Anyway, my eucalyptus inspired  today’s article.  I worked with several clients today who are shedding their current identities (what we believe, what we love and fear, our values, what we’re willing to express in the world) and restoring long lost ones or creating new ones. The new brilliant identities are bright, eager, a little shy or scared – they’ve been under the bark of more familiar, weathered, and  hardened identities for years, decades, a lifetime.  Or they are just being created anew.  Nature continues to let go of what’s done, recycle it, and nurture new beginnings.  We also do that through shedding identities that are no long big enough to hold who we are becoming.   The changed identity shows up in new actions, words, choices, relationships, and beliefs.  Just like our bodies grow and change every year,  our identity changes.  Perhaps we are too slow to change it once we become adults.  We forget that growth can happen all through life.

What brilliant new identity is ready to shove the current one to the side and show up for you?  I invite you to leave a comment.

I spent three days just south of the San Francisco airport at a seminar with Jeff Slayter and Kane Minknus, http://jeffandkane.com/, two passionate trainers bringing their brilliance to service professionals as well as Fortune 500 companies.  They are an example of a unique brilliance plus passion meeting the world’s need. Their passion is to free people up from negative beliefs and pattenrs in order to get on with making the difference they want to make with their business.  Their brilliance is their experience as entrepreneurs, coaches and consultants; their practiced presence in front of a room, and practical and useful steps to change.

Here’s one great insight I learned from Jeff and Kane: we are far more entangled in old family patterns, unconscious decisions, and limiting beliefs than we realize. This snarl of beliefs, history, genetics and more is called our ecology.  It acts like a rubber band snapping us back into our status quo whenever we dare to take on something so audacious as to live the life we want.  Perhaps we desire love, abundance, peace, and success and our ecology is about scarcity, no self-worth, fear,failure, or being the doormat.  Until we take steps to soften the pull of our ecology on us as we step out into our full life we will find ourselves on our butts back where we started.  An example of this – 80% of people who win the lottery are either dead or broke within five years – because their ecology could not expand to allow that much wealth – they were too different from family and friends and their own deeply held beliefs.

I won’t go into all the ways to relieve the pull of ecology on us as we seek our desires, but here is a step in the process – becoming aware.

* Whenever you act a certain way in a certain situation notice what you do, what you think, and what you say to yourself or others.  For example, in the seminar there were opportunities to work with Jeff and Kane in the front of the room. Being up there would be personally very enlightening.  However, I sat glued to my chair.  I clenched up – with tightness in my chest, feet planted on floor.  I remember that same feeling whenever I get in front of a room, way back to 1st grade show and tell. Any of you ever like that?

* Next, ask yourself, “What are the beliefs of someone acting and feeling like this?” Jot down several of them.  In the example above, someone who stayed in their chair instead of take an opportunity could be afraid of being found out, afraid of not looking good, not believe they deserve it, afraid to be in a place of not knowing something, afraid of ridicule, believe they are shy, feel ashamed….and more.

* Pick the one or ones that most resonate and notice where else it shows up in life.  Get acquainted and curious.

I  invite you to take this further and contact me to take on ways to move through these beliefs to unleash your brilliance in the world.

What are your dreams, desires and/or goals – the ones that come from your heart?  Leave a comment.

When your passion, your brilliance, meets a need of the slice of the world you’re meant to serve, you can experience more synergy, service, gratitude, ease, reward, and purpose.

“If you had a secret passion, something that you rarely speak about because it’s just too big or outrageous or unlikely, what would that be?” I ask this question of my long term clients.  Sometimes we do a little digging to uncover what’s been buried since childhood or college. This is what’s in your passionate heart, not your logical, reasonable and  perhaps cautious mind. It can be big or small, and it can be single or plural.  No rules. It could be to travel to a certain place, learn an instrument, go to college, get fit, climb a mountain, go camping again, write a book, change the world in some way.

