Everyday Bliss

This past year I have spent learning about duty, presence, and appropriateness in the process of preparing my house for sale. I took a half-time hiatus from my business to attend to the billion different tasks this involves and in the process, have found my way home again to a state of being I’d long denied. I’ve found that I take great joy in having the most mundane of everyday responsibilities, and living up to them. There is nothing more important in the world sometimes.

For the first time in a long time, I was the only person solely responsible for all cooking, cleaning and household-running. I became disinterested in obtaining what I did not have. Getting clothes and household items into plastic toters and archived in the cottage storage space was paramount, as was weeding down those items to a mere shadow of their former bulk. Coordinating the seemingly-endless garden and landscape restoration became all-important. Sister Lan and I dug pansies, Italian flat-leafed parsley, purple ruffled and sweet green basil, variegated and pineapple sage, tarragon, sweet alyssum, rosemary, lemon thyme, Greek oregano and sweet marjoram into fifty pounds of organic soil and mulch under the Meyer lemon last August. It was exhausting to do, but it’s a bang-up kitchen garden from which I actually used the herbs in our daily cuisine. Free organic vitamins, grew ‘em myself. Who can pass up a deal like that? From seed to plate, I know exactly what went into each plant. I rejoiced anew in cooking nutritious from-scratch meals for my family. These can take several hours to compile and clean up after, but the slow food movement has a definite appeal in this era of blindingly-swift-rat-race-indigestion. But I digress.

I dust, wax, vacuum and polish. The same furniture, the same tile and countertops, every day for months, again and again and again. "It’s never done", in the words of Lady Marian. I’m tired every night but happy, with a feeling of accomplishment I can’t apply to the completion of any other project. I don’t want anything more than what I have here.

Creating the perfect environment was one of the last and best personal coaching programs Thomas Leonard created before his death. Creating my environment anew every day by being in service to myself and my family isn’t necessarily what he had in mind. But in an amazing way, what worked to satisfy my mother and my mother’s mother, is what’s doing it now for me. I create my world anew each day and am grateful for it.

My maternal grandmother, Mimi, would laugh and help me bake a pan of cinnamon rolls just to dirty the kitchen for the joy of cleaning it again. She’d have joyfully chatted through three rolls and two cups of coffee to my one, embroidered a tablecloth or two and complained that I don’t eat enough. She was one of those grandmothers that made such comments no matter how fat we got, bless her. Dad’s mother, Granny Grace, would have cast a jaundiced eye at my housecleaning, declared it barely adequate, re-mopped the floors herself, cooked up several meals in advance and frozen them, mended several dresses, looked for more work to do and loved me anyway.

Girlfriends have looked at the sheer amount of housework I do aghast and say "I don’t know how you manage to do it all. You’re a superwoman!", which  embarrassed, I deny. No more superwoman than my Mom – than anyone’s Mom who did the same.

Here’s a hail to the Moms everywhere, and to those who like my own mother, never thought to ask for better than their lot. Who washed, cleaned and cooked and for whom, that was enough. And here’s to us modern women who have discovered anew the joy of a spotless living room, home-raised herbs and veggies and meals you can talk to your family over. And managed to make careers and creative impulses fit in as well. We seem finally to be getting past Superwoman syndrome and getting it right for a change.

Everything old is new again. And clam diggers – excuse me, capri pants – with hot pink and lime green flower-power are back in style. Not to mention Betty Boop and 50’s graphics. Style has become a matter of personal choice, not industry standard. We’re all growing up and growing older, wiser and more discerning. We’re no longer happy to be thrust at jetspeed through our lives at the whims of our next-door neighbors, style counselors and CEO’s. Today’s Head of the Company is CEO Me. The buck stops here, and I say we eat slow, enjoy our lives and families and take plenty of time to figure it all out. When we take it slow we can fully take in the important details, when we attend, we can make more fully informed choices. I’m left wondering how we ever managed to allow ourselves to be talked into this "hurry is good, we must be first-at-all-costs" nonsense. Nothing is worth the indigestion and insanity of the current race to get-it-all-done-before-tomorrow. And even if it all ends next Friday – there is still time, plenty of time. Make haste if you must, but slowly, very slowly. Hurry is entirely optional.

As a person who processes and lives better at a slower pace, I’m rejoicing to note more people seem to be choosing a slower lifestyle. I coach professional women to drop their hectic schedules, spend more time deep in thought and meditation and never let the sun go down without listening to their families. It’s heartening to find that people are more generally accepting of such lifestyle changes. Five years ago we couldn’t race fast enough. Now, thank goodness, the balance is swinging back to a saner pace.

Here’s to our sanity, our humanity and our success…as slow as we need it to be.

Read the rest of this entry »

From Nature.com:  The season in which a woman is born influences the age at which she will go through the menopause, suggests a survey of northern Italians.

