“A man who sees action in inaction and inaction in action has understanding among men and discipline in all action he performs.” ~ Bhagavad Gita

I learned one of the most important lessons in my life from a seagull… I know – how ‘70’s of me… right?!

It was one of those amazing, endless Chicago summers and I was in the depths of transition– break up, job change, living on my own for the first time – a triple whammy of change that left me exhausted.

But I couldn’t sleep – noooo, not in my brand new apartment, not in the beautiful new bed I had bought to celebrate my independence, not inside anywhere.  Part of this may well have been that I have one of those mothers who would never let you stay inside on a beautiful day – and all the days were beautiful that summer.

So, in my free time, I took to sleeping on the beach (somehow this was allowed… mom never did care what you did as long as it was OUTSIDE)

It was really windy that day – windy enough that I felt a bit like I was getting sandblasted – but I couldn’t not go to the beach.  I’d been there awhile when I rolled over to brush the drifting dunes off my blanket – and that’s when I saw them.

Over head, there was an entire flock of seagulls.  The birds were flapping like crazy, trying to fly into the wind, but the wind was strong enough that they weren’t getting anywhere – all that motion, energy, and effort – all to stay in one place…

Directly

Over

My

Head

(crap)

(literally)

So, now I’m REALLY tuned in and awake… in fact, nothing on the beach was more interesting to me than those seagulls – it was almost as if the birds were in Technicolor and everything else had faded to gray…  and as I peered at them intently, one bird, at the very back of the V stopped flapping.

Just Stopped.

I watched as the air currents took this lone seagull and shot her like an arrow on a course perpendicular to where all the rest of the birds were trying to get.  She took off so fast that she was almost out of sight within a breath.

And then, at the very last moment before she disappeared, I watched my bird, still not flapping, change direction again.  The wind button-hooked her around on a right angle to the rest of the flock, and before I knew it, she had landed gracefully on the pillar that all those other birds were trying to reach.

And I GOT it.

• Sometimes, the shortest distance between two points is NOT a straight line.

• Sometimes, what seems like a detour is really a shortcut.

• Sometimes, no matter how much effort we put in, we’re just not going to get there by doing what we’re doing.

• Sometimes, the best thing we can do is surrender, and let the winds (or the waters or whatever) of Fate (or the Universe, or God, or whoever) take us where we’re meant to go, as opposed to where we think we should.

• Sometimes, it’s ok to go along for the ride instead of insisting upon steering.

• Sometimes, we really don’t know what’s best for us, and in those moments it’s ok to not do anything, but instead to wait until the next right action is clear to us.

Sometimes, it’s good to be reminded.

“By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.” ~ Lao Tzu

(* “I dream of wayward gulls…” ~ William F. Claire)

“Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.” ~ Benjamin Franklin

We’ve been talking here in the HHP offices this morning – not just about the daily ins and outs of the business or the things you might expect us to discuss, i.e. energy medicine, manifesting, healing, the Bears –  but on subjects ranging from emotions & neural pathways to the death penalty & the overall failure of the penal system.

The nice thing, from my perspective anyway, is that this isn’t unusual.  We are fortunate to have friendly discourse on a wide range of subjects as part of our daily routine.  We talk about what’s going on politically, the news of the day, what we’ve been reading, ideas that have struck us.  We discuss, debate, springboard off each other’s thoughts, weigh in with our own knowledge & critical thinking.

Pondering ideas on our own can lead to some amazing leaps of understanding, and having the space to share that understanding, and grow from others’ response and viewpoint can both deepen and broaden our learning.  But maybe more importantly, it gives us a place to practice our discernment and cements us as a community.

Frequently, I walk away from these impromptu “meetings of the mind” with a much greater clarity and appreciation for the depths and intricacies of whatever the subject.   On occasion, I leave gnashing my teeth over a clash with an opposing view point – but even these frustrations bear fruit both in helping me see my own thoughts more clearly and seeing a wider perspective.  Always, I have renewed appreciation for the people I work with – their intelligence, intuition, and our connection to each other that allows for meaningful conversation.  We are all teachers and students here – a “Sarah’s Circle” vs. a “Jacob’s Ladder” – and we both give and receive the blessing of joyous and generous intellect.

