“The truth is, I now don’t travel back at all. Not even for the day. I just try to live every day as if I’ve deliberately come back to this one day to enjoy it as if it was the full final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life “‘
–Tim Lake

Tonight my family and I watched the movie, “About Time”.  It is a love story as well as a father/son story.

​Keep Kleenex handy!

What have you done to honor your body today?

Assignment: Find a body lotion that you love. Maybe you love the scent of the lotion. Maybe you love the way it absorbs into your skin. Or, maybe, just maybe, the tactile connection between your own hand and your skin feels like a friendship.
Or a romance….

Or maybe none of this is true.

The harder this assignment seems, the greater your obligation is to do it.

​The benefits of this practice are dramatic and potentially life altering.

Greg Hicks and Rick Foster set out on a three-year journey to study extremely happy people. The began to study happiness in 1995, and they eventually traveled to all 50 states, 7 continents, and over 40 countries, finding and interviewing hundreds of extremely happy people. Their initial research uncovered a system of nine choices that’s been studied by experts. These choices are showed to lead to better health and job performance, and effective stress-management. In their book How We Choose to Be Happy, they found that there are nine choices happy people make. One of the nine is to practice Appreciation.  The other choices include: Intention, Accountability, Identification, Centrality, Recasting, Options, Giving, Truthfulness, and Synergy.

 recent study in the journal Appetite examined the effect of eating chocolate cake. In particular, the researchers were interested in understanding the association of either guilt or of celebration with eating chocolate cake. In other words, when eating prototypic forbidden food like chocolate cake, were women likely to feel helpless and out of control (ie guilty) OR to experience pleasure and enjoyment (ie celebration)?

The study had two parts:

The first was to evaluate attitudes, perceived behavioral control, and intentions to eat healthily and their effect on a person’s reaction to eating chocolate cake.

The second was to evaluate if the association of guilt or of celebration was related to weight change over a period of time (6 or 18 months).

Do you criticize just about every nook and cranny of your body?

Do you have a tape running in your mind, telling you that you are too fat?

Self-talk can be so cruel!

Here is a newsflash:

The secret of successful, healthy weight management is not actually a secret.

Say what?

“How do I choose love if I hate myself?”, ‘Sherri’ (not her real name) asked me yesterday during her therapy session.

I said nothing but could feel my eyes soften and water slightly. (Who does not know that feeling?!)

She continued. “My stomach sticks out. I have a zit on my chin. The guy I hooked up with on Friday has not texted me back. He has posted stuff about other girls. All of them are prettier than I am. I feel like such a loser.”

In a recent magazine interview, Ashley Judd spoke about her role in the movie Divergent. Based on the book series, the film is about a society that divides people into five factions, each based on a different virtue.  A decision has to be made at age 16 to remain in the faction one was born into or switch into another, for life.

Judd’s character is torn between two powerful forces: The desire to belong, and the desire to be an individual.

Judd describes her true life struggle with the very same tension, especially during adolescence.

I was listening to a TED Radio Hour on happiness recently.  The host, Guy Raz, asked his guest, musician Pharrell Williams, to reveal the secret to happiness.

Williams was perplexed.

Here is what he said:  “I’m not some guy who’s walking around smiling every day.  We all have our ups and downs, lefts and rights, and diagonals.”

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’”
~Mary Anne Radmacher

I learned about the concept of courage when I was about six. I saw The Wizard of Oz.  The Poor Lion! He couldn’t get out of his own way.

Lions are supposed to be brave. This Lion was not brave. He was filled with fear.
The Lion reminds us that no matter how powerful or great people are, they too have fears.
We all have fears that prevent us from advancing toward our potential.
The Lion thought that he would find courage in the Land of Oz.
We may recognize that we too look outside of ourselves to find courage.
(Like reaching for ‘liquid courage’, aka alcohol)
Everyday we all display courage, and we may not even know it.

I like Winston Churchill’s definition:  How does thinking of yourself as COURAGEOUS affect your sense of yourself?

My yoga teacher shared a story last week that I love.
His five year old son recently went cross country skiing for the first time.
The boy loved it!
His dad noticed that whenever his son fell down, his son talked aloud to himself.
The words he spoke were enthusiastic, joyous, and confident.
“He’s down, but he is back up!”
“You got this! C’mon, you got this!”
The self-talk was overwhelming positive.
My yoga teacher invited us to apply the same kind of attitude toward ourselves on the mat.
Can we transition to poses with enthusiasm, joy, and confidence, even if we wobble?
If we fall or lose balance, can we just get back up with a smile?
How about if we adopt this attitude not just on ski trails or the yoga mat, but in our daily life?
As someone who only did things I felt reasonably good at, I missed out on a lot of life.
Luckily, that is changing.
In life, I allow myself to wobble, lose my balance, and fall.   And I have learned to  get right back up, instead of generating self-criticism and shame.

Try it!

​You got this!