity oldest literature, says is the axis that all matter revolves around.  Every faith I’ve ever studied sees that three-letter word as denoting a concept or an energy, not an actual being.  What he was really saying was “Victoria, it’s just a trough in the overall arc of a good person’s life.  The universe still rotates on an axis of pure love.  See that.  Don’t forget it.”

Seeing to the heart of what he was communicating transformed my whole conceptualization of what my life was about and what my response to the latest life-insult [a serious health issue] should be.

Fast forward to two years ago, when I was spending four days above the Arctic Circle in mid-winter, and it was every bit as icy cold from 10PM to 5AM as you are envisioning – times twelve.  The auroras were glorious; I could feel those magnetic fields resonating in my soul.  They danced their sparkling dance across a sky blazing with starlight. 

I noticed a Japanese woman who was traveling alone and reached out to try to share the experience, but her English was poor and I wasn’t pronouncing my 7 words of Japanese correctly.  So I held her hand, shared some reiki, and crocheted her a scarf, with reiki symbols in them, so they would continue to create a channel through me to her even after we all went on our ways.  So few words.  But the channel was profound.  We stayed in touch, she continued to study English.  Today, she is marvelously fluent, I’ve learned to pronounce better and we are doing wonderful spiritual healing work together. [If you can read Japanese, find Wami Amami online and sign up to work with her.]

We can find joy, we can find wisdom and we can find deep connection with unfamiliar words and with no words at all.  Joy can flow down like a mighty river into our unsuspecting souls, if we open ourselves to it.  I hope you will.

Bio: Victoria Leo offers both science-based and spiritual solutions that really work! Visit www.soaringdragon.biz and choose the program that will transform your life.  You deserve to soar with dragons! Victoria’s Facebook group Healing Minds, Healing Bodies welcomes you, as does her blog SoaringDragoninJapan.blogspot.com. You can find her books on Amazon or at your local bookseller.