We’re going to have a formal meeting of the minds this Friday, November 13th, at 6:30 PM.  We’ll be discussing gender roles, relationships, and the perceived disconnect between men and women… should make for a nice, light evening!

; )

We’d love for you to come and gift us with your perspective, your critical thinking, your wondrous intelligence… what a blessing for us all!

“The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.” ~ Sigmund Freud

“We starve, look at one another…Walking.. in our winter coats…Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in, the SUN shine IN!” ~ lyrics from the musical Hair

Today is a good day… in fact, today is a GREAT day!

It’s unseasonably warm and the sunlight is pouring down like the rain we in Chicago have had so much of.  This for me makes all the difference.

A friend of mine once commented, watching me skip across the lawn on the first sunny day after 9 straight days of downpour, “WOW, you really are solar powered, aren’t you?”  And yesterday, one of my favorite baristas at Starbucks noted, “You’re like a flower, always turning your face to the sun.”

It’s true; I am.  I blossom in the summer and feel as if I begin to wilt as the days grow shorter and winter looms.  In the past few years, I’ve noticed that fall brings with it a sense of impending doom as I slowly feel the brightness of my personality slip into hibernation.

This year is no different- actually, if anything, this year it’s worse.

Perhaps it’s the fact that we here in Chicago only got about 6 weeks of “real” summer before the cool days began again.  Maybe it’s my body memory of what seemed like an endless stretch of gray from Halloween to 4^th of July last year…

In the past, in order to combat my winter blues, I’ve upped my exercise, watched my diet, increased my water intake, taken melatonin, and purchased a light therapy box – sitting in front of it daily, like a plant under grow lights.  Last winter, against my more rational judgment, I broke down and went tanning once a week.  All of these things have helped, but nothing has ever completely dispelled the sense that a great weight was dragging me down or the urge to go to bed and not get up again until spring.

All I know is that I’m not interested in living like that again.  So I’ve done more research…

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) affects more than 6% of the population, with people in northern climates 7 times more likely to be diagnosed than those in the south.  Three quarters of those affected are women.

According to the Mayo Clinic, symptoms include:

• Depressed mood
• Irritability
• Hopelessness
• Anxiety
• Loss of energy
• Social withdrawal
• Oversleeping (feeling like you want to hibernate)
• Loss of interest in activities you normally enjoy
• Appetite changes, especially a craving for foods high in carbohydrates such as pastas, rice, bread and cereal
• Weight gain
• Difficulty concentrating and processing information

Sound familiar?

In the past few years, some scientists have linked the growing number of SAD sufferers with a high rate of vitamin D deficiency.  With the very real threat of sun cancer, very few of us spend enough time in the sun without heavy duty sun screen which not only blocks the cancer causing rays but also prohibits our bodies from creating D naturally.

According to a very well sited wikipedia article, “Vitamin D deficiency results in impaired bone mineralization and leads to bone softening diseases, rickets in children and osteomalacia in adults, and possibly contributes to osteoporosis…  Vitamin D malnutrition may also be linked to an increased susceptibility to several chronic diseases, such as high blood pressure, tuberculosis, cancer, periodontal disease, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, seasonal affective disorder , peripheral artery disease, cognitive impairment which includes memory loss and foggy brain, and several autoimmune diseases including type 1 diabetes. There is an association between low vitamin D levels and Parkinson’s disease, but whether Parkinson’s causes low vitamin D levels, or whether low vitamin D levels play a role in the pathogenesis of Parkinson’s disease has not been established.”

(other great information about the D deficiency epidemic can be found here and about D’s potential role in preventing Swine Flu here)

In addition, new research suggests that D may be crucial in both cancer & cardio vascular disease prevention.

