The Interconnectedness of Everything

Each week I write a Healthy Living column. I talk about food, toxic substances, mind and the place it holds in healing, or provide healthy recipes. All these things contribute to healthy living. Everything is connected. Our health is not measured just by whether our bodies work or not. Optimum health includes how we deal with others, how we take care of our bodies, our cars, our home, and our finances. Everything we think, say, and do is vibrational. Everything is connected. How do we take care of the earth? Do we contribute to the suffering of others? Do we treat ourselves and others with kindness? No act stands alone.

Everything is sacred, and when we only consider the effect everything has on us, rather than the effect we have on everything, we get sick. We get heart sick. We feel like something's missing, and what's missing is this connection to everything. All is sacred. There is nothing that can stand outside the interrelatedness of everything.

I saw a video that said that crows can remember someone who was mean to them, and when they migrate, they fly out of their way to avoid the place where this human was. The act of buying things we don't need, the act of letting good food go to waste, the act of poisoning insects and other species - all these are acts of blasphemy. And the blasphemy is against ourselves, because we are a part of everything, and when one thing or any system suffers, we suffer. We share the joy and suffering of everything, including microscopic life forms.

Some people want to build a wall on the Mexican border. Those that do, do not understand the wildlife that will be threatened because of this act. If the wall is built, it could mean extinction of the big cats and trouble for thousands of other animals. It will cut their food supply, their ability to migrate, and threaten their habitats. The fact that we can even think about building a wall shows how disconnected and wounded we are.

All disconnection comes from unhealed emotional wounds. Every politician should have to go through intense therapy and take a "Raising Your Self-Esteem" course before s/he takes office. We will continue to annihilate ourselves and our earth family until we dive into the world of self-healing.

While this is more of an Op Ed piece than healthy living; it is relevant. Sunday, April 22nd, was Earth Day. We need a People Day, an Animal Day, a Fish Day, a Fungi Day – we need a Recognition of the Importance and Interconnectedness of All Life Day. We need a Self-Forgiveness Day. We need a Day of Innocence. We Need a Cease Fire Day, where every country in the world sets down their arms for one day. We need a Kindness Day.

Many people feel they have nothing to contribute to the world, but if you look at all the possibilities spawned from the problems above, you might find something that is yours to do. Good God, hold a Flower Day in your neighborhood to show off flowers. Unless we connect, we are going to continue down the path of separation. Get in there and connect. Your health depends on it. And when you do, you will find that everything can be EZier and EZier. #earthday #weareone

Keeping Tabs on the Good: Building the Gains in our Lives

Too often we keep tabs on the problematic issues in life. It’s a limited viewpoint: life is a problem. This is how we make life hard. This is how we become Hardaholics – through our perceptions. For numerous companies, Y2K was problematic, but for hundreds, if not thousands, of well-paid programmers, Y2K was a job. It meant employment.

Rather than building problems with our minds, we might do better building emotional and mental scenarios of gains, rather than those of loss.

Please consider playing some of my favorite building games:

• Expected and Unexpected Income I start the day with this thought: “Today I receive expected and unexpected income.” Each day I keep tabs on my income, based on that intention. Recently I found $12 between some papers. One day a friend gave me a book. Another day we got one free bag of dog food for making our tenth purchase. That same day we received a free bottle of flax seed oil. My husband was told by a store worker that the store did not carry flax seed oil. My husband checked out, but before he left, the employee caught up with him and handed him a bottle of flax seed oil. “I was wrong. We had it. Just keep it for free.” That was $10.00 worth of oil.
• What good happened today? At the close of the day, review what happened and find at least one good thing that happened that day. Let the last thing on our minds be a life-supportive thought.
• Synchronicities of the day Synchronicity means meaningful coincidences. One of my most profound incidences of synchronicity happened when I was explaining the concept of synchronicity to a client. “If I am saying something to you and a tree falls in the backyard, that would be a sign that what I am saying is important. It would be as if the tree falling was the Universe’s way of saying, ‘Listen’.” As I was saying that, a tree fell in the backyard of my office. There was a window in my office, so we had a clear view. The falling of the tree pointed out that synchronicity would probably be important in her life. These events are magic and they make wonderful journal material.
• Keeping up with the miracles – the small ones. A miracle could be changing the way I react to something. The behavior or activity that used to upset me no longer disturbs me. Another miracle would be a deep feeling of peace even in the face of a loss. I remember flying home for my father’s funeral and feeling uplifted on the journey. It felt like invisible arms were holding me. A miracle can be meeting an influential friend or turning to the very page in a book that you needed to read for information or inspiration. Maybe it’s a good night’s sleep when you are an insomniac. Look for those miracles.
• Keeping tabs on me This involves taking a second throughout the day to feel what it’s like to be me, when I feel me, and I connect my mind and body. “Oh, here I am.” I check in throughout the day and it keeps my mind from too much chatter and calms me. Simple task; profound results.
• Keeping tabs on my breath I check my breath during the day. Just noticing my breath makes me sit up straighter and breathe deeper. If I’m holding my breath or have shallow breathing, it tells me I’m stressed. I relax my body. I let go in my belly and shoulders. Relaxation is the secret simple key to health. (I heard that relaxation quote recently, but don’t remember who said it).

The eastern trinitarian concept highlights construction or creation, sustaining life, and destruction or tearing down. Brahma creates, Vishnu sustains, and Shiva destroys. What does your mind keep tabs on? Is it the constructive or the destructive nature? Are you mentally affixed to the negative side of Shiva’s nature? Life is always falling apart; that’s the Shiva nature, but focusing on that aspect alone will bring despair. Things need to fall apart, but watching the fall may not be the best use of your time!

