Tag: Happiness

Covid Coming Out Party

Interestingly, I didn’t get to this post about Social Awkwardness until today…because I was too busy:

  • Getting Out There
  • Talking and Listening and
  • Taking Time (gasp) to get to know people!

Of course it started out as an assignment from good friend and counsel, but since I was already all dressed up with nowhere to go, I had one foot out the door.

It’s quite a miraculous thing to go on a hike or walk these days, and quite a few people are noticing the magic of simple encounters with another human being. With mask or without, it doesn’t seem to matter to folks who are more focused on regaining connections.

There was the earnest Gen Z-er who made the distinction for me that her peers were interested in changing the world unlike Millennials more interested in posting pictures of avocado toast. Her throw-down, not mine.

Then the forensics accountant who worked for Customs, a G-girl with a wry sense of humor and deeper soulful side.

And Sherree Patrice, wearing the most fabulous Elton John-esque specs and Minding Her Own Mission mask.

The very kindred spirit who had spent much of her life raising two young adult girls, dis-entangling from a Force of Nature mom, and learning to live with a fearfulness that really wasn’t hers but her husband’s.

And then the Iranian gentleman who responded two years ago to the oncologists’ dire predictions with “I’m not dead yet.” He keeps walking instead of waiting.

The pool of people willing to risk a get-together was growing! So Movie Night it was, with:

  • an “old-fashioned” British bloke I dare not pigeonhole with description;
  • a hairdresser who has discovered and loves the 11% British-ness among her African roots;
  • a ginger girl who self-identifies “bi” and is happily expecting Baby with new boyfriend from Romania via Australia;
  • an intuitive coach born and raised in Cape Town whose home may actually be in a galaxy far, far away; and
  • a German woman passionate about motorcycles, scuba diving, cats, and good “sex and snuggling.”

That we watched Car Wash, that early Seventies’ Blaxploitation film, before finishing the night with talk of other realms, Oneness and “individuated oneness blobs”…may say it all, or that I just have to leave it there… or here.

Strange Gratitudes

We’re an odd lot – Americans – when it comes to celebrating our holidays. Never mind the Christmas in October creep, let’s take Thanksgiving and our love-hate relationship with it. “It’s a really big deal here, i’n’t it?” notes my Brit friend Paul. Grounded in the tradition of breaking bread together and being thankful for blessings, it’s become a mad, frantic dash to… I don’t quite know… you fill in the blanks… gluttony, excess, strained pleasantries.

Take my shopping trip to Ralph’s two nights ago around 8:00. I strategically timed it to avoid the after-work rush, and thankfully, no jostling and weird cart-maneuvering were necessary. Of course the shelves were bare of some key items on my list – heavy whipping cream and Happy Eggs (organic, brown and delicious!), and the vibe was more Armageddon than Norman Rockwell’s depiction of warmth, home-cooked food and happiness. The clincher came when the rushed shopper behind me tossed two bags of frozen rolls onto the belt.

I wonder what it is that makes us so disconnected from the meaning and appreciation of days once dedicated to the rhythms of life and simple rites of passage. I’m going to let those musings lie for now because I’m busier these days with my own housekeeping.

For some time, my life has been about my disconnects and reconnects – with loved ones, my habits and purpose. The changes have been glass-shatteringly uncomfortable, but today is a good day – as it is every day – to stop in my tracks and notice the blessings that have come in strange packages.

I’m thankful that:

  1. My daughters and I are happily spending the holiday apart, all of us comfortable in doing what we want and without the need to fulfill obligations.
  2. It’s Thanksgiving morning, and I’m not in the kitchen over-cooking (as in cooking too much food) and burning.
  3. It’s storming in Southern California, and I don’t need to get into a car today.
  4. I have a new non-profit, The Pain to Power Foundation, that is reconnecting me to whatever it is that I want and need.
  5. I’m sitting at my laptop and blogging with joy again.

May your holiday season be filled with strange gratitudes.

Stepping into New Beginnings

I have a story around the Fulfilled Inside, Strong Together Retreat coming up in November that captures the magic of life and how unexpectedly blessings come when you allow them in. The trick is that we most often don’t know what it looks like to truly welcome what we haven’t been used to receiving.

Funnily enough, I met this woman at the very first retreat Rita gave …perhaps it was about five years ago. She was fxxking angry then and what with the “orange one” in power, she is still fxxking angry today. Of course that’s not all she is, and I’ve gotten to see the different shades of her passion and love.

