The holidays are upon us!

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Yep, Halloween signals the CRAZYness.

I do have some great tricks for you, some are downright atrocious and some a little tamer.

  1. Ditch the whole season and go on a 3 month meditation retreat.
  2. Ditch the friends and unlike everyone from your Facebook.
  3. Ditch the family and declare war by changing your name and your religion so you get a pass.
  4. Tune into your inner wisdom and do what seems right for you, even if it means doing away with some traditions.
  5. Gather the family via conference call, you can get a free conference call telephone number at www.free conference call.com, and tell them that this year you are giving a lump sum to a favorite charity in the name of the whole family.
  6. Send fabric squares to everyone on which they would inscribe “what family means to me” then give it to a local Quilter to make and raffle it off at Valentines.
  7. Write love letters or letters of appreciation to those who mean the most to you and to the others send your favorite poems, copied on beautiful paper.
  8. Ditch this whole list and bury your head in the and until December 24th then get your freak on!

 Whatever you decide, be sure it’s your decision. Cuz I tell you what, if you are not doing what YOU want, you are MOST certainly doing what someone else wants.

Aren’t you tired of doing what others want?

So, it’s off to the holiday races, see you at the track!

Love and light from Indrani

Poison Control Center

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Mr. YukWould you drink Antifreeze?

No you say, its poisonous?

Lets look at antifreeze. Antifreeze is odorless, colorless and tastes sweet. A little bit won’t kill you you may barely notice it. Drink a little more and slowly in time the body begins to feel ill. A little more antifreeze cardiac problems ensue then leading to acute kidney failure and then death.

Negative energy is like antifreeze. The first doses of it, you cannot feel its affects. You may not even notice it working in your system. A little more of that bad ju ju and you start to feel lethargic, sad, physically weakened, the mind and body’s defenses start breaking down. But your mind tells you you can take it, it will pass. Keep taking in higher doses of negative energy, more serious affects follow. The heart and spirit shut down, we shrink to a image of our former selves. We’re delirious not knowing how we got to this point, and we see we are dying.

So, why do we ingest negative energy then when it is poisonous?

What labels or identifying marks can we put on negativeness so we know to avoid it?

Who or what in your life is toxic?

The sewing machine, Facebook and donkeys

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Meet Frola Mabuga.  She is not on Facebook.

Frola Mabuga is a single 45 yr old woman in Kahama, Tanzania. Frola has lived in the shadows of HIV/Aids and poverty.  Frola wanted to learn to sew so she could provide for herself and her family, but she had no sewing machine. Frola shared a machine with her sewing classmates.  A friend who is with a local charity helped me get a sewing machine for her as a small business loan, so she could use to learn to sew and start her own tailoring business.

On October 5, in celebration of her entrepreneurial spirit she received the sewing machine to keep so she could start her business.

I posted a photo and Frola’s story on Facebook.

But the story does not stop there…

Another charity in Tanzania, saw my Facebook post and they offered to give her and her family two donkeys!  Donkeys you say?  Donkeys are like the equivalent to a John Deere Tractor or a Ford pick up truck. Now she has transportation, plow animals, assets.

Suddenly a simple investment in a sewing machine resulted in a domino effect of positive things to empower Frola to build a better life for her family.

 

What simple thing can you do for someone today?

That one act could be the catalyst for something life changing for that person.

Rest

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Have you ever faced a day/week/year when you have been so exhausted but stuff needed to be done so you just slogged through?
This is what I faced last week and this week. So I did not get my blogs written. I know I can prewrite and schedule them BUT I do so like to write about current events or at least events current for me. This week it is sheer exhaustion!
I had been teaching Yoga and Meditation for Dr. Patch Adams the week of 10/2 to 10/9 and I did not have the energy left to do a blog on Saturday. I let it slide. I gave myself a pass.
Then I came home and got slammed with a cold or something and was chief fire-putter-outer for my household and I had to face the fact that my Wednesday blog was not going to happen. Then I began to obsess about what to write, and would it be pertinent… ummm… is exhaustion pertinent? Me thinks it is!

