Posted By Bonnie on September 1, 2010
I subscribe to Mark Silver’s Heart of Business Blog. This morning he spoke about being in motion. The section that really got me thinking was this passage,
“The brilliance of this metaphor is in the observed phenomenon that you have to be in motion to see change. Just sitting there isn’t going to get you anywhere.
In writing that, I feel the need to explain I’m not talking about forgoing contemplative or devotional spiritual practice in favor of action. As I’ve written about time and time again, action can be useless or even harmful if it’s not based in connection and love.”
I was thinking that sometimes you just have to do something. I know when I was learning astrology they suggested that during difficult Pluto transits that you start cleaning out closets as Pluto was often about clearing out and transformation. If you were stuck doing that in life, perhaps clearing out the closets or the kitchen would help.
Sometimes when we get stuck and the changes we need to make seem overwhelmingly huge. Maybe we don’t even need to think how to start that but start changing something else. Something small that we know we can do. Can we change our schedule up a bit and eat lunch a different time? Can we change the color of the towels in our main bathroom? These are small changes and may be things that can be accomplished. In making these changes, we may free up our mind from it’s locked in patterns and we might find we have a brilliant insight.
Certainly it seems better to make changes that seem more productive, but there are times when life seems stuck in it’s rut. Making those other changes–just for the sake of change may shake things up a bit.
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Posted By Bonnie on August 30, 2010
I was reading a book on pet health. I was surprised, but not surprised to learn that most people feel a bit guilty over their pet’s death. Virtually all owners felt they should have done something differently or done more. It is as if we expect that we are more than human to our pets. It is as if we think we are God and should make no mistakes.
I think it is interesting that the person writing states that this is true even of people who do everything.
We can always second guess ourselves. Sometimes we can’t control everything. Sometimes our pets die. This is true in life as well.
We can do what we can to be responsible, but sometimes we have to ask, is it reasonable to expect ourselves to have had certain information at the time to make different decisions? How reasonable is it to expect that we should have known? Finally, would we hold another person to that same standard?
Feeling are always subjective and as such we create stories about what those feelings mean. If we just let them move through and be, perhaps we wouldn’t hang on to feelings like guilt and shame for quite so long.
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Posted By Bonnie on August 27, 2010
I was just over at the Global Institute for Awakening and read their post Are You Dreaming Big Enough. I know I’m certainly guilty of not dreaming big enough. What about you?
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Posted By Bonnie on August 23, 2010
Over at Heal Your Life there is a lovely post about listening to your body’s symptoms to check in with yourself. Is your body happy?
Category: About Disease, General |
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Posted By Bonnie on August 17, 2010
I’ve been reading a very enjoyable book called, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World
. I found it a lot of fun and insightful
Towards the end, one of the people in the book tells our writer that all happiness is relational. You can’t have personal happiness, it’s always happiness in relationship to another.
I think it’s something important to remember
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Posted By Bonnie on August 11, 2010
I was listening to Thom Hartmann the other day and he talked about sociopaths briefly. It sort of coincided with something I have thought. We worship sociopaths in our culture. Some of the things required to be successful in business require that one be sociopathic. One can’t care about what the product does to others. One can’t care too much about one’s environmental footprint. One has only to work for the good of oneself or the company.
Further, as you work inside the company and hope to advance, you can’t show emotion. Being emotional can kill a career. That means no tears, no issues, no emotion inside the workplace. While I think that professionalism is important, I have to consider the idea that most people spend forty or more hours a week at the work place. They spend a lot of time with people at work and you can’t talk about anything important? You can’t be emotional there at all? When CAN you be emotional? At what point do we forget the important of emotions.
Emotions are energy. They are meant to move and change. Clamping down on them is just as bad as the sociopath who has no real feeling or can’t access them. Why do we work so hard to be sociopathic? Next time you find yourself thinking you shouldn’t feel a certain way, maybe we can rejoice in the fact that we actually have feelings and aren’t pathological.
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Posted By Bonnie on August 9, 2010
Food Politics has another article on supplements suggesting that some claims are misleading and deceptive.
While I am a great believer in natural healing and the use of supplements and herbs, I am also a great believer in making sure someone who is knowledgeable about the use of the particular supplement or herb is giving the information. Supplements are generally considered safe because we think of them as food. On the other hand, food is a powerful medicine. Why do we constantly forget that too much of a good medicine can be bad for us? Supplements are just the same.