She expressed the greatest resistance to the subject matter – love – and came to me several times before the Early Bird deadline with questions about payment details, anger about Arizona being the destination (with its political climate), and so on and so on.

“I have such a resistance to going,” she said, her statement actually laced with one fxxking after another. “I really don’t want to go, and I know that probably is a sign I should.”

“I’m not here to push you,” I said, “you have time. Go ahead and sit with it some more.”

Only two nights later, I was awakened by the vibration of my phone which had fallen onto my chest. It seemed a dream to read her text, “I’m going to go to the retreat with Rita. I’ll just pay in full to you.”

When we finally talked in person, she told me how miraculous the past several days had been, that after some 20 years since her divorce, she was now in a relationships that in hindsight, had been unfolding for the past month. This old acquaintance had come back into her life through Facebook, and after several long conversations and a deep feeling that this is what she had been opening herself up for, she had a “boyfriend!!!!!!!!!!!! OMG”

I had never heard her speak so vulnerably, excitedly about how open her heart was. “We truly love each other,” were her exact words. Let me tell you, I love this woman dearly, but “fxxk” and “asshole” were more a part of her vocabulary than the word “love” ever was.

We’ve talked more and since, and realized that just the process, the work she did in deciding whether to attend the retreat was part of opening her heart and stepping into a new beginning. Fancy that.

What is a Foodie?

Is a Foodie a Food Snob? Too bad we’ve made it so, what with our lives becoming so disconnected from food and a true love and appreciation for it. We don’t grow it anymore. We don’t harvest it anymore. We don’t even cook it for ourselves very much anymore. So in order for a Foodie – someone who truly loves and enjoys food – to be able to savour what they eat, they must look for a quality and experience that isn’t always easily accessible.

…because the process of eating begins way before you put that first forkful in your mouth. The quality of the ingredients and the intention with which it is grown, cooked and eaten – all of this matters in how our bodies enjoy and process our food. But wait. Before you draw a conclusion that I’m advocating that you must eat organic, clean, vegetarian, or whatever it is we think is healthy, I’m not.

I think I’m actually advocating going backwards – not forwards – with respect to food. Back to basics, that is, with food and the intention with which we eat it.

How about if we looked at and changed or refined our assumptions:

  1. Organic is better – not an obsession with organic per se – but quality from the ground up.
  2. Bring the comfort back to food because the ‘ahh’ effect can boost our metabolism if our body is not simultaneously stressing over whether the mashed potatoes with butter will make me fat, or the piece of apple pie a la mode will make my ‘numbers’ spike.
  3. Slow down, be grateful for, and enjoy the process of eating and dining. It’s not the food which is the problem with ‘fast food,’ but the fast.
  4. Open up your mind about what the healthy and unhealthy is. Did you know that avocado oil is not healthy to cook with or overuse?

I invite you to read about Individualized Nutrition Plans (INP) and some of the intuitive eating articles and books out there. As always, I welcome your feedback!

…So What’s with Pink Martini?

I dropped this question in an earlier post to bring up the subject of Why Not Stories, the brain-spin that keeps us from living our dreams and being truly happy. So I’m back to say that with all the advice being given about how to be happy, having to “work for it” may be one of the overlooked elements. Lest you want to jump off right now, let me say that even if happiness takes work, it doesn’t have to look like WORK, whatever big-baddie that word brings up for you.

It doesn’t have to feel like a slog or pushing that darn rock up a hill everyday. But you do need to figure it out and make it happen. Okay, so take my simmering obsession with Pink Martini and the Hollywood Bowl. With the realization that I had much “more living to do,” attending their upcoming engagement at the Bowl jumped to the top of the list as a reachable star. The fabulous “little orchestra” whose music was joy and diversity and love for me was playing at the venue synonymous with the fulfillment of Hollywood dreams.

Choosing this Happiness seemed a no-brainer, and a quick visit to http://www.HollywoodBowl.com revealed that plenty of tickets were available. But here’s where that doggone brain keeps interfering and turning the No-Brainers into what Rita Harrison refers to as the “never-ending story of why not.”

  1. New to L.A +Texted all the folks I know + “Sorry, gotta do this.” Sorry, committed to doing that.” “Thanks, maybe next time.” = No one to go with 😦
  2. No one to go with + No once else to call = No one loves me!
  3. Water (tears) + stuck energy in my heart chakra = “My life is the shxx!”

How then did I get to “happy as a pig in shxx” instead?

