wellness + healing articles

7 tiny big life shifters

This summer was about deeper healing for me. Bod', psyche, bank account, relationships...relating...creating. Change can be radical but the steps to healing are usually small >> sequential >> interconnected.

This is how some of it came together for me. I:

1. Let go of my "check-my-email-in-the-morning-guilt." Screw it. I LIKE to check my email first thing in the morning. It doesn't mean that I'm a distracted workaholic, it means I'm an excited Creative who loves her friends and new friends and what she does with her day...life >> this actually led to LESS email checking throughout the day >> more creative space >> deeper meditation >> clearer ideas.

2. Got a mean blender machine. This led to smoothies >> more complex smoothies with bee pollen and greens and ginger >> less wasted food (cause you can just throw it in the blender!) >> healthier lunches >> feeling great(er) in the evening >> great enough to get my smoothie ass to evening yoga class.

3. Bought a two month pass at local yoga studio. The psychological grip of wanting to get my money's worth led to doing yoga at least 3x/week >> riding my bike more on the days I couldn't make it to yoga because I wanted to stretch >> feeling so good about riding + getting my money's worth, that I committed to an 18-month yoga pass.

4. Committed to doing 100,000 Heart Sutra mantras. I got this, like, "assignment" from a Buddhist Lama who's been good enough to humor my big Q's about consciousness. "Do 100,000 Prajnaparamitas and get back to me," he said. "Is that all ya got for me, Chief?!" Well, only 96,000 to go! Realistically, it will take me a few years to accomplish this, (unless I drop out of society and chant days on end for months.)

It's RADICAL for me to commit to something and NOT drive for velocity and accomplishment, but rather, devote myself to the journey itself. This has led to a deeper surrender to my creative impulses >> which in turn led to me giving myself permission to write a whole new book two years sooner than I had planned...but not in a rush >> which inspired me to take a lot of the summer off.

5. Started consciously smiling, gently, mostly internally, during meditation and on walks. This is probably the slightest but most effectual lil' thing I've done recently. Smiling effects brain chemistry. It's a reminder of your true nature. It let's the light in. It's shifting me.

Try it. Close your eyes. Feel a smile behind your face. (IMPORTANT: There is no need to bust out in a cheesy, forced grin. That's bad news.) Just let the corners of your mouth curl gently upwards. On the phone, falling asleep, right now...feel a smile.

6. I read Geneen Roth's Women Food & God. >> which led to the blender (see #1) >> which led to all sorts of delicious awareness. Roth has written a book of monumental importance in terms of our wellness. Want to convert years and pounds of toxic thinking and self-criticism into freedom-fuel? Read it and set yourself free. It is, as the subtitle puts it, an unexpected path to almost everything.

7. I read Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer >> which made me consider the more abstract and magical ways to tell happy-painful-true-imagined stories >> which inspired me to recapitulate all of the great stories and 'isms that my little boy and I have >> in to sitting down and writing our very stories together >> deeper love.

>> healing.

. . . . . . .

The rave reviews for The Fire Starter Sessions are rolling in. Big happiness.
Please check out the love and get your own copy for back to school brilliance.

"The Fire Starter Sessions is the revolution you’ve been waiting for. It will shake-up and wake-up every aspect of your life. Danielle LaPorte combines soulful wisdom with razor sharp business advice to create a blue print for moguls, spiritual rockstars, and lovers of life. Skinny dip head first into this hot and fabulous book. I dare you."
– Kris Carr | Award-winning Author and Documentarian, Crazy, Sexy, Cancer

 

depression vs. sadness: the power of mincing words

"When you're depressed, nothing matters. When you're sad, everything does."
- Gloria Steinem, via @spiver, aka Susan Spiver, author of The Wisdom of a Broken Heart

"So you're feeling a sense of hopelessness," the therapist said to me.
"No, I'm feeling despair," I clarified.
"Same thing. You're feeling hopeless," she came back.
"Nooo, I don't feel it's hopeless, I'm experiencing despair. I feel disheartened, but there's still hope here," I said.
"Hope and despair are pretty similar," she said.
"Look it up." I shrugged. "I'm going with despair."

(We didn't last too long as therapist/patient.)

