Morning Shift

Life has shifted.

Fall of 2013 has been the first season in his entire life when my son has been consistently getting up on his own in the mornings (and not at 4am as in years gone by) and getting dressed and ready for the day independently. I'm very proud of him.

For me, this has meant a major shift. Mornings are now quiet. Peaceful. And I now have the luxury of getting up on my own schedule rather than being woken by someone else's morning displeasures that continue until they leave the house - and sometimes beyond ;-) 

What a change! And very healing for the body, mind, and soul.

Calm and peace are first on my list in the morning. I often find myself coming out of a dream when I become aware of being awake in the morning, though not always. Sometimes I take a bit of time to remember what I've dreamt about but otherwise I start my exercises by watching the tree branches outside my window.

After a quick washroom break, I clean my teeth (baking soda, water, sometimes coconut oil, sometimes a natural toothpaste), and drink either a glass of plain water or water with baking soda. Then I move into the rest of my morning. My exercise time is for body, mind, and spirit. I meditate, do various stretches, exercise my focus, take time for creative free-flow thought, exercise my breathing, and purposely take time to feel a sense of wonder.

Then I indulge in my first breakfast. I'm a big fan of "smoothies" because I can toss all sorts of good stuff into the blender and drink it down: http://richesofsimplicity.blogspot.ca/2013/11/toss-anything-in.html.

This morning's first breakfast started with a pumpkin smoothie (frozen,/cooked pumpkin, banana, hemp hearts, water, chia seed, dehydrated kale, dehydrated spinach, maple syrup, cinnamon) followed by almonds followed by tomato juice:

My second breakfast was mashed chickpeas (garbanzo beans) that had been soaked (from dried) then cooked, mashed raw garlic mixed in with the chickpeas (a sort of hummus), cucumbers slices, and green tea.

My son is usually up by the time I've had or am having my second breakfast, and then our day together begins.



Choices

I choose.

I choose to see beauty. I believe part of that is intrinsic and part of that is conscious choice.

Consistently, frequently making that choice has provided the opportunity for my brain to learn to seek out. The more I've chosen to mindfully seek out beauty, the more my mind has been drawn to it, and seeks it out during times of difficulty. In my way of thinking, training our brain is actually done by everyone. Some train their brain by teaching it to react to whatever's happening, some by teaching it to turn to various means of coping whether healthy or unhealthy. I choose to train my brain towards beauty, nature, creativity.

I choose love.

I believe love is an active verb. If I feel affection towards someone but use terrible communication/behaviour towards them and then tell them that I am sorry and that I love them, I view the latter as an inaccurate statement. To me, it's akin to someone saying that they feed animals and then doesn't feed them but still says they feed animals, or someone who isn't a cyclist saying they bike everywhere. In my view, love is something we do or do not do.

I also believe that sometimes differences in the definition of love create a disconnect. I've seen this come into play in the scenario where one person is showing love and desire for peace by setting boundaries with another person regarding behaviour, whereas others are viewing those boundaries as being an indication of not accepting the other person and therefore not loving them. My view is that when someone has repeatedly shown damaging/disrespectful/inappropriate behaviour, setting boundaries with that person facilities love because it removes the potential for further damage and facilitates peace for all concerned.

I choose sadness.

Some seem to think that feeling "negative" feelings is a terrible thing; that "sad" needs to be "cheered up" and that anger is a scary thing. I believe it's what we do with those feelings that categorizes into what some believe as necessarily "good" and "bad" feelings. If we direct our anger at others in inappropriate/disrespectful ways, we've created problems for ourselves and those around us. If we wallow in sadness and wade into dwelling on the past, we again create problems. If we learn to make appropriate/healthy choices with our feelings (see below), we are capable of embracing our feelings as part of our life experiences. I have felt both sadness and anger. Embracing them has fostered creativity, for example, in the form of writing and painting, and has also ignited awareness and drive for advocacy.

I choose  happiness inner peace.

We all have events in life with which we have varying emotional responses. We feel. We all know it's not healthy to bottle up or ignore feelings. We all know it's not healthy to use feelings as a means to inappropriate behaviours. We also know that we can make choices. Except for those dealing with various medical conditions, we can choose how our feelings effect our lives. We can choose to put on our jacket and go for a walk even if we don't feel like doing so. We can choose to be active, be creative, be mindful - BE! We can choose to carve out all sorts of good stuff in our life whether we're feeling sad, happy, angry, etc. Where is our energy? I find mine in my mindfulness and in what I choose to do. Even during difficult times, we can choose to take steps towards healing. Focussing on a tree outside the window or the clouds in the sky is an active step towards healing through those difficulties. Training the mind to continually clear out other thoughts and focus on what the eyes are seeing can be a new exercise for some, but well worth the effort and a step towards  teaching oneself to tap into good. Training our brain to focus on what we want it to focus on can lead to all sorts of healthy paths in daily living, relationships, our way in the world.

What about happiness?

