Leaving

© 2010 by Joyce Mason
All Rights Reserved

One of the hardest things we ever do is to leave some place or someone we love. When I was honored for 25 years on my job, I got my first inkling that retirement might not be that easy for me. Even though I had written most of it myself, my contribution to the organization impressed me when I heard someone else read it aloud. I hadn’t realized I was having so much fun and making so much family. (I envisioned the last episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, inching in an ensemble hug to the nearest box of tissues, shuffling and sniffling ourselves toward door. I had a hard time imagining closing it and shutting off the lights for the last time.)

Rarely is it the best time to leave anything or anyone in anger. The best time is when it’s time.

Whether it’s a gold watch, wedding rings, or the keys to a house you have long called home, these are symbols of the most enduring aspects of our lives. They are hard to let go.


We live in times that demand us to live—and let go—at a breakneck pace. This is coupled with an interesting demographic. A huge portion of human beings living today are baby boomers, born after World War II between 1946 and 1964. Those of us on the earlier end of that time span have experienced a schizophrenic exposure to life. First, we’re the only generation with baby in our name, which speaks of our resistance toward maturity. Second, talk about change; our lives have spanned some wild fluctuations in society’s values.

We grew up with Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver. Many Moms stayed at home and baked cookies. They wore dresses and pumps to vacuum. We were always Making Room for Daddy. Fathers were “it,” down to our mothers being called Mrs. His First and Last Name. We were respectful, and we didn’t talk back.

As we became teenagers and young adults, everyone we ever believed in was murdered in our living rooms on prime time, as we watched helplessly on our still relatively new color TVs--first President Kennedy, then Martin Luther King. By the time Bobby Kennedy was killed, disillusionment was a national disease and what’s this world coming to was our mantra.

But we hadn’t seen nothin’ yet. We came of age in the ‘70s and some of us became the counterculture. We went to Woodstock, wore flowers in our hair, protested a war we thought was senseless, and envisioned a peaceful new world.

Ten years later, most of us were steeped in materiality and another pendulum swing. The ‘80s were about money and prestige, a sojourn to a place many of us had never yet been—those of us who spent most of our earlier lives focusing on very different kinds of values besides the price of property or BMWs.


As each decade turned, then a millennium, we found ourselves leaving behind old visions of the future we pictured as children. Technology changed everything. Now our community consists of our Facebook and email pals who may live across the globe. (Try borrowing a cup of sugar from that neighbor!) Often we barely know the folks next door, but we know intimately people we have never met in person.

Inside us, we still picture Donna Reid and Danny Thomas as our marriage models. In reality, staying married is a crapshoot—no better than a 50/50 proposition. We endured cultural revolutions, military wars, and wars of values within ourselves; and if we grew, by now we have arrived at some semblance of a happy medium.

Here’s an exercise: Write down all the major changes that have occurred in your lifetime, just off the top of your head. No matter how young or old you are, you will be amazed. To evolve that quickly, you can’t keep hanging on.

Life, from our first breath, is about surrendering the current moment for the next moment and all the promise and potential each one holds. Paradoxical as it is, you only get more by giving up what you’ve got.

In the most personal and painful losses, it is comforting to know:

Love never dies; it only changes form like anything in nature, including us.