The survey, which looked at nearly 3,000 post-menopausal women at three clinics, revealed that those born in March showed the earliest menopause, at an average age of 48.9 years. At the other end of the scale, those born in October remained fertile until an average age of 50.3, with many lasting beyond 55. Said Angelo Cagnacci, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the university: "The age of menopause is influenced by the season in which the female is born. It shows prenatal life is important for future adult life. Things that happen before delivery, during pregnancy, may determine many things in adult life, including when reproduction ends."  Read more here

But wait, there’s hope for them there hormones!

If you like me have an early spring birth month (I was born in April) this could mean that you will begin to experience the more negative side of menopause earlier too: hot flashes, serious cramping and hormonal surges leading to what my Dad used to call "the crazies". Every woman knows about them and every man on earth has been indoctrinated by his fellows to fear them. And all women have to go through this painful, debilitating process, sacrificing a few of her most productive middle years to temporary insanity, pain and disability. Or do they?

Now, at the dawn of the 21st century, the painful, compromised half-life of "the Pause" is very, very old news indeed. Here’s why:

Women all over the globe are using Quantum Flow Bioenergetics (QFB’s) the "energy therapies" to mitigate nearly all symptoms of menopause including those "monster cramps", memory glitches, "crazies" and hot-flashes of hormonal surges. Some women choose to use QFB’s instead of hormone replacement (HRT) and some use them in conjunction with medical methods. Since QFB’s cannot cause any harm or interfere with drugs, they are the perfect complement to HRT, herbs or other complementary therapies. Either as the main symptom-mitigator of menopause, or in concert with other methods, Quantum Flow Bioenergetics are proving time and again to be uniquely successful in women of all different cultures and backgrounds. Whether you favor EFT or the other tapping methods, the gentle point-holding of TAT or subconscious cue-wording  of BSFF, Z-Point or other self-hypnotic methods, QFB therapies are totally "client guided and applied", resulting in on-the-spot success in application.

Going crazy from hot flashes, memory glitches…hormone surges? Quantum Flow Bioenergetics can help by either greatly reducing or eliminating distressing symptoms in many cases. Get in touch for classes, one-time tutorial or ongoing private coaching using these amazingly swift and powerful methods. Tell me you saw this article on "Sage Wisdom" and I’ll even take 30% off your first session!

What labels do you wear? Parent…student…professional…intellectual? Healer…writer…lover…friend? Labels are not only what others "see" us as, but also invisible containers and delimiters we apply to ourselves. Labels represent beliefs we hold about ourselves, and sometimes those beliefs are ones we wish we didn’t have. Beliefs like "I’m lazy", "I procrastinate", "I’m not smart enough" and so on. At the recent ACEP conference I learned a really neat energy modification trick to help bust those beliefs – wearing labels!

I’m so glad I took Sandi Radomski’s Allergy Antidotes certification program after the main conference was over. Not only did I bust myself out of allergies that had plagued me for years, but I learned how to help others do the same.  It’s not medical intervention, but a simple, managable protocol to change the way energy flows in your body to support the "old belief" that you are hypersensitive to a certain substance. No pills, no potions, no shots, no sprays. Amazing!

And it was from Sandi that I learned about wearing labels. Got something you want to change? Think of its opposite and phrase it as a positive affirmation, then wear it as a label! Words have power, Sandi taught, as we know from the research of Dr. Masaru Emoto on the power of word-labels to affect the purity of water. As our bodies are over 75% water, we can transfer the intent of the words we write on a label to imprint the water in our bodies with a new direction, a new, more positive belief. While I was initially skeptical of a label to change my life, I experienced it working in my own life and those of my classmates. And interestingly, it doesn’t even take "belief in the process" for the change to occur. Complete skeptics and partial ones such as yours truly, witnessed changes happening, seemingly by magic!

Back to the simple principles elucidated in Wayne Dyer’s "Power of Intention" – what you intend and reinforce over and over again, will happen. Translate that to an energy changework technique: write your intent on a label with a few activating phrases and wear it next to your skin, preferably over one of the body’s energy-intake valves, the chakras. The chakra right over your heart is an easy one to use as is the solar plexus chakra, a few inches below your belly button.

I want to have a healthier lifestyle so I wrote on my label "Exercise and good eating habits come easily, joyfully and healthfully to me", with the activating phrase "Love and Gratitude" (which is a wonderful vibration to imprint upon your body’s water) and "635 nm" which is the vibrational frequency of a completely healthy human cell. Sandi says that adding this number to your affirmation plus the "higher intention" phrase of "love and gratitude" amps up the energy of your intention greatly and aligns it with the complete health of your bodymind. I wore this label taped to the inside of my shirt, right over my heart and in a week, I was both exercising more and eating more correctly. Not completely perfect yet, but I’m willing to give it time.

What labels do YOU want to wear?

Invitation: Got an allergy problem? Drop me a line or give me a call at 408.448.7685 and we’ll work on it together! You can do this work anywhere in the world that you live – it even works well over the phone! I’m offering Allergy Antidote Intro sessions at a specially subsidised price through July 4th, 2005. Get on my calendar before then and the lower price for your sessions holds for an entire YEAR. But hurry, my schedule is filling up fast!