Check out this important event for parents of daughters, coaches, teachers..anyone who influences growing girls:
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Often, in asking students the question, “What role does beauty play in your definition of health?” they think I’m asking about human physical beauty. I do understand the confusion since vitality can be clearly visible in one’s countenance. But what I’m really asking about refers to the experiential and how much personal time is spent engaged with art, music, literature, nature, spirituality, or other meaningful things one would classify as beautiful. Oftentimes, we don’t realize that a complete definition of health includes the integration of beauty into our lives, but it does, in a big way. Beauty fills a giant space in the core of human beingness. On the flip side, as we age and tend to spend more and more time thinking about what’s wrong and worrisome, we further reinforce what’s broken. But how to fix and solve those problems comes only partly from the itemized solutions and goals we think up. The rest actually comes from allowing ourselves regularly scheduled time to just be with something profoundly bigger than our problems—with something beautiful that stirs both heart and soul.
Given the choice, why not go there? “There” is anything that does it for you. For me, the natural world satisfies a lot of this definition involving beauty. I am mentally and viscerally enthralled by the relationship between sky and ocean, and the constant fleeting change between them. I took photos of this magnificent show last week over the course of 90 minutes, from about 7:15pm to 8:30pm as I hung out in the calm Gulf water and then from my chair in the sand. So moved and awed by these gorgeous natural elements, I actually sang, out loud (don’t worry, no animals nor marine life were harmed in any way). However, what I feel is profoundly beautiful, and what you feel is beautiful, probably differ. What is it for you? The important thing is to know in one’s heart what that is. Conscious awareness is essential here in order to participate in the experience when it shows up. While I love the ocean, I spend most of my time in Kentucky, which I also love. I’m enthralled here too, from my front porch.
I was acutely aware of everything good about this rainy day, the smell of the warm damp air, the sound of water, the flowers and happy birds everywhere. It took just 10 minutes on the porch for my bad mood to be soothed after paying medical bills all morning. I would definitely classify this experience as a beautiful one—I love a rainy morning in the summer, but it was Apple’s calm, sweetly quiet observing that made my heart melt in the midst of it. And all at once I felt a revelation about the simplicity of beauty in beingness. What matters most can be so routine and so right in front of us all the time that all it takes is some stillness and some noticing.
So now I know. These occasions add up; they make a difference in the overall quality of a life lived. Near the end, I want to say that I lived a beautiful life. So I intend it now—I’m seeking it and living it—trying to make enough time for the nourishment of beauty in my definition of health today. It must be working; I feel pretty good these days too. I do plan to work on my singing voice now. Anochi afar v’efer. In Hebrew this means, “I am but dust and ashes.” Seems to be a less than perky reminder about the inevitable, I know, but it does offer supportive wisdom actually. In the Jewish spiritual tradition of Mussar (the Hebrew word for ethics), the soulful human trait of humility plays a fundamental role in a life of balance. To realize that each of us no matter our accomplishments, inevitably become part of the physical earth, is humbling. Given the truth of this ultimate reality, how can any of us believe we are inferior to others, or superior? Anochi afar v’efer, it’s a perspective grabber, and a cool equalizer. This raises a significant question about what it means to be human in the time we have. How do we strive to fill in the time between life and, ahem, the alternative? How do we make our lives meaningful even in the mundane? How is one’s “mundane” existence actually not inferior to someone else’s life of adventure, leadership, intellectual contribution? We think of all kinds of answers here, or maybe we don’t even know where to begin.
