Light in the Darkness

One of the great joys of December is all the holidays of Light. The nights are becoming longer and longer. There is so much darkness in our days - and then the businesses and the homes start to twinkle like stars in the sky come down to Earth to bless us with what we most need. It's pretty, yes. But it is even more a symbol. Light in the darkness is Hope personified. The only real defeat in life is Despair.

Here is my little town of Ashland, Oregon, in the mountains just 14 miles from the California border, offering up Hope and Joy to the darkness....

2 Reasons Why "I Don't Know" Is Your Best Road to Health, Wealth & Peace of Mind

Can “I Don’t Know” Be Your Place of Peace?

I mention in a newsletter a free offer of an onsite consult and add “Please, God, not Medford.”   One of the readers is incensed enough at what she assumes is an arrogant, superior Ashland attitude to tell me so.  Real reason: I passionately loathe red-light ticket-cameras; evidence suggests that they are a revenue-generation scam, unrelated to road safety.  So I avoid Medford except for select shopping districts which I can get to without passing the revenue-scams.  She jumped to a completely erroneous conclusion, because she assumed that she knew.  She was absolutely certain, in a situation where she had NO actual information.  All she had was a trying-to-be-funny remark and an Ashland mailing address. 

Our brains are primed to do this by millions of years during which our ancestors were lunch to every passing carnivore.  The “assume it’s an enemy” neural pathways that run through memory and limbic system are the culprits in the “jumping to a conclusion” problem.  But being sure in a situation where certainty is not immediately warranted forms a major barrier in our road to inner peace.  Think I’m exaggerating?  OK.  Eliminate all national politics from the calculation and think about the last 5 times that you got yourself into a tizzy about something.  Ask yourself WHY you were so certain that you knew the other person’s motivation and ethics.  Do this on paper, not in your head.  So you have three columns:  What I Was Sure Of; WHY I Was 100% Sure; What I Discovered When I Asked or Researched.

For most of our tizzies, that last column is blank.  We never check our assumptions. 

Now, please hear me clearly: many times we are sure because our inner wisdom has perceived one of the English-language’s covert verbal attack patterns.  Even when we can’t verbalize how we know, we accurately know that the person is an Enemy.  But it’s not our inner wisdom in every single case.  Sometimes it is our brain taking a short-cut from input to conclusion, bypassing evidence completely.  In psychology, we call this Filling in the Gaps.  Our brains “save time” by filling in the information gaps in what we see, hear or read, by filling in the gaps with beliefs, prejudices and memories of people superficially similar to this person.  This allows us to feel (limbic system, remember?) that we have the preparation for an adequate conclusion. 

In the case I started with, all my client knew about me was that I teach great classes, I write books and I live in the Ashland zipcode.  What info does a person have in all that to come to conclusions about why I avoid Medford?

The major motivation for striving to limit the short-circuits to certainty is the damage that our anger causes in our relationships, with strangers as well as loved ones, and the legitimate shame that we feel when we discover the real reason behind people’s actions.  Naturally, the road to forgiveness, of ourselves as well as others, beckons, but how much better to never go down that road at all!

It IS possible to take control of this Filling in the Gaps.  Start with awareness of the problem.  Practice stopping in your mental tracks every time you feel a conclusion forming, about anything.  Ask yourself, “WHY am I certain?”  If you can interrupt one in a hundred of your leaps to conclusion, it is a start.  As you start this process, you will get to the point where less and less of your precious peace of mind is poisoned with conclusions that you were certain about – for which a better conclusion would have been “I don’t know.”  Not knowing is an amazing place of power.  Some Not Knowing isn’t worth more effort, like why the bank teller was short with you.  [Best bet: a personal problem.]  Say a prayer, send Reiki and move on. 

As Mark Twain reminds us, “It’s not the things you don’t know that will get you into trouble.  It’s the things you know for sure that just ain’t so.”  Amen.

Victoria Leo’s books are available wherever you buy books, including Journey Out of SAD: Beat the Winter Blues – 2^nd Edition, so relevant now, and her newest:  101 Healthy Meals in 5 Min or Less (2^nd Ed) and Red State, Blue Heart  Visit her at https://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses, www.soaringdragon.biz, www.youtube.com/user/humanbio4everyone/videos, https://www.facebook.com/Soaring-Dragon.  

Inspiration: Light in the Darkness

All we need when we are worried or confused is one light in the darkness.  That light is always there, if we are willing to see it.  Not an upending of whatever outcome we don't like, but an amelioration of pain - or any other way to be happy, without the person or outcome that we wanted for all the good reasons that we want things.