It seems to me that society teaches us to define happiness in relation to how we are affected by external circumstances. We are happy when someone gives us something or when something happens to us. Something "makes us" happy. I've given this much thought over the years. I feel happy in my core even though there are many circumstances in my life that would be considered "negative". I'm almost always feeling happy inside. I find it easy to smile. I feel very much at peace with myself. Then I began to wonder - is that what happiness is? Is it inner peace? In my experience, happiness and inner peace are different. I have a deep sense of peace about who I am and what I'm doing in this world. But there are times when there is turmoil happening around me. There are time when I cry. So is it possible to have a deep sense of peace about oneself yet have moments of not feeling happy? Yes. Is it possible to easily tap into a sense of happiness even when there's nothing different happening that would "cause" the happiness? Yes.  

Light

Today I came across this draft that I hadn't posted last year. I remember that I'd considered deleting it last year. Today I realized how pertinent it is to my present journey:

"Last week, I was sitting in a closet-sized room at a hospital lab where the only view included the three bathroom-stall walls around me and the empty wall on the other side of the corridor. Against the wall was a metal shelf unit on wheels, housing folded hospital gowns.

As I sat in the tiny space waiting for the lab assistant, I became aware of the sense that there was nothing inspiring that I could see, and I hadn't brought along a notepad for writing/ sketching/scribbling ideas. There was no window offering a glimpse of a tree or birds or sky. There was no music, no artwork on the walls - only my imagination.

So I challenged myself. I looked at that institutional metal rack and considered the possibility of thinking creatively about it. It was shiny. It was silver. Still nothing. It had wheels - that gave my mind a microsecond of a grin imagining the adventure Lucy Ricardo or some other character might have with a wheeled shelf unit in a hospital hallway.

And then my thinking took a sharp turn. I considered the idea that we often don't see because we don't "see" - we don't look, we don't understand, our interpretation is too shallow, too limited. Something inside me wanted to find what I wasn't seeing.

I considered that maybe that's what happens when we're in a desperate environment - we're reminded of the inner life within us rather than being so attached to the environment around us. We're beckoned to reclaim how we view life rather than having our view dictated by our surroundings. We're called to take the time to really see rather than just exist. And then I saw it. I caught my breath and smiled at the timing of the thoughts I was having and what I was seeing - the glint of light on the corner of one of the shelves. Reflection."

Light. It's what draws us to the magic of the stars in the night sky; the glow of the moon in the dark. Our ability to see colour is dependent on it. And it's within us.

Finding the Riches

Gratefulness. Every Day.
Purposely seeking out beauty numerous times throughout the day. Every day.
Purposely choosing to randomly smile throughout the day.


There's Something About Nature

"I love to rise in a summer morn,
When the birds sing on every tree"
William Blake

Remember being thrilled by the sight of a ladybug when you were toddling about and barely able to say the word, "bug"?

Remember how the rest of the world faded away while you marvelled at how the ants you were watching could carry such giant food crumbs and how easily they could maneuvoeur around the piece of grass you experimentally placed to disrupt their intended path?

Those wonderful, miraculous pleasures didn't disappear.

Looking into a flower and doing nothing else but breathing brings a calm  -  a different calm than one that comes from soaking in a tub or reading a book. For some who have been away from calm or from nature-appreciation for awhile, this might involve a bit of mind-training, but even starting at 5 seconds a day and working up to being able to successfully block out the world and focus on the simple and miraculous intricacies of a flower for a minute or more each day provides a sense of connection. Healing. Calm. I remember when I started to re-understand that as long as there was nature around me, all would be ok in my world.

There's Something About Music

Addict: noun [with modifier] informal
an enthusiastic devotee of a specified thing or activity

My name is Christine, and I am a live-music addict.

For me, it's not just the music. There's something very deep about sharing music. Beauty, connection, wonder  -  there's something unique and satisfying to being part of a live music performance. Whether you're on the sharing end or the listening end, there's something that's created in those moments of time that can never be recreated. And both the sharer and the listener (although, really, are those roles actually truly separate? hmmm) nudge each other's lives while experiencing those moments together.

Of course, the music itself does count. It reaches deep down inside; some place primal that's connected to ancient times before the development of verbal language. It can touch places that are so often untouched and left parched in modern society. And lyrics? Well, I'm almost always up for listening to a story!

There's Something About Friends

"I have moved and I've kept on moving
Proved the points that I needed proving
Lost the friends that I needed losing
Found others on the way"
{Caledonia}

I've found in life that there are so many layers of friendship (I'm referring to actual friendships here, not folks within our circle of acquaintances). When I was younger, I viewed friends as folks who drifted somewhere within my "inner circle" and "outer circle" of people I knew. The inner circle friends were those with whom I felt the closest (usually based on time together, familiarity, commonality, etc), and the outer circle were folks with whom I'd had similar connections but just to a different degree. Later in life, I reached a bit of a quandry in having common interests and general philosophies with some folks, yet was on the other end of the spectrum in lifestyle or other viewpoints. I began to see that some friends are like some relatives - with some, you develop a close relationship, and with others, you might or might not get together very often and might not have a great deal in common but there might be one or two good-sized factors that provide the glue that keeps you in touch and keeps you wanting to be there for each other.  I also simplified  -  weeded out unhealthy relationships as well as personal/friendship relationships with individuals who showed evidence of a lack of respect towards others, and found much peace in relationships with those who exhibit a true sense of peace in the way they live their life.  Most of the latter have included common interests as well as common philosophies in various areas, but some have included only one or the other. As a result, I truly enjoy and appreciate the eclectic treasure of individuals I am honoured to call my friends.