How can this be pertinent to you? Well for one, the holidays are fast upon us and ’tis the season when we pile more on our plates but forget to take stuff off. Halloween, Thanksgiving ( and God help you if you are a fan of Black Friday), finding the perfect black dress for the holiday party and the perfect professional “thing” for the office bash, then the gifts… Lord the GIFTS, the Tree, the family coming over and staying and staying and staying and….you get it.
Yes that sentence was long and drawn out and that is how this season may feel.
Give yourself a break and just sleep. That was my solution and I got a few hours respite from the fires and the sneezing and the cooking and the fires.
Have a good sleep. You so deserve it.

What does an Activist look like?

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Who can change the world? Does it have to be a huge change or just something you can handle?

This week, the medical elective at The Gesundheit Institiute hosts an amazing group of young medical students whom plan to do just that. Change the world…one medical evaluation at a time.
They come from all over the world but have the same heart and speak the same language of healing.
Do your part, heal someone less fortunate today. Just because it’s the right thing to do.

Stop this wheel…I wanna get off!!!

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It occurred to me this week that I have been on a hamster wheel. I really did not know when I got here, but I know how. Since the beginning of the year when I decided to change my profit business into a foundation, I have been pushing, spinning, looking for what to do next.

The social media has me going crazy. To tweet or not? To Face book or not?  How many blogs are enough to show that I am serious about my cause/ movement? How many newsletters are too little, or too many? I do not want to flood my readers, but I don’t want to lose them either. Can I tell one list about everything or do I have to split my message to fine tune my reach?

What to do when I find out that my newsletter provider, Mail Chimp gets upset and sends me nasty messages? How do I get my blogs out there so that my efforts are magnified without extra work?

If you have a business on the Internet you know exactly what I mean.

What if you don’t?

Does this hamster wheel thing still apply to you?

Well, are you working, inside or outside the home?

Do you have kids or a spouse?

Are you a single mom just trying to stay afloat?

Do you have aging parents who count on you?

Do you have siblings who don’t pick up any slack?

Do you have a job that drains you of your life force?

Do you have a boss from hell?

Shall I go on?

Ok then, do you have to leave your kids while you travel for your high profile job?

Has your husband lost his job and now resents that he is depending on you?

Ok, you get it, you really do get it.

What’s a girl to do?

Let me tell you about a wonderful coaching tool that Martha Beck taught me and uses relentlessly with her own clients.

It is called the 3 B’s:

Bag it

Barter it

Better it

 

Let’s start with bag it.

This simply means to let it go. Let it go if it does not provide anything that is useful to your family. Do you really have to scrub the tub every day? Do you have to fold everyone’s laundry? Do you even have to do everyone’s laundry? What would happen if your teenager had to wear clothes that were strewn on the ground because they did not know if they were clean? Who would care? If the answer is “yes, I would care” I must ask WHY?

Would you care because the school may think you are a bad mom? Would it mean you loved your child any less? Let me float something… would the world come to an end?

 

Ok let’s go to barter it.

Barter means to exchange something for something else. Are you a computer whiz? Do you have a friend who is pitiful with her computer but she is an excellent cook. Can you barter a few home cooked meals per week for some computer lessons? She might be so appreciative if you suggested that. Are you low on funds and cannot get those little perks like a haircut or an occasional manicure?

Can you approach the owner of the Salon and offer to Face Book her services and do some tweets so he can get some exposure? Do you get the picture? The other kind of barter is you exchange $ for a job you cannot do. At Christmas time I pay my wonderful handy man (my house hold husband) to take down the Christmas tree and to retrieve all the boxes from the attic. How does he know where it all is? Easy, he put them away last year. He actually knows more than I do about my Christmas stuff.

 

Now to Better it.