YIKES

So armed with all this research, I took myself off to the store.  Now, there’s also a lot of information out there from some very reputable sources that suggests that the current daily recommended dosage of vitamin d may not be anywhere close to sufficient for healthy living, never mind correcting deficiency.  I settled on a dosage that I felt comfortable with and went for it…

And, within a couple of days, I felt better.

I was leery, of course.  Perhaps it was just a placebo effect?  But it’s been several weeks now and I continue to feel bright and sunny on the inside even when the weather is cloudy and gray.  And best of all, I don’t feel dragged down… the spring is back in my step; I’m interested in being social, and I feel like I’ve got new buds on me – hopefully enough to keep my me-ness blossoming through the winter months.

That internal sunshine, that sense of lightness, that sense of being grounded in who you really are instead of being at the mercy of the season…. it’s worth the research, worth consulting your primary care physician (which of course we recommend that you do), worth the trip to the store.

“Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine.” ~ Anthony J. D’Angelo

“A world without a Sabbath would be like a man without a smile, like a summer without flowers, and like a homestead without a garden. It is the joyous day of the whole week.” ~ Henry Ward Beecher

I am continually fascinated by the “discovery” of practical, real life wisdom in religious traditions that we in Western Culture have rejected. More and more often, in this post-technological age, we are reconnecting and recovering an understanding – on a body level – of the value of various rites.

In the case of a dedicated Sabbath, I think we lost the connection to the why. Going to church and visiting with family and neighbors had become a “have to” and we were going through the motions without those actions having meaning. So when the stores started to be open, and we had to go to work, it seemed like an opportunity to put a little more cash in our pockets and move away from religious institutions that no longer worked for us.

Today, more than 30 years later, I think we are beginning to see what we’ve been missing. To have one day in our busy weeks when we can connect to our deeper selves and nature, when we can tend to our community, and make contact once again with the larger picture now seems an unbelievable luxury. It seems a luxury – but what it really is is a necessity. We crave it like our body craves oxygen – we don’t expect the car to keep going if we never fill the gas tank, and yet we push ourselves to do just that.

I’m not advocating that everyone go back to church – our ways of reconnecting and recharging are as beautiful and varied as we are as beings. For some, organized religion works, for others God/Goddess/The Universe/whatever can be found in watching the dance of light on water, listening to the strains of a far off saxophone, tasting the perfect pumpkin ice cream, running, dancing, laughing…

What I am suggesting is that we make some time on a regular basis to recover our smiles, tend to our emotional/spiritual flowers, and reconnect with JOY!

Happy Sabbath!

I recently spent some time thinking aloud with a group of very creative people in an attempt to come up with some tactics to help busy, care-giving people find balance in their lives.  In discussion, we had to acknowledge that all the equilibrium-achieving methodologies in the world won’t  help if the people who need them don’t feel they can take the time to use them… we needed to find a way to give people permission to take care of themselves.

And then it hit me – one of those bolt-out-of-the-blue, Cosmic Ah-Ha, life defining moments… the only person who can give any us permission is….. OURSELF!!!!!

Yeah… I know…

DUH

What can I say, sometimes the most earth shattering realizations are the most obvious…

On the other hand, how many of us are acting in the world as if we have permission to be anything and do anything we want?  When was the last time you gave yourself permission to take a nap, eat the last piece of pie, get a massage, SAY NO when you really feel it…. not to mention take a risk, try something new, be bold, act on your intuition?

Really, TRULY, as psychologist and educator William Glasser teaches, there is no external locus of control – there is nothing outside of ourselves that can make us do or not do anything so long as we are willing to give ourselves permission and accept the consequences…

And the consequences of self care are a greater sense of well being, renewed energy, fresh perspectives, a zest for life, better relationships….

Yup, I can accept that.  : )

“We need to give ourselves permission to act out our dreams and visions, not look for more sensations, more phenomena, but live our strongest dreams – even if it takes a lifetime.” ~Vijali Hamilton