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ISSN: 1530-5775
January 2010, Vol.12 #1
February 2010, Vol.12 #2
When the Snow Comes Down in Tennessee I grew up in the Midwest where snow fell from Halloween to Easter. In the southern states, snow and ice can stop everything and everyone in their tracks. Fast food restaurants and malls close down and shelves empty of bread and toilet paper. Because snow doesn't fall often and melts even quicker, the region is not prepared for icy roads. We have already had three snow days since the beginning of the year. When I was growing up, we very rarely had snow days even when it was freezing cold. Here in Tennessee, they have even called off school because it was too cold or there was a simple percentage chance of snow. I remember as a child waiting in front of the television in the semi-dark to see if our school had been called off for the day. Instead of waiting until 6:00 AM on the school day morning, the school system here now notifies us the night before. The newscasters and weather forecasters are antsy and excited about reporting cars in ditches. As parents, we scramble to find fun activities and snacks and lunches to keep cabin-crazy kids busy and happy. In the midst of all of the salted roads and messy driving conditions, there is one thing that remains the same from my childhood to that of my kids. For kids, snow is always fun. Even when it is zero degrees outside, there is something wonderful and magical and promising about the expanse of white snow and ice. Even without the vacation from school, the lure of nature and winter activities in a state that rarely requires more than a light jacket is enough to get them up with the sun. This storm has been heavier than others and we haven't exited the neighborhood all weekend. Usually the snow melts away by lunchtime. This snow has stayed for several days and with temperatures in the single digits, it won't be going away soon. As the occasional brave car crunches across the frozen road, we are warm and relaxed inside. The kids bundled up a little and went outside to sled down our backyard hill. They only had to wear gloves, hats, and their winter coats. No snowsuits or scarves were needed. No long underwear had to be found. After snowball fights and spontaneous ice-skating on our driveway, they were wet and cold and wanted to come inside. It makes me laugh a little to think of the difference between the snowdrifts and frigid temperatures of my childhood compared to the relatively small snowfall and patchy ice. I know without going to the grocery store that the bread and milk shelves are wiped out. I worry when I do drive on ice and snow that I am keeping everyone in the car safe. I have to search out all the warm clothes and winter gear before we can go outside. I have had to plan meals from what we have on hand instead of just running to the grocery store or out to eat. It is a different winter as an adult. I see the entire storm from a different perspective than I did as a child. I don't remember being cold or wet or freezing or worried. I remember hot chocolate and chicken noodle soup. I remember the crunch of the show under my boots and the feel of the snow at my back as I left angel prints. The magic of the snow is present again. I know that Emily and Joel love the snow. They love the feel of it, the look of it, and the special feel of days away from school and work devoted to at-home fun. Emily's main plan for the day was to catch snowflakes on her tongue. They made snow angels and compared the prints. Emily's idea of sledding fast down the hill was much different than the more daring Joel but still brought her thrilled screams of delight. I have found myself wanting that winter wonder again as an adult. Without thinking, I found myself wanting to escape the cold and wet. Instead, I helped build a miniature snowman. I took more than a few powdery snowballs to the side and the back. I did an impromptu judging of the snow angel creations. I have enjoyed the quieter time at home. While I do slip back into mommy mode and think of how much money we are saving by staying home, it has been a very relaxing and enjoyable weekend. I have rediscovered the childhood magic. I have rediscovered hot chocolate. I even caught a few snowflakes on my tongue. The weather forecast predicts snow again next week. I can hardly wait for the next snow day.
Read this feature from past issues.
