cultivating balance

Allow Your Self To Be

Live the Life You Love

How much do you love what you are doing? With your life? With your partner? With yourself? Are you able to look around your life and feel like YES! this is what I want to be doing? If not then it’s time for you to reevaluate your life and how you life it. Read on to change your life.

First, take stock of what you are doing and why. What drives your daily routine? Is it material items you don’t care about? Is it work that you feel betters the world around you? Is it what you want to do or what someone else wants you to do?

Now I don’t ask these questions with the expectation that you will drop everything to do a 180 in your life today, however you can start small.

The next thing you need to do is figure out what you want to do. Write a mission statement. Begin by writing down one statement that encompasses what you want your life to stand for. Sometimes it can be helpful to start this process with a paragraph about you someone might read at your death. What would you like them to say about you? What is the impact on others and the world you have left behind? Once you have an idea around what you would like your life to stand for write down the why behind your passion. What is the driver of this desire?

Then write down one thing you can do each day to move closer to this living this life. Now start doing that thing every day. My experience has been as I begin with one thing it snowballs and soon I am doing a number of things that support the life I want to live and I am no longer living a life that drains my energy, steals my excitement, and leaves me feeling life – less. Instead I feel life – full.

10 Healthy Things I’m Thankful For

We have arrived at the start of the holiday season. Regardless of spiritual beliefs this is a time of introspection and reflection. A time to assess what you have, where you are, and dream about what comes next in your life. Research shows when we are thankful we invite more of those blessings into our lives. Here’s a short list of things I’m thankful for. Maybe you’ll resonate with some and quite possibly add your own.

Comment on our Facebook Page to add your gratitude items. Community is a great place to share our gratitude and we all reap the benefits of reading others’ thankful prayers.

My body & its health
My mind’s ability to challenge me (in a variety of ways – at least I stay on my toes)
Family (including my dog)
Friends
Meaningful Work
Yoga
The smell of snow in the air – means I’ll be hitting the slopes soon!
Good (healthy) and tasty food that nourishes my body as well as my soul
Tea – I love it anytime of the day!
A good book to snuggle with on these longer winter days

And your gratitude list …. ?

The Power of Mindfulness – Build Your Brain

So today on this longest day of the year – just for the next 30 minutes – commit to Mindfulness. Just to see what happens. Just to notice if something is different in your regular routine after you try it. Just get curious. Just see…

This isn’t about a new age-y trip or about religion or yoga. This is actually about building your brain circuits. So why not try it out. See what happens in your brain when you become mindful for a short time. Just notice, see what is different than before. Maybe nothing … but I’ll bet something shifts for you.

Begin by noticing how your body feels, your posture, your hands, fingers, feet, and toes. How are you breathing? How are you holding yourself. Make a commitment to return to noticing as needed.

Then allow yourself to become immersed in whatever project you are doing. Turn off music, put away any distractions, tell your co-worker to be quiet (nicely). Allow yourself to connect with each detail of your project. What are the colors? Textures? Sights? Smells? Sounds? of what you are doing.

Finally, each time you find you are thinking about the future or the past note it as thinking and allow those thoughts to move through and out. If it helps you can tell yourself you won’t forget anything important that needs your attention – but for now you are focused on this project and will come back to those important thoughts once you are finished here.

No judgement – this is a practice for a reason. It’s not easy. So just give it a whirl and notice how it impacts your day. Commit to yourself for just 30 mins – Go On, Give it a try.

Let us know how it worked for you and read other’s comments by adding your story on our Facebook page under this post.

Finding the Time To Workout

I have been working to keep my time, mine. Anyone else out there have this problem? I have a daily plan and it slips away as though I didn’t do anything. I get maybe, two – three items crossed off my list and when I look back they were for someone else – NOT me! The first step to providing enough time for your workouts is to be realistic about what you can and cannot do.

I notice when I lose my time I am giving it away to things I may not need to be doing. I could call it “wasting” however that isn’t the right word. I ‘m doing things I enjoy or spending time with people I enjoy. I may just be overstaying my need. It is powerful to check in with yourself and notice are you giving your time away to others because you want to, enjoy it, or are you doing it because you think you need to – that’s your duty, they will be mad at you, or that’s what you are supposed to be doing?

Notice if your being (body, mind, and soul) expand when you are engaged in an activity. If they are not it may be time to look at your work / life balance. For some us we put way too many shoulds and have tos on our plate leaving little time for want tos.

With three kids, a job, and school I must say I’m busy. It is important I check my work / life balance often to make sure I am balancing out my life. If I spend too much time doing things I have to and not enough want tos my life wouldn’t work.

