Tag Archives: right action

Rest

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Have you ever faced a day/week/year when you have been so exhausted but stuff needed to be done so you just slogged through?
This is what I faced last week and this week. So I did not get my blogs written. I know I can prewrite and schedule them BUT I do so like to write about current events or at least events current for me. This week it is sheer exhaustion!
I had been teaching Yoga and Meditation for Dr. Patch Adams the week of 10/2 to 10/9 and I did not have the energy left to do a blog on Saturday. I let it slide. I gave myself a pass.
Then I came home and got slammed with a cold or something and was chief fire-putter-outer for my household and I had to face the fact that my Wednesday blog was not going to happen. Then I began to obsess about what to write, and would it be pertinent… ummm… is exhaustion pertinent? Me thinks it is!

How can this be pertinent to you? Well for one, the holidays are fast upon us and ’tis the season when we pile more on our plates but forget to take stuff off. Halloween, Thanksgiving ( and God help you if you are a fan of Black Friday), finding the perfect black dress for the holiday party and the perfect professional “thing” for the office bash, then the gifts… Lord the GIFTS, the Tree, the family coming over and staying and staying and staying and….you get it.
Yes that sentence was long and drawn out and that is how this season may feel.
Give yourself a break and just sleep. That was my solution and I got a few hours respite from the fires and the sneezing and the cooking and the fires.
Have a good sleep. You so deserve it.

What does an Activist look like?

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Who can change the world? Does it have to be a huge change or just something you can handle?

This week, the medical elective at The Gesundheit Institiute hosts an amazing group of young medical students whom plan to do just that. Change the world…one medical evaluation at a time.
They come from all over the world but have the same heart and speak the same language of healing.
Do your part, heal someone less fortunate today. Just because it’s the right thing to do.

Stop this wheel…I wanna get off!!!

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It occurred to me this week that I have been on a hamster wheel. I really did not know when I got here, but I know how. Since the beginning of the year when I decided to change my profit business into a foundation, I have been pushing, spinning, looking for what to do next.

The social media has me going crazy. To tweet or not? To Face book or not?  How many blogs are enough to show that I am serious about my cause/ movement? How many newsletters are too little, or too many? I do not want to flood my readers, but I don’t want to lose them either. Can I tell one list about everything or do I have to split my message to fine tune my reach?

What to do when I find out that my newsletter provider, Mail Chimp gets upset and sends me nasty messages? How do I get my blogs out there so that my efforts are magnified without extra work?

If you have a business on the Internet you know exactly what I mean.

What if you don’t?

Does this hamster wheel thing still apply to you?

Well, are you working, inside or outside the home?

Do you have kids or a spouse?

Are you a single mom just trying to stay afloat?

Do you have aging parents who count on you?

Do you have siblings who don’t pick up any slack?

Do you have a job that drains you of your life force?

Do you have a boss from hell?

Shall I go on?

Ok then, do you have to leave your kids while you travel for your high profile job?

Has your husband lost his job and now resents that he is depending on you?

Ok, you get it, you really do get it.

What’s a girl to do?

Let me tell you about a wonderful coaching tool that Martha Beck taught me and uses relentlessly with her own clients.

It is called the 3 B’s:

Bag it

Barter it

Better it

 

Let’s start with bag it.

This simply means to let it go. Let it go if it does not provide anything that is useful to your family. Do you really have to scrub the tub every day? Do you have to fold everyone’s laundry? Do you even have to do everyone’s laundry? What would happen if your teenager had to wear clothes that were strewn on the ground because they did not know if they were clean? Who would care? If the answer is “yes, I would care” I must ask WHY?

Would you care because the school may think you are a bad mom? Would it mean you loved your child any less? Let me float something… would the world come to an end?

 

Ok let’s go to barter it.

Barter means to exchange something for something else. Are you a computer whiz? Do you have a friend who is pitiful with her computer but she is an excellent cook. Can you barter a few home cooked meals per week for some computer lessons? She might be so appreciative if you suggested that. Are you low on funds and cannot get those little perks like a haircut or an occasional manicure?

