Imagine living in a home and in that home is a guest room. This room has a perfect atmosphere. The temperature is perfect. The circulation is ideal and if someone stayed there they would be well fed, well nourished, well-loved and well cared for. Imagine that room is available for forty years. And every month you clean that room and make it as inviting and hospitable as it was at the very beginning.
And what if one day, you become aware that this room is no longer available? Does the room feel badly? Do you feel badly? Do you experience regret, or beat yourself up for never having used the room?
But, what if the room was never truly empty? What if the room held the space for curiosity, adventure, creativity and alternative possibilities to show up?
What if, in place of regrets, you send the room love, and light and gratitude for the sacred space it gave you to have the unique and extraordinary life you created for yourself?
I am grateful for what the room allowed me to birth into my life, although not the traditional experience, but the experience of creating a life lived on my terms by the choice of my soul.
During this September, my birthday month, I send gratitude, love, light and peace to that part of myself that has always been there for me no matter how I chose to use it… or not.
P.S. To all of the women who’s “guest room” has been occupied at some point in your life. I wonder, have you received and do you continue to receive notes of thanks and acknowledgement from your guests?
The Holidays are here again. Can you believe it? December already. The weather is turning cold, and it seems that everyone is getting ready to wind down 2016 pretty soon. Too soon for me. Here are a few ideas to keep us from allowing the hectic pace and people’s “peopling”to trigger us to react with stress, anger and frustration.
Here are 3 tips to not get triggered and enjoy your holidays.
Understand that events are neutral. People are neutral. Nothing has meaning… good or bad until we superimpose our meaning onto it. So when you feel triggered, take a breath and realize that what is happening has no meaning… and then choose to give it the meaning that will serve YOU. If something is horribly triggering, breathe and find a way to separate yourself from it for a few minutes to give yourself perspective.
People are constantly “peopling”. What is that? It is that people with all of their personality components, their life situations and their history bring that into the room with them. Understand that you do not have to take it on. Any of it. Even with family, you can choose to objectively look at the behavior and language that is coming at you, and stand back, observe and then choose to engage or not. My Dad always said, you NEVER go wrong keeping your mouth shut.
And…. you can choose to or not to engage in the holiday ritual of shopping, and gift giving. If you have enough “stuff”, as I do, you can make the request of family and friends and co-workers, to make a small donation to a charity of your/ their choice. You can also ask someone to be specific as to what would be the best gift for them if they were to get a gift from you. Then you can choose consciously to create a holiday season that works for everyone.
Should you like to give the gift of coaching or voice dialogue facilitation to someone in your life or your organization, feel free to reach out to me and we can get it scheduled. My gift to you is that I’m here to help whenever you feel it will be a benefit, a joy or a gift.
I hope to speak for your organization or see you at an event in 2017.
With Peace and Blessings for a beautiful holiday season. – Carolyn
My take on how the election of Donald Trump may be exactly what humanity needs to wake up, resolve our issues and move us to a higher level of consciousness. For the past 3 days, I’ve been in a state of confusion and upset as to the divisiveness and ugliness that is showing up in our country as a result of the presidential election. As for me, I spent most of Wednesday sick to my stomach with despair and unable to comprehend how the people of my country could get it so “wrong”. Our country voted for a man who personifies all of the underlying demons that have plagued our nation, sexism, racism, misogyny, narcissism, fear and hatred. But I think I get it..and hopefully this explanation will help ease some of the tensions that many of us are feeling both personally and culturally. Anyone who has ever been to therapy knows that to handle and deal with an issue that is plaguing us, we need to bring it into the light, name it and deal with it head on. Therapy makes you aware that when you bury something sooner or later, it is going to emerge in a stronger, more potent, more obvious way to be dealt with. As human beings we have all kinds of levels and layers and attributes as to what makes us us. Some of those layers are buried in the shadows. Concepts and parts of us that we don’t want to look at and deal with as they make us uncomfortable and upset. We spend much of our lives in denial that these aspects exist within us. However once we bring these shadows into the light, we can bring love and understanding to them, and hopefully help them to heal and put them to rest. The election of Donald Trump is a demonstration of the shadows, the level of consciousness that we as an “embodied” nation are experiencing. For many people this is not the case, however this majority level of consciousness has created this reality. These underlying problems, issues and challenges have been just below the surface of our nation as a whole for decades. Trump’s “persona” brought to the forefront, as the most powerful man in the country, is causing us all to have no choice but to deal with these “hidden aspects” of us as a people. We can now choose to look at them, address them in the light, send positive energy to them as opposed to being sucked into the negativity. We can intentionally deal with them and hopefully resolve them. Then we can rise above, raise our consciousness and live in “The United States”, acknowledging our human connectedness to all things and each other. This can result in leaving conflict, bitterness and upset behind. If we choose it. It’s funny. I thought that we had processed through most of these issues years ago when I was a young woman growing up in the seventies and eighties. I thought we handled the pro-choice issue, I thought we handled the Equal Pay issue, I thought we handled the racism issue. Clearly I was wrong. And writing “laws” to handle them is not good enough, as those who oppose the laws will take their true beliefs back underground and back into the shadows. The only way to deal with our unwanted issues / demons is to look at them and name them. Donald Trump is the most obvious, blatant, physical manifestation of all of the disowned, dark and disliked attributes of many in our American society. So I want to thank him for showing up. Now we have no choice but to look at our issues proactively and consciously. Maybe then we can live in a country of peace, love, liberty and justice for all. Donald Trump is our collective wake-up call.
