I’m writing this as I sit in a doctor’s office while my daughter sees a surgeon about having her gall bladder removed. It’s sobering to see your loved one in pain.
So I’m thinking about the pain that so many people have, every day, because their health isn’t what they would like it to be. Not just physical health, but also emotional health, mental health, spiritual health. It’s so important to be healthy on all levels that just focusing on the physical doesn’t lead us to the life of our dreams.
What’s the last thing you did for your emotional health? Are you looking at your life for keys to the blocks that you are experiencing? Have you mined the past on your personal timeline to learn the lessons of your experiences? Are you developing new tools for your responses so your knee-jerk reaction isn’t where you get stuck when something happens in your life?
How about your mental health? Have you examined the tapes that play in your head for their source and to decide whether to keep them playing or to change them? Do you know what negative thoughts are popping up and keeping you from growing into the person you were meant to be? Are you holding yourself back from your greatness because you think you can’t be great?
And your spiritual health is most important because the beliefs you hold affect all the other levels of your being. Your beliefs affect your thoughts which generate your emotions and, finally, present as physical health problems if you haven’t cleared them. Oftentimes, beliefs come from our childhood or our family tree or our environment [society, teachers, churches, etc.]. They have not been generated consciously but are sourced in the unconscious mind.
What do you believe about yourself? Might there be a belief that ‘Everyone in our family gets arthritis by the time they are 50’? How about ‘No one from this neighborhood gets to go to college’? These unconscious beliefs operate to restrict us whether we are aware of them or not. Have you examined what you believe and made a conscious choice about holding onto that belief or releasing it?
At the physical level, you must choose to live in balance with all of your other levels. Are you eating in a way that matches your beliefs about food and its sources? Are you making physical choices based on unconscious emotions or thoughts that conflict with what is best for you? Do you ask yourself questions about your life and its balance when something presents as out of balance?
Many people can look at stress in their life and see the imbalance that is caused there. Too many believe that they can’t do anything about stress. But what they are really saying is that they don’t know what to do about the stress that they can’t change.
Things happen. We react. Then we choose our response to the event. That’s what life is.
And if we can’t change the things that happen, then we have to look at our reactions and our responses. This is the first place to build up our took kit so that we can live a conscious life and choose wisely our responses to events. This FOLLOWS doing all the other work to bring our beliefs, thoughts, emotions into balance.
When I spend a Muse Day with a client, where we have a whole day together to clear blocks and make plans, we often spend most of the day on the clearing blocks part of the agenda, checking in on the spiritual, mental and emotional levels. Creating a plan for the actions to take in the physical plan is often the easiest and quickest part of the day because we’ve brought every thing else into balance before we start the planning.
Trying to plan without the balance brings frustration and much harder work. Trying to deal with dis-ease without finding the source of the imbalance makes the task much more difficult, if not impossible.
Our daughter will be fine. She’s been working through many levels of what is happening. I’m sorry she’s going through the proverbial ‘2 by 4 to the head’ experience but haven’t we all had some of those? We learn!
And I hope that you, too, will examine the levels of your being for where imbalances live. Clearing those can really help you move the pain out of your life!
PS: This Friday, November 2, just in time for All Souls Day, the Day of the Dead, you are invited to a Conversation with The Other Side! I’ll be bringing in the Energies, Loved Ones who have crossed over, Angels, Spirit Guides, all manner of extra-dimensional beings during this time when the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest! Join me! Learn more here!
We’ve met our Tristan! It is so exciting to be with our new grandbaby. You can Skype or FaceTime but it’s not the same as being together in person.
Mystic Messages 
I Am Tolerating WHAT???!!! – Richard’s Commentary
September 12, 2013 — RichardTolerance, a “permissive attitude”, can be a lackadaisical approach to life or it can be a philosophy and intentional approach to life. Which is it? Maybe it can be both.
Tolerance in a carefully machined automobile part is the amount of deviation from a standard that can be allowed for the part to function properly. In this example machining the part further to comply with a tighter than needed tolerance would take more time and energy and would not necessarily improve the functionality of the part. A more relaxed tolerance in this case can save energy rather than expend more energy.
Personally I can tolerate a certain amount of dust on a windowsill or a few dust bunnies under the bed; if I vacuum the rug every two weeks rather than every week I am saving myself time and a bit on the electric bill. The tolerance level here is the amount of deviation from perfection that balances the energy saved with the energy expended on accepting the deviation.
If you are a parent, how much do you tolerate from your kids? Do you have a “permissive attitude” toward their behavior? And how far do you allow that permission to extend? Again, energy can be a measure here: the energy you spend on parenting can be balanced by the energy the children spend on testing the boundaries of your tolerance. They are busy learning about those boundaries and you must be busy setting them so they learn how to be balanced, creative, socially adapted individuals.
And then there are the personal boundaries that we develop and evolve as we grow and mature, learn and expand consciously. These boundaries form the tolerances in our lives. Some are external; they involve our family, friends, community, even country. Some people choose to leave their country of origin because they can no longer tolerate the living circumstances, whether those are political, religious, social, or economic factors. And then there are the internal boundaries, the tolerance levels we set up as standards for our own behavior and how we live life within those standards, or values. It is these values around which we balance the energy we expend on maintaining our adherence to those standards versus the energy drain from letting down our guard and giving in to a lower standard.
As an example one of my standards, a practice, is to write three longhand pages of text everyday, early in the day, preferably first thing in the morning. This is a practice I adopted from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I have been doing this for years, and I find it very worthwhile. It is a way for me to meditate, to journal, to dump the cobwebs from my psyche, to rail at the Universe, to give thanks to the universe, to channel the divine. I love this practice. Do I do it every day, first thing in the morning? No. Clearly there are things that get in the way, that disrupt this practice. This morning I am writing this blog post first before my pages. Lately I’ve been eating some breakfast before my pages. These are tolerances that I can live with; energy spent obsessing about always writing the pages first is not balanced by the positive effect of the writing. On the other hand there are some days I miss writing altogether. When I occasionally miss one day it seems to be OK, I can tolerate that. But when two or more days go by and I fail to get to my pages, I begin to notice the effects: I get more irritable, less tolerant! Then the balance tips in the direction of energy drained from me that is out of balance with energy spent in writing the pages.
How do you measure your tolerance levels? Do you do this consciously? Are you aware when your boundaries are crossed and your energy drained? It’s good to think about your boundaries so you can maximize your energy levels and live fully, in the present.
Now I’m going to write those pages!