Author: Susan Minarik

I live in a rural area, in a valley surrounded by high wooded hills. No cable. No satellite. No TV. Painfully limited radio and cell reception. Without the Internet, my access to the wider world essentially vanishes.

So when my Internet crashed, I was hurled into a suddenly shrunken world and an entire change of routine.

What a gift!

I didn’t have to see it as a gift. But I internalized the “make lemonade from lemons” outlook long ago. When I broke my right arm a few years ago, for instance, I sat in the ER thinking about how this would give me a chance to develop new skills with my left one. And it did, too!

So when my Internet failed, I decided right away that I would treat the episode as a vacation, an opportunity to view life from a new and different perspective while I waited for the revival of my connection.

It was great, and the timing was perfect.

It didn’t have to be that way. None of us likes to have our life’s plans and patterns unexpectedly interrupted in a major way. I could have gone Full Grump, big time.

I’m not bragging about my cultivated optimism. I just want to share that it’s possible to look for the good in anything that happens to you.

Sometimes that’s not an easy challenge. Life can deal some heavy blows. It can throw seemingly insurmountable obstacles in our paths. It comes with storms and thorns, with pain and loss. For all of us. No growth comes without resistance. Struggle is part of the package.

I got to do some extra reading while I was offline, and for the first time in a long time, I encountered a new answer to the question, “Why are we here?” Want to know what it was? “To learn what to do and what not to do.” That’s amazingly deeper and more profound than it may seem at first glance. Play with it a little this week and see how it clarifies things for you.

One of the things I’m grateful for learning to do is to look for the good in every situation. It allows me to live with much greater ease, and I’m discovering that living with ease is a skill that all of us can aspire to developing. Optimism helps.

And even though in some cases it takes a while to see it, goodness is always present. But you have to look for it, and expect it, and to be willing to recognize and claim it when it appears.

I’ll leave you with that for this week – with the hope that you’ll look for the good in your life, and increase in your ability to know what to do and what not to do, all with great ease and joy.

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by Briam Cute from Pixabay}

With global tensions ratcheting up by the hour around the world, adding to the stresses that all of us face in our personal worlds, I thought I’d share with you a little two-minute practice that will return you to the present moment and let you experience an island of personal peace.

I learned it from Dr. Kirsten Neff’s talk on “Resilience and Self-Compassion” on YouTube where she demonstrates it. (https://youtu.be/xyjLKgfV7Sk) Here’s how it goes:

1. Hold your hands out in front of you and tightly clench your fists. Pay attention to the way you feel as you do this. Hold this gesture for a few seconds, allowing yourself really to feel it.

2. Now open your hands, relaxing them in an open position in front of you and notice how that feels. Again, give yourself the opportunity really to sink into the feeling.

3. Now spread your arms slightly and extend your hands, palms up. Again, allow yourself to fully feel how you feel now.

4. Finally, put one hand over the other and place them on the center of your chest, over your heart. You may want to close your eyes as you feel the gentle pressure and warmth. Maybe you’ll even become aware of the beating of your heart. Let yourself sink into what you’re feeling.

That’s all there is to it.

In the first step, many people say the gesture evoked feelings of anger, tension, or the feelings of self-criticism. Imagine you’re wrapping any negative emotion in your fists—any pain or disappointment or frustration. Clench your fists hard, allowing yourself to feel the full depth of what you’re suffering, the tightness of it.

In step two, experience letting go, as if everything your fists were holding is simply floating away, evaporating. People in Neff’s audience said this step let them feel a sense of openness and relaxation, a sense that they could stop fighting and breathe.

Next, when you open your arms and extend your hands upward, you’re likely to feel a sense of acceptance or welcoming. Or perhaps a sense of receiving whatever the moment is offering to you.

Then, when you place your hands over your heart and feel the warmth, you are allowing yourself to feel the soothing, the kindness, the comfort of self-compassion, of being completely okay, just as you are, and with life, just as it is.

This little two-minute peace break is worth memorizing. Do it a few times, then keep it in your pocket as a handy stress reliever any time you need it. After you have done it several times, you can even do it mentally when you’re in a public situation where you can’t physically move your hands.

Sometimes all it takes is a little break like this to restore your peace and perspective, opening you to renewed composure, confidence, and the ability to see new solutions.