No matter how sad the ending, there is always a new beginning that calls us from the ashes of what must die to make room for new life. This is how we begin and end, and with practice in-between, we can make this chunk of our own evolution a little slice of heaven on earth before we shoot back to the stars.

~~~

Photo credit: TANGO COUPLE © Elultimode... Dreamstime.com

For more on this topic, visit this thoughtful post on Joy Frequencies, What Needs to Be Done.

Finding Love in Later Life—Spirited Edition

© 2010 by Joyce Mason
All Rights Reserved

This article follows up on some of the material in the last section of my recent post, Valentine’s Day—A New Vision. It’s the first time I am writing on a topic at the request of someone from our Cool Insighter community. Reader JuliaAna asked me to write: *


… a flower essence article for those of us who are older, but have never found the great love of our life and are now, as older women, looking at what is wrong with us and our energy, our projections, etc. … that has kept us from attracting that love we always wanted and still want in our lives. I have never been married, born in ’51. I’m a total romantic, but I have never found a true or great love.

This article idea intrigued me. I feel eminently qualified to write it, since I did not reunite with my childhood sweetheart until I was almost 50. Turns out, he was “still the one,” as one of my favorite songs goes, and there is definitely a lot of learning I can share on how that happened for me—and for us. Tim had never married; I was single for most of my adult life, though married previously. What I learned about relationship in-between my first meeting with Tim at ages 12-14 and our reunion, 37 years later, could easily fill several books—and probably will someday. As it stands, this will be a longer than usual post, just to share the key points.

I’ll get to the flower essence question last, but first, I’d like to address some of the issues in JuliaAna’s request.

Boomers: A Cool Saging Conversation 

Boom is the sound the baby generation makes when it explodes the old Old. TM

What’s Wrong with Me?

How many times I asked myself that same question as I, too, longed for the right relationship. This question needs to be balanced with reality and the clear vision of someone who has worked on him- or herself. Are your other relationships good—with friends, colleagues, bosses, and family? If yes, it’s probably “not you.” If you’ve looked deeply into your issues with intimacy, that usually means your Mom and Dad stuff, and feel you’ve done a good job healing them: there is nothing wrong with you.

One thing we often forget to examine is where relationship fits into our priorities. If you have kids from a prior relationship or a high-pressure job, you may need to make space for “romantic” love to enter. This happens on an energy level, and it can be also cured there.

Spend a lot of time envisioning how the right relationship would fit into your daily life. In advance, create the space for it. Nature abhors a vacuum and will fill it. Don’t let other activities take up your relationship space. It may take time to manifest it, but a relationship cannot enter a life with no room for it. You may actually have to allow yourself to feel lonely at times. I don’t mean you literally have to set aside two hours a day where you do nothing but wait for Mr. or Ms. Right… but have time set aside to do things that you can be easily downscale or let go when love arrives.

Being a romantic, in and of itself, can be a handicap in assessing your own role in keeping love at bay. By its very nature, being starry-eyed is not conducive to clear vision. If you work with astrology, we are the Neptune types (I’m one of them) who see the world—and love—through rose-colored glasses. That topic deserves its own section; it is such a stumbling block to finding a mature, lasting relationship.

Gauzy Vision and Other Romantic Handicaps

If you were born between 1942 - 1957, you have a particularly thorny issue with romanticism. We are the Neptune in Libra generation. When we were born, Neptune, which rules projections, dreaminess, and addiction, was in the sign of Libra —relationship, romance, and especially coo-some twosomes. We crave relationship like mother’s milk, but frankly, many of us are bad at it!

Why? That lack of visual clarity and the tendency to project what we want in a man or woman onto every passing could-be lover. More often than not, this results in harsh disappointment. We fall in love with what we think the other person is--and with what could have been between us—if s/he actually were that person. My own pain with just such a relationship took decades to get over. I just couldn’t give up who I thought he was and what we might have had … and I still occasionally catch myself wondering how our strong chemistry might have alchemized each other with more time together. I finally got over him in writing my memoir. I had to face, in black and white, that he was not good to me or for me. I had downplayed his cruelty and inflated his “loving moments”, often barely disguised manipulations, for 30-odd years. There’s a hint here.

