February's
final Monday has arrived, so it's time to think of
ending our month
on as many high notes as we can. What can you
do over the next few days to
ensure that you're ending your month in very
positive, very loving ways?
Whenever the flight attendant gives the standard
safety lecture, no one pays attention, but I stop
whatever I'm doing and make myself watch. It's
a welcome reminder to take better care of
myself. I savor the part where the attendant
holds up the oxygen mask and tells everyone,
"If you have small children traveling with you,
be sure to secure your oxygen mask before assisting
others."
How often do you get permission to put yourself
first?
Traveling parents aren't the only ones who need to
heed that advice. Too many of us, especially
women, are guilty of neglecting ourselves.
We're raised to put our spouse, children, neighbors,
and strangers, even jobs, first.
I once interviewed a psychologist from the Cleveland
Clinic for a radio show about stress. Dr.
Michael McKee said something I've never
forgotten: "Don't have a double standard
for you." You need to treat yourself as
well as you treat everyone else. That lesson
hit hard one day when I planned to go to yoga class
and finally penciled it in on my busy
calendar. I hadn't been to one in months and
made sure I kept the evening free for me. Two
hours before class, a dear friend called and needed
a sitter. Could I watch her son that evening?
Sure, I said, and canceled my yoga plans. Why
did she need me to babysit?
She wanted to go to yoga.
Arggghhh!
I got screwed out of going to yoga and I did it to myself, all
by myself. I had a wonderful time visiting with her child,
but I didn't stop and consult me before giving my time away. . .
.
How do we change? How do we put the oxygen mask on first?
First, give yourself permission to do so. Consider this
your official permission slip to take better care of you.
The care and feeding of you is up to you and no one else.
Dr. McKee offered a few solutions to try. Here are some of
the takeaways from our conversation:
Take care of yourself: Don't have a double
standard. Don't respect your commitments to yourself less
than you do your commitments to others. Don't give
yourself away so there's nothing left of you for you.
Don't pencil in time for you--put it in ink.
Take five: Stop and take five minutes to get calm,
centered, and clear. Before picking up the kids after work
or stopping at the store, sit in the car and be still.
Reboot. You'll make better decisions and discover you
really aren't the axis on which the world spins. What a
relief.
Take six breaths a minute: I suck at
breathing. Dr. McKee suggested taking just six breaths
every minute. Inhale for five seconds, then spend five
seconds exhaling. Try it. It's amazing.
Take it back: Don't hand the remote control of your
emotions to others. No more blaming: "That guy
is driving me nuts. . . My boss is giving me an ulcer. . . The
kids are giving me a migraine." Take back the remote
and keep pressing CALM. You can't control what others do,
but you can control your emotional reaction to them.
Take a breather all through the day: Pick cues for
practicing your new breathing, like when you're stopped at a
light, get an e-mail from your boss, or have to wait in line at
the store. Take one or two ten-second abdominal breaths
and say to yourself, "All is well, all is well."
Take a pleasure cruise: Every week set aside one
hour for you. Make it your own personal pleasure
cruise. Take an hour of beauty and go to the art museum, a
jewelry gallery, or visit a flower shop. Take an hour of
calm and listen to your favorite music, read a favorite poet,
use your favorite bubble bath. Take an hour of nature and
soak up the sun, the sound of the rain, the glimmer of
stars. If you can't do 60 minutes straight, give yourself
three 20-minute gifts of pleasure.
Take a blessing inventory: When you're stuck in
rush-hour traffic, look around and make a quick gratitude
check. The car next to you is held together by duct
tape. Ah. Be grateful for your car. The car in
front has three screaming children. Om. Be grateful
for the silence inside your car.
Take the short view: See life as a series of
sprints, not one long endless marathon with no end in
sight. In between the series of jaunts, rest and renew.
Aristotle separated the world into thinking, feeling, and
doing. Dr. McKee said to manage stress well, one has to
change in each of those domains. My favorite Aristotle
quote is this: "We are what we repeatedly
do." Try to make it a habit to love yourself as much
as you do everyone else.
Put the oxygen mask on yourself first, and everyone around you
will breathe a little easier, too.
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We strengthen life any time that we listen
generously or encourage someone
to find meaning, or wonder about possibility, or dream or hope or
escape from
self-judgment and inner criticism, or know that they matter.
Anytime we share
someone's joy, we bless the life in them.
Jesse does this as naturally as she
breathes. Her own life has not been easy;
nonetheless she is a celebrator, a deeply happy person.
Although she has had
two episodes of colon cancer and many professional disappointments,
her joy
in life is tangible. I smile whenever I am in the same room
with her. So does
everyone else. She is always one of the first to celebrate
someone's birthday,
to remember anniversaries, to congratulate people on their
successes, whether
she knows them well or not. So Jesse is one of the first
people to call
when something good happens to you or to someone you love. She
is there
to listen to the whole story with delight. Often when you
finish talking to
her you feel even better about what has happened, luckier than
before.
