your own forecast

When is the last storm that happened in your life? What did it look like? Feel like? Was it a tragedy? 

What was the outcome? A disaster? An opportunity? A gift?

Did you allow for change? Rebuild or Resist?

Restructure or just Repair?

And what did the light look like once you came out the other side?

(( Listen ))

same event, different me

Taking out Halloween decorations at the beginning of the month inspired this thought....

I felt like I was was (well....I was) opening up a time capsule from a year ago in my life.  I payed attention to the way I carefully wrapped everything in newspaper so that when I opened everything up again it would be preserved.  

Strangely, I felt like I was talking to my old self. My newer self appreciated that my old self had gone through the care of anticipating the future - that I was in fact going to be opening up this stuff again next year. I also empathized with how I must have felt putting it all away after the holiday, feeling a little sad like something was ending, and recognizing how excited it was to open the same container,

with all the old, sad newspaper-wrapped decorations

waiting there for me to revisit the same cycle all over again -

one year older, wiser, happier

and so much more present,

aware.

formless

Upon referencing my favorite author, Eckhart Tolle, to a good friend, I came across something he said about death. He says,

"Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to 'die before you die' -- and to find that there is no death."

This is especially meaningful to me as I watch someone so close to me 'die' of cancer and is near the end of her form.

We've all seen images of dead people or people in pain but to literally watch someone die little by little for two years is, I've realized, only an illusion.

Because how they choose to deal with their mortality is very different from how I watch them 'die'.

This is precisely because you can not lose what you are - only what you have.

Only you know what you are - that is, only your consciousness knows.

What I see in another is my perception, a phantom of what truly IS.

I am not losing her or what she means to me.  I am losing the form of her, not her formless energy that is her 'life,' the energy that I have come to love because it is also within me.  

"To love is to recognize your self in another."

~E. Tolle~

All forms fade with time, some more prematurely than others. And when these forms are placed in the earth, the marker which marks their form eventually also fades with time.

She will never fade away in me as long as I am.

We. Are.

Peacefully. Together.

I learned a lesson....

And that is to always learn from a lesson.

I thought of this while I was eating sprouts today :)

I thought if you are what you eat, 

then most definitely I want to be eating these sprouts.

Seeds, growth, wisdom.

Glad I payed attention to what was staring me in the face - this lesson.

  ~ And that's my Monday tidbit ~

Atmospheres

Five exoplanets have recently been discovered orbiting the star KOI-500, a star smaller and younger than our Sun.

The five exoplanets orbit this star so closely that their years range from only one to nine and a half days long!

Imagine!

And perhaps the coolest part of this system?

The planets are so close together that their mutual gravity slightly pushes and pulls on their orbits, yet their orbits are unusually stable are more synchronized than any other system that's been discovered yet, including our own.

Think about that.

Mutual gravity

Atmospheres

Synchronized

Close

Harmonious

~  Can you and I share this as well?  ~

(( can't we all? ))

not getting off at your exit

'Wisdom is nothing more than healed pain.'

And if I have to hurt a little here..........

.........Or a lot there to fuel this growth train,

~ Then it's okay ~

One layer at a time....

Peeling this onion today reminded me of something....

Forgiveness.

I thought of all the layers that have to be peeled away in order to forgive. Layers of self that take the peeling away of armor and flesh....and when you get to the middle layers it gets softer, like the onion. But the peel is much more tender, much less brutal than the cut, thus eliminating the sulfoxide enzymes that react with the water in your eyes to form sulfuric acid - burning and begging for the release of it's byproduct - the tear, to cleanse away the irritant that could have been avoided with the peeling away of the layers themselves, 

Tenderly...

     Forgivingly.

the ultimate movement

Funny how much the human race differs. To elaborate would take volumes. 

But more simply put, we are the same in more ways than not. 

Take Dance for example.

You go anywhere in the world and move rhythmically and someone from the human race will not only understand - but they will be affected, uplifted by your movement.

This is Matt Harding, known as the 'dancing man' when he went all around the globe teaching people his strange dance, and also learning dances from other cultures.  

Click HERE to watch his amazing journey as he dances everywhere from underwater in the Great Barrier Reef, to the middle of the ocean on an aircraft carrier with troops, and to the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia to mention a few.

~ UPLIFTING ~

no skin off my hands

What's worse than not being able to finish a workout?

People staying around you while you're way up there on the pull up bar and telling you you can.

I wanted to punch everyone in the face....
Not because they did anything wrong but because I felt incredibly vulnerable and was pissed that it was written all over my face.