Write about your relationships. Make a relationship history journal. Talk about hot flashbacks and cool insights! Patterns will leap off the pages. You’ll discover whatever you’re doing that’s not working with crystal clarity

The Time Factor

It is crucial to uncover as early as possible whether or not a love interest is real or a projection of your own mind. Most romantics don’t like this reminder, but here it is. To know someone takes time. I think it takes a minimum of a year—often longer. I suggest you consider not moving in with someone or commingling assets until a deep trust is established and you have cycled through several of life’s seasons and challenges. Then you’ll have a track record together and know how you both fare for better or worse before you say it—and seal it in ink.

One advantage: If you’re a woman 50 or older, you’re past the ringing alarm on your biological clock. In today’s world, there are few good reasons to hasten marriage. There’s no shotgun in sight. Allow yourself to grow through all the phases of relationship till you’re both ready to take the next natural step. Don’t worry. Don’t hurry. Be happy. And if it turns out in this process you find you’re not with the love of your life, don’t hesitate to move on.

There is more romance and sex going on these days in many senior housing complexes than on many high school prom nights.  Love knows no age limits.

Think you’re running out of time? There’s never any good reason for rushing in, given how painful a wrong decision and the wrong person can make your life.

The Addictive Factor

You don’t have to be born with Neptune in Libra to be a love addict. There are many more astrological signatures and people so inclined, whatever your year of birth. If you can’t live without a relationship or your longing for one makes your life miserable, it’s time to detox. It may take therapy. If it’s a full-blown sex addiction, it may take Sex Addicts Anonymous. It is unwise, unhealthy, and untenable to live a life where you cannot be alone. When you’d rather be in situations that are personally harmful than to be by yourself, please seek help. Even if you think you’re more compulsive than truly addictive—you could really stop if you just break the knee-jerk habit—the sooner the better.

Another sign of an unhealthy relationship to relationship is “trying too hard.” Relationships are like a handful of sand on the beach of time. The more you squeeze (want a relationship desperately); the more it runs through your fingers. The more you can live without it—the cooler you are way with being either single or partnered—the clearer your energy is for the right someone to pick up on your true self. See Your Cosmic Tractor Beam for more on how this energy dynamic works.

Let’s also talk for a minute about what squeezing sand feels like from the other side. Perhaps you’ve experienced someone who is so intensely “into” you before you even have a chance to decide whether you’re that interested. It feels icky and invasive. Too much, too fast, too soon—not conducive to good long-term relationships. Desperation makes would-be lovers run in the opposite direction at break-neck speed, as well they should. You’re in love with love. You don’t even know them. You’re cheating on them emotionally already.

Probably you’ve noticed that I’m referring to astrology a lot in this article. That’s because it has helped me more than any other tool to understand my own love addiction and to overcome it. More on that next …

You First, Us Second

If you’ve ever read my post, The Converse Golden Rule, you know I am still in the process of learning to make my needs as important as serving others. I have a lot of Libra planets in my chart, and I speak from the trenches of overcoming the malady, bit by bit.

It was working with my astrological passion, the centaur planet Chiron, when I first “got” why it is so important to become a fully realized individual before stepping into relationship. In the zodiac, the first half of the signs and houses from Aries (1st) to Virgo (6th) are about personal development. In Libra (7th) and Scorpio (8th), we bond with one other. In Sagittarius (9th) through Pisces (10th), we are developing our relationships with many others. (See Wholeness and the Inner Marriage on The Radical Virgo.) You cannot give your Self in relationship until you fully become yourself. Until then, you don’t have your whole self to give.

The best relationships come from two whole people who walk the path of life together. Then, when they give themselves to relationship, they create synergy. The whole is more than the some of its parts. But relationship needs both its parts—two budded individuals.

How I Manifested My Man

1. I followed inner guidance, particularly in a very literal dream that predicted a reunion with Tim.

2. I was at a point where I had accepted I might be single for the rest of my life, and I was OK with it. Tim was in the same place. Consequently, we were both broadcasting the energy of our true selves, which made our energies clear to one another.

3. I had made affirmations recently about what I wanted in a relationship. I was quite specific. I wrote them down, put them in a corner of my office where I could look at them occasionally, but for the most part, I just let go, figuring the universe would handle the details.

