Archive | August, 2009

12 Life Lessons I Learned from Swimming


I’ve been swimming most of my life, and have loved it from the very beginning. I remember my first swimming lesson at around age 5, where we had to put our faces in the water and then turn our heads to the right to learn to breathe. The teacher pointed at me and said, “Yes! Everyone look at her! That’s how I want you to do it!” In that moment, the water and I merged into one, and a life-long love affair was born.

For most of my life, I went swimming for fun. I played in the water for hours as a child, and learned to dive in my teen years (discovering it was NOT a good idea to do a belly-flop off the high dive!), and then as an adult I left most of the playfulness behind. Until I got around my guy cousins or my brother. Then we would chase each other and splash and dunk one another until we were exhausted.

My uncle taught us all to water ski. One by one, we all learned how to hold onto the rope and be pulled up. We also learned WHEN to let go (very important, if you are heading toward a dock, like my brother did one disastrous day!).
And in one particular public park in Lafayette, Indiana, where my family originates, there is a delightful water slide. At family reunions, our entire family would spend hours playing together at that pool. Even my grandmother, who was in a wheelchair, would join us in the shallow end of the pool, and enjoy the water.

It wasn’t until several years ago that I even considered swimming as a form of exercise. Laps? Are you kidding me? Swimming was for play, not boring stuff like doing laps. And one day, my husband and I went to the UVA pool, and I began to swim. (There were lanes there, and serious swimmers.)

I discovered I loved it! I reconnected with my love of swimming, my adoration of the water itself. I loved how refreshed I felt after a swim, how clean and how flexible my body felt. And after a long day at the office, it was so healing for me. What a gift this discovery was!

When we moved to Florida, I discovered that our community pool is shaped like a flower, with a great big fountain in the middle. Laps? They were nowhere to be seen. I sniffed and refused to swim for awhile. However, the lure of the water called to me.

One day, I went back to the pool. I began to flirt with the water again. I played a bit and half-heartedly swam some laps. This is how it remained for quite some time.
Then I began to listen to my Radiant Health affirmations CD.

Before I knew it, I wanted to swim. Every day. And I wanted to swim laps. Seriously. My lap count increased weekly. 10. 15. 22. 30. 33. (Could I make 44?) 40. Then, the magic number, 44.

Swimming has taught me some significant life lessons. (See if they apply to your own form of exercise or creative passion.)

1. Relax. You cannot float unless you relax.

2. Breathe. When you’re swimming, you’ve got to breathe. (“Well, DUH!” you say. Hang on, hear me out.) Part of being able to swim laps in particular is to be able to adapt your breath to your body’s needs. When you’re swimming faster and your heart is pumping harder, you need bigger breaths, and when you’re meandering across the pool, you can hold your breath longer. Well, when you’re in a situation where you’re anxious and stressed, what is the first thing your body needs? More breath. A deep breath. Several deep breaths.

3. Find your rhythm. Getting into your rhythm allows you to move into a space of surrender and peacefulness. And it leads you into #4, which is…

4. Be present in the moment. When you are present in the moment, you will be aware of the feeling of the water against your skin, your muscles moving, the sound of your breath blowing out under the water, the beauty of the sun and the water casting a light show on the bottom of the pool. It is in this space of peace and joy that co-creation occurs.

5. Be persistent. When you can’t find your rhythm (or don’t even know what that feels like), keep trying. Sometimes when I go, I am distracted and just cannot get into it (particularly if there are other people in the pool crossing in front of me). Go another day. Try again. You’ll get it.

6. Focus. This is related to my example of people crossing in front of me. When that happens, I find that I get irritated. “Don’t they know that I’m swimming here?” I think. Then I lose my breath and my rhythm. I’ve lost my focus. I have to consciously move them out of my mind, and refocus on my movement and my breath and the side of the pool that I’m heading to. Let other people do what they will, you pay attention to you and what you are doing.