Can you approach the owner of the Salon and offer to Face Book her services and do some tweets so he can get some exposure? Do you get the picture? The other kind of barter is you exchange $ for a job you cannot do. At Christmas time I pay my wonderful handy man (my house hold husband) to take down the Christmas tree and to retrieve all the boxes from the attic. How does he know where it all is? Easy, he put them away last year. He actually knows more than I do about my Christmas stuff.

 

Now to Better it.

Better it means to make the experience a little (or a lot ) better by playing some tricks on yourself.

Let’s say you have to get a root canal and you hate the dentist. You cannot bag it or you will be in pain and your tooth will get worse and fall out. You cannot barter it, because no one can do it for you. How can you better it? You could take your iPod and make a play list of soothing music to help you through it so you won’t have to hear the sound of the dreaded drill. You could dab some perfume on your upper lip so you won’t smell that burning as much. You could go shopping after, or treat yourself to a massage right after the dentist and you could barter the massage for some social media exposure for the therapist.

I hope by now you are getting it. It just requires a little forethought. This little investment will reap huge results. Now I need to find someone to barter a full blown Thanksgiving Dinner… any takers? I am a really great coach, can you use some coaching for a home cooked meal?

Chew on that a while, no pun intended.

Love and light

GOOGLE THIS!!

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Almost everything in this world can be Googled, right?

I can learn how to build a plane.

I can get piano lessons.

I can learn how to yodel.

I can teach myself Chinese.

Everything, right? Is that true?

 

NO, it is not.

I cannot access my inner wisdom with Google.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a site called www.intuition.source?

HaHa! Maybe Google will steal that idea!

Yes, I want a .source.

We have .tv and .net and .com and .org and .edu and .gov etc so I want a .source.

Should we feel “Crap! Then what’s a person to do?”

NO NO NO… I have the answer (read this sentence in a southern preacher voice)

YES my friends I haaavvveee the AAAnnnsweer.

 

 

Drum roll please…..

 

You already have a .source.

You have it within you.

There is an internal wisdom that most of us ignore.

 

This wisdom sometimes comes as a soft whisper, sometimes a moving picture in your head, or maybe a gut feeling. All of these ways are soft knowings of what your next best step needs to be.

These “knowings” are never judgmental shouts as in “you idiot you should’ve blah blah blah”

 

The knowings are comforting, even though they may be the biggest risk you ever took in your life.

 

To access this gift, just get quiet.

Try meditating, or prayer, or a silent walk.

 

Try a day of total silence; put this on your e mail responder and on your telephone messages.

 

You have much to gain and nothing to lose…

.source is waiting

National Women’s Equality Day.

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I know that this applies to more than suffrage. But I cannot help but
wonder how courageous the suffragists were to have stepped out from
the shadows of  ” women are not smart enough to vote”.
I think that for every overt suffragist there must have been 100
covert suffragists.

Yes I did pull that statistic out of my head, but it’s as good a guess as any.
Why do I say that?
I say this because I KNOW many women in 2011 who are still afraid to speak their truth.
They say things like ” Oh, I could never say that! At least not out loud!”  and other women
laugh and shake their heads in camaraderie.

Why are we still afraid to speak our truth? What EXACTLY will happen
if we do DECIDE to speak, and make NO mistake, this is a decision.
How many things in your life are you just accepting because it’s tradition?
The suffragists did not accept tradition as acceptable.
What is no longer acceptable in your life but you are ” waiting for the right time” to speak.

Guess what?
The right time is NOW. The first time you feel pain, or a twinge of
injustice, is THE EXACT RIGHT TIME.

Martin Luther King Jr said ” Our lives begin to end, the moment we become silent about things that matter”.

Gandhi said ” First they ignore you
Then they laugh at you
Then they fight you
Then you win.

I say then the victory is that much sweeter because you decided to speak up and be noticed.