The mastery of something refers to the inner realm, the part of us expressed through the soul traits we are all born with but that each of us have in varying degrees of development and measure: humility, patience, gratitude, compassion, order, equanimity, honor, simplicity, enthusiasm, silence, generosity, truth, moderation, loving-kindness, responsibility, trust, faith, yirah (awe of God). Read the rest of… Dear Readers, I continue to be awed and amazed by compassionate teen girls who support and help empower their younger "sisters". A few years ago, some of the wise teens in Lexington wrote an inspiring book designed to empower girls and their moms. The sentiments and guidance about healthy body image, self-esteem, and mom/daughter communication continue to be a household staple of support and wisdom for many families today. Our little grass-roots effort to help others is always blooming new little buds; we are now funding eating disorders therapy for girls whose parents can't afford it. 100% of funds collected from sales of our book this season will help make this happen! Please buy our book and join a community of people who also want self-esteem and health for the girls in their lives. Even if you don't know a girl to give this book to, someone you know knows one, your local library would like one, your dentist's sister's daughter would love one! From all of us at G.R!, Mail a check for $28 ($3 of this will cover the cost of shipping) to
Girls Rock! Inc My last column claimed that balance is possible in the face of chaos. I promised that we are all capable of maintaining inner peace no matter the environmental stressors—that work, play, challenge and rest are healthy integrative aspects of our lives. About the complaint of not feeling vacation-peace and bliss at home, I suggested that intention is everything. Wehhhhhhhhl, I wrote that column from the window seat of my charming straw-roof cabana in the Yukatan Peninsula just steps from the ocean as a warm breeze kissed my hair. A little voice in my consciousness said, “Writing about stress management from an emotional and geographic location that represent the opposite of stress might not be believable.” Yes, mi pequeno internal voice doesn’t use commas, but it is very wise. And it is true that faith is much easier to write about when times are good. So today I revisit my claim from the living center of chaos. I have been home for exactly 10 days, and I have weathered exactly 6 mini crisis since my return. 6! This might be a record. How am I managing, solving, dealing, integrating, going with the flowing now, you ask? I am leaning on ALL of my rebalancing support strategies. It’s a lot like the saying, “Don’t wait for the fire before buying the hose.” Turns out my impressive hose collection really is useful. And because of it, I think I’m managing with more grace than I used to—it’s clear I’m not going it alone. One significant resource I relied on this week was prayer. I sat down in a beautiful location near my house where I could feel the vibrancy of nature all around me, and I asked God for help, a lot of it. I remember specifically not knowing what the help would look like for this and that issue, and especially for my daughter Abby, struggling with a problem so deeply that she’d lost her appetite for days, but I asked for the ability to recognize the help when it showed up. Two days later when she finally felt hungry, Abby had me google the new Dominos in our Andover neighborhood. I dialed and we huddled together over the speaker-phone conveying our dreams of extra toppings. But when it came time for the phone number, pizza boy could not make sense of my cell number. Again and again we repeated it as he typed away on his Dominos Pizza computer, but politely he kept apologizing that there were too many digits.
Yes, it was a very good joke! I had accidentally tried to order a pizza from Dominos in Andover, in the United Kingdom! We looked at each other and then at the phone, and then at each other. The swirling confusion around us dissolved into laughter, “Haahaah, the most expensive pizza on the planet, haha haha haha!” Laughing harder, “After this phone call, we can’t afford pizza, hah hah hah hah hah!” Stomach hurting and tears streaming, “I hope we’re still hungry next week when it gets here! Hahahahahahaha haahaahaa haaahaaahaahahahahahahahahaha! We laughed at ourselves for about 10 minutes and then for 20 more as we called our family members to share what we had stupidly, hilariously tried to do. Finally, with ribs and face hurting we slowed down, exhausted. Abby looked at me calmly and with a new light in her eyes, she said, “I feel so much better.” Miraculously, what changed for my girl most in those minutes was her own sense of perspective. While the details of her week of struggle remained, suddenly her world felt much bigger than the confine of her problem—what better way to have the point illustrated than to order a pizza from overseas? But what’s more, when 16 year-old Abby saw that her problem wasn’t her entire life, just merely a part of it, I knew that my prayer had been answered. God comes through every time, and has a most excellent sense of humor, because we want to laugh. Read the rest of… I’ve been lulled to sleep for two nights by the constant thrum of the sea meeting shoreline outside my cabana. This morning when my daughter Abby awoke after 11 hours of sleep, she said, “How is it only 6:30am?” Welcome to vacation where time expands! I think that “vacation” is misunderstood. There is typically no more obvious time in life when we are more present, aware, and happy. It’s here, away from the rigors of usual demands (and ironically the reliable comforts of home) that we come home to ourselves–act in accordance with the natural rhythm of our internal needs and desires. Vacation implies that everything is left behind: work, school, bills, responsibilities, relationships, routine. But, is all that stuff really the everything of our lives, or is it just the stuff we’re in the habit of thinking of as everything?
