Happy New Year!

As we say goodbye to 2008 and welcome in a new year, I invite you to ask yourself what you are ready to let go of in 2009. What do you not want to bring with you into the new year? What would you like to live your beautiful, precious life without?

For me, I am ready to let go of the ongoing self-talk about what I "should be doing".

I have noticed this year that there are times I feel wonderful, alive, healthy, connected and other times that I feel stressed, in pain and at odds in my relationship with food.

The common thread I am noticing is that the wonderful moments are the ones I am fully present in. The uncomfortable ones are the ones where, if I pay close attention, I realize I have an ongoing stream of thoughts running of all the things I "should be doing" instead of being present for what I am actually doing.

I don't think that letting go of this habit is going to happen overnight but I am willing to make changing it a priority. My intention for 2009 is to be more fully present in each moment. I hope that many of you will be there to share some of those moments with me!

I would love to hear from you about what you are ready to let go of. Please share your comments.

I wish you tremendous blessings and peaceful good health for the coming year.

Turning 40...Happy Birthday to Me!

No one could have been more surprised by this surprise party than me. When told by my husband that there would not be any kind of diversionary tactics that would have led to my being appropriately dressed for the occasion, my cousin is reported to have responded "She is going to divorce you."

But his devotion to the element of surprise was not to be dissuaded. So...here I am unshowered and completely shocked when friends began arriving at my door. As you can see from the picture, many bottles of wine arrived with the guests and I suppose this quickly softened the shock of being discovered disheveled and completely unprepared. I loved it.

I also love these birthdays that end in zero. There is something about marking a new decade of life that seems to call for a look back at what the past ten years have meant and a look forward towards what the next ten could hold. That kind of reflection generally causes me to turn my focus inward and I had intended for the celebration of my 40th birthday to be a fairly private event with time for some journal writing and quiet moments alone and a little snuggle on the couch with my husband and kids. Alas, life (and my husband!) had other plans and the surprise party was just one of several occasions over the course of more than a week that were filled with friends, family, food and, yes, wine!

I took this turn of events to signal a sort of opening up of my heart and my life to mark the beginning of this new decade as a time that will include bigger events and broader horizons than I had originally imagined. And being thrown into a party looking like I just woke up...well...I had always hoped that by the time I was 40 I really wouldn't care too much about that kind of thing anymore and...well, I cared. But not nearly as much as I would have at 30 which I feel pretty darn great about actually. Happy Birthday to me!

Surging vs. Dwelling

I've been hiding. Hiding from holding myself accountable. To new goals. To endless lists. To my own health counselor. To my health counselor buddies who find me anyways.

Being a self-admitted over-achiever, this hiding out has been a welcome break from my usual approach of throwing my hand up and volunteering to be held accountable for whatever I am planning to be my next big giant goal.


In his blog post "What Consumers Do in a Downtown", Grant McCracken, an anthropologist affiliated with MIT, describes two modalities of consumer behavior. In a surging mentality, the world "teems with new features, new things, new opportunities, new excitement." In a dwelling mentality the consumer is focused not on the future but on the present, we "stop anticipating and start savoring."

So maybe I haven't been hiding so much as dwelling. But it has nothing to do with the economy.

Reality Check

Somewhere around May I got a wake up call that sent me running into my hide-out (aka my home) for a much needed breather and a long session of introspection that has focused largely on my role as a mom.

On Mother's Day week, my children's preschool held a tea for the Moms. My daughter's teacher created a project for the kids to list three things that their mom liked to do. The lists were decorated and posted on a wall and all of us Moms had to "find ourselves" on the wall.

I knew right away that I wasn't the mom who liked to: Eat Cheeseburgers and Swim Underwater. But when I started reading about the moms who liked to "read with me", "pick flowers with me", and "watch me ride my bike", I started getting a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

And then I saw it. A beautiful pink sheet covered in silk flowers that I recognized immediately:

My Mom Likes to:

Work

Drink Tea

Eat Granola

And there I was. I wanted to cry. No where on my four year old daughter's list was any mention of what I liked to do that involved her.

But she was amazingly accurate. Our lives had changed last year as I went to school and created a new career. And just when I was starting to feel that the transition was becoming too much for all of us, she felt it too.

In one swift moment, I knew our lives would need to change again. This was not the mom I intended to be. This was not the life I had meant for us to have.

