scarcity is a state of mind

In nature abundance is everywhere. Whether you look at the grass patch in front of your house (soooo many grass blades), the sand on the beach (soooo many grains of sand), the stream in the woods (soooo many water droplets), or your neighbor's apple tree (how many apple seeds on one tree?  imagine all the new apple trees that could be grown from all those seeds), or the stars in the night sky - nature's abundance is limitless. If nature is so abundant, then scarcity (as in "I don't have enough money," or "I don't have any friends," or "I have to hurry, otherwise they'll run out of fill-in-the-blanks)" is a fabricated state of mind.  Our mind is all powerful, and it influences how we see our world - and, yes, everyone inhabits their own version of the world. Since we exist in a continuous energy exchange with our surroundings the universe reflects back to us what we put out. If you keep looking out for lack, you will see lack reflected back to you. If you put out abundance, the universe reflects all that abundance out there back to you.

apple tree

You may have heard of gratefulness journaling, writing down moments of gratefulness during the day in order to become more content. In a similar way you can train yourself to become more aware of abundance in order to promote more abundance in your life in general.  Be aware that writing things down is more powerful than just thinking them because this crystalizes your thoughts, it brings you one step closer to actual manifestation. So writing down when you become aware of abundance helps to set this thinking into your mind. Notice the abundance of sunshine outside, the abundance of air, the abundance of bees, of carrots at the market, of cells in your body, of delicious moments in your life - imagine away and feel yourself expand.

routine, glorious routine

Children are getting bored (although they say they love summer vacation and hate school), parents are getting antsy. Summer is waning, the local tomatoes don't get any better than this, it is high pesto time, and we are approaching Labor Day fast. Schools have sent out supply lists, the children are relishing their last days of endless sleep, laziness and boredom, and we, the parents, are enjoying the last days of no-school-routine.

During the summer months bedtime was undefined and breakfast on your own, beds remained unmade, dinner was late, my yoga routine went bye-bye, and work came and went in spurts for me, unorganized and interrupted.

It is time to revert back to our school day routines. For me that means getting up early to make school lunches for my teens, having a sit-down family breakfast, tidying the house and making the beds before going about my work in peace and quiet and one long undisturbed stretch until the afternoon, putting on lipstick every morning, organizing after-school activities, cooking dinner every night, and making sure there is a bedtime.

We need the looseness of summer to enjoy the rigor and organization of the rest of the year, and vice versa. They complement each other in a yin yang kind of way the way week-end vs. week day routines do (see an earlier post on that).

receiving graciously

In a way we all want to be loved and accepted and patted on the back for it. But being a supposed goody two-shoes and feeling guilty about accepting a present is misconstrued.

A while ago we gave a friend's daughter a money gift upon her graduation and received a thank-you card back with an added note saying "you didn't have to do that." I know that phrase. I have heard it often among family members and it circulates widely. A few years ago I was playing money tag with my housekeeper. I paid her, she gave me some money back because she thought she had worked less than what I paid her for, but then I stuck the money back into her purse wanting to be generous. She finally put an end to our money tag and said something like "You need to let people give to you." The Japanese have the complicated social custom of giri, a kind of reciprocal indebtedness incurred when giving a larger present.

Think about the feelings that come up for you when you get a present versus when you give a present, especially one that you have selected particularly carefully or that took a long time to create. Oftentimes, I get more of a charge out of giving and seeing the surprise and pleasure on the receiver's face than receiving. But that twisted fact makes us so mutually intertwined that we need to become as gracious a receiver as being a gracious giver. Let others give to you and relish receiving.

pizza every night?

How boring. I'd rather eat something different every night. And from all over the world, too. We are so fortunate nowadays to have access to such a great selection of foods. We are exposed to so much diversity. Japanese sushi, Moroccan tagine, French snails, Middle Eastern mezze, downhome hamburgers, Italian pasta, Russian borscht, and on and on.... For that same reason, - enjoying diversity - , traveling is so eye opening because we get to see how other people live (and eat, and think). We need to get out of the house to learn to expand our vision because we learn through comparison. Comparison and juxtaposition show us alternatives, options, different ways of doing things. Only when we know what our options are can we begin to choose. Homogenization - a Walmart or Starbucks on every corner no matter how far from home we go, or pizza every night, or the same religion for all - makes us culturally poor and life dull.

