Want to play a game? Here’s one. Before you get out of bed every morning, spend a little time running a mental movie of yourself going through the coming day. Picture yourself feeling alive, aware, appreciative and calm, doing your routines, the things you’d planned, meeting the unexpected. Consider the game a challenge. Consider it another episode of living in life’s magic.
Know what happens? If you take time actually to play that movie – let’s call it “My Best Self” – every day, you lose the habit of being whoever it is you’ve been practicing being up ‘til now.
Picture yourself easily going with the flow, taking whatever comes along in stride, feeling great, feeling capable, expecting that everything’s going your way, and what doesn’t is okay, and may even turn out to be funny or to reveal a better direction to go.
Add in whatever traits and moods you want. Picture yourself getting great ideas and putting them to work. Imagine you’re full of energy, feeling healthier than you have in a long time. Imagine yourself grabbing the kinds of foods that you’ve been promising yourself you’d eat—and finding them delicious. Imagine going for a walk on your lunch break, or stopping by the gym on your way home, finding time to watch the sunrise or the sunset or to wrestle with the dog.
Imagine being captivated by your partner, amused and patient with your kids, enjoying your coworkers, loving your friends, noticing all the good drivers on the road during your commute, feeling wondrously grateful just to be alive.
See yourself wearing such a great smile that everyone wonders what you’ve been up to.
Want to supercharge the movie? Don’t get up until you actually feel the feelings that you’re imagining your “Best Self” is feeling. Do it every day.
Get inspired. Fire and wire your brain a whole new way. See how powerful you truly are.
When I took photos of the hostas, I remembered how I didn’t like them when I was a little kid, how I thought their flowers were wrong somehow, poking up from their big fat leaves on those tall sticks like that and how I now find them exquisite and dear, and hope, as I adjust the angle of my camera, that I can capture a whisper of their grace.
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.”
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.
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!
While I was at the park this week, I happened across two little girls playing at the edge of the creek. They were putting little pieces of driftwood on the water to watch it float downstream and giggling as they sang “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream . . . “
I hadn’t heard that little ditty in years and soon I was humming it myself as I walked along. “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream.”
It got me thinking about one of the phrases I keep in my back pocket to get me through stressful times or to reassure myself when I’m taking on a challenge. I’ve shared it with you before. Maybe you remember: “How easy can I let this be?”
The point of asking yourself to let the challenge before you be easy means that you’re giving yourself permission to relax into it. You’re asking yourself how much you’re willing to allow yourself to be at ease. Things are only difficult or trying for us because we frame them that way, after all. Almost anything can be done with ease if we take it one small step at a time. What’s the old saying? “Inch by inch, anything’s a cinch.”
Giving yourself permission to step into a task gently and with ease is especially helpful when what you’re facing seems unpleasant, or even repulsive or painful. It lets you face the challenge of doing something new or something you’re not sure you can do less daunting. Allowing yourself to let go of the tension of resistance tunes you in to your capabilities. Asking “How easy can I let this be?” turns “I don’t want to” into “I can do this.”
What’s more, it lets you glide into action with a grace that can build momentum for you, and even make the task feel rewarding and satisfying, or if you’re really lucky, fun. There you are, just rowing your boat, one stroke of the oars after another. And sooner or later, you arrive downstream, enriched by the experience. The challenge that loomed so large is behind you, now nothing more than a memory, a dream.
Let me invite you to tuck the phrase in your pocket—“How easy can I let this be?”— and to pull it out the next time you find yourself resisting a challenge. Maybe attach the tune to “Row Your Boat” to it just to give it a bit of flavor. Give it a try. You never know.
A few years ago, a friend invited me to the party celebrating her son Mark’s high school graduation. He’s a fine young man, a top-achiever, and although I don’t know him well, I wanted to attend the party to recognize this milestone in his life. I wanted to take a gift, but had no idea what I could give him. So I asked other friends, and one suggested that I write him “one of your letters.”
I did just that.