I invite you to speak up today about an injustice in your home or life or church or community.

Use any one of the above quotes as you banner statement or find one you like… But take action.
Unless WE WOMEN do something about gender inequality, NOTHING will be done.

Is that acceptable to us?

What can we change by this day 2013.
Let’s do it, if not for us for our daughters!
Please, the time is now.

Love and light
Indrani

Love and light from Indrani and her iPad!

Is your mobile phone more important that your child?

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I was in a store the other day and overheard this: “Sit down and be quiet, you cannot disturb your mother while she shops” said a male voice. Then I saw that mom was about 8 months pregnant and sent her some silent blessings and good energy. It was hot, her belly was heavy and she needed nursing bras. Been there…it’s not so much fun!

As I was leaving the store, I saw the father happily playing on the telephone as the 2-1/2 or 3 year old just SAT alone, STARING into space. I opened the door…and then changed my mind. I went over to the sweet little boy and gave him a magazine from the shelf with these LOUD words, “Here honey, it’s not a KIDS magazine but there are some pretty pictures”. Dad smiled at me and then I said, still looking and smiling at the little one “Dad, give your son the telephone so he can play games and you sit and stare into space” and I left.

PEOPLE what are we doing? I see moms pushing babies in strollers and talking on cell phones. What is so damned important? Is EVERYONE a brain surgeon?

I hear parents complaining that their teenagers sit at the dinner table texting and ignore the family. Where are they learning it? What are we modeling for this generation?

It is the ADULTS who are modeling how, when, and where to use cell phones. The kids are SIMPLY following our leads.

I have a challenge for my readers:

  •  If you have young kids, do not talk on the cell phone when you are supposed to be actively parenting.
  • If your kids are grown and you see a young mom ignoring their young kids to chat on the phone, go up and engage the child and ask mom if she’s having an emergency and needs help.
  • If you see a father ignoring his children to be on the phone, find a way to say something.

If we all just shake our heads and say “who’s minding the kids while we chat away?” then NOTHING will change.

 Maybe these parents were themselves ignored. So let’s save a generation. Let’s speak up for the little ones so that they get as much parent time as they get free minutes.

Here’s a great guide to the time you spend with your kids:

  • Take a stab at the NUMBER of QUALITY hours you have given your kids over the past few months. Write it down. Look at the last 6 months of cell phone usage and take the average and compare the two numbers.

Guess what? If you are on the phone, you are not engaged with your kids.

I hope that is a wake-up call for this generation of parents. If you do not change, please do not complain that your kids are ignoring you when they are all grown up. After all, you must ask yourself “where did they learn to ignore their families so brilliantly?”

Maybe we should all just be looking in the mirrors.

 

Love and light from Indrani

These united states of CONFUSION

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I find myself in one of the many STATES of CONFUSION.

In my piece of the world, these states can look like:

Lethargy

Over excitedness

Needing to shop

Wanting a drink… Real bad!

Needing to eat chocolate, or cake, or the whole loaf of bread

Deep sixing Self Care so that I become a wreck within a short while.

Well it’s been a few weeks and the Confusion persists. I have tried
many of the above coping mechanisms and must report that
THEY ARE NOT WORKING!

they are not working.

So what now?
Here is what I am not willing to do:

  • I will not become an alcoholic…that is just too big of a hole to crawl out of.
  • I will not eat myself out of house and home… Losing all that weight
  • I would gain would be an even deeper hole to crawl out of
  • I do not have the energy I used to have for over excitement… I get tired rather easily these days… Opps… there’s the lethargy!
  • BTW Lethargy is also out… I refuse to become the lazy slob I used to be before I found triathlons and marathons ( at 50 I transformed myself from a lazy slob and became a triathlete and marathoner).

So I will do what I know best… I will follow the simple steps I laid
out in my book, The Indrani Principle, Inhale Life Exhale Joy.

The system that I wrote about in my book, so many years ago, is one that I STUMBLED upon, while STUMBLING thru my life and challenges.

