Category: Sunday Letters

Once I read a novel that revolved around a 17-year-old boy. In the story, he’s a rather anxious young man, having suffered a traumatic mugging and then discovering his father in the arms of a woman who wasn’t his mother.

His parents are divorcing, and he’s been sent to live in a mountain wilderness where he’s cautioned not to leave the house without bear spray to defend himself against grizzlies.

In one minor passage of the book, he wakes to find himself inside “the perfect moment.” It’s a fleeting instant of time where no shadows from the past lurk and no fears of the future intrude.

He loves that moment and wants to extend it, but he’s thrust into his immediate circumstances before he can succeed.

When I read that passage, I immediately identified with the feeling of his “perfect moment.” You’ve probably had a few of them yourself. Maybe many. Maybe often. Maybe even now.

Capturing the perfect moment is hardly the young man’s main concern in the story. But I thought I’d share a way that you can expand your own “perfect moments” when you notice that you’re experiencing one.

Noticing one is the first step. And the way to do that is to remind yourself that you’re going to watch for them. You can set an intention at the beginning of your day, for example, or put a loose rubber band on your wrist to remind you to catch them when they occur. Invent your own reminder. You know what works for you.

The second step is developing a sense of how the perfect moment feels. It’s holds feelings of deep contentment, of total acceptance of everything the moment holds exactly the way it is.

It’s empty of concern for anything in the past or future. It’s a moment of wakefulness, where your senses feel alive and where sensing is pleasant and vivid. It’s being fully present in this very instant of now.

As the young man in the novel noticed, perfect moments can be fleeting. Distractions enter the scene.

And a distraction can make it disappear. But it doesn’t have to. (Unless, of course, you’re facing a grizzly bear.) Instead of letting the distraction pull you out of your perfect moment, welcome it into the moment and let it be a part of the perfection, too.

Because the perfect moment is generated by the heart, not by the head.

In fact, the more that you cultivate feelings of welcoming acceptance, appreciation and wonder, the more often perfect moments are likely to occur. And the more fully you feel these warm feelings from your heart, the more willing your brain will be to relax and allow you to bathe in them.

The fact is, your brain likes this state as much as your heart does. It’s called “coherence,” and it allows you to function at an optimal level.

If you have challenging mental work to do, being in coherence allows you to do it in the “flow” state, where concentration comes with ease and time seems to disappear.

If you’re doing a casual activity, coherence will allow you to do it with a sense of heightened pleasure in all that your senses are bringing you.

There are volumes of studies about all sorts of health benefits, too. But the main benefit, in my view, is the expanded joy that living inside perfect moments brings to life.

I wish you heightened awareness of them and happy practice in expanding them to fill more and more of the moments in your life.

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by mooremeditation from Pixabay}

Remember how, when you were a kid, you learned to make wishes on a star? You’d stand there in the dark, close your eyes, tilt your head toward the sky, and when you opened your eyes again, focus on the first star you noticed and say the magical chant. . .

“Star light, star bright
I wish I may, I wish I might
Have the wish I wish tonight.”

Then, silently, you’d tell the star your wish.

It was sort of like making a wish when you blew out the candles on your birthday cake. Except that wish came only once a year. Wishing on a star was something you could do on any clear night.

Remember how it felt, sorting through the crowd of wishes you could make to find the exact right one, to name the one wish, above all, that you most wanted to come true?

And as soon as you told it to the star, remember how easily and simply you let it go and went on with the night, happier somehow that you made it?

What a wonderful game! Not only did it give you a chance to look up to the star-glittered sky, to sense the vastness and wonder of it, but it let you tune in to your innermost heart, too. It let you listen to its desires. It let you taste each one, to weigh the depth of your desire for it, and then, in a moment of clarity, to pick the best one, imagining how delicious it would feel to have that one come true.

You can still do that, you know. Even if you’re somewhere that you can’t see the sky, the sky is still there and still sparkled with a billion stars, just waiting for your wishes.

