As we approach Thanksgiving this year, I want to remind you to focus on the most important gift of all. The gift of Life. Regardless of how your year has been, you are alive, and have potential for making your next year anything you want it to be.

There are many of us who have had loved ones die during this past year, and the best way to honor these people is to Live fully, and make the best use of the gift of life we have been given.

You may be thinking, ” I do appreciate my life…I do recognize that it is good to be alive, when others have not been so fortunate.”

But do you truly live each day with that awareness? Do you slow down to listen to the beating of your heart?

Let’s take it a step further. Do you take good care of your heart…and the rest of your body, that houses your spirit. Do you honor each day with enough Down Time to truly balance the Busyness in your life.

Do you appreciate your friendships and take quality time for your family every day?

These are the things that really matter in the end.

Are you grateful for what you have and verbalize that gratitude each and every day, rather than getting caught up in wanting more and more and more…scrambling for more money, more attention, more possessions?

Slow down. You have what you need to be happy, if your focus is in the right direction. You have, I’m sure, people who care about you. You have food to eat, clothing, shelter, and relationships that matter to you.

This Thanksgiving, focus your attention and energy on all that you have…all the intangibles that really matter.  It will warm your heart better than anything else you might think you still must have to make your life complete!

Most important, you have the in-breath and the out-breath. You have life.

As Mark Twain said: “Enjoy life!  There is plenty of time to be dead!”

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Coach Char

Guiding You To Grow Your Legacy…One Blog at a Time!

Do you give much thought to your thoughts? Have you ever said something that elicited the response, “Just listen to yourself!”

Most of us don’t pay much attention to what goes on in our head. And yet, there is a direct relationship between what we think and what we say. You have to process information through your brain before it can come out of your mouth! So what you say is actually what you think…literally!

In light of that, take a minute to focus on your thoughts. You are almost always thinking something, since the brain tends to fill empty space with something to avoid a void…so to speak. What types of thoughts are you noticing as you focus your attention on them? Some thoughts are random, stream of consciousness types of thoughts, and some thoughts are more focused and repetitive. Sort of an ongoing story playing out in your head…over and over and over again.

Our thoughts play a big part in our emotions and in our overall emotional state. If we tend to be happy, it’s because we tend to think more happy, positive thoughts than negative, unhappy ones. If we tend to be sad, angry, anxious, or hopelessly pessimistic, it’s because we tend to think correspondingly sad, angry, anxious, hopeless,and pessimistic thoughts.

Spend some time noticing the types of thoughts that generally fill your head.

Then see if you can begin re-directing those thoughts to other ones, if the thoughts you have been churning around in your head are creating emotional chaos, or sabotaging your mood!

You can absolutely learn to manage what you chronically think, and change your life for the better!

Coach Char

Guiding You to Grow Your Legacy…One Blog at a Time

I shop at Goodwill Stores. I am not shy about saying this…I consider it fun, thrifty, and a “green” thing to do. As I was shopping at one of these lovely establishments today, it occurred to me how much of a form of meditative practice it is. It is difficult to shop at Goodwill if you have a preconceived agenda regarding what you will find. It requires staying in the moment, in order to see what is there in a way that allows you to decide its potential usefulness…either in a creative sense, or a functional sense.

I am also amazed by how often I find just the perfect piece of clothing, in the right color, and often something that will match well with other things I already own. This only occurs, I suspect, because I keep my mind open and my judgments at bay. I, in effect, flow with the experience rather than holding preconceived ideas about what I want to find. This also happens when I need a picture frame to go with a watercolor painting after I complete the picture. I go to Goodwill, and a frame materializes that, when taken home, compliments the painting perfectly. You may be thinking I probably painted a picture which would go with that particular frame, or that any frame would do, but I have been told by others that it is remarkable how well matched the frame is to the particular painting that was just completed the day before shopping for the frame. I do believe in the concept of synchronicity, and I believe my experiences with Goodwill in this regard are evidence of synchronicity at work in the world!

I also believe that acceptance is the key to feeling satisfied in our lives, and Goodwill shopping helps me practice acceptance. If they don’t have a piece of clothing I like in my size, there is nothing to be done but to either feel a sense of resignation at the loss and to get discouraged, or to accept that I cannot have the piece of clothing and move on. With the practice of acceptance comes the possibility of seeing something else which might be just as wonderful!

Isn’t this the practice of life? I use my Goodwill shopping as a practice field for experiencing life in a way that allows me to feel good about what comes my way in my relationships and other life experiences, rather than choosing to feel bad when things don’t go my way. Try it and see!

I’ve really tried not to write this post, but I just can’t help it!

The elections are over, and I guess we got what we wanted…democratically speaking. We gave the new administration two years to fix what has been created over the last 8-10 years, and they didn’t do it!

And please, let’s not even make this about political affiliation, because frankly, if the Democrats had been making the decisions previously, we would still be out of our minds to believe anything could possibly be “fixed” in such a short time period.

We are an instant gratification kind of society, and we are not at all happy about the concept of accountability. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again…”You get what you create.” There are laws that govern stuff like that, and wanting it not to be true will not change those laws! We absolutely get the results of the decisions we make…period!

And we, as a country, as a democracy, blah, blah, blah have made some pretty bad decisions in the last decade.

You can’t just give anybody a loan for a house (no down payment, of course) whether they can afford to own a house or not…You can’t keep giving tax shelters to the rich and expect to not have resentment from the poor and a horribly unbalanced financial system…you can’t keep bailing out banks and car companies without some kind of repercussion…and let’s not even talk about the fiasco associated with “getting into bed” with the oil companies!

And then you can’t expect it all to turn around on a dime just because we don’t like the discomfort that comes with the consequences of what we have created.

There, I’ve said it…disagree if you must…in fact I’d love to hear from you…

Coach Char
Growing Your Legacy, One Blog at a Time!