So one of us kept a clear head and here we are. We’re just over two days into our beachside vacation and she has easily retained more study knowledge than she usually manages (painfully) in three days. And, she’s most definitely taking breaks to sun herself, swim, shop, swing in the hammock, walk along the beach, eat, read fiction, and nap. This excursion to Mexico with said previously stressed teenager was actually a little experiment in faith, for me. I knew in my heart that if she could study at home, she could do so here while drinking from a coconut and looking at the water each time she lifts her head. I wanted her to experience this combination of daily integrated, rest/play/work, because this stress-less integration is what I want for her for the rest of her life. Read the rest of…
I’m still celebrating International Women’s Day, but I’m calling it Fantastic InterGenerational Women in my Life Month. I feel so lucky to know some really compassionate, hilarious, brave, nutty, wise, strong women, and they come in an array of decades. I often wish I could gather all of them into one room so that they could know one another. (Hmmmmmmmmmm! What are all y’all doing on my birthday this summer?) This March 2013, I want to celebrate one Fantastic in particular, but I’m not sure of how she’d feel about the personal publicity, so I’ll use The Fake Name Generator here and henceforth refer to my friend by her alias. Delvonia Fansmetonopolis is a dedicated rehabilitation therapist. In her 70’s she is beautiful and hip, and people feel they can tell her anything because she has such a welcoming way about her. She laughs with you when you laugh, and cries with you when you cry. Her heart is bigger than she is tall, and she truly wants healing for everyone—this is her mission. While this mission may be true for most service professionals and healers, what’s unique about D is her dedication to her own personal healing. In her seventh decade, she is truly a role model who LIVES the healing she recommends to everyone. She’s not shy to confide that she is always learning, growing, finding new inspiration—that her health depends on physical, emotional and spiritual well-being. She teaches that here is no one magic pill, and having survived her own debilitating years of despair, D’s courage and commitment to a life of balance gently but surely precede her when she enters a room. It’s this vital energy that is a gift to anyone seeking his/her own courage and balance. Because recovery is such a raw and painful process, the promise of healing carried in the aura of the facilitator means everything, even before a word is spoken, and certainly in the spaces between words.
Though nervous, as anybody would be, D faced her surgery bravely and gets high marks for recovery to this point (though she was calling patients from her bed despite the fact that she barely had a voice in the days after surgery.) But it is something else entirely that inspires and moves me each time I talk to her. Simply, my friend D is FULL of grace, love, patience, and gratitude. How easy it would be to feel sorry for one’s self—the pain, the genetic misfortune, the inconvenience, the terror associated with this type of diagnosis. But instead, she has chosen to move with the very flow of her life; she is present in the now and she is finding a way to smell the flowers (well, she’s not bending down but she’s enjoying them symbolically)! I wouldn’t have guessed that each of my “consoling” post-surgery calls to her would leave ME inspired and reassured, but they have, each and every one. D’s ability to see her situation as an opportunity for deeper healing is transforming her very situation. Read the rest of…
 Click here to review/purchase. In 2004, after years of processing my own body image issues, and with a determination to have things be different for my daughters, I didn’t expect my own child to begin that steep slide into dieting misery so soon, if at all. I took a few hours to recover from my little girl’s statement of deprivation, and then I came to the conclusion that if I really wanted things to be different, I would need to take action myself, and fast. === The conversation and research that followed opened my eyes to several truths:
So what’s a mother to do? I wasn’t certain, but I was sure that I wouldn’t allow one more generation of women in my family to struggle with the self-hatred that comes from a legacy of criticism, peer pressure, never ending dieting, and debilitating low self-esteem. I did have a hunch that in order to help make changes for my daughter and her friends, I needed to help make cognitive and emotional changes for moms, too. Because after all, we were all once girls who grew on those very messages. No one ever told us to stop listening. And so, with mother-bear determination, I called health and wellness professionals in my Lexington community who seemed to carry some authority: pediatrician; nutritionist; psychotherapist; police-officer. And I asked them to become a part of the community that would influence and help raise healthy girls. With professionals on board, Girls Rock!: Workshops for Girls and Moms, was born. We would all come together, pre-teen girls, mothers, and professionals, for a big empowering day of programming that would make all of us responsible for healthier language, relationship to self and friends, and habits at home. But still, the kids in attendance would need real, up-close and personal role models to emulate—people they could think of as big sisters—the ultimate role models of omniscient authority to a girl. So I recruited a diverse team of teenagers with leadership potential who seemed to defy what Mary Pipher identifies as one of our culture’s greatest tragedies, “Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts.” Something profound happened in our very first workshops when the Girls Rock! Teen Mentors spoke. They stood with confidence in front of girls, mothers, and professionals and said, “We are all different sizes, shapes, and ethnicities—this is what normal looks like—this is what pretty looks like”. The young audience of girls listened closely, but the mothers and professionals were moved to tears. And then it was clear. Hearing for the first time from people who represented our own youth, that beauty was never meant to be one-size-fits-all, opened the blinds and let the sun shine on the truth that we always were, and are right now, pretty enough and good enough, and that we are so much more. Isn’t that what we really want for ourselves?