4. I gave up wanting to control what this relationship or person “looked like” and figured Spirit knew best. (I had a psychic reading many years ago that foretold my reunion with Tim. I thought the woman was nuts at the time! After several other happy reunions, I was now open to new relationships with people from my past.)

5. I stepped out in faith, took a chance, and contacted him. While I wasn’t sure what the dream meant about reconnecting with Tim—he could be married with five kids—I did “get” that I was to re-encounter my very first boy/girl relationship for some reason. I left the rest up to Higher Power. Quite honestly, I wasn’t sure a man/woman relationship was the reason I was supposed to reconnect with him. I was somewhat surprised when it turned out that way.

I can’t overestimate the importance of Steps 2 and 5. We were both internally in the right place of surrendering a sense of having to have a relationship, but God helps those who help themselves. Tim admits he would have never thought to reconnect with me after all those years. Yet, he was the one who kept all the pictures from our ‘tween-age romance. He was keeping some sort of psychic channel open, even though he didn’t realize it—and it worked!

Once You’ve Got a Hot Prospect

Other than letting it grow into whatever it’s supposed to be—a friendship, romance, marriage, or a brother/sisterly bond—I think there’s a very important question to ask. Do you really like each other?

A good relationship, in my personal experience, is far more about friendship than any other type of love. Yes, I’m a romantic married to a romantic whose goal is to tell me every day that he loves me. Everyday living with its moments of anger, frustration, and annoyance are where you need that romanticism most to remind you why you were drawn to this person in the first place.

I can’t assume because you’re over 50 that you already know this. Physical attraction can so often be mistaken for love. I am embarrassed at how many times I did so in retrospect. There’s nothing like the early months of relationship—hot sex, romance, and your projections going wild all over one another. But basing a long-term relationship on body heat is a big mistake, especially if you don’t bother to find out how you like that person out of bed. With jobs, possibly kids, projects and just the demands of modern life, even people with the world’s biggest libidos are unlikely to spend more than 5 or 10% of their relationship in the bedroom. Why choose a partner based only on that factor?

For some of us, as we age, hormone levels decrease and take the edge off the need to compromise who we are in order to have sex. As a younger woman, I couldn’t count times I didn’t stand up for myself or smoothed over tensions so we’d still “be in the mood” on any given night in any one of my “wrong” relationships. My “loves” were almost always driven by physical attraction first, and everything else second. Hopefully, if your passions haven’t waned even a little, you’ve evolved to the point that the friendship and spiritual aspects of relationship are important to you. That’s when we’re willing to be a lot more discreet about taking that first step into the bedroom or stepping into it anytime later, when things aren’t right between you. Smothering conflict for any reason, including sex, is how you lose your own power in a relationship, bit by bit.

Big hormonal needs as a younger woman took me places I would never have gone with rational forethought. We’re designed that way for perpetuation of the species. But, remember, we’re past child-bearing age. Sometimes, I swear, the oddest combinations of people seem necessary in the short-term for karmic reasons and/or to bring children into the world with a specific genetic make-up. One of the blessings of being over 50 is that there’s no other reason to be in a relationship except for your own reasons. This is liberating!

Help from Our Flower Friends

Because they work on emotions, flower essences are powerful allies in the tricky world of relationship where both head and heart need to be balanced for happiness. Here are some suggestions to match typical issues that come up, especially for mid-life lovers and beyond.

Bleeding Heart (FES) **– Never got over a specific relationship in the past; or having difficulty with a recent relationship that didn’t work out. You haven’t completed grieving. You can’t “move on.”

Swiss Glacier Essence (Ancient Forest) – Melts any hardening that has congealed around the heart, great for people who still bear pain and scars from past relationships who want to heal and open up to love again.


Celtic Healing Springs (Ancient Forest) – Helps us awaken from illusion or preoccupation with our own story. Promotes grounding and wholeness. Good for those trying to be less dreamy about love and open to more grounded, life-affirming relationships.


Self-Heal (FES)– Another good one for past relationship hurts when it’s more a question of the cumulative hurt than one relationship in particular. Still, Self-Heal works well as a “binder” with many other essences and would enhance Bleeding Heart or any of the others in combination.

Impatiens (Bach, Healing Herbs) – Impatient about getting a relationship; trouble trusting the universe to bring it to you when the time is right