I relish in semantics ("the meaning, or an interpretation of the meaning, of a word.") The more you know about the true definition of a word, the more powerful it is when you speak it. Precision is power.

Depressed and Sad are two very powerful, similar, misappropriated words. Portal words. Sacred words. And if we look more closely at them, we can claim what's true for ourselves and set about transforming depression and sadness into their contrasting states.

Sadness hurts but it signals that you are very, very much alive.
Depression may be the cousin of sadness, sometimes the defended response to unyielding sadness, but it makes you feel anything but alive. It dulls, weighs, and messes with your memory of your true essential nature -- which is that of joy.

I've been through wrenching heart breaks. I've left a decade-long relationship that is still intertwined with my DNA; been devastated by betrayal in business; said goodbye to overseas love that was doomed from the magical start. I've cried those guttural cries that dying animals make, I've canceled meetings because grief caught me off guard en route. I moved arthritically, lugging my heart in a wagon, to get groceries and tend to life on the surface. And through it all, I've felt undeniably, and intensely alive. And this, this is sadness. Acute, sometimes enduring, but always sensory and evocative, sadness.

When you're sad, you're feeling. Sometimes, more than you want to. You wish you could be despondent, but the sadness is sharp and it bleeds your attention from you.

Depression -- a term our med-happy nation uses much too glibly -- dulls one's feelings. Where sadness makes you feel raw and skinless, depression is like wearing a snow suit and mittens and wondering why you can't feel the caress of life. Sadness strips you. As I was just reminded, "Sadness is so f--king cleansing." Depression is muddy and muffling and numbing.

Depression vs. Sadness
Each comes with different gifts, challenges and assignments
Each is a sacred state. Both divine and brutal.
But not the same.
When you respect the difference, you're closer to the cure.

. . . . . . .

INTERVIEW
"If you could give any piece of advice for someone that feels stuck, what would it be?" READ ON AT Pure-Habitat.com

 

21.5.800: yoga, writing, life living

Hey hey, today (June 8) begins Bindu Wiles' (aka my fav Brooklyn-based Buddhist) way cool "21.5.800" community project. I'm all over it (and it's taking off like wild fire already.) It's just the right kind of creative crazy for me now.

For 21 days, we’ll be doing 5 days of yoga a week and 800 words of writing per day.

THE WRITING: The writing can be ANYTHING. Memoir, blogs, business plans, essays, fiction, free-writing, letters……ANYTHING. The point is to get writing again daily and to have the boundaries and challenge of a daily word count to reach.

THE YOGA: There are several options for you to do the yoga portion of 21.5.800 5 times in 7 days. Here are the options: 1. Go to a yoga class in your ‘hood. 2. Do a yoga dvd at home. 3. Take a 20-40 minute savasana* at home on the floor.

JOIN IN THE BEAUTY (and a bit of the brawn.) CHECK IT OUT HERE. SIGN UP. DO IT.

Follower Bindu on Twitter: @binduwiles

 

what’s your relationship to sleep?

I've subscribed for years to this occasional email from Dadi Jahnki. She's the current leader of the Brahma Kumaris spiritual organization. I loved last week's message from her:

Dear Friend,

Om shanti. Sometimes when we are together, you ask me why I don't seem to get tired when I travel from India or give programs into the evening. Tiredness is a kind of sickness. When we work with honesty and love, everything happens without tiredness. When we know how to take cooperation from others, there is no tiredness. It is not a matter of how long we sleep that determines whether we feel tired. It is waste and negative thoughts and actions that create tiredness. Create positive thoughts and elevated actions and you will take strength from that, and your tiredness will leave you.

Work for money and you will count your hours and your salary. Work for love, and you can work 16 hours a day with happiness and without getting tired. Serving others brings energy. You will then feel your happiness accumulating.

Love,
Dadi Janki

I think a lot of us have a big story around needing sleep. I know what science says about sleep and overall wellness ("eight hours is a must.") But then, science doesn't have quite as much to say about the chemical effects of joy or enthusiasm. Many eastern teachers believe that we are a culture that sleeps too much. Some practicing monks get by on five hours a night. Apparently Einstein slept in four hour increments to just "rest his brain." (more...)