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Savor the Flavor of Life
In the movie”Shogun,” an actor (Yabu) says, “Life is just the single beat of a butterfly’s wings!”
From an observer perspective, that is a very true statement.
You got to make the morning last
Just kicking down the cobble stones
Looking for fun and feelin’ groovy
I’ve come to watch your flowers growing
Ain’t cha got no rhymes for me?
Doot-in’ doo-doo, feelin’ groovy
I’m dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep
Let the morning time drop all its petals on me
Life, I love you, all is groovy”
The popularity of fast food outlets speaks to how fast we are moving. As one eats on the run, gobbling up whatever food that has been chosen, did you savor the taste of it? Did you enjoy the scent of the apple before you bit into it? Have you heard a song so soothing that it stopped you in your tracks to listen to it? Or perhaps it had a beat that made you want to dance?
If you are healthy, did you thank God for how well your body is working? If you are not, did you know in your heart that you would soon experience being full of vitality again. Perhaps you are recovering from surgery or a health issue. Do you ever stop to smell a flower or listen to a child’s laugh? What is your focus? So many times, ill health makes one’s mind turn in. The only discussion possible is how badly things are going with you.
Life goes on all around us. Yet in our urge to hurry, the point of haste is forgotten. The difference is addressed in The Majesty of Calmness by William George Jordan, written in 1898. “Nature is very un-American. Nature never hurries. Every phase of her working shows plan, calmness, reliability, and the absence of hurry. Hurry always implies lack of definite method, confusion, impatience of slow growth. The Tower of Babel, the world’s first skyscraper, was a failure because of hurry. The workers mistook their arrogant ambition for inspiration. They had too many builders, – and no architect. They thought to make up the lack of a head by a superfluity of hands. This is characteristic of Hurry. It seeks ever to make energy a substitute for a clearly defined plan, – the result is ever as hopeless as trying to transform a hobbyhorse into a real steed by brisk riding. Hurry is a counterfeit of haste. Haste has an ideal, a distinct aim to be realized by the quickest, direct methods. Haste has a single compass upon which it relies for direction and in harmony with which its course is determined. Hurry says: ‘I must move faster. I will get three compasses; I will have them different; I will be guided by all of them. One of them will probably be right.’ Hurry never realizes that slow careful foundation work is the quickest in the end. Hurry has ruined more Americans than has any other word in the vocabulary of life. It is the scourge of America; and is both a cause and a result of our high-pressure civilization.”
I have asked myself what the author would make out of our world today, 120 years later? So the idea of “slow down, you move too fast” has greater meaning to us now than it ever has! Hurry has expanded to almost everywhere on the globe as well. Very few places are exempt from it.
You see cell phones and every other electronic technology in action everywhere. The use of these has increased our efficiency and saved us so much time. But how is that saved time being spent? Are you moving slower or faster?
If, indeed, “Life is just the single beat of a butterfly’s wings!” – perhaps one can choose to slow down just a bit, use Haste instead of Hurry, and use your five senses to experience and savor the flavor of your life. It is your choice. What will it be?
God’s blessings upon your journey!
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a quality which is worthy of your intense attention. Without it, you drift through your life. With it, you can experience more joy and awareness than you would believe possible.
Mindful is defined as: “Having in mind; aware, heedful, or careful.”
Mindless is defined as: “Not using one’s mind; showing little or no intelligence or intellect; senseless or thoughtless; taking no thought; heedless or careless; unmindful.”
The first definition (Mindful) is informative, but the second definition (Mindless) comes closer by comparison to what can happen if one does not use Mindfulness.
You may ask: How does one begin to understand Mindfulness? The answer is quite simple: Stop and Breathe Deeply.
When one actually stops (as in sit down, make yourself comfortable, and begin to look around you), things change. You begin to see colors, shapes, and sizes. You become more aware of your surroundings. Use your eyes and really look at objects. Use your fingers and touch the cloth you are wearing, sense the hardness or softness of what you are sitting on, and reach out to touch things within reach. How do they feel? What do you smell? Is there some food cooking somewhere? Is there a sweet or a sour scent somewhere close by? What do you hear? Do you have some soft music on, or can you hear the children giggling as they play a game? Did you just eat something sweet or perhaps a piece of fruit? Can your taste buds still sense the tanginess of it? In other words, use your five senses to evaluate your surroundings.