One of the firsts is to call this inspirational quote what it is …crap. I don’t get it, don’t buy it. It seems like one of those deep ones that may happen if you learn to “just be,” but hey, that subject is for another blog.

Happiness ain’t free. As someone who’s been bargain-basement shopping for a long time, I suspect that if it did come free or cheap, it might not be worth anything. And if you didn’t have to do anything for it, you might not appreciate it …at all.

So that’s the thing about inspirational quotes. They only tell you how you should feel, not what you have to do to get there, and I had to graduate to asking the right questions. Not statements or directives. Not even Yes/No or Why questions. Good ones that free you from the Why Not stories.

Happiness and the Pursuit of Work

“I’m just looking for what’ll make me happy Dad,” she said with impatience. Dad had paid for his almost thirty-year-old daughter’s last year of grad school (unfinished), watched her leave one job, then another (finished, finished), until a holding pattern seemed to be setting in, without work or school.

“You don’t get to do that yet,” he blurted. Daughter was similarly built to Dad – that apple not falling far from the tree thing – and he had also not finished college before moving from one job to the next with some regularity. One stint did turn into a 25-year career and growing experience until he noticed one day he had the financial security to say goodbye to the working world.

Well, he thought he was retiring from Work, but the reality is we need to do it our whole lives. Defined as the “activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result,” is it work if done in the pursuit of happiness?

I’ve learned the answer is uncategorically Yes, we need to work for and even fight for our happiness …and even though it may look different for each of us, it’s achievement somehow involves making peace with Money, Health and Love. Think about whether that balancing act is a life-long assignment or not!

A combination of:

  1. lucky breaks
  2. good choices, and
  3. putting in the time

seemed responsible for this dad’s ability to retire early, but I suspect now that all three of those things were just different kinds of work. And then the task of finding happiness in the other areas of his life began in earnest. With two divorces behind him, what does success in love look like? The effort to understand what makes the people in his life tick – and then respect it – continues. Good health had even been a bit out of reach. Being given the genes of an 80-year-old dad will do that. So, coming into his 60’s, life was good because he could sleep as much as he needed and loved, whatever time of the day. Simple pleasures are such happiness …but he worked for it.

…so what do you think of the two Happiness quotes I found? If finding happiness in your life looks different, I invite you to comment, follow my blog, and listen to the Ask Rita podcasts for new perspectives on age-old questions.

Removing Money Blockages

It is a never-ending story, isn’t it? All the issues we wrestle with around $$$$. Note that I’ve used four dollar signs, because why go through all the work to bring in a $ (one-dollar-sign-) abundant life?

But how about if I dispense with going into the stories? I don’t imagine that you’d like to stick around to hear the ‘Woe is Me’, and even if you are a ‘Misery-Loves-Company’ reader, I’m not going to indulge you. Besides, recounting or reading them again is the quickest way to get pitched into and stuck in that old money pit again.

Three reasons:

It doesn’t take much for our energy to drop, way less to fall down stars as opposed to huffing and puffing up them. This highlights, by the way, that ‘easy’ doesn’t always equal ‘better’.

Two, if we focus on the problem, that’s all we’ll see – the problem – while somewhere else, waiting to be noticed, are the solutions, with arms flailing, “Pick me! Pick me!”

Three, hmmm, we would be approaching the whole subject as if it were a mind game, talking about it, dissecting it, planning a way forward…blah, blah, blah. Even if we focused on positive instead of negative thoughts, it’s all in our head, and what if the secret to outsmarting the money demons is to smoke them out body, mind and soul?

These tips are included in a free online class which I had the privilege of assisting with last week. I’ve taken many of Rita Harrison’s seminars before, but it was a reminder, pick-me-up, and a jump-start to a new (and too money-focused if I let it) chapter in my life.

It shifted me out of the I Can’t Afford and prompted me to get in the car, drive to Santa Monica, and explore with an absolutely certainty this was the place I couldn’t afford not to be.

Change Please

Now to the Change part, which is the Life part, because yeah, yeah, “Change is the only constant in life.” Yeesh, we know this and do it every day as best we can. There are the days when everything goes ‘well’ – whatever that means – and it’s easy to talk about smelling the roses, savoring the journey, and just ‘Be – ing’. You may try to replicate that for the next day and the next, but this is when you realize you really can’t and shouldn’t so precisely. “Have a nice day…or not,” a friend and I have begun to say, to turn on its head that programming that Nice and Good and Fine look a certain way and are what we strive for.

