We Are What We Do

Where you will be in ten years depends on the way you spend your time now. If you want to be a potter, a dancer, a writer or a singer, and you spend your days working at an office and then fall on the couch burnt out at the end of each day – you are never going to reach that goal. If you do not write, paint, sing, dance, or make jewelry today, you never will. Mastery of a skill is reached by doing that action repetitively, over a long period of time.

Emotional Cleansing

For many of us, due to our cultural upbringing, the role of emotions in our lives has been severely downplayed. Many of us have received the message that our emotions are inappropriate, even shameful. Faced with situation after situation of grief, heartbreak, violation or loss, we have not been given permission to feel and express our emotions and so we’ve pushed them deep down into the recesses of our psyche. This behavior pattern, left unchecked, will continue long into adulthood. Practitioners in the healing arts are desperately trying to awaken people to the severe health costs of unprocessed emotional history.

The Art of Feng Shui

By now, we’ve all heard of feng shui (pronounced ‘fung shway’) – perhaps you’ve been introduced to it as a way of arranging your furniture to draw a new romantic partner into your life! While it can certainly be used to create living spaces more inviting to certain opportunities, at its heart feng shui is the Chinese art of creating energetic harmony. Indigenous cultures were keenly aware of the energetic fields of the planet and all life forms, including trees, stone, water, animals, plants and objects. They are also aware of the polarization of energies that result in both positively- and negatively-charged energy fields, as well as different vibratory rates, and the subtle effects these energies can have on us.

Mid-life may be bring unexpected challenges, but that doesn't mean you can't be in control of your life. In fact, if you're not, then something or someone else is.

Darlene Cohen healed herself from rheumatoid arthritis, which had virtually paralyzed her. She has written two books on the subject. When I interviewed her, she told me the key was "living from the body's point of view."

Imagine yourself standing on a bridge between two worlds. On one side of the bridge is an upside-down world. Why is it upside-down? It is upside-down because people have lost their intimate connection to the whole, and feel isolated and separate from society. Even their thoughts are fragmented. That world is upside-down because fear has trumped love as the dominant emotion—even though love is what we all seek. It has been turned topsy-turvy because sources of news and entertainment paint dark pictures of violence and murder instead of celebrating the best that people can bring to life.

One can’t watch television, pick up a newspaper or surf a web site without being barraged by fear-based stories of doom and gloom. Our politicians treat us to scary images of mushroom clouds and a host of horrible weapons in “the wrong hands” as rationale to preemptively invade sovereign countries. Their sights are now seemingly set on two other points in the Axis of Evil—Iran and North Korea. Color-coded terror alerts are suspiciously raised in direct relation to falling poll numbers. We are told to buy plastic sheeting and duct tape for our windows, stick canned goods under our beds. Dire threats of an avian flu pandemic scream at us from TVs and radios. When we don’t buy it, violent crimes and violent storms batter us with visions of the Apocalypse. With the latest crisis in the Middle East, a coordinated effort to trumpet the arrival of World War III is taking place. The propaganda is coming at us fast and furious.

A prophetic teacher, Mark Chironna, said, "Sex is a poor substitute for intimacy." If any of my readers have had sex or have been in love or both, then you know that this insight is true. Often times we use sex to meet our emotional needs. We wonder why the day after, we are left with the same emotional needs--unmet.

It's been said that a man dies simply because he doesn't know how to live longer. Well, thank goodness for progress. People are living longer these days. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 1920 the average life expectancy was 54. Today, people can expect to live to 78.