So I have been hiding. At home. With my family. Hiding from all my lists of life goals and personal ambitions while I regroup as a woman and a mom.

It has been beautiful and painful all at once. And I am beginning to see how I am now ready to emerge into the next stage of my life with a new perspective on accountablity and self-care.

And a new vision for what my "unpredictable future" can be.

More soon on what that all means...

Grown Up Tantrums

Have you ever thrown a tantrum? As an adult? Until recently, I would have answered no. But something was going on with me that I couldn't explain and it occurred to me that maybe a tantrum wasn't a bad name for it.

What is a tantrum? By most definitions it is a fit of bad temper. And by some it is abrupt and violent. Ok, not much violence going on with me (thankfully :). But I have had a bad mood of sorts stewing about something and a grand resistance to doing anything about it for going on three months.

So what is this fit about? Well, for me, right now it is about my weight. My WEIGHT? Did we hear that right? My WEIGHT? What? I'm a health counselor. I'm supposed to have this all together, right?

I'd like to share something I have learned in a very personal way recently. When something in your life is out of balance, it frequently shows itself most clearly in your weakest link. For me, the area to always show a lack of balance first is my weight.

It didn't take me long to notice the extra five pounds. What took me a few months to really understand was my lack of motivation to really do something about it. Until I realized that my imbalance was precisely in the area of "doing". As in, doing too much. So, naturally my reaction to this imbalance was to simply do nothing about it. Unfortunately, that did not make my weight magically readjust itself back to normal (what is normal, anyway?).

So back to my "tantrum". I have really been having a silent "fit" of sorts against the imbalance I brought on by adding so much to my plate in the past year. The fit has manifested itself in too much ice cream and too little exercise (hence the five pounds) but that is just the downside. The upside is that my need to slow down has also resulted in endless hours of delicious time with my kids and a re-discovered love affair with mommy-hood. Hurray. Also, the kids don't notice the weight. Gotta love them.

Now that I have a clearer understanding of what has been happening with me (thanks to a lot of long talks with my fellow health counselor buddies), I feel a lot more loving towards my self about it and I can really see the need and the benefits for my grown up tantrum.

So I leave you with this thought to consider for yourself- What is your weakest link and how can your honor your own resistance to "fixing it" by recognizing how it might be serving your best interests?

Self-care and Home-care

I have a confession to make...I am a closet homemaker. One of my favorite books of all time is Home Comforts, The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson. There is something so incredibly satisfying and comforting about living in a space that feels comfortable and beautiful to you and that works well for your life.

But I recently realized that what was causing me a great deal of stress these days in that my home was no longer working well for my life. My life has changed so dramatically over the past year with returning to school and changing careers and I didn't make time to stop and re-organize my surroundings to match the life we are now living in our home.

Suddenly it hit me that I needed to make some changes....now! So I have been on an organizing kick this week and it feels wonderful. One of my favorite tasks has been realizing that I can't stand the amount of space that gets taken up by CDs and DVDs. So I am recycling all the cases and moving all of my media into binders. I found some beautiful binders at Russell and Hazel ans CD binders at IKEA, a great online store with a tagline I love- Add life to your work.

I also finally bought a book shelf to house the dozens of new books that returning to school has brought into my life and I am inspired to bring back an old tradition called the Homekeeping Notebook. I found a great blog about it which you can check out here.

I admit, I have neglected a few workouts and I have cooked a little less than usual this week but, for right now, I recognize that my self-care is my home-care. And I know once I complete some of this and feel happier in the space we are living in, my energy will shift back into other areas of my self-care. It is all about balance, right?

The Coffee Thing and Other Experiments

I promised several weeks ago that I would post soon about my no-coffee experiment. It has been interesting. As you may know, I am a coffee lover. I love the smell of it, I love the taste of it, I love a good coffee shop. I just love it.

Recently, however, I wasn't sure it was loving me back. I have had a really busy year and in January I was really starting to feel the stress accumulate in my body in an intense kind of way. I tried to tune in and really understand what I might need to change and I got the message that coffee might not be working for me.

My coffee consumption was about 1 cup a day of 1/2 regular coffee, 1/2 decaf. So I stopped it and switched to tea for about six weeks. It was interesting. I felt better, I lost a few pounds I had been hanging on to for a few months. I believe the weight loss was partly due to just the overall stress reduction. But there are also some folks who see a connection between coffee and blood sugar levels that could affect weight. You can check out an interesting article here.