Once as we were sitting together in a doctor's
office, awaiting the lab results
of her six-month chemotherapy checkup, I had asked her about her joy
in life. Her own life had been so hard. Didn't she feel envious of
others who had
things she did not? She had smiled at the thought and shaken
her head. "Then
what is your secret?" I had asked her, laughing. Suddenly
serious, she had
replied that it seemed to her that joy was not something
personal. When I looked
at her, baffled, she explained she has found that if you are
genuinely happy for them,
people are very generous with their joy and share it with you
openheartedly. "When something good happens to the person next to me, I am
there to celebrate
it with them. Their good luck makes me feel lucky. I
rejoice with them about it
as fully as if it was happening to me," she told me.
"It makes me really happy." She paused and looked thoughtful. "Of course, then it is
happening to me,"
she said with a grin.
When Jesse was first diagnosed, her cancer had
spread beyond her bowel. Despite
this, her surgeon had operated and removed as much of it as he
possibly could,
but he could not remove it all. "We need to keep her
comfortable for as long
as we can," he told me. But that was fifteen years
ago. It makes you wonder. When you strengthen the life around you, perhaps you strengthen the
life within you.
Living
Life Fully, the e-zine
exists to try to provide for visitors of the world wide web a
place
of growth, peace, inspiration, and encouragement. Our
articles
are presented as thoughts of the authors--by no means do
we
mean to present them as ways that anyone has to live
life. Take
from them what you will, and disagree with
whatever you disagree
with--just know that they'll be here for you
each week.
It
is not that you must be free from
fear. The moment you try
to free
yourself from fear, you create a resistance
against
fear. Resistance, in any form,
does not end fear. What
is needed, rather
than running away or controlling or
suppressing
or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch
it,
learn about it, come directly into contact
with it. We
are to learn about fear,
not how to escape from it, not how to
resist it through courage and so on.
J.
Krishnamurti
Alcohol
Having grown up in an environment in which alcohol was a huge
influence (due to an alcoholic parent), I've seen first-hand the
truly devastating effects that alcoholism can have on us, even if
we aren't the people drinking it to excess. Alcohol is a
completely legal drug that changes our ways of thinking and
acting, and for many people it becomes a drug of choice that they
use whenever they feel a need to make themselves "feel
better" or to "escape" from reality for a short
while.
What they don't count on, though, are the insidious effects of
alcohol, the ways that it can take a person over and cause them to
do and say things that they would never say otherwise.
Millions of people all over the world are made miserable by
alcohol and its effects, many of them helpless children who have
absolutely no way at all to escape the abuse that they face due to
the effects of alcohol. Children lose parents to the effects
of the substance--that drunk person in the chair isn't my father
at all--and tend to start blaming themselves for something that's
completely out of their control.
Personally, I've been very fortunate to have avoided the hell of
an addiction to alcohol. I reached adulthood not drinking at
all due to my father's actions, but after living a few years in
Europe, I found that I truly enjoyed a nice glass of wine before a
meal, especially with a couple of crackers or cheese. But I
never go beyond that, and there is no hard liquor in our
house--there's simply no use or need for it. And I really do
feel fortunate--picking up such an addiction can be very easy if
life has become difficult or if we're facing challenges that we
feel we can't cope with.
O God, that men
should put an enemy in their mouths
to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy,
pleasance, revel, and applause, transform
ourselves into beasts!
attributed to William Shakespeare Othello
It's almost
kind of sad that when we search for quotes about
alcohol online, we tend to find words that make
light of the topic, jokes about how important beer
is in our lives or how stupid it is to go through an
entire day without getting drunk or how drunkenness
is such a desirable state to be in. The truth
is, though, that alcohol is one of the most common
and most predominant obstacles to living our lives
fully and happily.
We don't have to be alcoholics for alcohol to affect
our lives strongly. We don't even have to
drink a single drop for our lives to be ripped apart
by the misuse of the liquid. All it takes is
for one person in our lives to start drinking too
much for our own realities to be shaken dramatically
or even shattered beyond repair. It's
especially bad when it's a person we have to live
with in the same home, but it can be just as painful
to watch someone else fall into a downward spiral of
substance abuse and harming their loved ones as they
do so.
And the emotional and physical damage is only part
of the story--the fact is that alcohol is quite
expensive, and an alcoholic can do horrible damage
to his or her families just by the constant spending
that they have to do in order to sustain their
drinking habit. And things get worse in bars,
as each drink further lessens one's ability to make
rational decisions--in one family that I knew while
growing up, the father (who was in the military)
would often go out drinking as soon as he got his
once-a-month paycheck, and by the time he got home
sometime the next day, his entire month's pay was
gone. Try feeding a family of five on no
income for a month.