After morphing from couch potato extradordinaire to elite athlete and then to author, life coach, business owner yada yada yada, I find myself stumbling yet again. I seem to be tripping all over my decisions. I am accepting blame for all kinds of accusations. I am
even convincing myself that somehow I have not been ” good enough”.
AND THEN something glorious happened… I was yet again accused of something and I felt my eyes do some rapid fire blinking as if to say…

Wait!
What?

Then I woke up from the known trance of
“This TOO is your fault!”

Ummmm… nOOOOOOO…. I reject your hypothesis. I bear no fault here.

So let me quickly outline the formula that I stumbled upon, 8 simple principles… Simple does not mean easy.
U…Ultimate principle
I…Intuition principle
F…Focus principle
E… environment principle
I…Intention principle
C…Creation principle
P…Planning principle
Y…You principle.

Tune in next Saturday for a guided tour of how to use these simply powerful principles.

Until then… I will enjoy my current state of confusion, knowing well that there are some juicy lessons here for me. The bigger the
confusion the bigger the lesson.

 

Love and light from Indrani and her iPad!

(photo credit middleastpost.com)

LOST

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I lost about 6 months’ worth of intellectual property. I had about 75 written blogs and classes and general musings in my notes on my iPad.

How did I lose it?

Here is the sad story:

I had a defunct email on my iPad and was deleting it to install my new email address (which BTW is: Indrani@indranislight.org) and when I hit delete, not only did the email go away but all my notes aligned with the email disappeared also.

I looked helplessly at the emptiness of my NOTES section. I could not even remember all the great stuff I had been writing over these 6 months. Even this blog is brand new but was supposed to be something else. I did not freak out, because it would have been no use. I did not yell or act ugly when the apple genius told me that there was nothing he could do. I recognized the truth when I heard it. It was just one of those things.

Is this the first time I have lost work? No. But it was the first time that I had lost this much work. I had to re-focus my energies and decide what to do next.

What was needed?

I needed a blog and soon.

What should I write?

There’s nothing as powerful as the present lessons to write about. In case you don’t think that this lesson can apply to you, let me give you some examples of stuff going up in smoke: You are counting on something happening in a certain order and out of the blue things change, like a vacation that gets cancelled, or you don’t get into the school of your choice, or your child decides that they are moving to another country and you don’t know how you’ll live without them… There are many ways to be lost.

You can bitch and moan or you can make a different plan. There are so many examples in life when stuff happens to good people, and I have no doubt that you are good people. I also have no doubt that you can use the brain in your head to come up with ways to cope.

The next best thing to do is to make a list of all that is still right with the world. This would look a lot like a gratitude list. Make the items as detailed as you can. It even helps to be grateful for that fact that you can remember that you are lost. What if you didn’t even know you were lost? That would look a little like dementia and that would be a little harder to fix.

So here are some of the items I AM grateful for:

I have use of my hands and can still type.

I still have a brain in my head that works pretty good and I can create new material.

I enjoy writing and have some readers who love to read what I have to say.

I did not lose my physical iPad.

I am sitting at the beginning of the last Harry Potter movie and writing this, while waiting for my baby girl with whom I have shared all the other HP movies. This just makes me all kinds of gratitude.

Do I still feel lost? Not so much anymore.

I have faith that I will create exactly what needs to be created at the right moment that it is necessary. In the meantime, I intend to just be grateful. Yep this is my plan.

Let me know what you can be grateful for.

Love and light from Indrani

Do you pledge allegiance… to YOU?

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We are about to celebrate another Independence Day in these United States. I am not a born American but I became a citizen of this, my adopted country, as soon as I could. For myself, I found MY personal independence here in the Unites States of America.

Why does America inspire so many to LIVE a full and complete life?

Maybe it is because the earliest Americans had to really scrap with the Almighty King George III to have the freedom that I enjoy today.

For a glimpse of a possible answer we must go back to the 1700s and what propelled the then British citizens, the Colonists to rise up and say to King George III, “Hey Dude… Enough is enough!”