Once you have done that, place one of your hands on your belly/stomach area and one on your chest. Close your eyes. Now breathe. If the hand on your chest is moving a lot more than the lower one, you know that you are not breathing in a good way. You are more subject to stress and a lot of other ills. If you are breathing like this, you need to relax your stomach/belly and expand it with the incoming breath, pulling it in as you breathe out. It may seem strange at first, but it is vital to your health to learn how to Breathe Deeply. Now try to slow your breath, breathe in as deeply as you can and slowly breathe out. Try to breathe out longer than you breathe in because it is getting rid of the carbon dioxide and impurities.
If you have tried these exercises, you have a new awareness of your surroundings. You can then begin to do it any time of day, anywhere, and under any circumstances. You can do it for just a breath or two, or as long as you please. You may find that colors become more vibrant, and your five senses will wake up to new levels of experience.
Mindfulness is a central theme to a movie I just watched titled, “Griffin and Phoenix.” It was a very interesting story about a man and a woman who find each other only after they have been diagnosed with a terminal illness and do not have very long to live. Each one knows, looking back at their lives, how they worked and lived without being truly aware of anything. They find in each other the ability to live with Mindfulness. They want to experience every day fully as they create memories together. She knows she will not live till Christmas comes again, and she loves Christmas and presents. At the end of the movie, he goes to a hardware store and buys whatever it takes to surprise her with a decorated Christmas tree in the woods, including batteries to light up the lights, and lots of presents. It was a very poignant story.
Mindfulness can become an important part of your day. Just the act of walking can activate many thoughts as you are aware of your space and others around you. Perhaps you may see other people differently because you are more aware of what you are saying and how you are saying it. That can cause a new interaction level which can be more pleasant, whether it be a small one with a store clerk, a coworker, a friend, or a loved one. It can make you more efficient at work because it is no longer a boring repetition, but your mind is actively creating — be it a work of art, a sentence, taking care of a customer, or just cleaning up a mess that a small child just made. Your life can change a lot. But first you must be willing to pay attention to the details of your life. Like a flower emerging from the snow, you can express more livingness and joy.
After all, it is your journey and your choice. Mindfulness is a mine filled with valuable treasures, but only you can use your focus to find them. Are you willing to do it?
God’s blessings on your journey!
Breathe
Bless each day
Tulips in snow
Crocus in the Snow
Crocus in Full Bloom
Azaleas in Full Bloom
Learning to Love Yourself
That sounds like an oxymoron, but it really isn’t.
We are trained from childhood to look for what we do wrong and not for what we do right. We make inner tapes of those people who are our idea of authoritative/instructive figures, and they are unedited tapes. Every time you say, “I should have…” you are actually listening to those inner tapes once again. It does not matter if the tapes are unedited and may not apply to a certain situation. We listen to them once again and beat ourselves up inside for some perceived shortcoming.
A simple example of this is etiquette: “Don’t put your elbows on the table while you are eating.” So, even if you have your elbows on the table as you lean forward to participate in an interesting conversation, you can look back on it later and say, “I should not have done that.” You then proceed to make yourself wrong after rethinking something. That happens all the time.
I have had different people call me later and apologize profusely for some apparent misstep, which I do not even notice, let alone recall. So it is not that something negative occurred which is clearly labeled that way. It is just someone is looking back at an occurrence, and, because they are a good person, they feel an apology is required…not optional. That happens frequently to lots of people, male and female alike. It is the tapes, always. The stronger the tapes, the more you beat yourself up inside, telling yourself what a bad person you are. Is this constructive? I doubt it. Can it improve your behavior, based on a negative model? Probably not. It just plants more self condemnation (which is a curse to a good self image), that is reproduced again later in a more lethal dose to your spirit. (How can you build something up by tearing it down?)