The
chief reason for drinking is the desire to behave
in a certain way, and to be able to blame it on alcohol.
Mignon McLaughlin
The human
being's desire to be in an altered state brought on
by intoxicants is truly a perplexing desire.
Nothing is gained by it. People use it as a
supposed escape, but we really do escape nothing
when we intoxicate ourselves--we just change our
ability to think a slight bit, and we allow
ourselves to be angry about our debt or about
someone else dumping us or about another person's
actions. We're spending a significant amount
of money just to try to avoid thinking calmly and
clearly for a while, but once the intoxicant wears
off, there we are with our problems once more, and
they're often compounded by problems that we created
ourselves while intoxicated. I don't know if
my dad drank to try to avoid problems, but he
created plenty more of them by crashing a couple of
cars and breaking his glasses several times and
causing huge amounts of stress in the family--among
many, many other problems.
Almost worst of all, when we do start using alcohol
excessively, we very often start lying to the people
whom we love, causing huge trust issues in our
relationships. We lie to ourselves most of
all, though, giving ourselves more justification for
doing what we're doing by telling ourselves that
it's okay, that we're not hurting anyone, or that
it's none of anyone else's business. But when
we start affecting other people's lives, of course
it's their business.
One of the most painful films that I've watched in a
while was Flight, with Denzel Washington,
which provides a brutally honest portrayal of a man
who allows alcohol and drugs to take over who he
is. It's not a film that I would watch again,
but it is extremely effective in showing just how
people lie to themselves and to others to cover up
their unwillingness to deal with their drinking
problems.
Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
Bertrand Russell
We have to be
very careful when we let things like alcohol into
our lives. While they seem to be quite
innocuous most of the time, they can cause us to
complicate our lives very quickly, almost without
warning at times. They can cause us to change
our behaviors, and they cause us to sabotage our
relationships and jobs. A major problem with
dealing with it, though, is that alcohol use is so
widely accepted, even to excess--it's something that
other people joke about and expect their friends to
do. There are hundreds of songs and movies
that glorify drinking and even glorify the stupid
things that people do while drunk, thus adding to
our societal perception that this is something
"normal."
But when a substance can make us behave in ways in
which we normally wouldn't behave, that can hardly
be called "normal." It's very
important that we recognize when that even though
alcohol is legal and generally accepted in our
society, we need to deal with it on our own terms,
honestly and clearly, and not on anyone else's
terms. After all, we're living our lives, and
what we make of them is definitely up to us, not to
anyone else.
Each of
us, as we journey through life, has the opportunity
to find
and
to give his or her
unique gift. Whether this gift
is quiet
or small
in the
eyes of the world does not matter at
all--not at all; it is
through
the
finding and the giving that
we may come to know the joy
that lies
at the center of
both the dark times and the light.
Helen M.
Luke
Twelve
Rules for Building Self-Confidence
1.
Focus on your potential instead of your limitations.
2. Determine to know the truth about yourself.
3. Distinguish between who you are and what you do.
4. Find something you like to do and do well, then do it
over and over.
5. Replace self-criticism with regular, positive
self-talk.
6. Replace fear of failure with clear pictures of
yourself functioning successfully and happily.
7. Dare to be a little eccentric.
8. Make the best possible peace with your parents.
9. Determine to integrate the body and spirit.
10. Determine to live above neurotic guilt.
11. Cultivate people who help you grow.
12. Refuse to allow rejection to keep you from taking
the initiative with people.
Alan
Loy McGinnis
Be courteous to all, but intimate with few,
and let those few be
well tried
before you give them your
confidence. True friendship
is a plant
of slow
growth, and must undergo and withstand the
shocks of
adversity
before it is entitled to the appellation.
George Washington
Yes, life
can be mysterious and confusing--but there's much of life that's
actually rather dependable and reliable. Some principles apply
to life in so many different contexts that they can truly be called
universal--and learning what they are and how to approach them and use
them can teach us some of the most important lessons that we've ever
learned.
My doctorate is in Teaching and Learning. I use it a lot when I
teach at school, but I also do my best to apply what I've learned to
the life I'm living, and to observe how others live their lives.
What makes them happy or unhappy, stressed or peaceful, selfish or
generous, compassionate or arrogant? In this book, I've done my
best to pass on to you what I've learned from people in my life,
writers whose works I've read, and stories that I've heard.
Perhaps these principles can be a positive part of your life, too! Universal Principles of Living Life Fully. Awareness of
these principles can explain a lot and take much of the frustration
out of the lives we lead.
Explore all of our
quotations pages--these links will take you to the first page of each
topic, and those pages will contain links to any additional pages on
the same topic (there are five pages on adversity, for example).
™
