awareness

<p>“Comparison is the thief of joy.”
~Teddy Roosevelt~

It would be very easy to catch right now.
I haven’t been vaccinated, I’m not big on needles.
All I can say is; It feels VERY contagious right now.
I hope I don’t come down with a case of Comparison-itis.

Here in LA it’s easy to get caught up in “keeping up with the Kardashians” so to speak.
You can find yourself wanting a better car or a bigger home. The clothes, the shoes, the handbags…oh my!
Even youth. This is the land of young and beautiful people.
Here in La-La Land that over 40 crowd that succumbs to Comparison-itis help keep the plastic surgeons in their alligator loafers.

The truth is; comparing WILL steal your joy.
Because there will always be someone smarter, taller, thinner, richer, whatever! And when you chase them, you lose sight of your own blessings.
Believe me, there are people who want what you take for granted.

I’ve started my business course this week and it comes with a private Facebook page.
There are fellow students posting the amazing progress they’ve made and the epic insights they’ve had. They’ve completed all the assignments, attained magnificent clarity, increased their customer base by 60% and their income by 200%, and they are enthusiastically sharing it with our community, to great fanfare.
Let me be clear, school started Monday…it’s Wednesday. 

I keep reminding myself that when you re-enter the school system, even on the internet, you avail yourself to every “itis” imaginable.
I see Comparison-itis and his buddy Competetive-itis hanging out in our virtual Facebook hallways.
I remember them from High School and College. Funny, they look the same, they haven’t changed a bit…but I have.

Maybe it’s my age. I’d like to think its the wisdom I’ve accrued. Ha! 

Nevertheless, I’m an observer rather than a participant this time around. My latent competitiveness has woken up, but it knows how that story ends, so it’s behaving more like a sling-shot than an anchor.

These people are brilliant!
With their enthusiasm, they are gifting us with all the answers, and that’s the difference. They have the best sources and ideas, so their posts are becoming gold mines and I’m mining them every day to help in my endeavors.

I do see others in the comments though, that have come down with a horrible case of Comparison-itis.
I suppose a short bout is inevitable.
When you up your game, when you enter the arena, you can’t help but notice where you are in the standings.
There are the true Gladiators, and there are the newbies.
You can feel inferior or inspired. 
I pick the inspired.

Inspiration seems to be the Holistic cure for Comparison-itis.
That virus can’t stand up to all the fresh ideas.
Creative juices flowing and all the new ways of being and thinking are the anecdote.
Try not to look around and feel like you’re not enough, like you’re not doing it right, or “getting it” fast enough!
Become inspired!
If “they” can do it, you can too!
XoxJanet

Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.
~Will Rodgers~

I had this post all queued up in my head and then I saw this quote on Sir Richard Branson’s blog…Go figure.
I believe the Universe seeds the air with messages so we can pick them up when we’re open enough to receive. For me that happens driving the car, in the shower, walking the dogs, or at the gym. Those are the times when my guard goes down and my antenna goes up. Consistent yes, convenient no!

Anyway, gossip…gossip…ohhhhh it can sound so delicious, yet be so malicious.
Sadly, it doesn’t stop at middle school. It’s an even snarkier beast as an adult.

The two key components with gossip that make it so hurtful are these:
1) It is often, and by often I mean almost always, NOT TRUE.
2) You would NEVER want it to get back to the subject, most especially not with YOUR name attached.
So right there, you have your filter.
Should you pass it along?
Not unless Barbie herself told you she had a boob job.
Even then, I’m guessing they can speak for themselves.

Think about it, the juiciest gossip is impossible to verify.
Did So and So’s husband really sleep with the nanny? Not unless you saw it with your own eyes. THAT is the only way to know for sure. And if you did, it’s more sad than salacious. It does not need a publicist.

Have you ever been caught on the wrong end of gossip?
Either as the subject or the spreader?
Both of those are entries into the humiliation and shame Hall Of Fame.
I’ve been both. I’m pretty sure if you’re honest and you’ve lived long enough, you have too.
Neither was my proudest moment, but MAN they taught me a lot.
I started to write them here, but then I realized in the telling of their stories, I was gossiping!
So I’ll just have to leave it to your imagination.

Here’s what I want all of us to do.
Just give it a second thought the next time a tasty tidbit is whispered in your ear.
Is it true? Even if it might be, is it for public consumption?
Would we want our name attached to it?
Would we want the parrot to blab?
Who would get hurt in the telling of this?
If it doesn’t stand up to these questions, no matter how sensational…we will walk away.
It’s none of our business.

XoxJanet 

Faith 
Some days my faith is huge and bold,
So large an ocean cannot hold.
Then other days, it’s all dried up,
just a drop in the bottom of a paper cup.

I vacillate between the two.
Fate waits to drop the other shoe.
Then luck comes by with his friend chance,
this is my lifetime’s little dance.