Shooting Star (FES) – A sense of alienation and not fitting in, perhaps because you’re single and have many married friends or acquaintances. Feeling you’re “too different” to find the right partner.

Sunflower (FES) – This essences if good if you’ve still got dad issues, but it’s also good for “being you,” that essential pre-requisite for becoming part of a dynamic duo. If you’re concerned about losing yourself or feel yourself slipping in a relationship, a round of Sunflower can put you back on track.

Mariposa Lily (FES) – Often called “mother love in a bottle,” this essence also handles any bottled-up, unfinished issues with your mom. When we are not at peace with our primary nurturer, assuming Mom held that job, it’s hard to nurture—or be nurtured—by others in a loving relationship.

The Monkeyflowers (FES) work on fears of intimacy. Try Pink Monkeyflower when you’re afraid to tell someone you’re true feelings or feel too vulnerable to take the risk. Sticky Monkeyflower is better when the fear of intimacy is specifically sexual, whether from fear of getting too close or past traumatic experiences involving sexuality.

Crab Apple (Bach, Healing Herbs) may stave off feelings of fading beauty or not feeling “enough” as you look for love in midlife or beyond.

Clematis (Bach, Healing Herbs) - Good choice, if you’re still too dreamy and romantic and your feet aren’t on the ground. Especially good to take at the beginning of a relationship where you think s/he might be the one.

Love: “Reality, What a Concept!” ~ Robin Williams

While my current marriage certainly has its shot of Neptune and romanticism, it is as real as it gets as far as the gifts of mature relationship. We are honest, loving, faithful, and loyal as puppy dogs to each other. (I shouldn’t have gotten so mad when we were kids and they called it puppy love. Puppies have some great qualities that make love work. And let’s face it, licking someone’s face can’t hurt!)

Our marriage isn’t as wild or heart fluttering as some of the romances of my youth; yet, it is so much more. It’s grounded, real, there for me—and something I would never trade for another one of those high adventures. We say, “I like you” almost as often as “I love you.” We are friends and family to each other.

Thanks to Hollywood, we are sold a bill of goods on what love is. To be truly happy, we have to stop making relationship “our everything” and become more realistic in our expectations. Fulfillment is your job, not your partner’s, although s/he may be part of what makes you happy. Love has many forms, and it’s probably the most important aspect of life where we shouldn’t put all our cookies in one basket. Imagine the pressure of being someone’s everything! No wonder the starry-eyed get dumped.

Sometimes we don’t even know it when real love is staring us in the face. Good example: If you caught the recent PBS Masterpiece Classics version of Jane Austen’s Emma. Who did Emma end up with? I’ll avoid a spoiler in case you haven’t seen it yet and still want to—but you can be sure it wasn’t the most exciting guy by Hollywood standards, but rather the one she never realized she had slowly but surely fallen in love with. It was predictable from the earliest scenes, yet fascinating to watch unfold. How many of us are missing someone right under our noses?

Speaking of noses, taking your rose-colored glasses off yours, now and then, might be the best thing you could ever do to find true love. This is especially true as you become more mature and more in touch with what makes life joyful. Take notice of people with similar values, looking in the same direction. Just be yourself and go places where you can meet people automatically, instead of in a contrived way. Awaken to those dynamic laws of attraction mentioned in Your Cosmic Tractor Beam. If you do, attracting the right person for you will be nearly inevitable. Less longing, more living. Dating services work for some people, I suspect in direct proportion to honesty and self-knowledge.

And when you know yourself that well, you’re on your cosmic beam. Love would have happened anyway, regardless of the mechanics.

~~
*Note: JuliaAna gave permission to share her name and e-mail excerpt.

** Links to essence manufacturers are made on first mention only.

Photo Credit: HAPPY COUPLE IN THEIR 50'S Creativest... Dreamstime.com

Blog Comment Contest! Don’t forget to comment for entry into this week’s comment contest for Valentine's month. Comments on any post qualify according to the guidelines in the announcement. Need how-to on commenting? Click on The Cosmos Comments. This is the final week, and the prize is an autographed copy of Capital Crimes: 15 Stories by Sacramento Area Authors. It includes Joyce’s story, “Digital,” which provides the comic relief.

Winner of Week 3 Comment Contest: Congratulations to Dänna Wilberg of the Sacramento area. Dänna commented on the post, Love from Both Sides: An Interview with author Stephanie Riseley. Dänna’s prize is a copy of  the e-book, The Training Tape. Week 3 ran from Feb. 15 -21. BTW, Dänna also has a story in the Capital Crimes anthology, next week's grand prize.

Cool Saging Conversations: Generation Segregation

