Inrageous/Outrageous Self-Care Enchantments for This Week

 

I am very aware that this blurb in not intended to be about me, it is intended to be about you.  Yet, the only life that I can speak about with any assuredness is my own, everything else is projection.  So, may I continue to speak from my wonderfully wounded heart?  It truly is perfect that I can literally feel a soft little tender wounded place in my heart.  The tenderness reminds me of so much!

 

I used to think that a spiritual path involved a challenge or initiation, completion of the challenge and then mastery.  This was my interpretation of Joseph Campbell’s writing of a “hero’s/heroine’s journey”.  Another way of saying this is that I thought that a major life crisis provides a doorway into deeper spiritual growth and that we each get one of these per lifetime.   I think this is a very “western” view. I had already had my “challenge” with a huge family crisis many years ago, felt that I was on my way towards mastery and see how my interpretation was incomplete and one-dimensional.

 

What is perfect about both my husband’s recent health issues involving almost dying and a serious diagnosis and my heart attack is that our lives have been shaken up so completely and so totally that there is no choice but to re-evaluate everything.  We are face to face with “the fear of death.”  This has resulted in me expanding my view and belief about spiritual life and in fact, the meaning of life.  I realize that I had used my good health, my husband’s good health, my relative youth (I’m 51), our 2 income status, to give me a sense of security and perhaps pride or entitlement.    We had a plan and it was working!  Feeling like the “rug has been ripped out from under my feet” has been scary, no, terrifying.  All the awful, horrible feelings, images and fears that I had kept solidly stuffed down inside a hardened heart are free.  I have come face to face with my fear of “being a bag lady”, a single parent, a disabled person, homeless, a widow.  How perfect!  I am so far away from life mastery that I can laugh and chuckle and my, how expansive and gentle and funny (in an honouring way) this feels. 

 

Your self care enchantments if you chose to this week, are about further exploration of “you” and developing deepening “unconditional friendship with yourself”.

 

Self Care Enchantments for the week:

 

1.  Explore when you feel secure and when you feel insecure?  What contributes to your security?  What if it was no longer there?

2.  How do you feel about your heart, is it hardened in any way, do you feel you are protecting an area of your heart?  Play with the images of a cold, hard, rigid heart and a soft warm melted heart.

3. In preparation for Thanksgiving, on a daily basis “give thanks” for something difficult in your life and observe the results. 

 

“May your life be like a wildflower, growing freely in beauty and joy each day.”

 

- Native American Proverb

 

Please share about your learning and exploration with these enchantments on www.thepowblog.com in the comments section of these enchantments!

 

namaste,

 

Zoey

 

Zoey Ryan

coach . catalyst . shakti sage

life & business coach for women

“Coaching for your heart & soul and the heart & soul of your business”

www.positivelyoutrageouswomen.com

www.entrepreneurialsuperstars.com

604-323-3700

 

Inrageous/Outrageous Self-Care Enchantments for This Week

 

You may have noticed that POW was not published last week.  I was having a wonderful personal adventure of having my life be my spiritual practice and was unable to publish POW.  For this week, I wish to speak from my heart and soul and share with you about this experience.

 

 As you know, the book for this month is Pema Chodron’s “When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.”  I picked this book specifically as we are going through a difficult time with a serious health issue with my husband.  As one may imagine, I have been “broken hearted” about my husband’s diagnosis. 

 

Well, my heart is broken, literally.  I developed a small tear in an artery of my heart resulting in a heart attack.  What I find fascinating is not just the fact that my physical body responded to my empathy and compassion for my husband but that I was reading the chapter in Pema Chodron’s book about “Nonaggression and the Four Maras”.  She says that the yama mara is rooted in the fear of death and continues by saying that it is when we feel we have gotten to the “good life” that we are actually not fully alive.  Here are her words “We finally feel that we’re a good person.  We have good qualities, we’re peaceful, and we don’t get thrown off balance when arrows are shot at us.  We’re the person who knows how to turn an arrow into a flower.  We feel so good about ourselves.  We’ve finally tied up all the loose ends.  We’re happy.  We think that that’s life.”  This is where I was at a few weeks ago.

 

Pema Chodron goes on to say “…rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death.  It doesn’t have any fresh air.  There’s no room for something to come in and interrupt all that.  We are killing the moment by controlling our experience.  Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later, we’re going to have an experience we can’t control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we’re going to find out we have cancer, a brick is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head, somebody’s going to spill tomato juice all over our white suit…The essence of life is that it is challenging.  Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter…..To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”

 

I have certainly been thrown out of the nest!  I share this with you not because I want or need sympathy, rather, I share this with you as a reminder of the inter connectedness of life and from the perspective of our lives as our spiritual practice.  Rather than running away from pain, hurt, fear, anger, anxiety, unworthiness, we can use these feelings to go deeper in our relationship with ourselves and use the reality of our lives as our spiritual practice.

 

So, this week, your self care enchantments if you chose to are about gently exploring both the sweet and the bitter, the good and the bad, the pain and the pleasure, the groundedness and the groundlessness.  This is a continuation of the practice of “unconditional friendship with yourself”.

 

 

Self Care Enchantments for the week:

 

1.  Explore what you believe about life and pain and pleasure?

2.  Very gently ask yourself how you “run away” from pain, fear, anxiety.  Do you use shopping therapy, food, exercise, alcohol, work for example, to take yourself out of your feelings?

3.  Honour the fall season and prepare for “the harvest” by acknowledging what you are harvesting in your life this season. 

 

“May your life be like a wildflower, growing freely in beauty and joy each day.”

 

- Native American Proverb

 

Please share about your learning and exploration with these enchantments on www.thepowblog.com in the comments section of these enchantments!

 

namaste,

 

Zoey

 

Zoey Ryan

coach . catalyst . shakti sage

life & business coach for women

“Coaching for your heart & soul and the heart & soul of your business”

www.positivelyoutrageouswomen.com

www.entrepreneurialsuperstars.com

604-323-3700

 

 

Inrageous/Outrageous Self-Care Enchantments for This Week

I have been deeply affected by the tragic and unseemly passing of a vibrant, “misbehaving woman”, Debrah Rafel Osborn.  Debrah, age 47 was a mother, wife, yogini, life coach, luminary and a very special person.  At Debrah’s wonderful “celebration of life” service, we were all reminded to hug our loved ones close, live life fully and HAVE FUN.  This is how Debrah lived her life!  I am reminded of Jack Kornfield’s words in “A Path With Heart” when he suggests that at the end of our time here on earth, we ask ourselves three questions: did I live life fully, did I love well, did I “let go”.  I believe that Debrah could have answered a resounding YES to those questions.  Can you?

So, your sacred self care enchantments for this week are all about living life fully, loving and having fun!

Self Care Enchantments for the week:

1.    Do something “wild and crazy” this week.  Maybe take a trip on the spur of the moment, do something that scares you, dye your hair blue, it doesn’t matter what it is, it just needs to feel wild and crazy to you!
2.    Answer the three questions above starting like this: how do I live life fully; how do I love well; how do I let go?
3.    Give your loved ones extra hugs!

namaste,

Zoey

Zoey Ryan
coach . catalyst . shakti sage
life & business coach for women
“Coaching for your heart & soul”
www.positivelyoutrageouswomen.com
www.entrepreneurialsuperstars.com
604-323-3700

“I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles”  – Anais Nin