You Call It Self Care

I call it self love. Perhaps it is the same thing. Reading here may reveal we are on the same page or not. I would imagine we are.

The Book of Self-care by Mary Beth Janssen can be found here: https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/the-book-of-self-care/9781454926313-item.html. Exercises and activities are always useful to get from advice to action. So check out the ones in this book.

It is important to note that maintenance is not growth. Maintenance is the soil for the seed of the soul. You germinate your higher soul with your sense of self love. Self love grows into the light, the warmth and transformative qualities associated with it.

Discover and share the unique of others. Highlight and refine the unique of you.

Unique U.

As a natural act of appreciation a Hamilton, Ontario radio station is asking listeners to call in with the first name of a front line worker (nurse, doctor, police) they want to say thank you to. ‘Sue, who is a paramedic from St. Catherines – thank you!’ Great initiative: simple and inclusive to recognize professionalism and dedication.

In these times of global worry what can we do to participate in societal protection and our communal recovery?

Like me if you are not working in a hospital or related services it can feel helpless to be confined at home. Although staying home is of great service to your family and all of the communities you are a part of so we don’t get sick or get others sick, it can feel passive.

What else can I do to help?

Seek the best in others. Offer the best of yourself.

Living without many of our daily habits, having our routines compressed or put on hold can put us on edge. Maybe you are taking care of and educating children. We can be impatient. Frustrated. Out of our element. Being limited by new health based protocols and regulations, that are for our own well being, can reveal we have to find new ways to live. Can we find topics of conversation so we are not accumulating fear by only focusing on the virus?

Yes! Go back to school. Enrol in Unique University. Unique U. is where we learn more about ourselves, others, marriage, parent roles, stages in life. We can learn jokes, new recipes, some Yoga, paint a picture, plant a few veggies in starter pots. We could get better at singing or realize what we already knew – that we will never be a good singer:)

In the tutorials of Unique U. we are the student one moment and the teacher the next. Our emotions (daily / devotional) and human qualities are the curriculum. Seek the one-of-a-kind of each of us that can easily get lost in the rush and demands of daily life.

Offer to read out loud to someone an interesting few lines from a book and seek their perception about it. Seek to understand the ‘why’ of yesterday to offer better vision of the ‘how’ for tomorrow. Seek satisfaction for yourself to offer fulfillment to others.

This can help us update our beliefs about ourselves. Highlight that you are versatile, creative and resourceful. It can also remind us our family members are funny, quirky, spontaneous and caring.

The Seesaw

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who said ‘ok’ to the playground bully when he said, ‘Hey jump on’ to the other seat of the painted green wooden playground seesaw.

This playground in front of the winter outdoor hockey rink (and summer tennis courts) also had the big swings that were awesome; you could pump your legs to swing so high. And then jump off at the peak of your follow through which was a good 15 feet above the ground. Way outta control!

There was the long metal slide that heated up to burning hot in the July afternoon sun. You couldn’t slide down without a serious leg burn.

So on this day the local buffoon convinced me to participate and now I am up in the air as he lifts his seat and bashes it back to the ground. This sends me flailing a foot above my seat. I hold onto the metal handle with all my ten year old might.

He laughs the asshole. He loves it. Again he bashes his seat down punctuated by his villainous cackle. Again my legs fly into the air. I’m bucking this green wooden bronco and wondering how to jump off as it looks like he is not going to let me off.

Likewise the seesaw in relationships can generate a variety of emotions from elated to enraged. I am sure you know what I mean.

Let’s look at the fulcrum which is the part in the middle that is the balance point between the two extremes. According to the little drawing above one side is ‘Self’ and the other being ‘Love’ in our relationship seesaw.

Too much self at the expense of love means a person is in a relationship for personal gain. To feel loved with out offering love in return. Another imbalance is when we don’t love ourselves enough and submit our fulfillment to the satisfaction of our partner.