One workshop led to another, and another, and we became a non-profit and published a book (Click here to order), and I can report that my daughters now teens themselves, are Girls Rock! Mentors, today. Hallelujah. Looking back now, it’s amazing to me that I could have pulled this off—recruiting and training teen leaders, finding passionate professionals and generous keynote speakers, and reaching out to other mothers and girls who would attend. Technically, I didn’t know anything about running this kind of thing—I was driven intuitively, and I found that women both young and old could relate, so I kept going. I prayed that my daughters and their friends would benefit, and that I could send my girls to sleepovers knowing they would be influenced in positive ways. Year after year, Girls Rock! continues to be one big community of volunteers and families showing up just because we have all been affected, are still affected by a ridiculously unfair standard. But most of all, we gather because we care about the development of self-esteem in girls. Though there is undeniable power in pervasive cultural messages especially saturated by media today, there is something more powerful about women coming together to educate, heal, and find inspiration together. As girls and women we are a part of something that is much bigger—it’s called Sisterhood, The Women’s Lodge, the Feminine Divine. This is a place anywhere and everywhere on this planet where females of every age, status, and background can gather to nurture one another with acceptance. It’s simple and it’s a magical thing to be a part of. It makes us grateful to have been born as girls. So, it turns out that my years of healing before motherhood were just the very beginning for me. My young daughter’s fateful entry into self-doubt felt like familiar territory—I couldn’t have imagined it would provide me the drive to heal more deeply, nor to help find a solution for my community. While the distance travelled to arrive to a place of peace is never easy with these issues, I’m feeling it’s been worth the journey so far. Most of all, as my daughters grow into adulthood with perspective, confidence, self-esteem, I will say that I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Prayer has helped a lot too.
After planning for months that several days at the end of February would be dedicated to the specific and serious de-cluttering of my home space, and after very painful procrastination during designated well-planned days, I unexpectedly ran into a colleague who offered up an identical story, strangely. While waiting in line for our lattes, he recounted his story of scheduled organizing, in the final week of February, and a lack of giddy-up in the GO. My antennae picked up the signal with maximum alarm. Inside my head it sounded like this: What?! Beeeeeep! Beeeeeep! Beeeeep! What?! I knew immediately that this encounter wasn’t just about the random coincidence of a mirrored situation from someone I rarely see and who never discloses information about his personal life. Nor was it about the unbelievable story of what was happening in the latte line. Nope, much bigger, much, much bigger, and I became consciously, thrillingly aware of it in its unfolding this time. Right there, in that informal setting surrounded by average people and beverages, I recognized the inter-relativity of everything, and, that I create my own reality whether I realize it or NOT. And this is what it look like: Read the rest of…
But I won’t wake her up; she is very tired. She didn’t get as much sleep as usual because for some period of time over the course of the night, she helped herself to a leftover chicken. Or maybe it only actually took 5 minutes and then she enjoyed a deeply replenishing tryptophan induced slumber for 8.75 hours. I’ll never know. I walked into the kitchen this morning, and the evidence was everywhere—the trash can tipped over, assorted garbage, mango skins, and the empty very clean roasted chicken containers were sprawled across the room—the cleanest garbage a person could ask for.
So I tested my hypothesis by calling my pup to the crime scene. I didn’t warn her with my tone that this was a test (and may I just say that this was very canny and professional behavior on my part, very, very canny and professional at 6:47 A.M after staggering out of bed with my dream all around me still. I have had no formal crime scene training). So she came wagging toward the kitchen but stopped on the threshold, head down, tail disappearing. Aha! She had done it. It was not a raccoon. Mystery solved. She slinked away to hide on my bed. In this 8 minute video, people of varying faiths discuss forgiveness. I’m drawn to The Dalai Lama in the final 40 seconds who says, “Anger [doesn’t] help—only destroy[s] your own peace of mind. Deliberately, try to keep your mind more calm.” Herein people are discussing forgiveness in far more serious terms than the sins of a beloved pet, but I feel it’s worth saying here that we practice first at home. What an opportunity to check-in with ourselves about our reactions. I ask myself here if I can respond rather than react in general, to perceived slights from others. What about when I’m kept waiting and it’s no one’s fault but a “stupid system” like traffic that has inconvenienced me AND caused me to be late? What about later today when I have to deal with roasted-chicken-carcass-dog-vomit in my carpet? Read the rest of… |
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