When I came across it again this week, it felt like a summary of everything I try to write about in these letters, and I wanted to share it with you. As you read it, please know that I send these words to you, personally, and hear your name in place of Mark’s.
The letter begins with a quote from Rumi, printed beneath the image of a soaring eagle. It goes like this:
“You were born with potential. You were born with goodness and trust. You were born with ideals and dreams. You were born with greatness. You were born with wings. You are not meant for crawling, so don’t. You have wings. Learn to use them and fly.” ~ Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Dear Mark,
Rumi’s right, of course. But it’s hardly the whole story. This learning-to-fly business is no easy thing. Nor is it quickly learned.
For one thing, you have to want it—that ability to soar above the crowd. You have to keep fighting against the pull of mediocrity. You have to want freedom more than you want to belong.
Those ideals and dreams you have in your heart? Define them. Write down what you want, and why, and keep your reasons close at hand. You will need reminders when the headwinds are strong, when storms come. And storms will come.
No one succeeds without chalking up a list of failures. Don’t be afraid to fail. Be afraid of not trying to win. “Wisdom,” an old saying goes, “comes from experience. And experience comes from making mistakes.” There’s no shame in that. Setbacks and failures are life’s gifts to you, sent as corrections to your course. Be daring. Take risks.
Keep a good helping of forgiveness in your pocket. Mostly you’ll need it for yourself. It will keep you from tearing yourself down needlessly and will help you maintain your humility while you continue your upward climb.
Learn not to blame circumstances or other people when things go wrong. The key to success is the acceptance of full and complete responsibility for every choice you make and for every action you take, for your own response to whatever is happening. When you inadvertently hurt others, be quick to apologize and make amends.
To the best of your ability, maintain your health. Eat wisely. Exercise. Get sufficient sleep. Learn to relax. Adopt some form of meditation.
Maintain flexibility of thought. Consider opinions that oppose your own. Be willing, if it serves truth, to discard every belief you’ve ever held. Demand truth, whatever the consequences. And to the very best of your ability, be honest with yourself and others; that’s what the practice of truth demands.
Nevertheless, be kind. Be gracious and tactful. Allow others the respect and compassion they deserve. These are the hallmarks of genuine maturity and of leadership.
Take time in your life for pleasure and play. To be alive is a profound privilege. And your gratitude is best expressed through your laughter and your joy, through your appreciation of life’s beauty and goodness and fun.
Above all, vow to learn to love, as broadly and fully as you can. For love is the wind which lifts us, and the power that enables us to soar.
You have wings, Mark. Learn to use them, and fly.
Congratulations on all your magnificent successes thus far! You have honored yourself and your loving family and made all of us who know you proud.
* * *
That goes for you, too, my friend. Simply to be alive in our challenging times is cause for congratulations. So straighten your shoulders, tip up your chin, and carry on. I, for one, am proud of you.
Wishing you love, and play, and beauty in your life.
I’ve been following the collapse of a mountain peak and glacier in Switzerland. It swallowed up a beautiful village and threatens several more farther down the valley. Roads are gone. A river, blocked by the debris, floods the surrounding area. Downstream, the river is cut off from its source.
To clear everything that’s fallen so far would require 540,000 industrial dump trucks. If you lined them all up, nose to tail, they would make a line from Switzerland to Beijing.
It’s an unfolding catastrophe, reshaping an entire mountain valley, a breathtaking reminder of nature’s raw power.
Catastrophes happen. Sometimes when you look around you, life can feel like that’s all there is, a constant sliding from one miserable disaster to another, with little rest between them. It can get scary. The tomorrows ahead can look frightening and bleak, the road pitted with pools of despair, or hopelessly blocked.
But amazingly, life goes on. More than that, if rises with unrelenting determination to make the most of things, however barren the landscape appears, however daunting the challenge.
It sends helpers. It sends glimmers of hope, and signposts, and ideas. It clears out patches of relief and rest.
We’re a part of it, after all, this expression of life on Earth. And wherever it comes from, life comes with a power mysteriously transcending nature, reaching beyond its grasp.