Somewhere in between the two is an ongoing sensitivity of give and take that looks to somehow feed both at the same time. So make yourself loveable and therefore, in your own way, attract love. Without negating this love you attract, your art is to seek out how to love another for the person they want to be.

What is True because of You -3 – Find A Way

Finding a way to improve my intention is a priority

Vacuums are frustrating. Especially if you don’t like to clean. And aren’t mechanically inclined.

And hate to admitting you are cheap.

The industrial vacuums can do a good job and last a while if taken care of. Even though they too have designed obsolescence (of about 1 year of regular use) and cheap plastic parts, most brands are reliable. But one of those would be way too bulky for my pint size condo.

Then my wife’s asking why spend $300 on a new vacuum that might give you 2 years service when a used one can do the same thing for $10. This time I agree with my wife.

So we bring home the new-to-us vacuum and fire it up as we didn’t test it in the second hand store. It is a plastic, black and turquoise creation that would make a decent R2 unit on StarWars. It starts fine and vacuums well enough but there is a stench.

Being the local fixer I drop a little Essential oil on the foam air filter and Bam – no smell! For 2 minutes.

Then back to the cheesy foot smell.

Upon further investigation it becomes clear nobody- the person who donated it, the store who checked if it worked and sold it nor the customer (me:)) had cleaned the filter. It was dirty. It was packed. With gunk and other people’s dirty stuff. And once clean it worked perfectly:)

To get the most out of life keep your filter clean so the experience you have is the true, best experience in the moment.

Dirty filters mean although our eyes and ears are open, we hear how the situation impacts us as opposed to what is actually happening.

Dirty filters mean going through the motions. Dirty filters means repeating the same mistakes.

A clean filter is refreshing and is forgiveness. A clean filter is living in the moment. A clean filter is liberating your instinct. A clean filter is you when you answer your devotional life by seeking higher perception.

This higher education we can submit into daily life to improve it for ourselves, for community, tribe, for those future people who struggle with engaging humanity.

Submit it through a beautiful range of ways including: telling jokes, telling stories, inventing ceremonies, exuding love of your higher self, respect of what is foreign to you, loving and being loved.

What Is True Because Of You – 2 – Standards Are Important

Kurt Vonnegut advised to ‘Start as close as close to the end as possible’.

The American writer had 8 Rules For Writing. Gems of guidance for creating an interesting story. The above is #5.

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Rules for Writing

Vonnegut’s writing put humanity on display – and it often wasn’t pretty.

Perhaps he was lazy. The closer you start to the end – the shorter the journey so the less you need to write. Perhaps starting close to the end is a story design method so the writer stays true to the intention of the story.

Each conversation is a story. Even if that conversation in a dark 30 seconds on a downtown street is between strangers, full of swearing, worrisome and in full public view. What happened was this big and tall guy darted in front of two walking women (mother and daughter) and ‘BOO!!’ he yells out of nowhere. The daughter screams back; her mother said don’t. Daughter pursued him down the sidewalk to share her fright but he wasn’t interested. He already got what he wanted and wasn’t about to listen. His sudden scare manoeuvre works to steal some good energy. In this case: Female energy; high potency anger energy; the beautiful energy of being the focus of the ‘conversation’. All of this makes him feel important and makes up for a lack of relationship in his life.

Dirty business tactics on his part. The business of energy management –

we are all in the same business of energy: give and take, diminish and elevate.

The big, tall guy on the dark, downtown street was using guerrilla tactics. And he started quite close to the end of the intention of his story – which was to steal good energy. It only took him seconds. End of story. For him.

Does that mean he is good at what he does; steal? Or that he has no art? No energy art.

What about the others in the conversation?

Still recovering from the disturbing encounter the mother was coaching her adult daughter as they resumed their journey. The residue on the daughter from the experience is anger. Next time ‘listen to your mother’.

And if her mother isn’t there next time then the daughter would do well to activate her strength of resistance. Meaning make the continuance of her life ( like the walking conversation with her mother) more important than a grown man who is blind to his own value (due to self esteem or illness).

Resist the low. Adhere to the high. You are important. Standards are important.