And Light never shows off so well in the daylight as it does in the dark night.  Gratitude in the dark times is the graduate degree in wisdom.  To have some peace and contentment when everything goes your way is easy, but gratitude in deep night?  That's the Victoria Cross.... for Valor under the fire of Life.

https://youtu.be/9lo7wtnqPsA

For more resources:

www.soaringdragon.biz

New books:

https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Heart-Victoria/dp/1974032272/

Humor, inspiration, thought-provoking essays on how to make American culture healthy and kindly

https://www.amazon.com/Healthy-Meals-Minutes-Less-Transformation/dp/1979815445/
101 Healthy Meals in 5 Minutes or Less

https://www.amazon.com/Busters-Healthy-Longevity-Through-Barriers-ebook/dp/B01MZ4HNRZ

101 Stress Busters

Online classes

5 Tools in 5 Minutes/Day:  Strategic Self Care for Entrepreneurs & Other Busy People
https://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/106742

Kick Dieting to the Curb
https://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/76428

http://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/pain-free-without-drugs

Inspiration and Meditations from Yellowstone

Some of these will be folded into my new Fall releases of online classes, so if you want to be a beta-tester (some of the classes are free, but some are not, so you can save some money by seeing the early versions!  Just email me at victoria@soaringdragon.biz).

Enjoy!  [Want a continuing connection to high-quality inspiration and meditations?  Join my Soaring Dragon tribe by subscribing to monthly updates.]



Y-stone series: 
Road out of Overwhelm: Trees  : https://youtu.be/k60K9K08kzcRoad out of Overwhelm:  Norris   https://youtu.be/EUVLzw91BSE

Inspiration: Beauty All Around  https://youtu.be/S2cf38HaPEUInspiration: Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the power of water   https://youtu.be/bdtKUZu2-4E
Inspiration: Lehardy Rapids  https://youtu.be/sajc85OoamI

Inspiration: Power of Unity    https://youtu.be/bGenGcDOawE
Inspiration: Power of water  https://youtu.be/rws8N9rjFFgInspiration for Entrepreneurs:  What is Negative?  https://youtu.be/v_jJCNZ5d5w

How to Tame Anxiety    https://youtu.be/7pBstbOppQw

Listen to your Deep Unconscious   https://youtu.be/cGBA2JOPTvU
5 Breaths in Y-stone   https://youtu.be/DP5OFNo36E0

Why Soaring Dragon?         https://youtu.be/jcqBw2GqSKI

FREE Resource: Meditation Videos

Are you feeling tired, stressed, frustrated?  Of course ypu are, from time to time or most of the time, depending on your circumstances.  If you're thinking I'm going to ask you to sit quietly and "think about nothing" as one of my clients put it - nah.  [My new book 101 Stress Busters has lots of walking meditation and active visualizing meditation, along with 86 really fun and very powerful creative arts that will induce relaxation among other important medical changes.]  

Slowing the adrenal cascade improves your blood pressure which protects your sexual health, as well as protecting you from deadly strokes and kidney failure.  It also protects your brain from loss of memory and general dopiness - powerful medicine for everyone from full-time parents to small business owners and entrepreneurs.  

If you're an entrepreneur, it WILL boost your income - giving you great new marketing ideas, boosting your energy to work, and wiping out the worries that sap your productivity. 

How about taking 45 seconds to a minute and a half to contemplate a really beautiful natural scene while you take 5 slow, deep breaths?  Here are some examples:

https://youtu.be/aGuUCEoSfD8

https://youtu.be/teQds4mz_C8

https://youtu.be/Bdz_UmDXFvs     for entrepreneurs

https://youtu.be/wYAmJyOfsMw

https://youtu.be/T7KSbv8cXag     end of day, gratitude

https://youtu.be/hLbwlDiYduY     walk in the woods

Join my mailing list for inspiration, to get first crack at free beta test enrollment of my new online classes, and special offers just for subscribers.  email victoria@soaringdragon.biz

www.soaringdragon.biz

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.

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. 

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

Join the newsletter mailing list for free, valuable content.  On Facebook: Soaring Dragon page and Healing Minds, Healing Bodies group.

It's a good year. No, it's a bad year. No, it's.....