This includes looking closely at the things I enjoy. If I spend too much time with my friends I may not have time for my family. If I spend too much time with my kids I may have a under – exercised lab. If I spend too much time reading I may not have time to enjoy any of the above. Get it? Its all about balance.

Check out how you have spent your time in the last 3 days and notice if you are spending too much time doing things you have to, want to, or should do. Then begin to make sure you’ve got balance each day between all three. AND make sure to do at least one thing you enjoy each day, just for you.

Begin Living Your Life Today!

5 Ways to better life balance. Balance your life responsibilities

On Monday we looked at our lives subjectively. Are there areas I feel out of balance and I can I see ways to change. On Wednesday we took an objective look at how we spend our time and decided if how we spend the majority of our time is how we want to spend the majority of our time. Today we look at 5 ways to manifest better balance into our lives.

Once you have determined areas of your life you want to change it is easy to blame why you don’t change on others:

My kids need too much
My significant other doesn’t want to eat healthy
I have too much to do
I am taking care of my parents
the list could go on.

The bottom line is – change is hard, there is a reason you are caught in the patterns you are caught in, and if you really want your life to look different you will have to figure out ways to make that happen. Small steps can make that happen.

Here are some ideas to get you started.

Write down your goals
Delegate – are there jobs you do (laundry, cleaning, cooking, errands, car pooling) that others could do. Hint: they will do it differently than you and that is ok.
Create some boundaries. Do you need to tell people no more often – “no I can’t cook X for the upcoming pot-luck”, “no I can’t coach soccer this fall”. Get clear about what you want. This is critical to honoring yourself and others in your actions. Be kind, open, and honest when turning down offers and be ready for resistance from people who are used to hearing yes.
Create a goal poster – clip pictures of your life vision and set the intention to achieve them. Place it where you will see it often everyday.
Commit to live with intention. In each moment ask yourself if this is what you want to be doing/thinking and honestly listen for the answer. When you find yourself answering no decide what you do want to be doing and make efforts to move in that direction.
These are not suggestions to shrink from life responsibilities. All of us would rather be doing something else at times but by listening to what you would rather be doing you begin to see a pattern of what is working and what is not working in your life. By visualizing what you want you are better able to recognize activities which might move you in that direction. In doing those activities more often you are more likely to get the life you want one step at a time.

Your Life – In Balance. How to Find Life Balance

If you checked out Monday’s blog I hope you did some thinking over the last few days about where you might want to create better balance in your life. And if you feel pretty balanced right now you may want to think about strategies to keep it that way. Life has a tendency to cycle and the more tools you have in your toolshed to better able you’ll be to handle any curve balls thrown at you.

Here is an exercise I like to do in workshops to help create a visual of where life may be out of whack. I usually do it as part of a long workshop (more than 2 hours) so take some time with it and see what comes up for you.

Materials Needed:
Large piece of paper – make it work for you
Crayons, markers, or colored pencils – at least 3-5+ different colors
Some quiet time to think

Fold your paper into four quadrants – you can also use the back if your paper is small.
Across the top list your major areas in your life – give each its own color, for example:

Work
Home
Me Time
Social
Spiritual
1. etc – put as many labels in as needed to get a complete picture of your life obligations.

In the top left square – using a different color for each activity (work, home, me time, social, spiritual, etc) place your average daily schedule – from the time you wake up till the time you go to bed. Mine might look like this:
6am – wake up (me time – red)
6:30 – yoga (spiritual – green)
7 – breakfast (home – purple)
7:30 – shower (me-red)
8:00 – leave house (work – orange)
and on throughout my day – each activity has a connection to a larger area of my life and is colored coded accordingly.

In the bottom left quadrant draw a circle – using the visual of a clock (but don’t use the actual time numbers as your segments) begin to fill in the number of hours you spend in each major area of your life.
This may sound a bit confusing – but the idea is to take an honest look at how much one area dominates your life.
I like to start with one area
Count the hours I spend “doing” in that area
And color all my hours in one block – so I end up with a neatly shaded pie
Each color representing a different life area, and each area/color a different slice. It soon becomes clear which slices/areas dominate my life and which are lacking. In the above example I would have:
1 hour – me time
1/2 hour – household
1/2 hour – Exercise
1/2 hour – work

Once you have completed this exercise it is easy to repeat every so often to determine an objective look at how you use your time and what areas of life are controlling the majority of you. This objective look creates space for you to determine if the activities you spend the majority of your time on are the ones you want to be spending the majority of your time on and better able to make changes accordingly.