Some days an ocean, some days a cup,
I stay the course, I won’t give up.
I play the game, my heart is true,
with faith as my partner, how about you?
XoxJanet

“As you begin to take action toward the fulfillment of your goals and dreams, you must realize that not every action will be perfect. Not every action will produce the desired result. Not every action will work. Making mistakes, getting it almost right, and experimenting to see what happens are all part of the process of eventually getting it right.”
– Jack Canfield

Oh God, here I go again…experimenting, making mistakes, almost getting it right…Crap!

As Monday approaches, which is the day my online business class starts,
I’m getting a stomach ache. Maybe a headache too. Yeah, definitely head ache.

Why you ask? Because of my expectations!
They started off strong, which is par for the course for me.
I devoured all the pre-class curriculum, watched the videos…twice; then I got to the parts I just didn’t understand, and I got frustrated. 
” Go big, or go home!” has often been my battle cry. But that was in the ventures where I knew my shit.
Now, I’m WAYYYYYYYYY out of my league, and I want to go to bed.

That all got me to thinking about expectations. 
I’m expecting everything to be over my head.
I’m expecting that I will not understand analytics, web design, content blah blah, and all that jazz.

I’m expecting to be asked to build a rocket ship from popsicle sticks, some gum and a flashlight.
I don’t understand how televisions work and planes fly. I know it’s something about capturing pixels and aerodynamics, but it’s all just a miracle to me.
So is the internet.
And I’m about to go behind the curtain and see how it all functions.
Then, I’m going to learn how to finagle and manipulate it.
Then I’m going to rule the world! Mwaaaahaaahaa!
Expectations too high?

See? My expectations have run amok. I vacillate between knowing I’m gonna suck, to thinking I’m the next Mark Zuckerberg.
Damn you expectations!
Do you do that too?

I have until Monday to stop being so expectation-ally schizophrenic and get a more realistic grip on them.
Then I need to just be okay being a student.
I can’t be good at all this stuff, because it’s all NEW to me. Some things I’m going to grasp right away, and love them because they make me feel smart.
I expect a great majority of the material will read like Greek to me, and I’m gonna suck.
I’m expecting a lot of tears…Because that’s what I do when I get frustrated.

So stay tuned. This should get interesting, funny and soggy.

This blog will soon become part of a website. I expect it to be…great.
You will all get to witness this transformation in the coming months, and I know you’ll weigh in 🙂
There will be two, maybe three books available. They’ll be compiled from the over 400 blog posts I’ve written so far.
Hey! Email me your preference for the first book, will ya? Atikhome@me.com
1) The poignant posts with a message and the poems.
Or…
2) The more humorous posts.

I know you’ll be honest with me, because…
I expect nothing less.

XoxJanet

in·tu·i·tion
noun
1.
the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.
“we shall allow our intuition to guide us”
synonyms: gut feeling (I added that) instinct, intuitiveness

“Can you use that word in a sentence please?”

Isn’t that one of the questions spelling bee participants ask?
I love the sentence Dictionary.com came up with: We shall allow our intuition to guide us.”
Wouldn’t it be great if we all REALLY did that?
I’d like to live in THAT world!

When’s the last time you said: I shouldn’t have trusted my intuition? 
Probably never.
Here’s why: Intuition is your internal GPS. She hold the maps, she has all the directions.
Your intuition has access to all your wisdom, all your talents, all your hopes and dreams.
Even the ones that are buried so deep you don’t acknowledge them or show them to the world.
Then, she has access to wisdom and talents that YOU didn’t even know you possessed.

The thing with intuition is: she’s got your back.
You have to really know that in order to trust her guidance, 
because when you can quiet the bullshit, she will be your North Star.
She will guide you to exactly where you should be.
Where you need to be.
You just need to listen.

Intuition is that voice that keeps repeating.
It is calm but insistent.
You’ll try to talk yourself out of it, there doesn’t seem to be reason to its request.
Sometimes it doesn’t make sense.
OFTEN it doesn’t seem rational.
That’s the thing, it isn’t reasonable, it isn’t rational, it’s intuition.

Mothers have it IN SPADES!
“Check the baby”.
Calm, but insistent.
“Check the baby”.
There is no mother on earth that ignores that voice.
They go check the baby, damn it!

Intuition has conviction, it has that knowing.
I’m going to add that to the definition: having a knowing…just KNOWING something.
There’s never a question mark at the end of the request.
If the thought starts with “should I “? Or “What if”. That’s not intuition.
It says without a shadow of a doubt “Don’t marry that man”.
End of discussion.
Shit! We know that voice is telling the truth, we just don’t want to hear it the night before the wedding.

There are some people that risk looking foolish to obey their intuition.
People get off planes that then crash.
There are the stories of people that didn’t go to work, didn’t go back in the building or were “late” on 911.

“Get that mole checked”
That’s intuition. It’s not asking you, it’s telling you.
Whether it’s telling you to get off a plane, see a doctor or leave the ass hole at the altar. It’s trying to guide you and possibly save your life.

