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Showing posts from August, 2017

Taking Time to Smell the Flowers

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In this world today we are so rushed. We rush our breakfasts, if we eat breakfast, we rush to work, we are always on our phones texting or messaging, we rush our lunch and even eat at our desks, we rush home, and so on. In America, if we are lucky we get two weeks off a year for vacation. We rush to finish things, we want to know how things end and we want to rush to the end. What happened to taking the time to smell the flowers? When I look out at the blooming trees as an example, I love to see and appreciate what they look like now and also remember how they looked just yesterday and appreciate the daily changes. If I were rushing in my mind I wouldn't be able to see these subtle changes. This sounds so simple, but if we really think about it, how often do we not take in the new beauty around us, and just see things as they were or as we want them to be? I know I am guilty of this some times.  Another example of this is that I can remember the negative reactions to t

Being Vulnerable

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We spend a great deal of our time in life protecting ourselves from perceived hurts from life and from others. Some of us take on the role of being a victim and so we go through life over sharing and being over vulnerable with others, bonding over our wounds and almost unconsciously asking to be hurt again. Others of us take on more of a role of everything being ok, and not easily asking for help and not easily sharing our true and vulnerable, underbelly selves. Neither extreme is one which is helpful to us, and yet we developed those ways of coping from our early life experiences. Which way of coping do you find yourself most resonating with? Both ways actually keep us from being truly vulnerable in a life affirming way. They are defenses built to protect us from hurts. Defenses could also be called fences. These fences keep others out from our hurt selves and keep us in, really not allowing our further growth and expansion. We developed these fences as a way of surviving.

Change Is In The Air

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Change is not easy for most of us. Letting go of a thought or an idea or of something or someone in our lives challenges us. This is true even if and when we know they or it no longer serve us. We are creatures of habit. What we hold onto is connected with our early need to belong. This holds true even on a macro level as we see with our government and our political beliefs and we see playing out in the world. Yet what we see playing out in a big way always begins with us individually; with our internal work with ourselves. We hold onto that which served us at one time in our lives. That time period has great meaning to our inner world even if that was in the past. Our inner world knows time very differently than our outer world; the world of defenses and masks we developed to help us to survive in our world.  I remember a conversation I had with a group of friends at Passover this year. We were talking about forgiveness. How do we forgive when someone killed a family