I have a friend who is successfully removing lots of weight. She looks great. But there is a slight disruption that occurs when she spends time with an “old friend” who just can’t handle her transformation. Here is my thought on how to engage others and alleviate the pain of change.
Change is scary…. on an instinctual level for everyone. It threatens the status quo. Even if the status quo isn’t good, change makes people nervous/ uncomfortable. So when a person decides to change their body, it can shake up the people around them. Here are some tips to have your friends, families, coworkers, and those around you, support you in your weight removal efforts.
1. First, make your intention to remove weight public. Declare it to your friends and ask them for help. People love to help people they care about. When you ask someone for their help they will feel involved and engaged and since they feel they are a part of the change, they may even take pride in helping create the desired outcome.
2. Next, make the win of your removing pounds a win for everybody. Create a plan and share it with people that help you reach your goal weight. Plan to do something with everyone who helped you, perhaps an evening of bowling or hitting golf balls or a bike ride or even a night out at your favorite healthy restaurant, or a healthy meal at your home that you prepare for them.
3. And finally, let people know that you support them. Ask your circle of close people, what one of their goals is for the next six months and ask how you can support them. Create a win-win. They support you in removing weight, and you support them in whatever their goal is. That way everybody wins and you end up with the support you need.
It happened again. I was on my spin bike for a class that started at 9am. I looked at the clock and it was 9:06 and the conversation had already begun. My legs started saying, “Oh my gosh, I’m tired, I don’t want to do this, in a conversation with my brain, who agreed, “I know, legs, you seem tired, why are we doing this?” Then, another voice – I think it’s my higher self who wants what’s best for me – showed up and said, “just keep going.”
Two minutes later, my legs started really complaining and saying, “I did not want to keep doing this. Why are we doing this? I’m tired. I hurt. I’m achy. This is stupid, we are moving fast, and no one is chasing us!” My brain then responded with, “And do know how many other things we could be doing right now? We could be working, we could be having coffee, we could be watching a movie. There are a million other things we could be doing.”
My higher self watched the two parts conspiring to stop me from exercising, and it said, “just keep going.”
Three minutes later, it happened. That magic moment where all of a sudden, my legs started being quiet and happy. My brain started smiling to itself, thinking, this is great. And my higher self said, “See? I told you. Just keep going and it will all get better.”
I’ve talked to many people and almost everyone I talk to has the same experience. I call it the 5-15 barrier to exercise. Physiologically, it takes energy, oxygen and blood flow to get to the muscles to make them exert, to make them put out effort. Somewhere between five minutes and twelve minutes in, there is an oxygen and blood deficit in those muscles, so doing any type of aerobic activity gets hard to do during that deficit.
However, what I’ve learned is that when you allow your higher self to win, the part of you that knows and remembers what it feels like after you push yourself through that five-to-fifteen minute barrier to exercise, the 15 to 45, or 15 to 90 minutes that follow will be wonderful. Your muscles will adapt to the amount of oxygen and blood flow required to keep going, you’ll pass over the barrier, and the following 30 to 90 minutes will be a wonderful experience for your brain (thank you endorphin release!), your legs, your heart and your whole self. Treat yourself to a great workout today.