Better it means to make the experience a little (or a lot ) better by playing some tricks on yourself.

Let’s say you have to get a root canal and you hate the dentist. You cannot bag it or you will be in pain and your tooth will get worse and fall out. You cannot barter it, because no one can do it for you. How can you better it? You could take your iPod and make a play list of soothing music to help you through it so you won’t have to hear the sound of the dreaded drill. You could dab some perfume on your upper lip so you won’t smell that burning as much. You could go shopping after, or treat yourself to a massage right after the dentist and you could barter the massage for some social media exposure for the therapist.

I hope by now you are getting it. It just requires a little forethought. This little investment will reap huge results. Now I need to find someone to barter a full blown Thanksgiving Dinner… any takers? I am a really great coach, can you use some coaching for a home cooked meal?

Chew on that a while, no pun intended.

Love and light

GOOGLE THIS!!

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Almost everything in this world can be Googled, right?

I can learn how to build a plane.

I can get piano lessons.

I can learn how to yodel.

I can teach myself Chinese.

Everything, right? Is that true?

 

NO, it is not.

I cannot access my inner wisdom with Google.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a site called www.intuition.source?

HaHa! Maybe Google will steal that idea!

Yes, I want a .source.

We have .tv and .net and .com and .org and .edu and .gov etc so I want a .source.

Should we feel “Crap! Then what’s a person to do?”

NO NO NO… I have the answer (read this sentence in a southern preacher voice)

YES my friends I haaavvveee the AAAnnnsweer.

 

 

Drum roll please…..

 

You already have a .source.

You have it within you.

There is an internal wisdom that most of us ignore.

 

This wisdom sometimes comes as a soft whisper, sometimes a moving picture in your head, or maybe a gut feeling. All of these ways are soft knowings of what your next best step needs to be.

These “knowings” are never judgmental shouts as in “you idiot you should’ve blah blah blah”

 

The knowings are comforting, even though they may be the biggest risk you ever took in your life.

 

To access this gift, just get quiet.

Try meditating, or prayer, or a silent walk.

 

Try a day of total silence; put this on your e mail responder and on your telephone messages.

 

You have much to gain and nothing to lose…

.source is waiting

Are You Trying to Intentionally Hurt Me?… Because When You Speak those Words, You Touch Shame

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Two Saturdays ago, I was immersed in Dr. Brene Brown’s work on Shame on Shame and Resilience.  From that point forward, I knew I would be fundamentally changed but I had no earthly idea just how much. This whole week I have been observing my own shame reactions. I had actually thought that I had worked through most of my shame issues. As IF!

Have you ever felt shamed by someone’s else’s words? Do you know what shame feels like in your body? It is really beneficial to each of us to observe our physical reactions to shame. Personally, my throat closes up, my brain freezes, my upper body gets hot, and I feel life RUNNING!

Shame hates to be named, much like Lord Voldermort in Harry Potter. Shame makes us feel so small that we just want to disappear, fight back or flee.  The area of the brain where shame is felt does not have access to language. Our access to language resides in the pre-frontal cortex.

When you are faced with shame and feel confused you are not losing your mind, only your words. The only way to find words to describe what you are feeling is to be able to step out of shame and have the ability to access the descriptive words.

There is no way I can do justice to Dr Brene Brown’s work in this short blog piece. Nor will I even try.  Her work is based on more than 11,000 interviews and decades of analysis.

Suffice to know the next time you cannot find your words, just remember that you have not lost your mind, only your words.

If someone says,
“Are you out of your mind?”
Simply say,
“No, just out of words!”

Want to know more? Read I Thought It Was Just Me: Women Reclaiming Power and Courage in a Culture of Shame, by Dr. Brown, and come to my Chat & Chai on November 14th, 11am Central, when Dr. Brown will be my guest. You may even have a chance to ask some questions.

Have a wonderful week ahead!
Love and light,
Indrani