But with diversity we must learn tolerance. You don't have to have sushi, but it's great that it's available for those who like it. Let's enjoy the possibilities and excitement that diversity affords us instead of hitting those with different opinions or preferences over the head. As Frederic the Great said, "Jeder soll nach seiner Façon seelig werden," or "each must live as he sees fit."

no to TV

We have no television, never have, never will.   Although it's nice to save a few dollars on cable, that's not why.   And don't get me wrong, we love good movies and do watch them. What I'm really talking about is a totally different reason for not having television, the one that Waldorf schools have advocated all along. Television with its massive amounts of manipulative commercials that constantly disrupt programs and the stream of thought, and with all those pictures of ugly events, from natural disasters to man-made ones, creates a distorted and highly negative picture of the world. Weather predictions, too, are designed to create hype. Think of the nervous anticipation the weather people create before a winter storm or a heat wave (and sometimes nothing much manifests and you could have spared yourself all that adrenaline). When, on top of that you hear the same story repeated over and over and over over the course of a day or two or three the nervy effect is cumulative and highly toxic.

Not only does it feed our anxiety level, another consequence is our heightened need for safety and security to compensate for this seemingly dangerous world. Think of it, teachers wish the kids a "safe summer" before summer vacation. When friends go travelling we wish them a "safe trip." And we hover over our children, taking opportunities away from them to grow and become independent, assess risks on their own, learn to get themselves into a situation and back out. Remember when you were young? I bet you were more independent than your own children are now.

Call me old fashioned, but I prefer by far my paper newspaper. I can skim over the ugly stuff, filter it, or read it without that frenetic anxious energy of live on-screen reporting. Without television the energy in our home is a lot more peaceful.

music to my ears

Sounds, just like comforting smells, say of freshly baked apple pie for example, can trigger and evoke memories.   It's as if the sound lodged itself in our cells and replayed certain memories, emotions, or situations from the past that get triggered on command. That way we come to associate a particular sound or piece of music with a particular memory, pleasant or not. The neighbors across from our new house have a rooster that crows on occasion.   I love that sound. The rooster's crowing evokes for me the European countryside together with peacefulness and that dreamy quality of a summer morning or of a languorous Sunday lunch that comes to an end. When I told our neighbor I loved the sound of her rooster she was so happy, saying apologetically that she had thought it might bother people. Not me.

Church bells also bring back nostalgic European childhood memories for me. Over here we don't hear church bells much, and if we do many are electronic, which removes the charm of the sound. But in Europe church bells still sound regularly on the hour or at least on Sundays, not only in small villages but also in big cities. It is a comforting sound to me.

What sounds trigger pleasant memories for you?

chaos before order

Seems that order must be preceded by chaos.When I decide to rearrange and reorganize my daughter's closet I pull everything out, throw it on the bed and floor, then sort and fold all the clothes anew, before placing them neatly back in the closet.When the kitchen pantry cabinets need to be cleaned, everything comes out and gets spread all over the counters, gets inspected, the kitchen looks accordingly, and once the shelves are clean all the food bags are returned in neat and orderly fashion.

They say that creativity breeds better in disorder, and that creative people usually have unorganized working areas.Not sure whether that should be an excuse to be messy?But from chaos arises order.I am hopeful.

more chaos

My own life is currently in disarray as we have begun to pack up the house we have lived in for more than twenty years.We find things we forgot about long ago, even silly things like refrigerator alphabet magnets (yes, we have been here for a long time), and my daughter is hopeful she'll find her long lost library card.It's a great opportunity for clean-up, for sorting things out that just take up space but have become obsolete, for clearing house literally.No need to move things we no longer need or want.I have already given two pick-up truck loads of stuff to a local shelter.

Since I am usually very organized, and since I clearly like order, predictability and harmony, all this is quite unsettling for me.But change is good and change is in order.It's time for a fresh start.The freaky thing is that the technology around us also seems to reflect the current chaos, external and internal.We have been experiencing internet problems in recent weeks, although it's been checked and rechecked and supposedly nothing is wrong.A telephone problem was diagnosed and fixed.The dryer (that I usually don't use) stopped working, then luckily came back when we unplugged it and plugged it back in.And I have a really weird bug in my bookkeeping system since the switchover to the computer I'll be using in my new home office. 