I have a little project going.
I’ve been taking photos through my studio window every few days to record the changes and see what I could see. I started last autumn.
I watched the leaves in the woods that surround me change color and fall. For endless weeks, the bare trees stood exposed to the winter’s cold winds, to icy rain, to snow. Beneath them, the fallen leaves dissolved into a carpet of muddy brown atop the frozen ground. Above them, the sky was blanketed by gray more often than it was clear and blue.
But today, I gaze at a world reborn, singing with broad, green leaves, with billowing ferns and wild flowers dancing in the dappled sunlight on the hillside. Once again, life has come, with its bounty of beauty and power.
In Switzerland, and all around our disaster-ridden globe, people are moving heaven and earth to rescue one another, to mend each other, to protect and nourish and comfort, to work together, to plan.
I think of Winston Churchill’s words to his people in the midst of the terrors of World War II: “When you’re going through hell, keep going.”
And we do. Life marches on, inside us and out, with all its mysteries and beauty and transcendental power.
Experience it I say. I believe that’s why we’re here. While we’re alive, let’s be alive and experience it all, every morsel of it, every flavor. And may we be moved enough by wisdom to sing our thanks as we go.
Wishing you rich experiences and a smooth stretch of road.
Warmly, Susan
Image: Screenshot from YouTube Video describing the mountain collapse in Switzerland
I went for a country drive last week and, on impulse, I took a Pema Chodron CD with me from her True Happiness set. I hadn’t listened to it for a long while, and thought it would be good to hear her gentle wisdom as I drove. She didn’t disappoint.
“If you want to get past something that’s upsetting you,” she said, “stop talking to yourself about it.”
“Amen, Pema!” I said out loud. That is one piece of priceless advice.
Once I saw a man walking down the sidewalk angrily shaking his fists, his face full of rage, shouting at someone who wasn’t even there.
I’ve played versions of that scene myself, although not out in public. I remember a day, decades ago, when my mind was playing a movie about an unfinished argument I had with a friend. I was in the kitchen pouring myself a cup of coffee, all the while spouting out my side of the argument, and I poured one for him, too. Only when I walked into the living room with a coffee in each hand did I realize he wasn’t even there. The whole scene was a product of my imagination!
We all fall into that trap from time to time, playing out unresolved issues in our imaginations. It’s as if we think if we tell the story long enough, we’ll get up the nerve to do something about it, or maybe we’ll come up with the perfect way to get even, or to get the sympathy we want for being so unjustly treated. At least we’ll justify our anger and confirm our opinion that the other guy is a big, stupid jerk.
But the fact is the longer we tell the story, the more energy we give it to rule us. Our hurt and anger don’t dissipate; they build. And we stay stuck in a morass of fiery pain.
It’s not only hurt and anger that fuels our negative story-telling, though. Sometimes what’s upsetting us is guilt, or shame, or fear, or worry. And our story-telling locks us into unsettled past events, or into a frightening “what if” future that’s nothing but make believe.
We can even get locked into story-telling when someone expresses an opinion that’s at odds from our own beliefs. How could she possibly think that! How ignorant!
Whatever the trigger, the story-telling blinds us. It locks us away from the gifts of the present moment and all of its possibilities. It prevents us from viewing the event—whether past or future—from a different angle, from a fresh and open perspective. It keeps us from questioning whether our story is even accurate, or complete, or true.
“Stop talking to yourself about it” is, I know, easier said than done. The trick is to hear yourself doing it, and then to realize that you’re only keeping yourself stuck. The story holds no solutions. It offers no answers. It only perpetuates your misery and keeps you from getting on with your life.
But here’s the good news: there’s always something else you can do instead. Wash the dishes. Go for a walk. Clean the garage. Get in motion. Get to work. Make a decision. Move on. Move into the glistening Now.
Remember: Time is passing. Be awake and alive in it. Because it has so much to offer, and you have so much to give.
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.