Did the colonists unanimously decide to be independent in one fell swoop?

No, they did not…

Here is an amazing fact about the unanimous signing of The Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin tried to establish The Albany Plan in 1754 and it was soundly defeated, so that The Declaration of Independence was unanimously signed was nothing short of a miracle. We are told that “this coming together happened very gradually”. It seems that the colonies had a series of meetings each priming them for compromise. It was this feeling of oneness that made them a solid block.

Ben Franklin had tried back in 1754 to get the Albany Plan of Union passed and it was NOT supported.

According to the website I used, http://www.ushistory.org/us/9.asp, “This plan, under the slogan ‘Join or Die’, would have brought the colonial rivals together to meet the common threat of the French and the Indians. Much to Franklin’s chagrin, this plan was soundly defeated”.

The colonists thought themselves very much “British Subjects” yet they came together to DECLARE themselves free and independent of The Man just a few years after they rejected Franklin’s Albany Plan.

So what led up to Britain losing to a “rag tag group of freedom fighters”?

Can you imagine the surprise on ole King George’s face when the ship bearing the news that the colonists were winning arrived?

I imagined that he must have declared, in the vernacular of the times, “are you guys sh**ing me?”

From my research, I understand that the push for independence came about from a string of steps that the British made. Some of these are called the Intolerable Acts:

1 Boston Port Act

2 Massachusetts Government Act

3 Administration of Justice Act

4 Quebec Act

The Colonists were further pushed over the proverbial edge with the Stamp Act. This said that all official documents had to bear certain stamps and the costs were extremely probative. People could not even issue birth certificates without these added expenses.

The masses were getting restless. Hey King…you’re in for a bit of a fight, buddy!

Further Independence was not won in ONE epic battle. Rather it was a series of smaller battles, each one giving the colonists more confidence.  “How could the Americans ever hope to defeat the mighty British Empire in a military conflict? Americans faced seemingly impossible obstacles. When the guns fired at Lexington and Concord in 1775 there was not yet even a Continental Army.”

Some of the major battles of the American Revolution are:

April 1775 Lexington-Concord

June 1775 Bunker Hill

December 1775 Quebec

Oct 1776 White Plains

Sept 1777 Saratoga

Sept 1779 Siege of Savannah

Sept 1781 Siege of Yorktown

There are many more…

Why list any of the above?

This is, by way of telling you that Independence is a fight, that is worth it. Your personal independence is worth it. Your personal battles are worth fighting and you will gain confidence with each battle fought.

List your intolerable acts.

List your battles.

Begin to make your case.

Thomas Jefferson was a major writer of the Declaration of Independence, and he had assistance from John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R Livingston and Roger Sherman.

This amazing document has 4 parts

1. Preamble… Tells why the document is written, gives all the reasons why the people must support this.

2. Rights of all the people…life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

3. List of Grievances…unfair actions of the King and Parliament and lists steps the colonists tried to take to settle these differences. This part ends with saying the King of England is “unfit to be the ruler of a free people”.

4. States that all the colonies are free and independent states.

So as I wish you a MOST HAPPY FOURTH… I invite you to declare your own Independence over your fears and the rules that are holding you back from living in true Freedom.

Here is a little formula to follow:

Write down some of the battles you have fought, give them some juicy names.

Write down some intolerable things that you have endured.

Get your peeps together, the ones who support you and begin the writing of your Freedom Document.

Write your declaration, change it as often as you wish, but keep working on it.

Send me your declarations and I will post some to my blog for the world to see.

Go forth and find your freedom wherever you may live.

Love and light from Indrani

Frustration

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The most frustrating situations occur when hard decisions have to be made. The decision is obvious, yet it is of the anticipated reactions by others that causes the frustration and pain.

Perhaps if we did not pre-determine the reactions in our heads, we could make the right decision easily, and then have the clear mind and heart to deal with the repercussions, if they occur at all.