Dad was right about life being a bit Russian Roulette and that we can’t know the good days without having the shxx ones. So I guess I subscribe to the, “It’s all good.” Or not. I’m really loving this “or not” thing to take the edge and Shoulds off of life, because there are other days that are just not fun.

Like yesterday, when an innocent comment like, “I wouldn’t do that” lands with a thud and I have to take a breath to get out of the “Can’t you do anything right!?” file. When you get an invitation to a “bring your swimsuit” bbq and in that off-handed “Hey, bring your friend (whose name I can’t remember)” way. When a conversation that starts as “What do you think about…” turns into wrangling and then to “I feel like a punching bag and can’t talk to you anymore” and finishes out the day with “Guaranteed we’re not going to talk tomorrow.” When the high point of your day is returning a toilet seat to Target. When your sister says the words “family trip” and “Bali” all in the same sentence.

Physical exertion, there wasn’t much, but I would certainly call it a ‘heavy-lifting’ or according to my British sparring partner, a “fxxx-all” day. Essentially it was one of those days when buttons get inadvertently pushed over and over, and memory files are yelling and reacting to each other, and it would have been easy to let the broken record play “Life’s a Bitch, and Then You Die.” The hard feelings could have really set in with each of us making assumptions and decisions about the other.

This is then where the freaking hard work (or not) comes in, all the hours and practice that the magician puts in behind the scenes, deep down, in plain view, wherever it needs to happen to make the Show …. well … magical. Stay tuned.

Agent

“Uhhh, I think I’m your agent,” I said, grasping for some definition of the tasks that were falling to me. And then everything made perfect sense for each of us. The “Why L.A.?” became “of course, L.A.” because where else would a holistic healer have an agent? Then the relationship suddenly had all the right words to define it: Collaboration, Autonomy, Expertise.

As Rita Harrison’s client and student, I knew the Willow System in such a way that I could represent it authentically and passionately. And because Rita and her methodologies aim to and do deliver “optimally,” I had the confidence, competence, and clarity (yes, more about the Power of 3 later) to move into my soul purpose. Ok, let’s say that again. Needless to say, it’s been an interesting road to finding that happiness thing, especially when I’ve sought it from others most of my life.

So I reclaimed the business experience (leaving behind the stuff that had put old ventures into indebtedness), corporate and institutional familiarity (without the non-constructive contempt), and a mother’s multi-tasking and juggling skills (that had lost their sense of purpose with kids grown and off on their own paths). What transformed all of that turned out to be remarkably simple (which doesn’t mean ‘easy’ by any means).

It happened that a reading by Connie Viveros crystalized it beautifully with images so lush I couldn’t speak as I received them. Don’t forget, I now say to myself: Toss a joy for living – tears and all – into the magician’s hat and one by one, all I need to create my new life will be provided one white dove at a time.

Love, Money and Success

Write Your Most Empowered Love, Money and Success Story! Make it your new normal…

Create Your Self Meetup – Los Angeles Chapter
Thursday, June 6, 2019, 6:00 – 8:00 pm

WeWork, 10000 Washington Blvd, 6th Floor, Culver City, CA

Create even more than you imagined by liberating yourself from what doesn’t work anymore!
When you dream big, you are already on the right path to success, but many people make the mistake that when they don’t achieve their goals quickly enough, they stop dreaming, thinking that they dreamed too big. That’s wrong. What’s right is to keep on dreaming big and build the foundation on which it can happen.
Known for her efficient approach, Rita Harrison shows you how to do this in 3 powerful steps. Come and experience it for yourself.
Rita is an international healer, author, and inspirational speaker who has helped close to 55,000 clients over the past 35 years to achieve their goals. Her passion is to help people find their inherent gems and apply them effectively to transform their lives into precious crown jewels!
As the developer and founder of The Willow System, which helps people maximize their potential, she has worked successfully with the Hawaii Counselors Association, Healing the Healers, and SAG-AFTRA Portland besides many others.

Visit www.willow4u.com for more information.

“After an hour with Rita, I found myself liberated from aspects of my emotional landscape that were truly holding me back. I experienced a state of joy and optimism, and carry the results of this experience to this day.
I’ve worked with energy prior, and my time with Rita exceeds anything I’ve done before in real, powerful and exciting ways. This is Rita’s life’s work, and she travels the world doing this – it is her way of healing the planet and its people, one energy system at a time!” –Mary McDonald Lewis, Voice Actor, Affiliate Voice & Dialect Coach