Ego is an important aspect of a healthy consciousness. It helps us to know and honor our own personal truth in life. It helps us to move through life with a positive sense of ourselves and our place in the world that is grounded in the greater well-being of all. If you have a healthy ego, you don't take it personally when things go wrong in your world. Instead, you focus on fixing what is yours to fix, asking for help when you need it and giving help wherever you can, and you trust that there is a greater plan for all of us that is beyond the limits of your own vision. You are willing to be wrong, and you give other people the same right to be wrong as you. You are willing to weigh the thoughts and words of others when you disagree, and you certainly don't need to be right all of the time in order to feel good about yourself. Good self-esteem is probably a more positive way to express it in a world as ego-centric as ours, where the only thing that seems to matter sometimes is "what I want, regardless of the cost to others, so get out of my way." Ours has increasingly become a world of hyper-inflated egos that all too often fail to make room for anything other than the big "I." Still, good self-esteem and a healthy ego really are the same thing and they are an important part of a healthy you. You know that your ego is not healthy when it is constantly telling you how fabulous you are in comparison to everybody else: "They've" got it all wrong. "They" don't understand you or appreciate your true genius. "They're" just too stupid. You know that your ego is not healthy when you need others to agree with everything you say and do in order to feel good about yourself, and you especially know it is not healthy when you always need someone else to interpret your life for you, to tell you what to do and what to think and how to feel about what is going on. You also know that your ego is not in very good shape when you've moved into self-importance, where you have an exaggerated sense of your worth to the world, an inflated feeling of superiority to everything and everyone else. You may have done something exceedingly well, you may have done a lot of things spectacularly well, but when you use your accomplishments to elevate your sense of entitlement beyond what is reasonable, you've actually moved away from a healthy ego and into a state of neediness. You need the world to acknowledge your greatness, even defer to you, or you feel angry and miserable. You are sitting on top of the world, yet you feel cheated. What has happened is that you've moved from ego into the ego mind, and the ego mind is one of the biggest traps into which you can ever fall. It is the home of the shadow dwellers, those negative aspects of your being that feast on all of the negativity that you are willing feed them, feast on your negativity until there is nothing left of you. There is a very fine line between ego and self-importance. The ego is a normal part of a healthy psyche that helps you to be the best person you can be in life, not the person others say you should be, especially when you know that what they are saying is not right for you. Self-importance is when you get so caught up in yourself that you begin to feel entitled to the adulation of others, entitled to win even though you might not have done your best that day and someone else really did better. Self-importance does not come from the ego, which tells you to do the best you can in any given situation and let the rest go. Self-importance comes from the ego mind, which tells you that you are better than what you got, you are better than those around you, more entitled to succeed than others. There is an attachment that happens when you move into self-importance, a certain kind of energy dynamic. Old sorcerers call it the 'devils.' They say that when you are wrapped up in your own self-importance, you have devils sitting right on top of your head. These devils, however, are not evil spirits from some alien source. They are of your own making. They are shadow dwellers, creations of your own negativity that will devour you and destroy your life if you feed them often enough. I have worked for many years with a chamin curendera of the Yucatán, a sacred healer named Zoila. Her husband is also a shaman healer, and they use that kind of conversation often. When something happens that moves one of them into feelings of self-importance, the other one will say, "Ah, you've got a devil sitting on you." And they can literally see the negativity sitting on one another's heads, waiting to devour them. It is a very short hop from self-importance to self-pity, which is also a creation of the ego mind, also a shadow dweller with a huge appetite for your negativity. In fact, one sure way to know that you are in self-importance is when you find yourself in self-pity. Of all the shadow dwellers of negativity, self-pity it is the number one energy thief of your entire existence. When you are in self-pity, you lose your power and you lose your energy. When you sit in self-pity, you lose all enjoyment of life, and if you sit in it long enough, you may well lose your life. Such is the way of negative thinking that it has the power to create exactly what it is we are thinking. There is an antidote to self-importance and self-pity, and that antidote is to look at all of life and everything that happens to you as an opportunity to learn and grow. Every experience you have in life offers you mirrors for your own enlightenment, opportunities to grow into the best person you can possibly be. You can choose to look into those mirrors, painful though some of them may be, to find the lessons that are hidden there. If you will look for those lessons and learn from them, you will find yourself moving up the pathway towards enlightenment and away from the bottomless pit of negativity. When you move towards enlightenment, you move towards a higher awareness of life and a greater connection with the Great Spirit. Then there is no room in your life for indulging your ego mind. You are no longer food for the shadow dwellers. Without your negativity, there is nothing for them to eat, and they will wither away. Winning, having the acknowledgement of those around us is a wonderful thing. It can add a terrific bonus to a day that is already fabulous simply because you are alive. When things happen that don't turn out exactly as you expected or hoped or wanted them to be, that perhaps took something from you that you really thought should be yours, it means that life is holding up mirrors for you. Some of those mirrors will show you lessons you can learn that will move you forward in life. Some of them will offer to pamper you and indulge you in your hurt feelings, promise you comfort for the wrongs "they" have done to you. It is a false promise. Into which mirrors will you choose to look? Self-importance and the ego mind, what's a person to do?