We so blithely talk about having a “good” or “bad” year.  What we mean is a time in which we got what we wanted out of life - we had health, a good marriage, a nice income, low stress – or we had a time that presented many challenges, sometimes intense challenge on one front – exceptional health challenges or frustrating unemployment .  My “bad” years frequently feature being nibbled to death by ducks – dozens of mild to moderate problems, but constant and relentless  - that lead your psyche to believe that the Lords of Creation have it in for you (as a Christian client referred to it) or that life is just a constant struggle with one stumbling block after another.

2015 was a difficult year for me.  2016 is shaping up to have lots of challenges as well.  I lost 5 weeks of my life to a serious bronchitis attack and now my beloved sister is riddled with cancer and breathing through her last weeks, the latter hitting with almost no warning.   Why did my goddess, angel and animal spirit cards, not to mention my Akashic consults, all tell me that this was going to be a “good” year?  Are they wrong – or nuts?

Maybe the latter is closest to the truth.

I think the disconnect can be explained by a story from one of the Buddhist scriptures, which I will paraphrase and shorten.  A farmer had a young son who was an excellent helper.  That’s good, his neighbors told him.  Then the boy broke his leg and it set poorly; he would always have a limp.  That’s bad, his neighbors said.  Years pass and the nation is at war.  All the young men are conscripted for military service.  All the fathers lose their young male labor and have to work hard in the fields.  Except our farmer.  Because the boy limps, he is excused from military service.  That’s good, the neighbors say. The young man does not die in the war and remains to help work on the farm, albeit at a reduced capacity.

This constant mental categorizing event outcome as “good” or “bad” is the major cause of our life’s dissatisfaction.  If things aren’t good or bad, but just are, we can move on to maximizing the value of what we have, like the farmer.  His emotions weren’t up and down, fluctuating with the “story” that his mind created about reality, like his neighbors were doing.  Some people read the story and think that the moral is that you have to wait to decide if something is good or bad, because of course the story ends up “good” – the young man does not die.  But the real meaning is much more profound.

So what about me?  Maybe I can be very sad, weep and journal and be hugged, but my sister’s untimely death isn’t “bad,” per se, just very, very sad.  Maybe it just is.  Maybe the bronchitis just is.  [Compare this with “the bronchitis is actually good because it got me to cut back on the number of overseas trips I was planning for 2016, which were exhausting to think about, much less do” which is the psych cognitive-behavioral approach, and a very good one it is, too, in getting us to see another possibe interpretation of the available facts.  But with all its virtues, it is only turning bad into good, not walking away from bad and good as categories, period.]

So I don’t think all those cards and Akashic messages were wrong.  It was my interpretation of them that was off-base.  They didn’t say I would have a “good” year.  They said that many blessings were coming to me.  It was I who mistranslated that into “nothing sad is going to happen.”   When I take a more balanced look at the year, the blessings – so many more than in 2015 – stand out in stark relief.   My gosh, what a shower of blessings, in business, in health and in new friendships and spiritual relationships.   Not nothing but blessings of course.  But blessings there are.  And all of it – without being labeled good, bad or both/neither – just is.

If you ask me how the year is going, I may make you comfortable by saying, “Many blessings,” because small-talk doesn’t require philosophy or truth.  But know that I know what kind of year I’m having.  I’m having a year in which I am alive, and all of it just is.

Being Real

Over a century ago, this American essayist wrote a profound truth about human nature: we don't want to hear the truth about ourselves. We respond to truth from others like we respond to rattlesnakes. We don't tell ourselves the truth. And our conscious mind is so 100% focused on protecting our social selves from any kind of negativity that we suppress all that we could know. But all that energy spent fending off deep self-knowledge, if it were harnessed to the wagon of our dreams? My god, we could rocket to the stars, couldn't we? So much peace of mind,just waiting to be harnessed. Such creativity - blazing fountains of creativity! - if only we could reclaim all that blighting energy.

What are we so afraid of? The scorn of the "world" when we show/admit that we aren't perfect people, in one or all of our roles (entrepreneur/career, parenting, spouse, citizen, Christian/Jew/Muslim/other - every single label that matters to us - and we all have labels that matter to us!) The disappointment of loved ones who see the real us for the first time. [They preferred to put us on a pedestal, so they didn't have to do the hard work of being real, either.

Take one small step nearly every day. Be real in one moment with one person. Eventually you'll be able to fire your social self's internal "safety net" but don't expect to do that today. For today, one person, one moment. As the Buddha said, you fill the pitcher drop by drop.  

Digging Deeper Into the Terror Attacks, A Brilliant, Simple Explanation for American Disengagement

What We Miss When We Jump….