If you were going to make a wish right now, what would you wish for? What’s the one thing your heart would most like to have come true?

That’s a good thing to know. It gives you clarity about what, at this moment, you want to experience more than anything. And when you have clarity about that, amazing things can happen.

I wrote a poem once with lines that said, “When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true, although not necessarily in the time, or form, or manner that you’d imagined.”

One day, maybe a week down the road, maybe a year or a decade or two later, you realize you followed a nudge, moved in the direction of a new idea, made unexpected connections, spotted new opportunities. And now here you are, experiencing the very reality you wished for.

Not because a star in the sky made it happen, but because you did, because your wishing let you know what you truly wanted and set that wish as a guiding star within you.

“Star light, star bright, I wish I may, I wish I might. . .” Whisper that to a star some night. Then let it go, taking the magic of the moment with you. You’ll be glad you did.

I’ll be wishing wonderful wishes for you.

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay}

I keep my eye out for good self-reinvention techniques. You know, the little tactics we use to fine-tune ourselves, to keep us moving
more fully into our preferred selves. I call them my “joy tools.” 

They get me out of ruts and unstuck so that I can remember I always have more options than I can imagine.

Well, I ran across a technique a couple weeks ago that knocked me over with its power. I call it “The You Power Strategy.”

It’s a twist on affirmations, those old gems where we say to ourselves, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” It goes beyond afformations, where we turn an affirmation into a question, such as, “Why am I getting healthier and healthier now?”

Instead, the You Power statements aim at our identity, that collection of qualities we think of as “me.” Our identities are important to us; they describe to us who we are and how we act in the world.

We hold onto them for dear life. But they keep changing. New parts get added. Some old parts let go. And any feedback we can get about how we’re showing up is a definite help in keeping us on track and secure in who we’re being.

That’s what gives the You Power Strategy its power. It speaks to you about your identity. It mirrors the you that you aspire to be. And it’s as simple as replacing “I” with “You” in your affirmations: “You’re making more and more healthy choices now.”

For some reason, the idea intrigued me. I decided to take it for a test drive, to see where I ended up.

I made this huge list of things I wanted to express more fully in my life. I filled a whole page. Then, in the morning, I read them to myself. I read them a second morning, too. Then on the third day, I skipped them; it was too much to read first thing in the morning. And by bedtime, I was too tired to bother. Maybe you’re familiar with that kind of pattern.

Still, as the week wore on, I noticed one or another of the you statements floating into my head. I’d open the refrigerator and grab a healthy snack. I’d follow an impulse to work out with an exercise video. And I’d notice the thought, “You’re making healthier choices now,” float through my head.

If a mere two day trial was so clearly influencing me, why wasn’t I reading these statements every day? Because, I realized, there were too may of them. I should just pick, oh, maybe five of them. I could remember five and say them to myself before I got out of bed in the morning and maybe at night as I was drifting off to sleep.

Bingo! That worked for me. And to tell you the truth, I’m pleasantly amazed at how this little tool is keeping me on track. It’s almost as if the statements are a background navigator, gently pointing out opportunities to do what I genuinely wanted to do, to be the person I want to be.

I heartily invite you to give them a try. Think of five things you’d like to do or be. Write them down as “you” statements. Repeat them to yourself at the beginning or end of your day, or both. See what happens.

  ”You are discovering so many ways to be productive now.”

  “You’re getting along better with Jim every day.”

  “You’re taking more time to be in nature now.”

  “You enjoy keeping your environment clean and organized.”

  “You appreciate your friends and family more deeply all the time.”

Go ahead. Do it. Just think of five things . . .

Wishing you powerful surprises!

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by MasterTux from Pixabay}

This coming Friday, we citizens of the USA will be celebrating Independence Day, the anniversary of the day, in 1776, that our Founders declared the people of the colonies to be free and self-governing states. In other words, it’s our birthday.