For emotional eating, it seems that every year is met with the same disappointment for the past year and then hope for the New Year. The disappointment for the past year seems to be directly proportional to the amount of uncertainties experienced in the previous year. Losing weight seems impossible. And those uncertainties are generally proportional to the financial and personal losses suffered during the previous year. Yet, if we can live in the moment, the financial and personal losses don't impact our attitudes about life or conquering emotional overeating. Psychologists did a study with two ten-year old boys. One boy came from a well-to-do background and the other ten year old was from a background of poverty. The psychologist put the boy from a well-to-do background in a room full of the most advanced toys and the boy from a poverty background in a room full of broken toys. They left the boys alone for a half hour after which they found the boy from a well-to-do background sitting in a chair kind of disappointed. They asked him why he was disappointed, and he replied, "I already have all these toys, I thought you'd have something new and neat." They found the boy from the background of poverty excitedly going through the broken toys and were surprised. They asked him why he was so excited and he replied, "With all this crap around here, there has to be something good someplace and I'm going to find it." This is truly a model for any stress management training exercise. You add a shift in attitude to the basic stress management techniques such as deep breathing, muscle awareness, exercise, and so on. I like to remember that story and often wish I could be more effective myself in adopting that attitude on a day-to-day basis. It truly is the challenge and if each of us could do it, we'd be much healthier and happier, lose weight and stop emotional eating. Of course you might think it's impracticable, but I suggest that that is merely your limiting beliefs forming that attitude. We start off each New Year with hope and promise that somehow gets side tracked a few months later because we are deficient in motivational thoughts and our weight loss is stagnant. Ultimately the answer is in creating a shift in our attitudes so that in the midst of "crap" or disappointment, we can we can be excited about finding something good. From a stress management training basis, there are two basic things that stand in the way of our doing this: What about the stress of dealing with uncertainty? Answer: As you acknowledge it and choose to embrace it you use your affirmations to navigate through uncertainty. The end result is that instead of being glad to get rid of last year, you're pleased and happy with last year. Sure you look forward to the New Year--but it's with the same excitement that you looked forward to in each of the last 52 weeks. To empower your motivational thoughts there are two tapes/cd's for self help programs--Affirmations and Prosperity that can make a huge difference in your life. Of course famous resolutions for the New Year are to lose weight and stop smoking or some other hurtful habit. Instead of doing it with hope of something like medications or shakes/gum doing it for you, look to affirmations--not that you won't also use the shakes or gum. A New Years' resolution that can't lead you astray is to use affirmations--motivational thoughts--every day--they reprogram your intelligence and vibrate with source to provide prosperity and health for getting a handle on emotional eating--the best sort of stress management training so each New Year brings you the best possible of the year.
Read this feature from past
issues.
Dollar Store from Lisa Hecmanczuk
Shame! Shame! Shame! from Georgia Jones
from David Donar
The Magic of Change with Molly Koch
Brain Food
When the Snow Comes Down in Tennessee
Self Esteem, or Self-Importance?
Understand Emotional Eating
A conversation in Poems
February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month from Danielle Joy Linhart
Elizabeth Blackwell from teen author Brittany King
Mysterious Strangers and Other Things You Might Hear
The Goodness and Badness of Organizations
A Review of Kabul Beauty School
Good News Bad News
New Stuff
Your chance to say what you think
Next Time You Eat A Plant...
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Read this feature from past issues.
Self Esteem, or Self-Importance?
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1. Our self limiting beliefs such as not deserving or our inability to do something.
2. Lack of using affirmations or tools to develop prosperity consciousness. Being in prosperity doesn't mean that disappointments don't happen, it's that instead of being drowned by disappointment that instead we capitalize on them.