So, tonight when you lay your head down – wonder – ‘what is true because of you?’

What do you want to be true because of you? This is like Vonnegut telling his students to start as close to the end as possible. If you have a good day what is the energetic residue? If you have a bad day, what is the energetic residue? If you are alone? If you are accompanied?

Close your eyes and know:

Because of you there is a marriage with a sense of loving and being loved;

Because of you a woman has no fear of violence in her marriage.

Because of you a colleague knows they are valued.

Because of you nature spirits flourish.

Because of you …

Life will jump in front of you and scream ‘BOO!’ now and again. When it does, resist the low. Maintain your standards that seek the good.

What Is True Because Of You – 1 – Intention: Make it happen

Intention – what do I want to cause?

I was 14 and my friend’s dad was dropping us off at 2 week summer camp when I heard the news on the radio.

Terry Fox has died.

He didn’t cross Canada like he wanted to. He made it halfway – a few thousand kilometres. On one real and one unreal leg.

The point was to raise money for cancer research.

Now 40 years later there are annual Terry Fox runs all over the world raising money, funding research, increasing awareness and strengthening community.

All of this is true because of Terry’s intention to run across Canada.

Awesome.

There is a tensile, human strength in maintaining your intention while you make it happen. Realization of your intention may easily unravel before you in the moment. For most of us it requires we stick with it over many years. That is so valuable in this Twitter age.

The benefits of persistence- staying focused on the objective – are transferable to the next challenge. And are shareable with colleagues and children and spouse.

So …

Put it out there.

Share it.

Feed it.

Ask yourself ‘what do I want to cause?’

Make it happen.

Flavoured Water

Every morning I drop one or two wrinkled pods of dried green cardamom into my coffee/spice grinder to grind with the coffee beans. The fine grind is flecked with the light green of the ground cardamom. I love the smell of fresh ground coffee probably more than drinking the coffee itself.

We actually just got back from an autumn weekend in a rented cabin and all my coffee paraphernalia came with us. It means we are not buying coffee that is more costly and generates waste vía cups, lids and stir sticks. Before bed we have started drinking a cinnamon/ginger brew to boost our immune system. My favourite drink during the day is a bit of fresh hibiscus tea mixed with sparkling water. Super refreshing.

Whether it is tea or coffee, cola, wine or whiskey. Coconut water, kombucha or beer. All of these are water based drinks. Some have sugar or fruit. Others are healthy. Again others fermented. Some are popular drinks because they taste good, a few for their rejuvenation factor and others are a success of marketing.

Water is to our body as oil is to the car engine. We are 70% water each of us. That kind of makes us, or our body, a bottle of water. How do we flavour our water?

Dr. Masaru Emoto pioneered the research into the consciousness of water. Based on experiments with water and music he concluded that we flavour our corporeal water with what we think, feel and do. The residue of these impressions settles in our blood, bones and organs where the water is at work. We flavour our water with life; good and bad, high and low, as a victim or author of our response to each stage of development.

But often it is the label of our human water bottle that we focus on most of the time.

We get caught up in the image so often that the ingredients, or their production, gets minimized.

We are born with 2 eyes, 10 fingers and a little hair all of us. What anchors your existence is a planetary soul. That soul gets imprinted with the genes you are going to give expression to in your daily life and give continuance to by your life journey. So those eyes might be green. Those fingers could be brown. And that hair might be black. We all have eyes, fingers and hair but we are all so different. Why?

Race, religion, culture, upbringing and education. All of these are ingredients that get integrated into your soul. It takes a strong desire and sensitivity to interpret the soul and not get distracted by the ego of the image.

What does it take to be a Sommelier of the soul? Because, if you think about it, we are flavoured water. How would the sommelier describe your soul? A hint of creativity, bold and upfront, goes great with fish? Refreshing! No bitter aftertaste:)

The Healing Gap

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

Healing and Treating doesn’t have to be an either/or situation.