One of the key teachings of all the wisdom traditions concerns the dangers of jumping to conclusions on the basis of inadequate information.  Our limbic systems, bless them, never, ever think that they have inadequate information.  What we call a capacity for critical thinking is merely a limbic system that has been trained to stop, loop in the prefrontal cortex, and then and only then step lightly to a not-deeply-held conclusion.  Everyone who has taken the training with me is glad they did. 

I’ve felt for some time that the answer to “why didn’t Americans get emotionally involved with the East African embassy bombings?” wasn’t simple racism.  I knew that the knee-jerk “they’re all racists” explanation for why there hasn’t been a Je suis Ankara movement to complement the solidarity Americans felt with Parisians after the terrorist attack, was missing a core truth.  But simply knowing that someone else is engaging in simplistic thinking isn’t the same as being brilliant oneself. 

Then I read an article in APU Insider [In Homeland Security contributor Sylvia Longmire] that supplied the brilliant missing link. [I got my 2nd MA at APUS, great school.]  The reason why Americans are emotionally wrought about Paris is because we either have been there, someone close to us has been there and connected us to it vicariously or we dream of going there (mostly because – again – it is someplace that others we know have been).  Few Americans have been to, or wish they could go to, Dar es Salaam or Ankara.  Psych research clearly shows that a huge part of emotional connection is familiarity.  When something is just a point on a map, we humans don’t feel connected.  But places that feel “familiar,” we care about.  [Advertisers understand this: even if you rationally don’t want to, your limbic system, where decisions are made, feels more positive about products you have heard about repeatedly.  The familiar has a positive vibe to it.]  

** My earlier post misattributed the brilliant idea.  Pls forgive my error.

Sign up for a FREE Getting Unstuck session with powerful coach and transformation guide Victoria C. Leo, at www.soaringdragon.biz

The Spiritual Road to Weight Loss - Live Webinar 3/23 6 PM Pacific Time

Have you been struggling with your weight? Does it seem impossible to get results that last? Are you TIRED of counting calories and constantly telling yourself NO? Do you feel like a failure? [You're not. Your strategies are ineffective, that's all.]

Trying to change your life with only willpower and "inspiration" is a losing strategy. It will work for a while, but it can't transform your life. The complete Spiritual Path program WILL! The key to success is using the right tools, in the right way, consistently and with intentionality. Once you have your first experience of blasting through the barriers that are keeping you from success, you will never look back - never return to the old, ineffective strategies.

“Spiritual” means a connection to the transcendent, which has an infinite number of forms. This class harnesses spirituality to unlock the door to PERMANENT weight control.

If you have been able to achieve permanent weight control, great; keep doing what you're doing. If you haven't, it's time to admit that what you're doing isn't working for you, long-term, and commit to a new program that really works.

Join a group of dedicated seekers who are tired of the old shame and blame game and are ready to combine effective action with joy. You can do it! This is the road to success.

Pre-requisites

A firm intention to follow the program

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/8440/The-Spiritual-Path-to-Permanent-Weight-Control-Blasting-Through-the-Barriers#

Can Auroral Energies Really Be Channeled?

I just spent a week in Fairbanks, Alaska, with a spiritual healer who is positive that our healing work is stronger there because we channel the energy of the auroras. I'm thinking perhaps it's just because the natural beauty makes us so filled with happiness - and that's what is making the distance healing I do so much more powerful.

There's some support for the latter hypothesis: happiness makes us healthier, so it's plausible that it would make a healer more effective. But what about the auroral energy? Any ideas?

Perhaps it's both factors at work.....  It's only Western philosophy - the Cartesian duality belief - that says there is only one answer to all of life's questions.

You Don't Need a Date for Valentine's Day!

5 Top Reasons Why You Need to Focus on THIS Form of ME Time

Some of us don’t give ourselves any Me Time at all, because we’re convinced, for family, gender or cultural reasons, that taking time for ourselves is selfish.  Some of us take our relaxation primarily with evening television or by physical pampering like mani-pedis.

I’ve shown you how having Me Time is the least selfish thing you can do for your family and career in another post.  For now, assume that you’re  convinced that you need Me Time and are ready to consider spending anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour on most days, entirely engrossed in your most creative, fun activities with absolutely NO guilt!  How does this sound?  Look what joys await you when you get up from the zoning-out-with-TV habit:

Ø  Diving into library books and magazines on crochet [come sit down next to me!]

Ø  Watching videos, and YouTube – humor, how-tos, history, science, drama, cute kittens.