Some of us know the story of the holiday’s origin; increasing numbers of us, sadly, don’t. Nevertheless, we celebrate it loudly! We’re like that. It’s one heck of a great, big party.

It’s been my own custom since I was a young teen, to think about the freedom our Founders so soberly and courageously declared in their Declaration of Independence.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

There comes a time, they said, when men must say “Enough!” to tyrannical rule and to refuse to bow to it any longer. And their time had come.

The Constitution was signed eleven years after the Declaration of Independence and the ten amendments that composed the original Bill of Rights came four years after that. But for us, the heirs, the three documents seem a single piece and outline for us what the Founders meant by freedom.

Two hundred and forty-nine years have passed since our nation’s beginning, and, in the chaos of our current age, both the interpretation and the wisdom of our founding documents have come into question. As with almost all questions before us now, we are passionately divided in our opinions. Only time will tell how we shall sort it all out.

At any rate, with the holiday’s approach, I found myself thinking, once again, about freedom and about the question of inalienable rights, those that belong to us as human beings, and are absolute.

I’m not talking about the rights granted to us as citizens of a state, but about those we possess regardless of the government under which we find ourselves living. And of the three which the Declaration mentions, the one I find most significant is liberty, the right to choose who and how we will be.

It’s this one that’s assumed in the other rights our Founders enumerated. And while there will, perhaps, always be those who seek the power to limit our choices or to force us to conform to their wills, in the end, each of us has the power to say yes or to say no at every turn of the road.

Let me ask you then, how are you exercising your right to choose? How clear are you about what you genuinely want for yourself? About who and how you want to be?

What tyrant is holding you back? Are you allowing convenience or habit to stand in the way of your being the best that you can be? The happiest? The most fulfilled? Where are you compromising yourself? Are you placing blame on something or someone outside yourself for keeping you from being who you want to be?

If so, write your own Declaration of Independence, and then work toward shaping a new set of self-governing laws under which you vow to yourself to live, regardless of the cost or struggle, in the name of integrity and honor. You have, after all, the freedom to choose. And nothing can take that away.

Wishing you courage and a vision of wonderful possibilities.

Happy Birthday, America . . . and many more.

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by Nick from Pixabay}

A while back when I was coaching people through challenges in their lives, I found myself puzzling over the difficulties we have in making worthwhile changes in our lives. “Why is that?” I wondered.

There seemed to be as many excuses for staying stuck as there are people, each of them specific to the person and situation. But one day I happened on a sentence that clarified it all for me. “If you want to change your life,” it went, “you have to change your life.”

Bingo! It’s not like there’s some big blank spot in your life with nothing in it, just waiting for you to fill it in with the new, improved you. Nope. You have to toss out something that’s in your life now to make room for the new stuff.

What triggered the memory of that discovery was a comment I came across this week that shed more light on the challenge of making changes. “Life doesn’t come with a remote control,” it said, “You have to get up and change it yourself.”

Aha. That’s a big why, too. We really don’t like the idea that we have to be, gulp, responsible for ourselves. We’d rather let somebody else do the grown-up stuff. It doesn’t sound like any fun at all.

But here’s a secret. Taking control of your life is the most fun thing of all! You get to feel in charge, empowered and free, capable of saying your own yes or no to yourself and to the whole world around you.

So if you want your life to be different than it is now, the first thing you have to do is to get a nice, clear picture of what you want. That’s a really important step. Get that first. Then, once you have a solid picture of what you want, decide what it’s worth to you, and figure out what you can trade for it.

What are you spending minutes on now that you could trade for minutes of being in control, the director of your own show, the composer of your own song? Take some of those minutes and use them to figure out what your next best step could be. And there you go; you’re on your way.

In real life, if feels a lot more complex than that. But the bottom line is still the same. If you want to change your life, you can decide to get up and switch to a more appealing channel. That’s one of the cool parts about being a human being. We get to decide!

