You might know turmeric by its yellow color, its bitter taste, its health properties, its character as a good citizen who always helps you clean your garage. But this spice has a triple secret life. Watch and learn!
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Zensday Wednesday – Adjusting the Antenna
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!
The Day After Zensday Wednesday
I was all zen in a week (or past two weeks) of insanity at work. Zensday Wednesday was all ago.
Thursday was a different story. May have overused this coping technique…
I Blued Myself
I was born a blonde. I didn’t stay a blonde naturally. But that didn’t stop me from continuing from being one.
My hair grows very fast, so keeping up with the maintenance meant I needed to go out often. My checkbook couldn’t take it.
Then I found ways to go in for “Apprentice nights” where I pay next to nothing to have a student at fancy salons work on my hair. The time commitment was too much (most of those salons were across town) and you would be in the chair for awhile.
I LOVED the people who have worked on my hair! But I needed to at least try to color my hair myself.
A year and a half ago, I found the youtube channel of Ellebangs! She is awesome! And her tips and advice gave me the confidence to go at it on my own.
It’s been great for the most part. I color, I highlight and I tone. I use a toning shampoo when I don’t want to use developers.
The one I was using was great but when I heard about a new one that was more pigmented, I couldn’t wait to try it.
I tried it. My hair felt fantastic, and oh yeah, it was blue.
Here is my vlog about how I color corrected my gunmetal grey to become a fabulous blonde with household items.
Hope this helps, and even if you don’t need the help, hope it entertains!
The Challengers
On the walls of the day
In the shade of the sun
We wrote down
Another vision of us
We were the challengers of
The unknown (lyrics from “The Challengers”)
In the shade of the sun
We wrote down
Another vision of us
We were the challengers of
The unknown (lyrics from “The Challengers”)
I have been on vacation for two weeks. Though it’s not the first time I have taken such an extended time off (people asked at work, “What are you? French???” If only! Mais oui!), It feels like it might as well be since the change in me is profound.
The first week was spent with my sister visiting from Europe along with her kids and husband. We rented a beach house near Ventura and Shaka and my dad joined as well. Normally family vacations though well-intended can feel like a pressure-cooker of past grievances. But it was such an enjoyable time (aside from my sister almost choking on rice and me panic-stricken in the ocean way past my depth trying to rescue my nephew, but I digress) and I even worked on my video projects. First one is soon to come! It was awesome to see dolphins and sea lions every day, as we surfed and chatted and fell down and laughed. The sunsets seemed more vibrant while not having a rush-hour steering wheel clenched in my fists.
As if time with the family wasn’t enough of an identity reminder, the next week, as Shaka went back to work, my dad went back home and my sis and fam headed back across the pond, I found myself in a staycation of the best sort. I converted my old audio cassettes to mp3s and I got another shot in the arm of my past (I also realized how annoying I was in these old recordings – but bygones : )
And it comes out to this… I like where I came from (I never thought I would say that). I like where I am today even more. I feel more empowered by excavating my memories and putting them in appropriate mental files (as well as actual Windows files – ha).
So with all this blissed-out, love-fest, vacation-girl time, I wondered why I still felt a sense of panic. A feeling that the other shoe was going to drop. The internal dialogue sometimes sounded like an external dialogue of theatrical proportions as I was driving around town, working out my worries.
I decided I was going to put old fears in a suitcase that gets lost in a transatlantic flight. And then dropped in a fire pit. And doused with forget-me-nots…uh, I wanted it gone.
Progress was underway. I was driving around, not realizing how hot it was getting and how exhausted I was. That night, Shaka came home and noticed I seemed listless. I had a headache and neck ache and felt like I had lost all strength. Then, right after dinner (with black rice – sooo healthy – sooo hard to find), I threw up. Shaka looked up signs of a female heart attack – I had most of them. I scoffed. It was just hot. It was just a tiring day. But I promised him that the next day, I would call the doctor.
I awoke very refreshed but keeping my promise, I called. The on call nurse wanted me to come into the ER. WHAT?
Now I was nervous and started to imagine that I was having a heart attack right THEN.
6 hours later, EKGs, Xrays, all kinds of lab work and consultations and a Dr. Oz episode with a segment of women under 55 who have heart attacks (naturally I assumed this was a sign that I was never leaving that hospital bed) – it turns out, I had just experienced a vacation-induced Panic Attack. Drama much? If my old cassettes had proven anything, I hadn’t changed all that much.
A clean slate feels pretty good (see happy face above – No Pain)
This weekend, Shaka and I headed to our friends’ place in Corona to celebrate birthdays, anniversary, last days of summer (tell that to the weather) and to ground ourselves with a meditation.
Plus there was wine and lots of it.; yummy food, good friends and pool time. We all felt a bit like we had been tumble-dried this summer with life events. Many of us had been awakened by physical problems to shift our thinking. It was very comforting to know that we were not alone with some of what we had been experiencing. I mean, just turn on the news or sports and you’ll know – the world is crazy lately!
What a balm, a salve, a healing, a …you get it. It was good.
I made a mixed cd for the hostess. One of the songs was an older one from the New Pornographers called, The Challengers.
I love the tune. But there is something even more powerful about the lyrics – like we are cutting a swath through this strange plain of existence.
In the end, all these details, all these emotions don’t really matter. We only have to exist from cradle to grave and experience it all – for good or bad. But I am grateful for my family, for my relationship, for my friends, for the adventures of the past two weeks. Grateful for the challenges of what it means to be human and for all these emotions and all these details because they are what make us unique in our common experience. To be challenged is natural. How we handle it, is how we learn.
“Until I see you around
Until we clear the accounts
Leave it there
Leave it to us
We are the challengers of
The unknown”
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