Ø  Chatting with friends

Ø  Reading, especially about hobbies or interests that engross you (deep-ending in histories of Elizabethan England, Ancient Scythia or WWI)

Ø  Picture-intensive books about travel, garden makeovers or visual hobbies (art, crafts)

Ø  Listening to catchy, upbeat music.

Ø  Listening to audiobooks and podcasts.

Ø  Building or making physical objects, from bat houses and cat houses to human furniture.

Ø  As well as more specialized joys, like feeling the joy of warm water all around you, or taking a virtual bike-ride along the wine valleys of the Loire.

Now THAT’S what I call Me Time!   Are you ready to plunge into all this fun?  Good, because I want to give you the 5 powerful reasons why you want this particular form of Me Time:

Reason #1: Your chances of developing 14 different forms of cancer, plus diabetes, Alzheimer’s and heart disease plummet.  Your blood pressure and blood cholesterol plummet.  You add an average of 7 healthy years to your lifespan!

Reason #2: Your enthusiasm for life and your positive energy will soar, without you having to recite affirmations or engage in any other life changes!

Reason #3:  You’ll get fewer colds, you’ll be less liable to depression even when the days are cold, cloudy or rainy, your sleep will be easier and sounder and you’ll be able to successfully race for the express commute bus.

Reason #4:  Your career will improve because your mind will be calmer, your confidence will skyrocket, your ideas will be more creative and clever, and your increased energy as evidenced in your sparkling eyes and easy smile will convince management that you are overdue for a promotion to more responsibility.  If you own a business, people will be drawn to become customers because of the magnetism of increased confidence, which also manifests in smarter business decisions.

Reason #5:  You will be a kinder, more patient and understanding parent (with less effort), and all your personal relationships, including your marriage, will be happier and calmer.

So HOW do you get all these benefits and enjoy all that Me Time?

Are you ready for the Secret?  Take a deep breath, because it’s really, really powerful

Here it is: Go to the gym, or community center, at least three days/week, and engage in vigorous movement on the other days.

That’s right, it’s exercise! 

I go to the gym to get Me Time to deep-end in imagining new crochet projects while I walk on the treadmill or use a stationary bike.  My clients revel in the guilt-free joys of reading and taking vicarious trips, including the creative lady who bike-trips along the Loire.  She bikes in place and can taste all that lovely wine in her imagination!  Others enjoy guilt-free video or Facebook time as they bicycle or treadmill.  Gyms always pipe in catchy, upbeat music to help keep you moving as long as possible.  Home shops can be hives of vigorous movement as you build and create.  Once a week, hubby and I take a water aerobics class and laugh and giggle together as we leap, jump, and practice-box in the soothing warm water; after class we laugh and catch up with our friends. 

And it’s all guilt-free fun, because you are doing the #1 thing that you need for optimal physical and mental health, a happy life and successful career. 

Are you convinced that you hate exercise?  Want to bet I can’t change your mind?  OK, the deal is on!

Step #1: Sign up for my transformative, fun class here: https://zparkl.com/course/about/transform-your-relationship-with-exercise/.   This class focuses on the most powerful organ in your body – your mind.  It is in your concepts and beliefs that you turn away from the most powerful Me Time on the planet, with all the amazing benefits it brings you.  Exercise literally puts money in your pocket as it adds years to your lifespan.  For $19.95, it’s priced to be super-easy for everyone.  So go ahead, sign up!

Step #2: When you have completed the class, call or email me and book a FREE Getting Unstuck appointment.  If you complete my class, I will DOUBLE your free session to a full hour, and we will get to work demolishing the barriers that are holding you back from all the fun of the most powerful Me Time ever.  That’s my gift  and it’s worth a whole lot more than $19.95.  Maybe we can solve your time problem or blast away your other barriers and hand you your heart’s desire on a plate in one session.  Maybe we will only get part-way there.  The important thing is – you get a $70 value for only $19.95, even if my class doesn’t do for you what it has done for everyone else who’s ever taken it.

Are you willing to bet that I can’t make a Me Time addict out of you?  Sign up now at https://zparkl.com/course/about/transform-your-relationship-with-exercise/.

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The Real Cost of Over-Focusing on What is Lost

My cats are incredible teachers. They teach me patience - because they haven't got any. They teach me not to let my heart get hardened by betrayal and unfairness - because their hearts are always open.  And this month they reminded me of the importance of looking outward and forward.  The only part of my life that wasn't turned upside down by a remodel was my office. [That awful fate comes next month, god help me. ] So while the abode was in chaos the cats spent the day in a large open crate on the back porch. They had vistas of forest to behold, squirrels to squint at, birds to bedevil.