Isn’t life an interesting place!

Wishing you a most excellent week,

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by Adriano Gadini from Pixabay}

When I was a little kid, one of my favorite activities was going on scavenger hunts. Usually they were organized by the mother of one of my friends as part of a birthday party. She would divide us up into groups of 3 or 4, give us a list of common items—a shoe lace, a paper plate, a bottle cap, a spool of thread, a ball— and send us out to knock on neighbors’ doors with our lists and ask them to give us whatever they had. The group that returned with the most items won a prize.

Looking back, I think it was an ingenious way for the mom to get all of us kids out of the house for an hour or so. I don’t suppose moms can do that anymore, since it involves knocking on strangers’ doors. But back then, we lived in a safer world where people seldom even locked their doors and when strangers were, as Will Rogers once said, “just friends you haven’t met yet.”

I’m playing a new variation of the game these days. When I wake up in the morning, I set the intention to find something that will delight me so much that I catch myself laughing or gasping in wonder. And I expect it to be a surprise, and so wonderful that I can’t miss it.

Today my first moment of delight came right away. When I opened my curtains, I saw that my white lilacs had blossomed, and when I opened the window, their fragrance wafted gently in, perfuming the whole room.

For me, there’s nothing like being gifted with a moment of delight. It’s like a burst of sparkling light that ripples right up from your heart and out your smile. And all you can do is grin in gratitude, your whole being saying, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”

You can scavenger hunt for anything. It doesn’t have to be for delight. Sometimes I ask for trances of beauty, and then I’ll be driving to the store or to an appointment and all of a sudden the world will look like a movie set with perfect lighting, enchanting as could be.

You can ask for things like moments of kindness, or attunement to the symphonies of sound in the world, or for a sense of comedy, or affection, or simply for a little stretch of simple happiness.

Just pick whatever you want to find and set yourself the intention of noticing it when it comes. Because it will. And when it does, it will color your whole day.

Wishing you a week of happy hunting!

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by Vinson Tan ( 楊 祖 武 ) from Pixabay}

Last night I was gazing up at the stars and, once more, I was struck by the realization that our amazing home is but one speck of rock circling one star among countless stars in one of an unknown number of galaxies. How small we are!

And yet, how incredible our minds, to be able to grasp the immensity of it all, to compute the distances, to be capable of wonder and to marvel at its mysteries, and order, and beauty.

How can we be asleep to that? How can we take it all for granted? Why, when we’re gifted not only with intelligence but with the capacity to love, is our little globe beset with such rancor and pain?

You know, there seems to be a trend afoot these days to pit us all against each other, to egg us into taking sides on every conceivable issue.

Tensions and conflicts engulf our homes and work places, our neighborhoods and countries. And this, despite the fact that all the overwhelming majority of humans want is simply to get along with each other and to live our lives in harmony and peace.

None of us has the power, individually, to change the course of world events. But we can have an influence in our immediate corners of the world.

I heard a suggestion this week that gave me pause for thought. Instead of getting entrapped in the blame game, it said, focus on seeking solutions. Ask yourself what you can do to make things better and be willing to give your ideas a try.

Sometimes that can mean having to admit you were less than kind, or thoughtful, or honest. None of us is at our best all the time. We get tired, and crabby, and selfish. It’s part of being human. But so is our ability to apologize, and to ask for time-outs, and to look for ways to make amends.

Sometimes making things better means stretching beyond our comfort zones and trying on less than familiar behaviors—holding our tongues when we would normally confront, forgiving hurts, deciding to overlook other’s foibles instead of falling into irritation or taking offense, looking for things to appreciate in those whose opinions contrast with our own.

What can I do to make things better? That’s the solution-focused question. How can I create more harmony? More understanding? More beauty?

Every time you choose peace in your own life, the world does indeed become a more peaceful place. One act, one person at a time.

Wishing you a week filled with excellent solutions.

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by Cheryl Holt from Pixabay}

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}