7. Pay attention to where you are going (or, as my husband, the sage, put it, “Don’t bump into people”). Sometimes when I’m in the flow of the movement, I close my eyes as I swim. And sometimes when I do that, I run into the wall. Not good. Watch where you are going. And on a much larger scale, pay attention to what you are doing now, because it affects where you end up.

8. Pay attention to the details. What kind of kick am I using? Can I kick harder? How far am I reaching when I move my arms? Are my hands cupped all the time, even in the turns? Are my feet pointed? All of these details make a difference in efficiency as well as in how I feel when I’m done.

9. Challenge yourself. Can you go faster? Can you go longer? Can you try a different stroke? My favorite stroke is the Breast Stroke. I also love the American Crawl. However, I try out the Butterfly every now and then just because I like the challenge of it.

10. Try something new. When I learned to turn at the end of the lane, I learned to turn to the right. So, for years, I’ve always turned to the right. And it’s always felt a little strange to me for some reason. A few weeks ago, I decided to see what happened if I turned to the left. It felt so right, and it was easier, for whatever reason. Now, my turns are much more smooth and fluid. What have you been doing the same way just because you learned it that way? Can you think of doing it a little differently? (What is calling you to do it differently? That’s your first clue.)

11. Celebrate your accomplishments. That I’m swimming an hour each time I swim is an accomplishment! And when I made my goal of 44 laps I felt so proud! Today, I swam 15 of the laps faster than I’ve ever done it before. Celebrate! In celebrating, you are swimming (forgive the unintended pun) in the energy of lightness and love. This is the energy of Spirit itself!

12. Have fun! Life is meant to be fun. When you are having fun, you are vibrating in a feeling space of joy. And when you are vibrating in a feeling space of joy, you are then drawing to you – and creating – all kinds of wonderfulness.
Your assignment: Look at your own life. How are you learning these same lessons in the things you are doing? What one thing can you do differently today to move you toward your dreams?
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How Do YOU Rise Again After Crash & Burn?

Yesterday, I had a splendid crash and burn. Publicly. You see, my social media coach and dear friend, Mande White, and I had decided we were going to create a Blog Talk Radio (BTR) show called “The Business Bitch.” (We do it, so that we aren’t.) Catchy, right?

Our intent in creating this was to normalize the process we all go through in this walk we are on as solopreneurs. (That’s an entrepreneur who is working alone.) As solopreneurs, we have some pretty unique experiences. There’s the delicious joy of experiences gone right, and then there’s the exasperating frustration when they don’t … and there’s the feeling of overwhelm that occurs frequently.

So, we set the date, created the page of information on the BTR site, and then began to announce it on Twitter and Facebook. Only we didn’t practice. You see, BTR will only allow you to schedule one thing per day, and by the time we realized this, well, we were at the day of the show.

Uh-oh.

Mande’s intuition was warning her. In my usual optimistic way, I said “Look, even if we mess up, it’s our first time, and we’ll learn, right? It’ll be fine. We’ll do great.” Of course, I was thinking she was worrying about us not having enough to say or nobody showing up, or something like that.

It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to figure out how to use the switch board (or that there even was one!) and that I wouldn’t be able to even get Mande on the call! Yep. That’s what happened. We spent half the time trying to figure out how to both be on the call. Live. With listeners. Actual listeners.

We laughed about it later, but oooohhh, boy, did I ever feel foolish when the laughter was over.

Crash and burn.

So, how do we recover from crash and burn? How do we rise like a phoenix after humiliation, hurt, frustration, and all those other “lovely” experiences?

Well, here was my process:

1) Share your pain: I immediately called my husband and my mother – the two people who love me most in the world, and wanted to share with them. Unfortunately, they weren’t available when I needed them. I then called a friend. That helped, a little.

2) Do something you love to do: I next saw that my ducks were all waiting for me to come feed them and that the bird feeder was empty, so I went outside to feed them all. (We live on a lake and the ducks – and the turtles – have become dear little friends of mine.)