Good Idea or Bad Medicine?

Boom is the sound the baby generation makes when it explodes the old Old. TM

Let me say upfront; there is no right answer to this question. At best, you might find the right answer for you.

I am proud to be a baby boomer. While I don’t necessarily broadcast my age, I don’t hide it, either. The postwar babies born between 1946 and 1964 are a unique generation with a generous span of fascinating life experiences. The question is whether we want to spend most of our time with “our own” as our main companions and primary influences.

My husband Tim and I talk regularly about whether we should consider a 55+ active community like Sun City. (We have two of that brand and several others in the greater Sacramento region.) He has some physical limitations, and I have some conditions that nag and potentially could become more than annoyances. If we moved to a mature adult community, it would make our neighbors all close to our own age or older.

Truth is, we relish our privacy and know only a few of our neighbors after living in our home eleven years. My communities stretch way beyond neighborhood geography considering cyber, work, and organizational connections. I can’t say we know any of our neighbors well, although we have a pleasant relationship with those we see regularly, especially our wonderful next-door neighbors. Yet there are potential physical barriers to our current home we love. This knowledge keeps us on the brink of realism about how long we can stay here.

My uncle lived in the family homestead on Long Island past the deaths of his parents and his sisters, who lived with him most of the time. He lingered there until shoveling snow and some of the other heavy work just became too much for him as he rounded 80. A few years ago, he moved to an active senior condo complex not far from his home of over 50 years. It was the best thing he’s ever done! His only regret is that he didn’t do it sooner.

Uncle Mike and his condo-mates are family to one another—they eat, drink, and play together on a frequent basis. There’s always a card game, a birthday to celebrate, an invite for dinner, or some trip they’re planning. Since moving there, Mike has been on cruises to the Mediterranean, Canada and the Caribbean—air and bus trips Las Vegas and the Saratoga, NY races and other “gambler specials.” The way the community cares for each other and its camaraderie are touching. We loved spending Thanksgiving at the condo a few years ago and meeting many of these lively people, not to mention all the amenities of a pool and gym on site.

I am a mind and spirit kind of person. It’s more important to me to be with kindred spirits than to be with a kindred age group. Like mindedness and a broad view from the mountaintop about life is the neighborhood I need to live in. Oddly, that’s often easier to find on the Internet than anywhere because here we connect mind to mind and heart to heart and by like interests. If we’re lucky, we might meet face to face someday. Still, I’m not naïve enough to think it’s good to be too homogenous when it comes to friends and family. That can quickly go from kindred spirits to cliquish or clannish—just a step away from exclusionary. I wonder for myself; where is the balance?

Other practical considerations: As we age, we lose friends and family at a faster pace. Tim’s sister and husband live in a 55+ active community where they are beginning to attend one funeral after another. Sometimes, their layers of grief on top of grief are hard to bear. Yet, they also feel solace knowing that whichever one of them goes first, the other will go on in a caring community of support. If for no other reason than the terrible prospect of being the last one standing, I am grateful that several of my close friends are 10-15 years younger than I am, especially since I don’t have children or grandchildren. Theoretically, I won’t outlive all my friends. Still, if I think about it, even the youngest among my close friends is technically a boomer, thanks to the fact that our generation is defined by an 18-year age span.

When I made the decision early this year to revision my blog, there were many reasons that motivated me. One I may not have emphasized; I was not comfortable with age segregation. It took a quote on Twitter from my cartoonist friends at Perrie Meno-Pudge that finally helped me realize why:

The key to successful aging is to pay as little attention to it as possible. ~Judith Regan

There’s nothing that makes me feel older than talking about aging too much, even in a positive way. There’s nothing that makes me feel younger than diving into life and dealing with the petty annoyances of aging as comical asides and not the real drama.

Bottom line, I don’t want my age to define me. Of course there’s a place for boomer forums, how-to’s and humor, or I wouldn’t be writing this article. Yet, if we truly become what we give energy to, I think I’ll stay away from senior segregation and an age-related focus for now and keep feeding my timeless spirit.

And if a time comes when I don’t have a realistic choice but to live exclusively among the saging set, I’ll make the best of it—and hang out with the most young- at-heart and upbeat boomers in the batch to keep me on my toes!

