Happy Zensday Wednesday!

I have had wonderful ideas for you to ponder the past few weeks, but one week, it came to me on a Tuesday and another on a Friday.  So, I haven’t been ignoring you, I have simply not been good at looking at a calendar! One thing that came to me was the idea of wanting to change your life and how would one go about it.

Cuz, really, how much can you change your personality?  Turns out, you don’t need vast changes to see improvements.

You only need to adjust your antennae.  You need to try to get a different channel.

And most important:  you NEED (sorry to be so demanding) NEED to show gratitude for what you already have.

This seems counter-intuitive when you don’t want aspects of the life you have.  But looked at another way, why would you want to pray, meditate, ask the universe (whatever you want to call it) for more things if you aren’t appreciative of what you have? Everyone has something they can look to in their life to say they are:  proud of, like, enjoy.

Even if it’s just:  hey, I am alive today and my legs are strong, or 8 1/2 of my fingers are working perfectly (one of my gratitude thoughts).

Hopefully and this is the challenge, you can come up with 10 things  you are grateful for in your life.  It might be tough at first but as you start to list it, the more you do it, the more you think of. I have started doing this lately and this week is a very different experience than last week.  Better – in case that wasn’t obvious. : )

On Monday, after being cognizant of what I am grateful for, I set the next challenge to be to stop the mentality of BATTLE aka Me vs Them. This was geared towards work and traffic and dealing with the public, in general.

What would it look like, if I were to not be an amoeba reacting to stimuli at every turn, but was really present in the moment and taking care of living on purpose. It started with traffic and I found that my knee jerk reaction was quick to blame and get angry at people I wouldn’t even be thinking about 5 minutes later.

It was a challenge, for sure.  But I managed to let people in who were trying to cut me off.

Love, I thought, I love that you are bold to cut in front of me.  And I smiled.

The 2 people who did that never thanked me. Ego, I thought, this is ego needing the appreciation.

Then one of the cars, after cutting me off and not thanking me, drove very slowly.

REALLY! I screamed.  Then I remembered.

I won’t remember the woman in the Jetta 5 minutes later (no I just remember her two days later for the purpose of this post – ha), and I thought, those few seconds are not worth my heart rate going up.  So, after my expletives, I let it pass.  Phew.

Later that day at work, an email from a co-worker started to make my blood boil.  He had failed to do a part of his job and knew it, but tried to put it on me.  Here’s the thing:  there was nothing to put on me…except his negative, blamey energy and I almost took the bait as I have many times before.

But I paused and realized I was in the clear and this was alllll ego (for both of us), so I responded with “Thank you!”  and I laughed.  It felt good.  It would have felt AMAZING to stick it to him, but that euphoria would have been short-lived and I would have entered the ring of lunacy – and lost, cuz let’s face it, he’s better at it.

Little victories without the battle.  Who’d a thunk it. It should be simple, and it kind of is.

The hard part is extracting yourself from past, rote behavior.

Rerouting your neural highway sounds more like the kind of thing that would set me off in traffic, but it’s a detour of the Zensday Wednesday kind.

Good luck with however you find your gratitude or however you decide to adjust your antenna to a channel that will serve you better!