3) Get quiet and listen: After feeding the ducks, turtles and birds, I sat at the edge of the lake for about an hour. Just being. I felt the earth beneath me, the breeze around me, saw the life in the lake around me, and heard the quacking of the ducks, and the call of the Blue Jay telling his friends that food was there. I absorbed the energy of Mother Earth, and allowed my disappointment and frustration to flow out of me as I received the message that all is well.

4) Tap: When I realized that what I needed someone to say to me was that everything was fine, and that I’d do better next time, that this is a learning process and I’m learning – and that I wasn’t hearing it from anyone outside of me – I knew I had to say it to myself.

So, as I tapped, I told myself these kind things (all true, by the way), and I began to integrate their truth into my being. This is a really important step, because we often will not hear what we need to hear from others. Once we become aware of what it is we need to hear, we must give it to ourselves (and most of us have never learned how to do this).

5) Take care of yourself: When my husband came home, I told him, “I don’t want to do anything tonight. I just want to relax and watch TV.” Later, I took a bath with candles and soft music, listened to my Unlimited Wealth CD, and went to sleep early.

6) Turn lemons into lemonade: By writing this article, I am turning my lessons into an opportunity to share, to grow, and to help others.

We all have experiences of crash and burn. It’s what we do with those experiences – how we handle them – that matters.

Which of these steps do you use? Which work for you? Do you have others that I didn’t include here? What are they? Care to share?

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” The Dalai Lama

 

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Been Triggered Lately? I Have…

Several weeks ago, I was spending the morning with my husband at our local Senior Center’s Flea/Antique Market. It’s always an enjoyable morning, as we peruse the vendors’ items. A favorite vendor carries used DVDs, and we happily stock our collection with some delightful new titles.

This particular morning, Francisco asked me to come take a look at some ribbons a vendor was selling. I finally got over there and discovered that he had large rolls (100 yds!) of satin ribbon in a variety of colors. Unfortunately, they weren’t colors I could use … until I saw some in ivory. I picked up one roll and held it thinking of how it could be used for my daughter’s wedding. (She’s put me in charge of decorations.)

I then picked up two more (he had six total rolls), and began to process out loud with Francisco how they could be used at the wedding. I had two of one width in my hand, and one of another.

“How much are these?” I asked the vendor.

“Fifty cents each,” he replied.

Before I could even think, another woman reached down and grabbed the other (and last) three rolls.

Shocked at what I perceived to be her incredibly rude behavior, I began to mutter things out loud, like “I can’t believe she just did that! Are you kidding me? I’m looking at these and she just grabs them up!”

She ignored me. I got louder (and more irritated).

She continued to ignore me.

Then, as I paid the man, she stood next to me, and I said to her, “You know, I was going to use these for my daughter’s wedding, and you knew I was looking at them! I can’t believe you just grabbed them like that! Would you even consider letting me have them?”

“Not with that attitude, I wouldn’t,” she replied, snootily.

I was incensed! Aside from feeling like a little girl who had been publicly scolded, I felt the whole thing was her fault to begin with. (And I knew I hadn’t handled the situation well at all.)

I looked around for my husband (who had distanced himself from me-lol) and walked toward him, saying, very loudly, “Can you believe her? How incredibly RUDE! You see, this is why I HATE Florida! So many people here are like that!”

He said, “I TOLD you to come over here. I kept telling you to come over here and look at them. But did you? No. You wanted to look at the DVDs.”

If I had had something in my hand I could have belted him with, I might have done it. Now I was angry with two people!

“Ok, you know what?” I said. “Just leave me alone. Let me cool off, because right now I’m really angry, and I don’t want to say things I’m going to regret later.”

Wisely, he did.

And I cooled off, and then began to look at the situation with some humor.

Why am I telling you this?

Well, because I know that I’m not the only one who gets triggered. I know that I’m not the only one who feels frustrated, and annoyed, and who handles things with less-than-perfect grace.

Because this is a perfect example of how the Law of Attraction works (or how “Thinkin’ it Into Bein’” works – yeah, kinda in reverse of what I wanted, but it is how it works!). And it is a useful teaching experience.

