February 27th, 2017

February 27th, 2017


Affirmation: Choosing positive thoughts and making positive choices fill me with new strength, confidence, and excitement.


Word of the Day: shunpike (n):

1. a side road used to avoid the toll on or the speed and traffic of a superhighway.

Body Intelligence (1)

Your intelligence is always with you,
overseeing your body, even though
you may not be aware of its work.

If you start doing something
against your health, your intelligence
will eventually scold you.

If it had not been so lovingly close by,
and so constantly monitoring,
how could it rebuke?

You and your body's intelligence
are like the beauty and precision
of an astrolabe.

Together, you calculate how near
existence is to the sun.

Your intelligence is marvelously intimate.
It is not in front of you or behind,
or to the left or the right.

Now, my friend, try to describe how near
is the creator of your intelligence.

____


Warning Signs

Marc posted a beautiful anecdote today that I wanted to share with you all along with a few of my thoughts. I love stories and metaphors because I believe that they often allow us to access and integrate meaning and learning at a much deeper level, much in the way poetry can. In any case, here is the short tale:

Once upon a time, many moons ago, there was a village of people who lived in handcrafted wood houses.  And like other villages in this era, fires were a very real and present danger at all times.  One small flame could burn the whole village into ashes within a few short hours.  So the villagers developed a clever fire fighting system.

A rotating group of volunteers kept watch over the village from a lookout tower at all times, day and night.  At the first sight of smoke, a volunteer would turn on a loud siren that was only ever sounded when warning the villagers about a fire.

The moment the siren sounded, all villagers would drop everything and run to a pre-assigned location for firefighting.

Young, strong men and women would pump water as fast as possible from the village wells, teenage boys and girls would fill big buckets with water as it was pumped up from the well, and all the rest of the villagers would occupy designated locations and ultimately form human chains leading from the wells to the fire.  The bravest men and women would stand next to the fire and heave buckets of water until the fire was extinguished.

One day a traveler from a distant village heard the siren and asked someone on the street about it.  

The woman – who was rushing toward her designated location – quickly explained, “Whenever there’s a fire, the siren is sounded and the fire is extinguished!”

The traveler was amazed, and decided to bring this remarkable siren technology back to his own village, which also had dreadful problems with fires.  Days later, he returned to his village with a siren that perfectly matched the one he witness in action on the lookout tower.  He gathered all his villagers together, and he said, “You don’t need to fear fire anymore, my friends.  I have found a new way to extinguish it.  Watch closely, and I shall demonstrate.”

The traveler lit a large bale of hay on fire that was sitting next to his own cottage.  The flames quickly began to spread closer and closer to his home.  Then he took out the siren he’d acquired and sounded it.  The fire only grew in its intensity, so he sounded it again.  The fire continued to grow rapidly.

“Just be patient, everyone!  It should happen any moment now…”

In a panic he sounded the siren again and again, but still the fire grew and blazed with even more intensity.  Within hours the entire village burned down to the ground… because, of course, the traveler had misunderstood the purpose of the siren.  It wasn’t used to put out fires.  It was simply a signal that directed the villagers to take positive action. 

____

There are many important messages I take away from this story, and here are just a few of my thoughts:

1. Pay attention to the sirens in your life. And when you "hear" them, remember that ignoring them won't make the fires go away. Ultimately, failing to take action only results in the fire(s) growing ever bigger until they are so powerful that they force us to listen. Ignoring our sirens leads to things like "stress, illness, confusion, broken relationships, fits of anger and bouts of deep, dark depression." Aren't you worth more than that?

2. Don't expect others to hear your sirens. Our sirens ring specific to our ears and the only person who can truly save ourselves is us. And the way to do this is not merely by being aware that something is awry, but but taking positive action and doing something about it. This is often neither easy nor comfortable, but it is necessary and far more preferable to the alternative. Taking care of the fires before they grow unmanageable also makes our task easier.

3. Our culture, lives, etc. often distract us and deafen us to our internal sirens. Blame modern life or stress or simply getting older, but the bottom line is that we need to be aware that our sense of connection to our internal alarms and intuition is often rusty from years of being ignored and repressed. We can reawaken and exercise our connect and sensitivity to our internal sirens and intuitions by regularly (as in multiple times a day at regular intervals!) checking in with ourselves to gauge how we a doing, thinking, feeling, sensing, etc. Body scans are one helpful tool that can assist the process.

We all love the idea of being listened to, but we so often forget that it is a gift that we can give ourselves!

4. Remember that you cannot be all things to all people. It is hard enough to be who you want to be for yourself. And at the end of the day, your relationship with yourself will always be your longest lasting relationship. So take care of yourself. Give yourself a break when you need one. And get to truly know yourself so that you are able to respect, explore, and nurture yourself in all of your uniqueness. Doing so will ultimately enable you to contribute so much more to the world and those you love.

5. Be honest with yourself. You cannot preach honesty or talk the talk without "walking the walk" of living in integrity - and that includes living in integrity with what your body, mind, and spirit need. Your intuition deserves to be heard and heeded and not clouded by others' views on what you should be doing, thinking, or feeling. Creating "a life that feels good on the inside" matters so much more that creating one that simply looks good on the outside and doing so will actually fill you up in a way that pretenses can never hope to.

In short, remember that people, things, and events come and go but your relationship with yourself and a life that nourishes and fulfills your soul will remain with you forever if you work at it.