My husband and I follow intuition’s instructions every time we get on the motorcycle. We’ve gotten really good at it; because we want to live to see another day.
On our long distance trips we schedule a stretch break every two hours so our butts don’t permanently fall asleep.
Several times, just because one of us has gotten that “hit”, we have pulled off a road to check a map or get a coffee way ahead of time, and it has saved us.

I can remember two times in France. Once we missed a ten car pile up by about a minute. Another morning we left early, just before a sniper opened fire from a bell tower, on the plaza where we were staying in Tours. If we had stuck to our original time, we would have been having coffee…in that plaza…at that time. Guaranteed.
I’m not kidding, we are probably alive because we deviated from our plan, we both had a gut feeling to leave early.

In March of 2010 on Oahu, my friend was teasing me because I was convinced there was going to be a tsunami. I was drinking umbrella drinks and obsessing, so he Googled the frequency of tsunamis in the Hawaiian islands.
Rare.
Didn’t matter.
I heard the voice that kept saying very calmly, but insistently: there’s going to be a tsunami. If Oahu had been an airplane, I would have grabbed my carry-on and gotten off.
Well, it never occurred, we left the next day and I forgot about it.

The next year my husband and I were invited to Maui to stay with friends.
On the drive from the airport to the condo, there’s that voice again.
“There’s going to be a tsunami”.
So I blurt it out over the bad music on the radio.
We then had a spirited debate on which was more likely to happen, a tsunami or a giant volcanic eruption? We both end up on Team Volcano, because THAT makes sense.
It’s reasonable and rational, unlike a tsunami…and we forget about it. 
I do have to say, I did pay attention to the fact that we were six floors up. I know I wouldn’t have stayed beachfront. No way.
So you can imagine my husband’s face when 10 days later CNN breaks in with coverage of the huge Tsunami in Japan, and a few minutes later all the Islands are put on Tsunami Watch! 
Intuition had my back. She had OUR back.
She just had her dates wrong the first time, she was ahead of herself by one year.
Or was she?
XoxJanet

When I forget this, I get scared.
Another one I like is from Esther Hicks/Abraham: Things are always working out for me.
Doesn’t that just make your shoulders come down off your ears?! Deep breath…
Things are working out, everything will be ok.
Carry on.
XoxJanet

This made me laugh! Happy Sunday!
XoxJanet

ELEGANT
el·e·gant
ˈeləgənt/
adjective: elegant
1.pleasingly graceful and stylish in appearance or manner.
“she will look elegant in black” (a reason why I always wear black, ha!)
synonyms: stylish, graceful, tasteful, sophisticated, classic, chic, smart.
antonyms: messy, unwieldy (hot mess)!

Oh yeah, I’ve talked about this. I cautioned you in the previous post.
We can aspire to it, aim for it, even pray for it, but enlightenment, spiritual awakening, whatever you want to name it, is rarely elegant.

And by rarely…I mean never.

There is a mine field of inelegance that surrounds becoming conscious.
You can side step the big stuff, like disaster and dis-ease, but you’ll still get your shoes dirty.
It’s kinda the name of the game.
If it was pretty; clean and easy, everyone would do it.

Take meditation for instance.
I can’t tell you how many friends have said this to me: When I started meditation, all hell broke loose.
It starts out all zen and blissful, with the breath and the inner peace. You will have that in your back pocket for life; but ask anyone who’s seriously meditated for a while.
Shit can hit the fan!
If you meditate every day, you literally change your brain…and your body.
You put the monkey mind in its place, and make your connection with source.

But source likes a clean link. It doesn’t like an old plugged up infrastructure, so it cleans and clears things out. When that happens, all your bad habits, your sabotaging self talk, your anger, hate, rage, lack of forgiveness, selfishness, greed, and jealousy, to name a few, are chased out of the shadows and into the light.

Get the fan.

This will set you free, but these guys won’t be graceful, chic or elegant.
They will give you the middle finger on their way out.
Meditation shook their cage, and they’re pissed.

Yoga is right up there too. A great practice, amazing for the mind and body, but it’s not just exercise, there is a spiritual aspect to Yoga that you can’t get around.
Yoga in Sanskrit means “the Divine Union”. Using the physical postures to bring the mind under control and join with the Higher Self or Source.

Uh oh.
Get the fan.

A regular Yoga practice will unleash all the usual suspects.
Anger will be released from your hip joints, sadness from your shoulders.
There will be heart openings, epic realizations, even tears.
It will free YOU as well…it just won’t be elegant.

Choosing the path less traveled.
Operating outside your comfort zone.
Mindful living.
Being of Service.
All call for making the tough choices, lots of “no’s” = Fast track to a more enlightened life.
Elegance…not so much.

Enlightenment is the loftier, more desirable pursuit of the two, but it has been my experience that you can’t have both.
Choose wisely.

XoxJanet