Share it with a friend or family member if you like. You could even practice it together and share with each other the way it makes each of you feel. Not only will you be reinforcing the power of it for yourself, but you’ll have given a fine gift of instant relief to your friend. Self-compassion, after all, flows naturally to having more compassion for everyone. Cool how that works, huh?

You can find several more self-compassion exercises at Dr. Neff’s website, https://self-compassion.org/self-compassion-practices/ .
Pop over there and bookmark it. Visit it from time to time. It will unfailingly remind you that hey, you’re a human, and you deserve to hold yourself in caring and understanding.

Wishing you inner peace, no matter what.

Warmly,
Susan

susan@notesfromthewoods.com

^{Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay}

Every Monday, three friends and I get together for a chat, catching each other up on the happenings of the previous week. We’ve been doing this now for nearly 18 years.

It all began as a Master Mind group focused on self-development and having, as I recall, a dozen or so original members. Over time, interests changed, life took people in new directions and our group dwindled down to us four. We met via conference call for many years. Now we meet on Zoom and love seeing each other’s faces..

Last week I found some notes I’d made after a call from a decade ago. We were talking about how each of us tends to think of our own life as ordinary. Mundane. Pretty routine. Boring, even. But then we realized that we found each other’s lives fascinating. We keep calling every week, after all, just to find out what happened next.

It turns out that what happened next usually wasn’t some great achievement or adventure (although we’ve had our share of those), but instead it was maybe a new insight or observation, a way of looking at the familiar from a slightly different vantage point.

We had been talking at the time about ways we could become more aware of the stories we tell ourselves, of the habitual labels and judgments that we slap on our experiences, and how becoming aware of that helps us break free of them and lets us experience things with greater freshness and joy.

So I got to thinking about the way we label our lives as ordinary and deem that to be a negative thing, as if life held zest only if it was filled with new and exciting events.

What if, I wondered, we chose to see the routines of our lives as a pleasure? What if we awakened to the comfort they gave us?

What if our stretches of boredom were simply the result of not paying attention? Ta-dah! There’s a little eureka moment for you!

Then, mid-week, I was doing some random surfing on the Web and I stumbled on one of those “photos of the day” sites that offers glimpses into the way people around the globe are spending their time. There’s a lot of celebration and achievement going on out there! But there’s a lot of pain and conflict and suffering, too. And the photos showed the whole range.

The photos that struck me most were one of a woman feeding her infant a spoonful of soup inside a tent in a refugee camp, and one of a father holding rolled razor wire up with a stick so his five year old daughter could crawl under it toward the relative safety that waited on the other side.

And I’m going to complain that my life is routine and ordinary? I could be one of the firefighters battling flames. Or one of those whose homes were burning. I could be digging through mud with a stick, trying to find any belongings the flood may have left behind.

May I be grateful for the ordinariness of my life!

Yesterday, I went in search of insights into the benefits of ordinariness from other people. The first one I found brought the photos back to mind:

“How we take it for granted – those trivial conversations; those mundane moments that we think hold no meaning. We never realize how much we rely on the ordinariness of everyday life. When love is gone – when our entire world is gone – only then do we understand those moments are what we live for.”

― Dianna Hardy, in Cry Of The Wolf

And then there was this one, echoing my own realization that awareness is the key:

“I thought: This is what the living do. And I swooned at the ordinary nature of the task and myself, at my chapped hands and square palms, at the way my wrists bent and fingers flexed inside this living body.”

― Dee Williams

The ordinary s the stuff of the good life, the day to day conversations and routines. In the end, the ordinary things are the ones that give our lives meaning. The key is to see them for the treasures they are, to be aware in them, and grateful.

Here’s a poem little from a guy who gets it. I’ll leave it with you as my parting gift for today:

“Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.”

― William Martin, The Parent’s Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for Modern Parents

Wishing you a gloriously ordinary week!

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by Pexels from Pixabay}

My friend sent me a video the other day of the workshop she’d built for herself over the winter months. A couple years ago, her previous workshop burned to the ground in a fire.

The new one was a work of art. It’s walls were hung with organized tools above cabinets and sets of shelves on rolling casters filled with labeled bins, and a rack for storing lumber. She could rearrange her space according to whatever project she was working on. As usual, she’d done a top-notch job.