~~~

Cool Saging Conversations is an occasional feature retained from when Hot Flashbacks, Cool Insights was geared to a baby boomer audience. When issues arise that impact our generation and I feel compelled to comment, the cool sages watching boomers blow up the old Old will come out. I hope our boomer readers still enjoy seeing them. As ever, your feedback is welcome.

A Special Happy Birthday to my sister, Janet—a regular reader of Hot Flashbacks. I won’t give away her age, but I have to rib her a little and tell you she’s the older sister, even if not by much!

Do Something Different Day

Seven years ago, I did something different. I gave myself a gift that keeps on giving. I catalyzed the creation of a small circle of like-minded women, similar in our spiritual outlook. We’re out to live life to the fullest and to bring more light into the world, starting with our own enlightenment. We wanted the intimacy of a support group and the spiritual inspiration of a church without the institutional factor or large size. The “founding mothers” weren't regular churchgoers at the time, although we were all brought up in traditional Christian faiths. We see the good in all beliefs, meditate and pray regularly, and always invite Spirit to guide us. We like to create ceremony and draw inspiration from the best of many traditions. Our invisible, potent partner and member: the Ultimate Light in His/Her many forms and facets.

Within our Magic Circle, one of our nicknames for our monthly meeting, we start by each sharing what’s happened since our last get-together over take-out— dinner picked up by one of us on the way. One member is single with a large, comfy home, so her house is our meeting place. The other components of our gatherings vary slightly, but usually they include prayers, meditation, and a spiritual education segment.

All of us are over 40—and half of us can add 20+ onto that number. Being women “of a certain age,” one member suggested that we read and discuss The Second Half of Life: Opening the Eight Gates of Wisdom by Angeles Arrien.

In case you don’t already know her, Angeles Arrien, Ph.D., is a cultural anthropologist, an award-winning author, and consultant to many organizations and businesses. She lectures and conducts workshops worldwide, bridging cultural anthropology, psychology, and comparative religions. My favorite part of her work is how she takes the best of traditions among various indigenous cultures and suggests how we might apply their wisdom to modern living.

“The Second Half of Life” is a cornucopia of spiritual food. I can’t say enough about this gorgeous book, rich in imagery, wisdom, and suggested questions and activities for “stayin’ alive.” There’s one particular concept in the book that has been invaluable to me. I call it Do Something Different Day. It’s a way of celebrating your birthday—and yourself—once a month in addition to the big bang once a year.

In her discussion of The Silver Gate, Angeles talks about facing new experiences and the unknown and the importance of renewal to keep our souls alive. Why this hit home: I am a person with compulsive tendencies. I spend too much time chained to my computer like a fanatic. I barely see the light of day. Sometimes I feel like I need someone to throw a bucket of cold water on me, just so I get up and move! My love of ritual easily turns into the rut of senseless routine, without an occasional tweak by outside forces. Do Something Different Day is a tweak I anticipate with glee, knowing it’ll get me up--and up to something fun, more often than not.

The custom Angeles mentions—the one I call Do Something Different Day—is an ancient European one, practiced in parts of the Pyrenees Mountains in Spain. People are encouraged to celebrate their birth day each month of the year by doing something they have never done before. For example, if you were born on the 7th of any month, on the 7th of every month you Do Something Different.