Have you heard the story that the mother repeatedly brought her son to Gandhi to be healed from his eating a lot of sugar. On these visits the doctor reviewed the patient but gave no remedy or course of action which became frustrating for the mother. Finally on the last of many visits, Gandhi looks the boy in the eye and says directly and with compassion, ‘Stop eating sugar’. As the story goes the boy’s sugar eating problem disappeared in that moment. Leaving the office the mother looks over her shoulder to ask why it took so long. The doctor replies, ‘I had to stop eating sugar myself first before I could ask your son to do so.’

Is this story true?

The point is find out how to grow oneself and heal and be on the journey of one’s life that makes us responsible. Then we can look to see if there is a healing gap in our life or profession where technology or terminology usurps human contact and connection. What is a first step and if now is the time to take it?

Another report this week states that interns in hospitals are exhausted because they have long shift work over night.

12 – 24 hour shifts. A quick Google search shows that these reports come out every 2 years in the media locally.

Truck drivers are allowed a maximum of 13 hours in Canada. The reason for the limit is that they won’t have all their faculties to be aware of themselves and others.

A person, a young doctor may have the energy to want to help people and this can give them an extra boost so they do not notice the long day’s demands. They are fed by this sense of purpose and thrive on more opportunities to learn and get experience so they can be of use when a patient has a question or looks with worry and need at them – the doctor.

Photo by Zach Vessels on Unsplash

This need (of the patient), to be taken care of, to be healed, is an important aspect of people feeling good. Of being fixed, cured, ‘all better now’. It pulls energy from the doctor to the patient. Despite the abundance of advances in medical treatments and developments in medicine that have greatly minimized intrusion for surgeries and deaths or suffering due to various diseases, the need for healing will never diminish. That is ok, natural, to be expected. The need to be healed is human. Some people love healing and some of them become doctors. The healing capacity is a part of the doctor that needs to be present, active, trained and supported.

Long shifts at the hospital require energy. Healing requires energy. Both requirements of doctor energy need to be managed. How is that going these days in our state of the art medical centres?

There is a gap between treatment and healing.

That gap will be different in each doctor, dentist, massage therapist, nurse, psychologist.

Gaps in healing accompanying the treatment will be created and impacted for a variety of reasons. Reasons like culture of the person, the culture of the workplace or industry, confidence of the person in themselves as a medical professional, level of personal development, understanding of healing, physical health, emotional health, relationship health, financial and spiritual well being, training, education and mission in life.

It makes sense there is a gap because the machines and chemicals we insert into the medical process between doctor and patient for getting us back to health. You could say, pills and devices work on the physical while healing takes on the person occupying the body.

Do we know the gap exists?

Do we think it is bad and there is someone to blame for it?

Can it be addressed in medical school curriculum or does it have to be on an individual basis?

Is it relevant in our new moment of virtual medicine and AI.

The gap is inevitable with the growth of technology and maybe not a bad thing at certain times to have a distance between the doctor and patient as long as the patient is directed along a healing path because the gap made them more proactive about their own health.

The gap could be necessary for geographical reasons, money, health of the doctor etc.

Photo by Ramdan Authentic on Unsplash

The efficacy of placebos tells us we can heal ourselves with the power of the human mind and emotion so why do we dump that responsibility onto the doctor?

Identifying and dealing with the healing gap is not a blame game but a call to responsibility and actions and learning and community.

Big Pharma is not evil in its existence but their ways are the equivalent of the fertilizer/seed conglomerates in the agricultural sector by using a business model that destroys, quite often, growth.

So what can be in done in the face of billion dollar government health budgets, massive profit seeking companies plus a mix of sincere health professionals and self satisfying business people?

Heal.

Healing is a power that responds in the moment of the injury or sickness. Healing is already happening before we even know it.

Healing power is there for doctors to connect to. Therefore to be able to manage their own energy without reducing their role in the healing process.

Healing is fast – can we catch up with it?

Healing is precise – do we know when it is to start and finish?

Healing is to be understood for its many facets or expressions and the human acts it can permeate .

What else?