Message 320

it’s time  for you tto think both inside  and outside of he box, with or without the wrapping.

No it’s not the success hot line challenge although that’s very important. 

“Oh my, what could be more important than that?”

I looked up what is meant by the Christmas spirit -oh and first, i am talking about all different holidays here, not just the Christian one so please understand that i’m using Christmas so i don’t have to spend 2 1/2 minutes each time to list all of the different observances. 

Back to the meaning –  my AI buddy told me it’s:

1-A sense of generosity

2-Warmth and togetherness

3-Hope and renewal

4-Joy and celebration

5- Reflection and meaning

If you’re crazy enough to be out today, Black Friday, then i bet these 5 things were not at the top of your list. Mine would have been:

-selfishness

-rushing

-taking

-exhaustion

-stress and pressure

-competition 

-success -I beat the other guy to the deal”

oh and a fair amount of complaining too

I know all of you that are doing the success hotline are busy with the challenge but here’s my challenge to you

When i said think inside the box – it was meant for you to continue your reflections that you’ve hopefully been doing over the past week. You owe it to yourself – and to your loved ones to take care of you. This is a time of immense stress and pressure. You have to make your sleep, hydration, nutrition and some sort of exercise a priority, even if it’s just gettiing up and walking around for 1 minute every half hour. You’ve heard Dr. Gilbert talk to us about how stress kills. It does and i am a personal testimony to how it can make you very very sick. But, i think i’ve told you all that story before.  use the next 6 weeks to practice taking care of yourself.

If you do that, THEN you can go about thinking outside the box – doing for other people.  But we should go beyond material gifts. 

I bet you’ll be as surprised as I was to find out that the suicide rate does NOT increase during the holiday season. It does increase slightly around New Year’s Day and that week. 

What does increase and this is where i would like you to pay attention, is in depression symptoms or any other symptoms if someone has a mental heath disorder. 

Depressive symptoms increase for a variety of reasons: financial pressure, grief or missing loved ones, family conflict, social isolation, disrupted routines, and the gap between idealized “happy holidays” imagery and a person’s actual situation.

Surveys of people living with mental illness show that roughly two-thirds report their symptoms get worse around the holidays, and about one-quarter say they get “a lot” worse.

Polls in the general population show that around 40-41% of adults say their stress or emotional strain increases between November and January compared with the rest of the year

We’ll continue with this next week 

Message 319

Happy Thanksgiving

This message is dedicated to all of you who listen to me ramble every day and to those who then come up with coherent thoughts they share.

I have a couple of suggestions for today.

first i encourage all of you to dig deep and be thankful for your own qualities – in other words, your parts. And your body and its organs. Without the miraculous functioning of your body and its systems, you wouldn’t be here. And even if you’re experiencing some health issues, be thankful for what IS working in your body and for your brain.

Find the qualities, the virtues, the feelings you have deep inside. For at least one day, bring them to the surface and give them (and you) space and appreciation. You’ll most likely feel very silly especially if this is the first time you’ve ever done something like this. so you can do it to yourself or even in writing. I just want you to be grateful for your thoughts and feelings. I know for me, being grateful for my feelings is hard because i dont really have any good idea of what they are. But i’m working on it.

I also feel we should all use this day to begin to get ready for the holidays and the new year. How? By letting go of a lot of the garbage that has accumulated this year. The “shoulds”, the “i cant’s”, the “i have tos”, the ‘what would people thinks”, the “it’s my responsibility”s, the “if i don’t do it, who wills”, the “I’m too olds”, the “I’m not smart enoughs”, the “i dont have enough moneys”, and whatever other limiting beliefs and thoughts you have. why not use the next month to do some spring cleaning of your mind.

This wil help you have a clean slate to begin the year? and maybe it will go hand in hand with your post thanksgiving challenge for the success hotline.

When was the last time, if ever, that you did an inventory of your beliefs? Not just, i believe in the republican or democratic party or in capitalism or any of that stuff and while it’s important, what you really want to know is what’s underneath those beliefs. Often time, you’ll be able to uncover shame and guilt feelings that date way back and have formed the thoughts and beliefs that follow.

i know i have a very strong guilt part or feeling or belief from when i was 13 or 14 MONTHS old. I may have told you and i apologize if i did. I had a baby brother who was 6 weeks old when i was 13 or 14 months. my mother put him down for his nap TO FEED ME. and when she went to pick him up again he had died of SIDS (sudden infant death). I doubt they accused me or even thought to but given that my mother must have been emotionally unavailable with difficulty taking care of a 5 1/2 year old and me, I’m sure my soul was riddled with guilt. I won’t go into it more but there are many thoughts and beliefs in me that have come from that experience.

Unearthing such root causes is freeing and can lead to healing of the soul and the body.

Write down what you believe in. Thanksgiving, or any holiday, dinner is a great place to start since there’s usually representatives from various stages of your life that if you let thme, will stimulate a memory that might help you in this.

i’ll close with a humorous quote i saw this week. it said sonething like “Be sure to bring up politics at Thanksgiving. it’s the best way to save money for Christmas”

on that note, i wish everyone a happy thankgiving and send out my gratitude to you all.

Message 317

Gavin de Becker gives us this quote in The Gift of Fear,

“When you worry, ask yourself, ‘What am I choosing to not see right now? What important things are you missing because you chose worry over introspection, alertness or wisdom?”

Or does getting upset provide you with more options?

You may think your mind can entertain on finding solutions and worry. Remember that worry induces anxiety and anxiety like anger will shut down your frontal lobe. When that happens, the chances of finding a solution are minimal.

This is a skill that must be cultivated—freedom from disturbance—so you can focus your energy exclusively on solving problems, rather than reacting to them.

This is one of the primary reasons I chose wisdom (to pause – I told you I was cheating) for my first word of the month. I think learning when to and how to pause are essential to success in anything.

If an emotion can’t change the condition or the situation you’re dealing with, it is likely an unhelpful emotion. Or, even a destructive one.

Real strength lies in the control of one’s emotions, not in pretending they don’t exist. I was always good at that pretending that my emotions didn’t exist. All that did was to provide more pressure in the pressure cooker called anger and boy was there a quick release valve work that one. Nothing slow about the release of my anger.

We defeat emotions with logic. Logic is questions and statements. Logic requires use of your frontal lobe and the emotions associated with worry and anxiety interfere with that same little but important lobe in your brain.

Always remember “The quality of the questions that you ask yourself determines the quality of your life. They direct your mental focus, and therefore determine how and what you think and feel.”

So ask yourself what you’re choosing not to see right now. You can use this query to add to your yearly review. Speaking of which I have added another task when I’m looking at mine. I’m asking what was it that made this happen or led up to it. Then once I find that I ask myself is this something I wand to continue to do or shoudl I eliminate it or maybe just tweak it in some way. This will help to remind us that things don’t happen in a vacuum.