Another example is, “I have to learn things the hard way.” Isn’t that a great affirmation? If you want some more of what you don’t really care for, say that one!
I was 19 years old before I found out I could something right: I learned to ice skate. What a joy it was! I could fly across the ice and just enjoy being alive. I felt like I was finally free of the negative issues that I was surrounded with. I had been raised by my mother, who was raised in an orphanage as her parents had died before she was 5 years old. She raised me in the only way she knew, which was not pretty. My father had died two days before my 8th birthday. My self image was not a good one. I knew I was wrong before I got up in the morning, and I would be wrong when I went to bed that night. My mother was a good, gentle person trying to do the best she could. Her best nurturing came when I was sick, so I was sick a lot, of course. (We all need nurturing.) I was raised with the script: Don’t Be (which is synonymous for Do Not Exist). That, by the way, is the hardest one to get rid of. Heartache, Inc., is what it should be labeled.
Because the tapes are inside of us, they are difficult to access, particularly if we do not realize they are there. Could you sit down and write down your own personal list of “Should Have’s” and “Ought To’s?” That would be a nice beginning to the ability to recognize tapes, which become commandments in our daily living. (It should be noted that this happens at the subconscious level until we bring it to the conscious level so we can override it.) Once you write them down, you can begin to realize where and who they came from and just how much they control your life. You can make a judgment about whether that particular tape is worth keeping and what is immediately made trash-worthy.
Self analysis is an art, is not easily done, and is often confused by the inner voices/tapes from our past. The more difficult our past has been, the harder it is to know how to begin. The only way to do that is really more simple than you have been led to believe. You don’t have to “rake around in the old bones” of your past for years, psychoanalyze all of it to look for reasons for causes of your behavior, and crawl to a new beginning, ever so slowly. You can begin today to make a difference and to make changes to your life. All you have to do is to decide right this moment that you want to cultivate a good self image–the beginning of learning to love yourself, right where you are with all your faults and gifts which need unwrapping by discovering what they are.
Just a word about the difference between a good self image and ego/grandiosity in all its forms. EGO is defined as that part of you that experiences the external world through the senses, organizes the thought processes rationally, and governs action; it mediates between the pleasure and wishing impulses of the id, the demands of the environment, and the standards of the superego (inner tapes). GRANDIOSITY is described as seeming or trying to seem very important–the negative aspect of which is putting yourself down all the time–same thing just at opposite ends. Ego can be a good thing if approached with caution, extreme caution. It is an element of a good self image if it is balanced with good ideas: The ability to see reality clearly and acting appropriately (as in not needing to puff yourself up at somebody else’s expense; not continuously putting yourself down because you are riding your own case constantly; getting your feelings hurt because of a perceived {and sometimes real} slight that somebody else has said or done to you). In short, one can get confused easily by everyday occurrences in your life. You can assume guilt where there is none. You can be very selfish and not care about others in any way. You can put someone else down because they do not perform in accordance with your expectations, forgetting that they have their own ideas as well. There are many permutations of the above idea. You may discover many of them on your journey…in yourself and in others. Once discovered, you alone must decide their worth to you and to others–you can keep what you want and discard the rest.
Anyway, my journey to a healthy self image has been a very long one and continues today. Through life’s experiences, both good and bad, I have found out what does and does not work–what matters and what does not. I have used books, workshops, and church classes in my search for any information that will help me to become a better person and who I was meant to be. I have found so many things to love about my life and find great Joy in just being alive, in seeking Beauty daily in all her forms, and in caring about others, helping them to find a handhold on their journeys so they can grow. A healthy self image is a treasure for the rest of your life and is well worth striving for.
Are you interested in discovering who it is you really are, without the dictation from the inner tapes to control your every move subconsciously? As stated above, you must first make the effort to discover these inner tapes and make them conscious so you can edit them and make changes in your life. Are you willing to do that?
Life is a symphony. You can make sweeter music and unfold like a flower if you do.
Make sweeter music and unfold like a flower!