So, first off: what were my underlying beliefs to begin with that created a situation like this?

1) “The people in So. Florida are rude, rude, rude.” (Sorry to those of you beloveds on my list who live here; I realize this is a huge generalization, and is meant more about strangers in stores. Regardless, I have this belief, and it gets activated waaayyy too often.)

2) “I have to get mine before someone else takes it from me.” (Yep, that one’s in there, sorry to say.)

3) “There’s not enough for all of us.” (Old stuff for me, and very familiar to most, if not all of us.)

4) “When I get angry and loud, then I get in trouble/rejected/ignored/silenced.” (A female issue, generally speaking.)

I’m sure there are plenty of others, but these are the bigger, more obvious ones. (Can you spot any that may have come up for you in the course of reading this?)

So, here’s something to be aware of: we all get triggered. And when we do, we usually don’t handle things as well as we would like to, or as well as we normally do. We go to some place inside of us that is much younger, and less able to handle the situation with objectivity or grace.

This is where EFT or the tapping comes in so handy. Because when you tap on your feelings as you are triggered, you release them or neutralize them. Maybe not immediately, and maybe not completely, but you will soften the intensity of them. Over time, you find yourself getting less and less triggered about, well, pretty much everything.

And here’s something else to be aware of: When you’re feeling something – joy, delight, frustration, annoyance, anger, whatever it is – Law of Attraction will only bring you more of the same, or some very similar-type vibrations.

You can see from my above example that I went from annoyance to anger, as more and more of my negative beliefs were activated and triggered. The more I paid attention to them and gave them energy (or voice), the bigger and more intense they got – AND – the more they attracted similar beliefs or vibrations.

(This also works in the opposite way, too; the more you pay attention to something you want and give it positive energy, the bigger and more intense it gets – and the more quickly you see it manifested in your life.)

I even knew this even as I headed down this road. Frankly, I didn’t care. I was on a roll and nothing was stopping me. Until I went so far that I really didn’t like where I was ending up and how I was feeling. It was then that I stopped. I chose differently. I had to. I was feeling too awful.

I removed myself from the situation, went outside, yelled at the lady (and Francisco!) in my mind for a minute or so, then breathed deeply, looked at the trees, and even tapped. I began to feel relief. I began to feel better, softer, kinder.

My immediate relief was when I took myself away from the situation. Then, as I tapped, I felt better. I didn’t laugh immediately, but when I finally went back in and found Francisco, I was able to laugh again – at him, at myself, even at the lady.

But, know this: it was a process. It always is.

I could see how I had created the whole encounter with my beliefs. I could see how I activated all of those beliefs through my intense feelings (and, by the way, knew that I was creating my future even in that very moment by thinking those thoughts and feeling those feelings – grrrr!).

So how do we create?

1) Through the very thoughts we think.

2) Through the very feelings we have about the thoughts we think. The more intense the feelings, the quicker you manifest. (This is very good, if you are practiced at feeling hope and joy and delight, especially while thinking about the things you want to create. On the flip side, it can also be a challenge if you have practiced feeling intensely negatively about things. If that’s the case, work on it, tap on it … work through your beliefs.)

In my own example, I have had some pretty intense negative feelings and beliefs about the way I think people behave in So. Florida. Do you think that those feelings and beliefs are creating my reality? Yes. Absolutely. And because it has been so strong, I frequently see examples of it, and I think “See, I’m right!” And while I get to be right, I don’t get to be happy here in Florida. I can’t have both. (I’ve worked on it, I promise you, and it’s gotten much, much better. Still, this showed me I still have more work to do.)

3) By holding the vision of what it is we want.

So, dear ones, have you been triggered lately? If so, how are you using it to learn more about yourself? How are you using it to learn more about how you’re creating? And how are you using it to learn more about how to create what it is you want in your life?

