A Cornucopia of Wellness Resources – Part 1

cornucopia.jpgThose of us committed to deepening ourselves and learning all we can from our life journeys, are using this passage of time right now to say “Yes we can.” Yes, we can focus on all we have in our lives, all we aspire to, and all we have to share and give.

In this spirit of abundance and plenty, I’ll be sharing some of my 2008 harvest in the next few posts. I’ve gathered together some resources that have contributed to my own Well-Being this year. So feel free to dig around in the next few posts. Find just the right something within the bounty of quotes, websites, blogs, stories and snippets of thought I’ll share, that will contribute to your own sense of abundance, appreciation, delight and Well-Being this season.

I give thanks for your readership, your comments, your inspiring progress you’ve made through our coaching sessions and teleclasses and wish you a meaningful Thanksgiving…

Today’s Harvest brings this Snippet of Thought that meandered through my mind just the other day:

Simply Enough

I sat at my desk, facing my computer, navigating around the internet in total physical tension and mental overwhelm. With lightening speed, thoughts racing through my head screamed, “So much to do. So much information coming at me. So many email messages to read. So many new e-books to read, CDs to listen to, tele-events to attend, marketing actions to take. Other people are out there making giant headway…will I ever get enough new and useful information and get it fast enough?”

I did what I know to do when I hit this stage. I pushed away from my desk, took a breath, left the room, got a glass of water, and went outside.

The crisp autumn air greeted me. A sudden glimpse of a hummingbird, dancing in our red-flowering bushes, helped me forget my tension and brought an ear-to-ear grin to my face. I took a deep breath, looked up at the wide blue sky, grabbed another deep breath and stood there just Being.

Gently, a thought floated into the space of my refreshed mind…

“Wait a minute, Erica. What is the rush at your computer? You take a deep lung-filling breath of air here, not worrying about whether you grabbed enough, or worrying if there won’t be enough air for you, or that someone else will get to it first, or hurrying to grab the next breath. All the air you need is right here. All around you. Why not approach the internet and information the same way. In fact, why not approach life this way?”

I stood still and appreciated this short but life-altering moment. I had a deep visceral understanding that, in this age of information, our job is to discern what we need, take it in, use it, and gently let the rest go. And just like it’s not ours to worry if we get the right bite of air, or worry if we’ll run out of air, or fret that someone else is getting better or more air than we are, it’s not ours to try to take in every drop of information. Ahh.

I took another deep lung-full of air, stretched toward the sun, and headed back inside…forever touched by what I’d breathed in.

Are you “taking in all the air you need?” My friend, Gremlin-Tamer, and coach, Rick Carson, is fond of asking this question. When I’m not breathing, or I’ve squelched my breath in a moment of worry , he reminds me to take in all the air I need. How is your breath at this moment? Are you taking in all the air you need? Are you remembering that there is plenty of it available?

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Grab a bite of holiday coaching with Erica this holiday season. Call for an individual session or join others for the December Teleclasses, “Why Weight?” and “Sacred Attitudes for Stress-Free Holidays“. Space is limited. Offices: 925-933-7445

Thinking About Joy, Abundance & Well-Being

resting-at-apple-tree.jpgThere’s nothing new here. Truly. You’ve heard all of what’s in this post before. You already know the information, the concepts, and the ideas. So do I. But there are just times when I need a reminder. So I really wrote this one for me.

Joy. It’s not outside of you. Before my husband and I reached the millionaire mark, I thought doing so would make me happy. It did for a while, but the novelty wore off after a bit. I thought that when my health returned after an accident, that I would be happy. Again, it did for a while, but that joy was also temporary. And after years of inner work, meditation, therapy, and studies with world-known experts in the field of spiritual growth, I continually returned to that familiar statement “joy is within you, not in things outside you.” But did I really get it? I thought so. But maybe not…

Thinking I knew what to expect. For the past month or so, in preparation for a teleclass I’m teaching soon, I’ve been doing the abundance exercise presented in the Abraham-Hicks book, Money & The Law of Attraction. It’s the one where you get a check register and some checks that you aren’t using, and post “money” (imagined) into the checking account each day, increasing by $1000 each day. Then you “spend” that amount daily and actually write the check for things you will buy. To up the ante, and make myself “stretch” a bit, I began with $10,000, then “spent” that, added $20,000 the next day, and so on, increasing the amount added each day by $10,000.

At first, doing the exercise and “shopping” for stuff I wanted was fun and joyful. I actually felt like I had already purchased and ordered those things and they’d be coming in the mail any day. And I wrote the checks with no hesitancy, knowing that the next day there would be more money in the account, as if by magic, without my having to do anything. It was a feeling of freedom. And, after a few weeks of this, whenever I went to write “real” checks, from home or business accounts, I had a visceral experience of feeling the same freedom as I paid bills or bought things – no worries about investing right, the economy, or my businesses —  just knowing there would be more money in the account the next day. So far, so good.

Much more to learn. As I said, I’ve been doing this for a little more than a month now. So today in the exercise, I put the $400,000 amount I was up to into the account and chose to “buy” a condo on Maui. As I wrote the check for the condo, I had an odd feeling. A rather sad feeling actually. I couldn’t pinpoint it. So I stopped, took a breath, and sorted things out. What was the source of the sadness? What thoughts were present? Why wasn’t buying this condo bring me joy?

Ah. There it was. I wasn’t in a state of joy to begin with this morning. I wasn’t “buying” the condo from a place of joy. As I wrote the “check”, I realized that no matter what I bought, it wasn’t going to make me happy.

Now I’ve known this intellectually my whole life. But I didn’t know it as deeply as I do today. The money is just not going to make me happy. A new anything won’t make me happy. Perfect health, my spouse, the perfect career, or the perfect friends won’t either. Only I am going to make me happy.

This was sobering. I thought I knew this. I truly am a human in process, learning each day. I am sitting with today’s learning for now.

Just thought I’d share.

p.s. if you decide to give the exercise a whirl, let us know what happens…
p.p.s. “Most of you do not believe that it is your natural state of being to be well.”
— Abraham
Excerpted from the Abraham-Hicks workshop in Boston, MA on Sunday, October 20th, 1996