Wanna visit an uplifting blog featuring positive, courageous and helpful things people are doing, available right here on wordpress?
I trust it’ll cheer you up if you need cheering.
Page 14 of 17
Vision Boarding :)
Do you know about vision boarding or creating a vision board for yourself? Years ago some friends and I got together to create our individual Vision Boards early in the new year as a way to help manifest what we sought for ourselves in the coming year.
We each had a board or poster surface of our choice, surrounded by magazines, markers, glue, and other decorative supplies of our choice. We were to go through the magazines and just cut out pictures or words or letters that appealed to us. Somehow it is believed that in the non-thinking manner, we will gravitate towards something that helps us create what we say we want. And we aren’t talking monster trucks and endless trips if that is more fantasy than ones’ life or life’s passion, but certainly material things will factor in. And so will the picture of friends smiling and drinking tea together. That might represent a feeling you seek in the coming year.
Once we are surrounded by our cut-out pictures, words and letters, we look at what it might tell us, and start to arrange it to make sense for us and our vision board. We may be surprised by what our cutouts tell us, like how important travel is, or a dinner table surrounded by friends, or to get the promotion in Paris. We cut, arrange and paste. As we finish up, we take time to share with those in the room, what was our experience as we put our vision board together, and what it tells us for the coming year.
Vision boards are to be hung somewhere in your home where you will regularly see it and be reminded of your Vision for yourself. It seems taking the time to vision your year ahead, putting it down concretely, the act gives your mind and heart the message. I have friends who brought their previous year’s vision board to the current session. They could point to the ways their vision board had delivered their vision. Well, my friends had delivered, but the vision board reflected what they themselves wanted and then created for themselves.
Symptoms of Inner Peace
Symptoms of Inner Peace
I share with you Dr. Bernie Siegel’s 12 symptoms of Inner Peace from his book, “Peace, Love and Healing”. I seem to fluctuate in how many symptoms I might be experience at a given time. Some days it seems none, and for one magical summer I believed I was experiencing all 12. The feeling is hard to describe, but part of it for me included a different sense of time.
1. Tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than from fears based on experiences from the past.
2. The ability to enjoy each moment.
3. Loss of interest in judging self.
4. Loss of interest in judging other people.
5. Loss of interest in conflict.
6. Disinterest in interpreting actions of others.
7. Loss of ability to worry.
8. Frequent episodes of appreciation
9. Contented feeling of connectedness with others and nature.
10. Frequent attacks of smiling through the eyes of the heart.
11. Increasing susceptibility to love extended by others as well as the uncontrollable urge to extend it.
12. Increasing tendency to let things happen rather than make them happen.
* Dr. Bernie’s note: If you have all or even most of the above symptoms, your condition of peace may be so far advanced as to not be treatable.
Bullies
I heard a great truth the other day.
A bully is just a coward in hiding.
Ideally, the longer one is on this earth there are truths that become evident because of that time and experience one has had to watch and learn. I agree. Bullying is cowardly behavior. A courageous person does not take the offensive. There is no need. Yet a bully’s fear level is high for whatever reason. And that often looks like anger. Bullying is a form of attack, to keep others off balance, put them on the defensive…. for the bully’s reasons, not anyone else’s.
Depending on whether it is a bully on the playground or in high level politics, the point of bullying is to attack and manipulate. Those attacked are forced to react to the attack rather than seeing behind the bully’s motivation, like what the bully might be hiding. Maybe it is like the shell game the magician does, with 3 shells on a table, one hiding a pearl, yet with fast hands the viewer loses track of the shell with the pearl underneath. The bully stays on the offensive, coming out of left field or attacking unexpectedly , so his “victims” are looking at one thing (the shells) while the bully’s true issue is really something else. That behavior is not courageous in my mind.
Courage is knowing yourself, speaking your truth and doing no harm. Manipulating others can be masterly I suppose, yet I would rather see a world where we used our creativity for connecting ourselves to one another rather than alienating people through attack and the bully’s fear. And bullies blame others and don’t take responsibility for their actions it seems. And why does a bully act like a victim, as though he/she has been wronged?
If we knew what the bullies in our lives were afraid of maybe we could bring down the decibel level and start some constructive conversations. And imagine if the bullies knew what they were afraid of and started to take responsibility for it? Mmmmm, just imagine.
Seeker and a Finder
It’s good to be a seeker, but sooner or later you have to be a finder. And then it is well to give what you have found, a gift into the world for whoever will accept it.
– Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Laughing is Good
Do you like to laugh? Do you need a laugh? What is it about animal videos and either the antics alone, or the voice over that can just make us laugh out loud? Truly, I do laugh out loud with some of these.
The link below is one of my all time favorites. I was delighted when a friend just reminded me of it and sent it again.
May you LOL.
The Power of Commitment
This quote is powerful, inspiring and long lived. It may be older than some of us, so the truth of it seems to have aged deliciously too.
Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.
I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
— W. H. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition
Published by J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1951
Kind Action
“No kind action ever stops with itself. One kind action leads to
another. Good example is followed. A single act of kindness throws out
roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. The
greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind
themselves.” ~ Amelia Earhart
Whose Your Tribe?
Who are the people you pull close to yourself in times of good and challenge? Who do you tend to look out for and want to help if you can? Who do you find easy to trust and care about? To work with? Some people talk of having a tribe as a means for moving ahead in ones career, to develop a tribe made up of those folks who help us, open doors of opportunity for us, and have our back and vice versa. An article covering tips for life and work, posited that excelling at work and life aren’t about merit, but actually the tribe mentality. The author claimed men better understood than women that merit and fairness don’t really matter or factor into someone getting a raise or promotion etc. If you are part of a tribe that looks out for you and vice versa, that is how many people succeed.
Is that a tribe in the Whitehouse? If a leader trusts his tribe, like his family, then naturally he would bring them along with him and together they have that belief, history and practice.
Whose your tribe? Or do you believe that doing good work, meeting deadlines, coming within budget alone, that merit will matter? Meritocracy is a myth according to some people. It makes sense that having people to function as a tribe of sorts, can lift everyone. Is that what we see in fraternities, government parties, families that run organizations and countries? When is a tribe healthy and unhealthy? Loyalty is good but could blind loyalty get in the way of one’s own inner compass and values if you had to ignore how you felt in order to go along with the tribe?
A supportive tribe, with healthy opportunity for dissent and problem-solving sounds ideal. And working together to bring the tribe along, using all the various gifts, talents and experience for the greater good is something worth supporting. If the tribe is open, curious and welcoming to new members, then perhaps within that model merit also would have its’ place, and would matter.
Moving Around
For those of us who have lived in many places over our lifetime, a young friend leaving for university, gave me this quote she found online:
“You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart will always be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.” – girlgi.com
We both found comfort in it, as between us, we do have friends and family all over the world. Often we look at those who still live in the same town where they were born, are deliciously happy and wonder why are we thousands of miles away from our beginnings? Yet our choices make us who we are, and there is a richness in loving and knowing people in one place, or in more than one place. Savor what is.
Ageilicious 