Each of our bodies needs certain things in certain amounts. We want balance. It is okay sometimes to take too much or perhaps to get too little (how much is too much and too little depends upon the thing in question). However, taking too much or getting too little over the long haul is a bad thing.
A trained practitioner can evaluate and rule out the wrong supplements and herbs. This is a far better approach than someone who is just trying things to see if they work.
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Posted By Bonnie on August 6, 2010
Often people think that if there is a psycho somatic component to their illness it means it’s not really in their body. In other words, if they have an emotional issue around which their body symptoms exist, somehow this means the pain isn’t really in their body.
It really is in the body. The pain may be originating with the emotional energy around the issue but the pain or other symptom is actually in the body. Sometimes resolving the underlying emotional issue just happens to create a more permanent cure for the physical symptom.
I don’t believe that we all always have to understand it all. Sometimes just getting in touch with the feeling is enough. Sometimes working on the physical symptoms help too.
I am reminded of this by my very angry Siamese. I got a new kitten. She’s really unhappy about this. She’s had vomiting and diarrhea for two days now. We’ve been to the emergency vet. We’ve been to her regular vet (who is a naturopathic vet). There is nothing to find. They can see gas in her stomach and at points throughout her intestinal tract. It is not consistent with a foreign object. My cat is just having trouble stomaching another cat. The vet gave her a homeopathic remedy (amongst other things). The remedy is for someone who wants to get close up is afraid to. I think that sums up my cat–who I adopted after her career as a breeding queen was over and she needed a new home. No doubt she gave up a lot of kits that she adored. She adored my kitten. I was surprised she just didn’t take to this little cat, but I suspect there is that fear of loss that she went through.
My cat’s symptoms are absolutely physical. They are also spiritual/emotional too. Hopefully by working with both we can make her feel better, both now and in the long run.
It’s easy to think that one has to concentrate on either the physical or the emotional. Some problems work best when both sides are addressed. Others are solved by going for just one side of the issue. Each person needs to decide which for themselves. If one works from the emotional side, however, this in no way suggests that the issue is purely emotional and not manifesting in the body. Sometimes we forget that.
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Posted By Bonnie on August 3, 2010
I’ve been working on selling cards for acupuncturists and doing artwork for them. I have been focused on how I want to sell them. Now I’m on Zazzle but it’s not how I really want the business to work. For one thing I think the customization arena can be confusing to those who haven’t used it. For another, I think Zazzle is a bit expensive (particularly considering what my cut is). While I plan to keep that store, I’ve been working on my own branding.
And it’s growing! I have tons of ideas and implementing them just keeps taking me down new steps. I think one reason that I haven’t done this before is that I was thinking too small. The idea was always big but I was trying to make it work small and that’s why it wouldn’t.
Does anyone else have places where they need to think bigger than they?
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Posted By Bonnie on July 30, 2010
My husband and I also visited his family in a small town in Southeastern Alaska. In most areas that I’ve been in that are smaller, the food tends to be less nutritious. While this town still had a lot of easy to prepare fake foods and condiments, finding things made from mostly real ingredients was easier than in most cities in the “lower 49″.
In town there was a little cart with a tend that served breakfast and lunch. While I had the egg sandwich and breakfast burrito, neither of these was the standard fast food fare. Real eggs graced the sandwich and burrito, along with real bacon or sausage and we had a choice of cheese, although no “American” cheese food products were offered!
Lunches included nice deli sandwiches. While the meats were likely just common deli meats with nitrates that aren’t optimal, they were freshly made while you waited. The bread to protein ration was higher than usual as well and they didn’t skimp on the “fatty” condiments. While nothing here was something I’d want to live on, for my 10% because I’m on vacation food, it wasn’t completely horrible. Elsewhere halibut and salmon abounded (it is summer). While halibut fish and chips were common, the breading was nice and it was obviously fresh. We got it at a place where crab were placed in a tank waiting for new owners to take them home for dinner.
Having seen the prices of food and knowing that most food must either be home grown (lots of fresh green house grown tomatoes and lettuce here) or imported from a long ways away, I was surprised at the choices. I was also pleased that while the ingredient list may not have been the best, most of the food at these small restaurants was freshly and carefully prepared. Certainly the energy that the cook imparts to her gifts to the world can feed us energetically in a way that mass processed food never can.
What I find so encouraging is this is the sort of thing I wish we saw more across the lower 48. With access to pastured eggs, pastured butter and other foods from real nutritious ingredients, image how much better travelers could eat than they do now, when it even sit down restaurants so often rely only on frozen meals and ingredients.
Category: Experiences, General, food |
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