Your assignment, should you choose to do it:


Think of a time when you were triggered about something. Now look at the underlying beliefs you have about that situation. Write them down. Tap on the most intense one(s). Notice where it shows up in your life in other areas. (It will. I promise.) Notice how this belief infiltrates your life. Tap on the belief – daily, if you must – to reduce your intensity.

Extra Credit: Think of something you really want to create in your life. What beliefs do you have that are keeping you from creating it? Tap on the most intense one(s). Notice where it shows up in your life in other areas. Tap on that belief – again, daily, if you must – to reduce your intensity. Begin to move into joy and excitement as you think about your dream. The more frequently you can stay there, the more quickly you will manifest it.

I Promise.

 


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Faith, Hope & Trust: Co-Creation’s BFFs

Thank You!

“First: seek joy, and all else follows. Since your feeling of joy is your indication of your connection with your Source, once you have achieved joy, you have achieved connection with your Source. And under these circumstances, all that is good follows.”


- Abraham-Hicks

Thank You!
On June 14, I was contacted by a mother of a teen-aged girl, asking for some good energy and support in holding the vision that her beloved daughter would be able to get into a particular community.
Thank You!
You see, her daughter is autistic, and her mother knew this community will love and support her daughter as she moves into adulthood. It will offer her opportunities that her mother simply cannot provide.
Thank You!
As of her email to me, the daughter had been offered a place in this community; what was left was the funding. This was why she was contacting me. Not for money, but for spiritual support in holding the vision. (She is a member of the EFT & Affirmations group on Facebook, and she knew me from there.)
Thank You!
I wrote her back something to the effect of:
Thank You!
“I love how you have been creating this, have been tuning into it energetically for years, and then you put the wheels in motion for the past two years, holding fast to your vision. And, through the strength of your vision, your intention, and your love, you are creating the perfect place for your beautiful daughter to be held, loved, nurtured, and given opportunities to expand and grow.

“The funding is indeed the last stop. It is the last bit of fear to be dissolved. Letting go of any ‘How can this be?’ or ‘I can’t afford’ or ‘It’s too much’ or ‘It’s too much to ask for,’ and so on and replacing it with ‘The Universe always provides, it always has, and it always will. I know it will provide the way for my beautiful daughter to be at this community. I trust this with my whole being!’ Become one with THAT!”
In addition, I asked her to please offer it to the group on Facebook, and to ask them to also hold the vision with her. She did, and the group responded with great love and grace.
Thank You!
This week, on July 13, she emailed me again, telling me that the funding had been approved. (She had been concerned about this because this particular community was more expensive than the state’s budget normally allowed. And yet, it was approved.)
Thank You!
She was exultant! She said that in her dark moments of fear, she would look at the words I sent her and attune herself once again to hope and faith, through tapping and through choosing to think thoughts of trusting. She would re-claim her vision for her daughter.
Thank You!
She said, “I printed out the core of your words and have been meditating and tapping with them every day. Trust. Trust . Trust. What a journey and what a lesson.”
This is the work for all of us as we co-create our lives, and co-create our visions. It is to us to hold fast to that vision, to tap away the fears and the dis-belief, and to shift the dis-belief into belief. It is up to us to say to ourselves “Yes, I can!” over and over and over and over (did I say over?), until we are in alignment with that vision.
Thank You!
And when we are in alignment? Manifestation!
Thank You!
Most of us don’t think we have a choice. We do. We choose how we approach an issue. We choose how we step into our faith and how we give it voice. We choose what we do with the darkness that sometimes surrounds us, and even fills us until we can barely see the light. We get to choose, just as this loving mother did.
Thank You!
Truly, how cool is that? How awesome that we have the option of choice? What are your visions? What are your fears about your visions? What are your dreams? Your hopes? Your desires? What conversations are you having both in your head and with your family and friends about why you can’t have your dreams and desires come into being?
Thank You!
You can choose differently again. And when you forget and start listening to those inner voices? You can choose yet again. And again. And again.
Thank You!
So … what are you thinking into being?

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