        What did they do? None of the above. Orono curled up into a ball and refused to emerge.  Gabriel spent the entire day staring inward at my office, intermittently meowing. There were birds eating from the porch railing (seed had fallen from the feeder above) not two feet from his head - and he is a mighty hunter and a great bird-watcher, ordinarily - and he was staring and crying fitfully, focused on what he had lost and no longer had. What a dork, is that what you're thinking? I was overwhelmed with compassion for them both, poor souls, because I know how many times I have done the same, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for hours or days or (ouch) years.



The temptation to bemoan the lost past is so strong.   We know the value of what we have lost.   We don't really know the value of what we have to gain. Our amygdala has been set by evolution to the "worry about it" setting, and we DO, as a matter of biology, tend to come down on the side of caution when approaching the unknown.   With good reason, if you have read Man the Hunted and know the reality of the lives our ancestors faced.  It's darned inconvenient now, though, when we are truly safe most of the time.  Only meditation and other inner retuning can tame that automatic fear-caution filter. 

 So, my poor kitties are a model and teacher for me once again.  I look at them and resolutely focus on the future.... letting go of losses and resolutely lighting candles to dispel the darkness.


[This is adapted from Chapter 16 of my upcoming title Red State, Blue Heart, due for release in June 2016.  Want to get an announcement of the release?  Email victoria. leo.reiki@gmail.com.]

https://zparkl.com/course/about/transform-your-relationship-with-exercise/

Ready to Find Your True Path in Life?

 January, the first month of the new year.  What glorious feelings of new beginnings start to stir. 

Mixed in with all the ideas that are easily actionable, like losing weight and exercising more [take my new class https://zparkl.com/course/about/transform-your-relationship-with-exercise/] are the very different stirrings of the heart that is starting to yearn for a new engagement with life.

I know what my true path in life is, and I am living in full-time.  One of my passions is finding great resources for my clients.

Elizabeth Gilbert loves it.  So do I.  A charming new book on how to find and follow your passion, titled The Crossroads of Should and Must (Elle Luna), coughed up some gems that I rarely find in such books. 

After explaining the difference between Should and Must, and explaining that some Shoulds will become Musts, because they are righteous and good – like supporting and nurturing whatever children you may create, intentionally or not – she talks a lot about the Must of your life, the work that you have to do in some way, somehow, because it’s what you were born for. 

And this is the place where so many well-meaning people, from Marsha Sinetar to Marianne Williamson and dozens in between, have gone aground. 

Luna addresses all of the key worries that assail my clients when they are considering going deeply into the question of what they love: what about money?  What if what I love doesn’t pay enough to support my family?

Here’s her answer:  “If doing what you love doesn’t pay the [necessary, not extravagant] bills, then you must find another way to make money.  Period.  Being able to pay your bills can create the temporal and mental space to find your calling.”

Have you heard “Do what you love and the money will follow”?  When you’re in your twenties and sometimes thirties – when you don’t know much about life and are prone to confusing the desperately wished for, for the even plausibly possible – that phrase resonates strongly.  It is accompanied by a manifesto on having passion and intention, whence your longed-for brilliant future magically manifests.   Decades later, having received some belated education in how business works, I discovered that success occurs in the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, and what a significant portion of the rest of the world wants desperately and has money to pay for.  You can create the world’s most fabulous canal boat ropes, because you are a history enthusiast, but there isn’t enough of a market there to keep a flea alive.  Do it, by all means, but have another occupation for making money, and be proud of it.

As I explain in my Take Back Your Lost Heart, it isn’t more noble to work at Other work and do your Calling part-time until you have the income that you need to support yourself in reasonable comfort.  Not to mention the other things that contribute to your peace of mind.  The responsibility to provide children with safe and secure housing, education and as much of a leg up in life as you can.  The peace of mind that paying all your bills in full at the end of the month gives you.   Philip Glass, who worked as a plumber to ensure he had the cash flow he needed, while also pursuing his love as a Broadway composer is the poster boy for this, as is of course Albert Einstein, who used his slow-moving, un challenging work in the Patent Office to set his mind free to soar. 

Call me for a Getting Unstuck session today!  

We will explore your search for your calling and I will give you the inspiration and the practical tools that will get you started on the road to your dreams.  You CAN do it!  Put wings on your dreams  so they can soar, and put feet on your dreams so they can become reality.  www.soaringdragon.biz