At age 12 a passion to “Discover America, It’s 3,000 Smiles Wide” was born when  I saw that written on an Amtrak advertisement.  Sixteen years later I took a leave from  my job for the summer and rode across America on my bicycle. It was now or never.  It was more than the challenge of the ride, it was seeing the beauty and connecting with the earth and honoring my brilliant passion before it was too late.  It took many people to help me make it happen.

Action

Close your eyes, relax with a good breath, and ask yourself what is my secret passion?  If you don’t come up with a response, let it be and use that question as an inquiry over the next couple weeks.  An inquiry is a coaching tool where you ask a broad, curious question and let your experiences give you many answers and take you down many tunnels.  If you’re already in your passion, that’s good.  Help someone else find and claim theirs, and get curious about what it is to live your passion, and if all the elements are in place.

What can you do this summer to bring the experience of your passion into your life? What steps can you take, what is ready to happen?  Maybe your passion is to play basketball professionally, but you’re already 40 years old.  Where/ how/when can you experience or live

the essence of your passion?  Find a team, form a team, coach a team, write about a team….? Get creative!  Well, will you?

It’s a good idea to keep it to yourself; or share it only with people committed to helping you realize it, until it takes shape.  Don’t let anyone stomp it out of existence, don’t let it die before its born..  If you’re ready, I invite you to write me how your brilliant passion is emerging this summer in the comments below.

Let a passion be part of your life every year, no matter how small it might need to be to fit in with everything else.  Let it nourish you.

I recently checked a book out of the library (remember those?)  called “Extreme Ice Now” by James Balog.  It tells how Mr. Balog set up time lapse cameras on about 30 glaciers to record their movement over months and years.  I wanted to see the time lapse results so I searched the Internet for a video.  This video is a presentation Mr. Balog gave at TED in summer of 2009.  It shows some of what his cameras recorded and the implications of what we’re seeing.   It is astounding and sobering – a message communicated by merging art and science that neither could do alone.

I don’t usually blog about the environment, ecology and politics.  However, when I saw this video I felt compelled to share it with as many people in my world as possible.  First, it is an extreme work of art.  Second, it is a sobering wake up call – it makes climate change real and vivid.  Third, it ends on a note of optimism and hope – so let us do what we can do every day to heal our global community.

Let me know what you think and how you feel in your comments.  Thanks!

Come home.  Why come home to you?

1. To know your own wisdom,  value, values, preferences, purpose.  To get to know you like you know your Facebook community or co-workers.  To discover the culture that is unique to you.
2. To experience the very alive, sweet, precious essence of you.
3. To  love.  To know love – love of yourself and others.   To grow love so that when you’re with partners, children, colleagues, family and friends you have your own wellspring of love to bring to the relationship.  You are not needing love.  You are full and  sharing it.
4. To choose.  The input of the world meets your own personal biology, beliefs, values, and purpose when you come home in order to choose.  Your choices will honor your own personhood – not that of the outer world.  You can say yes to a request from being home rather than from not knowing home and thinking that what others want is also good for you.   You can say no, thank you.  You can honor the wisdom of your body in order to sustain your own inner peace and follow your purpose.
5. To rest.  Your lives are lived at a tremendous pace – every 5 years adds dozens of new distractions, games, shows, demands, and possibilities.  Bodies are built to recieve input – nerves fire and process all over them all day long.  Sleep is a way of coming home.  And so is hitting the pause button in the middle of the day.  When I feel exhausted in the day, often just five minutes of quiet time re-energizes me.

How do we come home? Here are my suggestions – you check out your own biology, life, and style and discover what coming home is for you.

