SoaringDragon: resolution

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.

Saturday, January 9, 2016

4 Steps to More Powerful – and Happier - Problem-Solving

A seminar attendee asked me yesterday what I considered the biggest blind spot in the human soul. What would you say? There are so many amazing candidates for that honor. Close your eyes, breathe deeply for a few moments to let your heart soar, and watch all of your own candidates bubble up to the surface.

What did I answer? What was “top of mind” for me, and what I said, was that we forget that humanity was never, ever designed to be a solitary problem-solver. As far back as we go in the hominin lineage, and back much, much farther than that, we see groups of people constantly working together, healing each other, giving each other a hand up, seamlessly shifting from give to take, moment by moment. Group living conveys so much benefit, from safety from predators to lowered cortisol levels and improved immune system function. Today, the “predators” are rent increases, medical crises, car accidents and malevolent co-workers, but the same advantages are there.

Except that we’re not taking advantage of what we evolved for. Modern US culture creates people who grow up with the bizarre belief that they are supposed to solve their problems alone, figure out their dilemmas alone and rely on their personal resources alone. THAT, I said, is the biggest blind spot in the American soul. We evolved for alliances, and we stubbornly, insistently, cut ourselves off from our own strongest power and fastest road to success.* So many of us have rebelled against the dangers of dependency and have gone to the other extreme, because those are the two choices our culture allows us. Our souls want to be interdependent within a reciprocating system of allies.

The next time you have a dilemma, keep this blind spot in mind. Here are some hints:

Hint #1: You could hire someone to do some things for you. You need to move, so you hire some people and a truck. You need a stump dug and instead of putting your 50-year-old back out, you get a moonlighting young neighbor to do it. Your small business needs bookkeeping and you hire someone. When you hire someone, you send cash-energy circulating in the world, you allow people to feed and support themselves and their families and you tie connect yourself to the wider world.

Hint #2: You swap with someone. I don’t have the physical abilities to take care of my ¾ acre healing center entirely on my own. I am a truly amazing healer of minds and bodies. Put the two together.

The swap might not even be obvious as a swap. I spent 18 months in a weekly cleaning session every Saturday afternoon for a friend who was recovering from serious surgery. He got the physical help he needed and I got two hours of stimulating intellectual discussion and deep philosophical insights. That was a fair swap. When I lived in North Carolina, I had all the neighbor kids at my house for a monthly Girls Night Out for their single moms, a nine-month swap instigated by me and enjoyed by all.

Hint #3: You could receive a gift. I spent two hours today sending a friend on her first Reiki and hypnotherapy journey to end her anxiety and insomnia. I enjoyed the thrill of a really amazing healing session and so did she. So many people have reached out a hand and pulled me out of mires, over the course of my life, and the same is true for all of us. The universe contains both challenges and gifts. Ask for the resources you need, from individuals and from public options. Ask gently and if help isn’t possible from one source, keep asking until you have the resources you need to thrive. Those who can’t help you directly can send you their prayers. Breathe deeply and let the prayer-energy fill your soul and give you the courage to keep going.

Hint 4: You could borrow or repurpose a resource someone isn’t using. So many times, when I have been tunnel-visioning on a problem, someone will come up with a resource that could be repurposed to give me what I need now – either my resource or theirs.

The only failure is the choice to turn inward and believe that you are an entire universe. You aren’t and never can be. Your DNA is screaming for you to expand your vision. The resources to solve your dilemmas exist. After you have brainstormed, repurposed and juggled your own resources, expand your heart again and see what the wider energetic world might have for you as a swap, a purchase, a repurpose, a borrow or a gift.

Don’t fail.

*Yes, I really talk like this. On our first email exchange, before our first in-person date, my future husband said that I looked a lot like his step-daughter. Sure, sez I, because 60,000 years ago, massive volcanic eruptions killed off the entire human species except for 2000 individuals in East Africa, so all the 8 billion of us alive today are the descendants of a very small gene pool, so of course lots of us look alike. I don't try to be a nerd. It just leaps out of my throat on its own.

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Wednesday, December 30, 2015

New Year Resolutions 2: What Do I Focus On?

Resolutions 2: What Shall I Focus on?

Study yourselves; and most of all note well
Wherein kind Nature meant you to excel.
Not every blossom ripens into fruit.

Amen.

When it comes to the character virtues of good listening, good will and good heart, we are all equally capable of excelling. Not so with all the other characteristics.

There has been a lively debate among researchers and also among us average Joes and Jills about what to focus our self-improvement energy on. When I was a kid, the focus was all on removing or ameliorating one’s weaknesses. We studied ourselves to find our weaknesses and then added education or training to our To Do list and we got rid of it. It’s a good plan. Celine Dion couldn’t make it as a singing mega-star until she had elocution lessons and plastic surgery. Reality is what it is and women are judged on their appearance before anything else. Consider the mean tweets about Carrie Fisher’s appropriately-aged face this week. So removing barriers is always a good idea.

The 21^st century spawned the Strengths movement, specifically to counteract the all-pervasive search for defects, and that has merit as well. As Longfellow’s quote shows, this isn’t a new idea. There is a great deal of value in knowing what you are already good at or naturally good at, and focusing on that. Polishing your gemstone so it gleams even more brightly. There is some evidence to support this as a strategy, in that hiring managers and potential spouses over-focus on one’s shining points if you dazzle the eyes with them.

The dilemma is succinctly explained in the last line of the poem fragment: not every blossom will ripen into a fruit and you only have 18 usable hours every day, less if you exercise and you will exercise, right? [If you don’t exercise every day, and you have $20 in your pocket – you know you do – click and start changing your internal landscape now! https://zparkl.com/course/about/transform-your-relationship-with-exercise/ ]

So what shall I spend my precious time on: fix it or get better at what I already do well? Fixing things, if they are barriers like Dion’s, can give you a big bang for your buck. Better organizing of paperwork? Probably not, but it might significantly lower your stress at the office and give you more time to ride a bike or do yoga or paint. If I focus on what I know I am good at, I will have a thrill of victory as I climb higher and higher on a path that I am already halfway to Denali’s peak on. There are pros and cons no matter what you choose.

For me, it’s still fix-it. Healing what needs healing, growing in virtues, and making time for the creative activities that feed my soul, that’s where it’s at for me.