I have a compost bin in my kitchen. It lives in my pantry. I don’t deny its existence. I use it to dispose of my vegetable and fruit trimmings, but I don’t stand over the compost bin for hours and smell the stench. It really stinks. I know it’s there, covered and tucked inside my pantry, but I don’t let its existence determine my life’s view.

What we keep tabs on colors our world view and either builds or destroys personal realities. What are you keeping tabs on? Tim Bays says it so well in his song, A thousand things went right today and will again tomorrow. The exercises above build the mind and heart and take us from hopelessness and helplessness and deliver us to peace, ease, and happiness. Please join me in creating an easier and safer world. Your world view is up to you, and it’s time to make it easier, freer, and lighter.

Anne #prosperity #Ezosophy

How to Have a Great Relationship

Have you experienced disappointment in any of your relationships? I certainly have, and on more than one occasion. Given the demands we place on relationships, pain and suffering are inevitable. We get into relationships to gain something or to benefit, only to find that relationships can't offer a permanent fix to our hungry souls.
 
Frequently, there's an inner desperation, one that we don't know we have, that slithers its way into our primary love relationship. We go into a relationship during our finest hour, only to lose our brilliance once the clock strikes 12. We put on a show for about six weeks, then revert to our self-centered, got-to-get-more of something mode, must have a better version of something, or a different version of something from this relationship. We try to get our partner to change, to fit our model of how things should be, and if the relationship endures, we go to work on it. We accentuate the pain as the pleasure recedes beyond our reach.

Relationships do not work when they are applied as a bandage to life. They can only add richness when we are already full. Relationships  are the dessert of life; they can never be the main course.

How do relationships get this way? What makes relationship failure a pandemic disease? Hold on to your ego; the following might be distressful. We suffer because we foster multiple relationship illusions. We take the Daffy Duck approach with our significant others. Remember Daffy? He was one of the first animated characters that showed up and acted like a screwball! When we believe the following ideas, we get screwball results:

• We must belong to be happy.
• We must have a mate to be a success as a person.
• Getting married brings safety and a sense of belonging.
• Someone must love us or we can't be happy.
• We cannot be happy without a significant other.
• Single people are sad and to be pitied.
• People will stay, and if they don't, we have the right to feel abandoned. (Maybe they will stay, but not all the time. They divorce us, die, and emotionally check out.)
• The romance lasts forever. The chills and thrills are required, and if they are gone, something is wrong.

We experience a diminished interest in our relationship when we see our beloved cannot fill enough soul holes. Once we see the illusion, that relationships will not fulfill our fantasies on a permanent basis, we try to find another way to realize our illusions. Maybe we go on to the next partner. We might have an affair. We may emotionally block out our partner and pursue other means of fulfillment, such as work or a hobby.

Hopefully at some point we figure it out. We've been looking for love in all the wrong places. We have been looking at love in false concepts and beliefs. We place our salvation (happiness) in the hands of another person. This is the worst place to put it. Our happiness and well-being belong to us, not to others.

When we get to the end of the relationship road, it's time to go where fulfillment lies, and, if we are sensible, we will start that inner journey. It seems simple, but few people are willing to give up delusional thinking. The mind believes that without this self-defining thinking, it (the mind) would be left in an endless void. The mind cannot deal with the angst of losing its limiting concepts. These limiting concepts define our minds and what we believe to be our selves.

When wisdom dawns, we find that the mind exists only as the concepts it holds. The mind as we know it consists of limited viewpoints, memories, and future projects. Emotions work symbiotically with mind to create the entity we call ourselves. We further limit this self-constructed entity by believing that it is a body. Even though bodies and complex belief systems give us a point of reference for reality, they are merely a limited viewpoint. The less we identify with the mind and body, as who we are, the freer we become and the more we experience reality as it is. The experience of reality is different than the second-hand version we define and refine to fit our beliefs.

There's an old tale whose point illustrates our unwillingness to look inside for our divinity. We prefer our souped up version of reality. Our version of life is exciting and full of purpose, even if the purpose is only to get out of the dramatic situations we create! What we fail to see is that our divinity is our identity, and until we know this and live from our divinity, our relationships are doomed.

So rather than studying relationship techniques and trying to get our significant others to give us what we need, we would be better served to spend our time practicing the Presence. Home work is the practice that teaches school children certain skills. We take time to practice the guitar. People take golf lessons and play round after round of golf. The more practice one gets, the more proficient s/he becomes at golf. Do we practice the presence of our divinity? And if not, why not?

Don't answer that last question. Looking at the problem can release us, but too often it sends the mind spinning and lands it in another useless intellectual pursuit. It's simple. Practice going to the center of who you are as frequently as you think of it and put as much silence in your mind as you can. This practice takes on a life of its on, and as our awareness expands into the Stillness, we lose our need for external fixes. The sweetness of the inner world calls us to this Radical Presence, and when it does, our relationships become the dessert of our lives. We get to enjoy them rather than place demands on them. We get to have fun in our relationships rather than having to control them. We get to experience freedom rather than the feeling of being trapped. We get to feel okay, whether we are with our significant other or not. When we practice the Presence, we discover our identity as divinity, and the need to strive disappears.

Practicing the Presence is the easiest way to bypass the multiple avenues of relationship distress and to come into the joy of being. Good relationships are the byproduct of our inner divinity and inner joy; they are not our reason to live nor the cause of our happiness.

Let's give up our need to find a partner, fix a partner, or get rid of a partner. None of these actions will deliver what we need. But practicing the Presence will deliver the fulfillment we seek. Try it and you will find that your life becomes EZier and EZier.

Anne