To creative chaos in preparation for new and improved order!

on quietude

We have been living in a very old house in the countryside on a fairly busy road for the past two decades. Before that we lived in New York City, where you hear car alarms and fire trucks at all hours of day and night, and where there is always background noise. As a matter-of-fact, except for a few years when I was young, I have always lived in big noisy cities. You do get used to the constant background noise, but it becomes like a chronic illness. After a while you only notice how noisy it is, when there is silence in between. I know they say that quiet comes from within. But then they also say that we create what we connect with, what we need, what we are attracted to.  When I was young I was always looking for inspiration from the outside - travel, experiences, moving to yet another place, or starting another career. You can create a certain amount of inner quiet, but at one point or another, peace and quiet around you are helpful for tuning out chatter, staying grounded, concentrating on your work, and promoting peace and balance.

It is wonderfully grounding and balancing to just sit in nature with no other noises than chirping birds, buzzing bees, the wind quietly sweeping through the grass, or the waves of a lake lapping at the shore - and in between utter silence, nothing. No electronic beeps and alerts, no planes overhead (just heard one), no cars passing by (several just drove past), no phones ringing (yep, just rang), no kitchen machines running in the background (I hear the faint noise of the dishwasher humming). All those mechanical human made sounds are less harmonious to our ears and grate at you after a while.

Inner and outer silence make room for creativity, for concentration, for going deep within. It's what they mean by a pregnant pause - the in-between space, the space that came before the Big Bang. This space is empty but so full of potential.  I am looking forward to this quietude as a basis for increased creativity in the coming years.  When I open the windows in our new house all I hear is birds singing, the wind swishing through the trees, and occasionally the neighbor's rooster crowing (ahh, such a European countryside sound to my ears, love it).  Pure bliss.

the war against evil?

Have you ever wondered why there is so much warfare, strife, and conflict out there? Mother Teresa supposedly replied to an invitation to participate in an anti-war demonstration by saying: "You can invite me when you are planning a pro-peace event." The perspective is fundamentally different.

Ask yourself how you think. We tend to be against certain politics, hate such-and-such a person, dislike fish, mind the rain, despise the humidity, or have a dust allergy. In summary, we very much know everything we don't like. The problem with that perspective is that it creates adversity and conflict, inside ourselves and outside in the world around us. It reinforces the negative. When we can't get along with our neighbor because he mows his lawn at odd hours, and we dislike him for it and stop talking to him, we create conflict. When we can't have a spirited but civil dinner table conversation with a person of the other political party, we create conflict. When we spray pesticides on the little critters in the garden, we create conflict. When we forbid our children certain activities or certain behavior, it creates conflict.

How about looking at it the other way round, in the affirmative? This refocuses our outlook on what we like, on what we want, and want more of. How about rewarding your children (even just with kind words) for the type of behavior you would like to see more of? How about marching for peace? How about modeling the behavior you would like to see in others? How about making a list of all the things and people you do appreciate? How about remembering everything that went right today?

The war within and without keep going if we keep feeding the fire. How about starving that fire, instead?

beYOUtiful

Inauthentic living creates a lot of stress. Inauthentic living is going against your grain, it's doing things to please or impress others.

Authentic living is about leaving behind pretense. It's about being You instead of a composite of what your family, your partner, your culture, or your friends think you should be. Living authentically is about being true to yourself, about doing what your heart tells you to, about aligning yourself with source (God, spirit, your higher self, whatever you wish to call it), about that which is good for you. This let's the energy flow.

Every time someone says to you "you should," you are being shoehorned into their vision of you. Every time you say to someone "you should," you are doing the same to someone else. A lot of times you probably tell yourself, reluctantly maybe, "I should," because of some preconceived notion or belief you hold. Think again.

I learned early in life to be different and to stand up for my beliefs. My best friend in elementary school taught me that lesson. She was different, she came from a different background than the mainstream kids, she looked exotic with her jet black hair and green eyes, and some kids made fun of her because of the way she spoke. I came to her defense, which in turn sprouted a fierce sense of individuality in me. Now I teach my children to critically inspect the many cultural mainstream paradigms before following the lemmings.

Many of us live in fear  - of not having enough (money or other things, but mostly money), losing our job if we don't please the boss, losing our social standing if we do something outside of the social norm of our peers. Conforming for supposed emotional protection at the expense of authenticity is always a compromise.

Feeling good about who you are deep down takes courage because oftentimes that means going against what others do, think, say. But it makes you shine. BeYOUtiful is what you want to be, because you become more beautiful the more you become You.

I also invite to revisit an earlier post "finding the You in You."