1. To begin, stop  leaving your home, your body / mind / spirit for a period of time each day.   Sit here and just know you.  Even if just for a minute a day to begin.
2. Come home from phones ringing, buzzing or vibrating;
3. and  music, no matter how spiritual it is to you.
4. Come home from digital images flickering through your eyes and brain.
5. Just for these moments,  come home from  people in your space
6. and thoughts churning about problems.  Yes, you can pause them.
7. Come home to your presence in nature, in quiet, in reduced input.
8. Yes – seated, standing, or lying down.  Yes – awareness and senses turned inward.
9. Try the meditator’s way to center -  be aware of your breath. If you are doing this for a minute that is about 10-12 calm breaths.  That’s all.  Be aware of your breath in your nose, throat, chest.  Good.
10. Massage is good for becoming aware of your body.  Start here.
11. At any given moment, just tune in-ward.  After a workout,  during or after a meal, during or after sex, during or after an argument, turn your awareness inward for a deep and pleasurable homecoming.

Now that you have come home, what inspired actions arise from your connection to yourself?  Write them down, then take off!

I offer coaching and workshops on inner peace, and taking off from there

In what ways do you come home to yourself?  What do you discover?

Surprisingly warm for the mountains, day dawns in our campground.   Today my brother and his wife and their two teenage girls, my other brother and I climb Flattop Mtn. – 12,200 feet above sea level and an altitude change of 2000 feet over 4.5 miles.  Packing sandwiches, snacks, and water is quick as we need an early start in order to be able to hightail it off the peak before the afternoon thunderstorms hit.  My nieces had a dream to conquer a peak this year.  Boots, socks, packs, binoculars and cameras all strapped, tied, pulled or slung onto shoulders or feet (appropriately).  We stride out of the campground and hit the trail by 8:40.

My niece, Julie (not her real name),  has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. I have very little idea what it’s like inside her mind and body, but outside it can show up as not focused, excessive worry about future or past events while trying to do a task, and heavy thoughts making heavy, slow footsteps.  Whatever it was, we knew her pace would keep us below timberline all day.  After the first half mile I took her hand and said, “You’ve got your rhythm, and it won’t get you up the mountain today. How about trying another one? Let’s sing, and you match my rhythm.”  She readily agreed (she’s wonderful about receiving support).  We sang and danced, “I’ve got rhythm, I’ve got music, I’ve got my man, Who could ask for anything more?”  “I’ve got hiking boots, I’ve got a trail, I’ve got my family, Who could ask for anything more?”   After a while Julie said she could do it on her own and she spent the next half hour in her new energetic, steady rhythm.  She leaned into that mountain.

At about noon we emerge above timberline. And oh, oh, oh, there are amazing stalks of pink elephant-head flowers blowing in the breeze; red and yellow Indian paintbrush, little purple moss campion hugging the lichen-speckled granite to avoid the wind.    The tundra is an explosion of color, of tiny plants, of adaptation to cold and wind, and rocks, rocks, rocks!  Mountains, valleys, lakes, streams nearly shout with their crisp edges and vivid shapes.

By 1:30 we reach the top!  My two nieces have conquered their first mountain! We flop down in the tremendous wind and devour the best sandwiches the world has ever tasted. The mountain decides that’s enough and throws a hailstorm at us and we scramble into ponchos that flutter like flags.  We begin the climb down.  I hear Julie tell her dad as we keep an eye on the lightning moving across the valley, “You know my disease – that schizo affective thing?  I conquered it today!”  She paused and added, “I can do my homework now.”

Moral of the Story:  An inner shift in perspective, or rhythm, or focus always changes outer results.  A coach joins you  on your journey to help shake your brain out of its patterned perspectives so you can see and achieve new results.  Also, a change in one area produces a change in other areas.  What other morals do you see?

Like the athletes, many people have the same purpose that can be expressed in different ways.  The purpose might be to be peace, and the expressions might be teaching, leading a march, meditating, or practicing Buddhism.    So, for those of you who thought you loved the work you chose but you are not happy with it, you may need to find another expression of your purpose, one that you are uniquely designed to do.  You don’t necessarily have to change everything.

Sun and Earth

The wolrld is ours to heal or wound.

Every penny given in care and love to the people of Haiti is a penny of peace, love, hope and healing for Haiti and our world.

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