I am qualifying for a competition in November and I am being WAY too hard on myself.

I finished the third out of five workouts yesterday - or should I say - I didn't finish.

25 wall balls

25 toes to bar (parallel knees only)

25 thrusters

25 pull ups 

200 m kettle bell run.

All in under 12 minutes.

Well....I did everything except I ran out of time to complete the run.  That's because it took me half of the overall time to do the pull ups.

My hands and shoulders were shot.
I still can't wash my face or do much at all with both  hands like this.

But regardless - a few lessons learned -

 ~My hands will heal. I've come to appreciate my hands more than ever and I'm happy to actually have them at all.

~I'm reminded how much I appreciate seeing others in a vulnerable position and how much more respect, empathy and compassion I have when they're strong enough to show it.

~ There is only one 'winner' in a competition, but all the other 'losers' are people who put just as much effort into it as everyone else. They have parents who cheered them on, kids who were so excited for them, strangers screaming for their 'success', the skin ripped off their hands and they also dealt with the same real feelings I experienced today...

Emotional and physical exhaustion.

~The only one 'watching me fail' is myself. Through my own eyes. If i say I failed then I failed. But if I see the value of every failed attempt as a building block of my growth, wisdom and maturity,
it's all one big, giant, victorious

WIN.

for no one else but you...

"Let go or be dragged"

Is a quote I keep coming back to.

I could let go of about 10 little things a day and about 10 big things in my life overall. 

Some happened before, others are happening now.

Sometimes that's the only choice you have.  

Still, some things - very few - are worth being dragged for a long time.

Others aren't worth being dragged for five minutes.

I've got a good grip on this most of the time -

Not on the letting go - 

but on the drag.

Let Go.

Or.

Be

Dragged.

When you don't know what to do with your anger..........................

...................... Let it Go.

Let it go regardless...

On Mondays,

Octobers,

2012's,

~Now~

Then replace it with compassion.

not just for the lonely

For anyone who ever feels alone, 

especially in a crowded room, 

the movie

The Giant Mechanical Man

is a must-see.

I'm still not sure what yet, but something changed in me since I saw this last night,

something small but noteworthy.

who are you really?

I'm very picky about the books I take the time to read, which is why I am always drawn to non-fiction. Usually they're slow reads, ones you want to go back over and highlight certain parts to iron in your memory. 

Like this book: 

It's a book that walks you through your relationship with your thoughts and emotions, often referring to your inner thoughts as your 'roommate.'

It's refreshing to know that the voice inside your head is a boundary and can be set free from the self.

What's special about this book? This part was an 'aha' moment:

An event or experience happens and affects you.

Your heart and mind are fixated on that experience even though it's already gone.

"There's a blockage, an event that got stuck. All the subsequent experiences are trying to pass through you, but something has happened inside that has left this past experience unfinished.  Life must now compete with this blocked event for your attention...You will see that your tendency is to think about it constantly.  This is all an attempt to find a way to process it through your mind.....because you resisted, it got stuck, and now you have a problem."

Sound familiar?

Read his solutions to these stuck-in-the-mud thought patterns.

Set yourself free one at a time.

take it from a rocket scientist

I picked up a magazine at the airport and read this interesting tidbit from Alyssa Goodman, PhD, a professor of Astronomy at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics:

"The thing that's grand about spending your time thinking about the universe is that it makes you feel insignificant.  I don't mean that in a bad way.  If you understand that we've not discovered entire solar systems that contain planets similar to Earth, and that those are just the ones we know about, since most of the stars we've looked at are within about 300 light years of Earth and the distance to the center of our galaxy is nearly 110 times that - then you realize that the laundry you've left undone and the dumb thing you said yesterday are about as significant as slime mold."

Phew.  

cleaner

I felt unusually gross when I left the gym today.

And in the shower it hit me.....

There are some days, like today, that I feel dirty with other people's sweat - from the floor, the equipment, the days we get on the ground and, well - get dirty. 

Then there are other days, like when I run, where it's only my sweat.  It's less dirty because it's my own. It's not roses but it's pure dirt - raw - sweat - on top of my skin. Cleansing in a way because it's the dirt coming out - not your dirt going in.

The epiphany in the shower was this:

How synonymous to every day life.  Your drama and dirt is a lot harder to clean off than my own inner issues.  It makes me want to take longer showers and scrub harder.

So I'll still carry on getting dirty when life throws me in the mud.

But I'll try my best to conserve water and stick to shorter showers.