So I was going along quite merrily without my coffee for several weeks and actually not missing it and feeling quite good. Then I decided to experiment with tweaking my diet a bit by doing an elimination of wheat and dairy for a week. The idea was not to eliminate these things from my diet permanently but just to see how I felt when I removed them and then reintroduced them.

Well guess what? I did that for about six days and then I wanted coffee again.

Am I telling you all this to confuse you? NO, hopefully the opposite. What I hope to share with you is that these past two months have been a really good reminder to me that the best changes happen slowly over time. I tried to do too much too close together and I really saw the tendency within myself to overdo the experimentation.

I think a lot of us do this. We make a change, we see some success, we want more success, we make more changes. But sometimes, if we really haven't given our bodies and our minds the opportunity to fully adjust to the last change, introducing another change may not only not succeed but it may undo some of the positive changes we have already made.

My advice (from personal experience)- go easy on yourself! Make changes slowly over time and they will be far more likely to last.

Oh, and in case you are wondering about the results of my experiment:

1. I started drinking coffee again but not daily and now mostly decaf.

2. I didn't notice any significant impact of reintroducing wheat and dairy but I am sure both of them only work well for me in real moderation.

3. I am not doing any more experimenting for a while. Well, only with my hair. I just got most of it chopped off for the first time in more than 10 years and that felt great!

Reinventing Date Night

Check out this article on Reinventing Date Night:

New York Times Article

I am not suggesting you crawl across the floor with your hands and feet tied (don't freak out, you have to read the article to know what I mean) but maybe a new hobby with the love of your life could be good for your relationship?

I'll let you know if Rod and I decide to take up country line dancing or play racquetball or fly to Italy sometime soon.

Preventative Eating and My Favorite Snack

I'm not a big fan of eating when you are not hungry but I've had enough poorly planned meal times to know that if I don't think ahead, I don't always leave myself with great choices.

So I am sitting at my desk and having my tea (more on my no-coffee experiment later!) and I decide to run out to Target to pick up a couple things I need and take a break from my computer.

I'm not really hungry yet. BUT I know I am going to be gone for an hour or more and I will probably be starving before I get back. This all sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? But how many times have you left yourself stranded without a good choice of something to eat?

In these kinds of moments, you've got to either pack a healthy snack to bring with you or do what I call some "Preventative Eating". In this case, for me, it is my favorite snack in the whole world:

Ezekiel 4:9 Toast with Almond or CashewButter (I prefer Raw Organic Tree of Life) and a little bit of Agave Syrup or Raw Honey (buy Raw Honey locally when you can and check out this link for more on the benefits of raw honey!)

Yum!

Now I'm off to the store and I know I won't get hungry because, really, what in the world are you going to eat at Target? It kind of scares me to think about it...

Reducing the Noise...and Tuning in

Do you ever get mad at yourself for craving something you "know you shouldn't have"? For most of us it is usually sugar, right?

But our bodies are amazingly intelligent, aren't they? Your heart beats, your blood circulates, how many incredible things does your body do for you without you ever having to think about it?

And yet...when the craving for something "bad" hits, why don't we trust ourselves? Why don't we recognize that our body really does know what it is doing?

I'm going to post more soon about cravings but for now I'd like to suggest something to consider:

If our bodies are super intelligent, then the messages they send us about what we need have real value. But what if our interpretation skills are a little off?

What if our body says....REST! And we hear...SUGAR! (Because, probably, we're too busy to rest). What if our body says...SLOW DOWN! And we hear...COFFEE! (Again, sorry, too busy!).

In her book Healthy Living from the Inside Out, Mariel Hemingway talks about "noisy foods". Noisy foods are processed sugar, caffeine, and chemical additives.

Take a moment to think about the possibilty that the noisy foods you are consuming might be interfering with your ability to correctly interpret what your body is saying. What if you could reduce the noise a bit and tune in to what your body is really trying to tell you?

More on cravings soon. In the meanwhile, I will be working on reducing the noise in my body and my house tomorrow since the impending snow storm here in Massachusetts may mean the kids will be home from school!

Happy New Year

I'm keeping it simple in 2008. My resolution? Just be really good to myself. Whatever that means each day, I intend to tune in and really treat myself right.