I was impressed.

I smiled as I watched the video. One of my friend’s top joys in life is designing and building things. Big things. The coop she built for her flock of chickens, for instance, is so elegant that I call it “the chicken palace.” Yet with all these achievements, she talks about herself as being lazy.

So I watched the video of her fabulous new workshop I wrote back, “Not bad for a lazy girl.”

She told me about the list of tasks she still had to complete, the final touch ups. She’d put in months of work on her project and the few loose ends weren’t exactly sparking her to get up and get them done.

But then she found the key. Instead of thinking “I have to,” she taught herself to say “I want to.”

And then, she said, “It gets done!”

It was a technique I’d discovered, too. I’ve learned to turn “have to” into “get to,” framing an obligation, responsibility, or less-than-welcome task into something I was privileged to be able to do.

I turn “should” into “could,” too. Instead of feeling pressured to do something, I claim my freedom to decide whether to do it now or not.

I consider how long it would take, how much energy it would require. I check my current intentions and priorities. I consider whether there’s something else I genuinely need to do now instead. Or maybe I’d rather do one of the other things that I could get done. All this takes place in a few seconds. Then, whatever I decide, I’m making my choice consciously and freely, and I get to do what I truly want to do.

My friend and I had both stumbled on one of the simplest and most powerful tricks for shifting into a more positive mindset: Our choice of the words we used to frame our situation.

Here’s how this magic works. Picture a triangle with the words “behavior,” “thoughts,” and “feelings” written on each of its sides. Now imagine an arrow pointing from each word to the next. What it’s telling you is that our behaviors influence our thoughts, which influence our feelings, which influence our behavior, and around and around.

If you make a change in one, each of the others will shift, too. You can try it out right now. Put a big smile on your face, or sit up straighter and see what happens to your thoughts, to the way you feel.

When you can reframe things in a more positive way, you get a lot more done and done more easily. Because you’re dissolving the stress of the oppressive thought, you free up pathways that are healthier on all levels.

Just think! It’s the beginning of a whole new season in your life – one where you get to do anything that you want to, that you could. All you have to do is notice when you’re putting off a ‘have to’ or a ‘should’ and reframe your view of it with a friendlier word. And isn’t that a fine trick to know!

Wishing you a week of inviting choices. Happy Spring!

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image from my friend’s video.}

A neighbor of mine, a single mom with two small kids, told me about a remarkable experience she had this week.

She’d gone shopping with her two little toddlers in tow and had set her purse atop her car while she buckled them in their car seats and loaded the groceries into her car. She’d spent her last dollar on the food and was anxious about how she’d find money for gas to get to work the rest of the week.

She was almost home, she said, when she reached for her purse to grab a tissue and realized what she had done. She broke into tears right then and there in despair. She retraced her route, scanning the roadside in the vain hope that she’d spot the missing purse. Then she drove to the local police station to report her loss.

To her astonishment, the police had her purse! It was beat up, as if it had been run over. They said some dirty, tattooed biker had brought it in just minutes ago. He told them if the owner happened to report it, to ask her to call him. He had left his phone number.

Puzzled, she called him while the police listened in, afraid he might have extortion of some kind in mind.

He said he was just returning from a 200-mile charity run and had spotted the purse by the side of the road. He told her that he looked through it for ID but only saw the photos of two babies in the empty wallet.

He thought the woman who owned it must be having an awful day. He said he was sorry she had lost whatever else was in the purse, but he had brought it in just as he found it. Except for one thing.

My friend said, “One thing? What was that?”

“Look in the zippered pocket,” he said. She did as he asked and discovered a crisp $100 bill.

“I hope that helps a little,” he said. “I just wanted you to know that good things happen in life as well as the setbacks.”

The police officers on duty were as shocked as my friend. “Just goes to show you,” one of them said, “You really can’t judge a book by its cover.”

That was two years ago, my friend said. And she never forgot the biker’s amazing kindness—or the lesson about judging people on the basis of stereotypes.

You never know how much impact a kindness that you do will have on other lives. Each gesture of kindness ripples on and on.

I know the grungy biker’s act of generosity meant everything to my friend. And I hope by telling you about it, you’ll benefit from his kindness, too.

Pass it on.

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by Susi Schneider from Pixabay}