As a Virgo who loves precision, I have always gotten a big kick out of going the extra fractional mile when reporting my age. While most people would say 49½ from the six-month mark on, I like to goof around and say 497/12. (I wish!) Little did I know the power of that one-twelfth fraction toward spiritual revitalization. Each twelfth of our birthday cycle can become a mini-retreat and change of perspective.

Since I spend most of my life at my computer, I have put Do Something Different Day in my electronic calendar reminders with enough advance warning to plan something new for myself. What a simple but profound practice.

In fact, I’ve started to create a Do Something Different Day planning list, a sort of mini-Bucket List. On my upcoming birth day, the 22nd, I have plans to meet a dear friend for lunch; then, the Magic Circle meets later for dinner. Both dates are different from my normal routine—they only happen monthly or so—but I have done them before. What will I do that’s new? In-between, I’ll stop at a music store I’ve wanted to visit for years and just never made the time. I’m starting to get the urge to play the piano again. My husband and I have been threatening to try a guitar/piano duet sine 1997. I plan to find us sheet music so this hot duo can rehearse. Then, on another DSD Day, we can give our premier performance for the cats.

Your Something Different doesn’t have to be earth shattering or groundbreaking. It can be as simple as having a fancy flavored latte, a kind you’ve never tried before, instead of your usual cappuccino. You can drink it at Peets instead of Starbucks. Start with training wheels! Advance to a two-wheeler, a racing bike, and then maybe a unicycle.

Before you know it, you could be standing on your head, bungee jumping, or climbing Mt. Everest. Stretch yourself. At five-foot-nothing, I personally want that growth in both body and soul!

~~~

Photo Credit: VITALITY © Looby Dreamstime.com

Reconstruction Zone!

Countdown to June 17 …

… More Details and First Post on the New, Widened Road

Dear Cool Insighters,

I can’t wait another day—much less another month—to share my plans to refocus the Hot Flashbacks, Cool Insights blog toward spirituality, women’s issues, and especially the development of our intuitive gifts as guidance, that thing some people call “women’s intuition.”

The shift will take some behind-the-scenes planning, like a new blog slogan and some site reorganization. The same types of posts about better living through insight will continue, just more on intuition and spiritual guidance—topics you’ve already seen here. This transformation is compliments of a loud cosmic hint, the same guidance I plan to talk more about from now on and to help you learn to see and hear as much as possible in your own lives. I had a huge aha moment that this is the true core of my book that this blog was created to complement.

Boomers: I’ll keep a recurring “cool saging” feature for the generation I’m proud to be a part of. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m a founding member of Boomer Authority on Twitter. I have volunteered to monitor posts on the topic of spirituality. As you can see, that’s a blend of both the old and new blog emphasis. I’m at the stage of life where, having really lived, Auntie Mame style I’ve learned a lot. My age or stage isn’t as important as the epiphanies and tools I’ve found that have helped me live a rich life and keep on beat with my passions and purpose. My toolbox is what I really want to pass onto you. The tools work whether you’re 20 or 120.

Meanwhile, stay tuned! Join me in anticipating our expanded audience: women of all ages and men who what to “play the symbols,” too.

--Joyce

PS – Your comments are welcome on this post or one-on-one: hotflashbacks@gmail.com.


Photo Credit: CONSTRUCTION CONE © Juliengron... Dreamstime.com

Introducing Boomer Authority!

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Gain access to a community of over 80 professionals and organizations for free timely advice!

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@BoomerAuthority is a free service on Twitter that advocates the rapid shift in the way marketers of products and professionals selling services reach you, the baby boomer consumer, from one-way communication to one of listening and individual response. Through Twitter, @BoomerAuthority connects you to qualified professionals who will first listen and then help you with your question.

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Include in the tweet your preferred method of response: @Reply (public stream) DM (Direct Message)--or whatever other method you prefer, such as email or telephone.

Click @BoomerAuthority to ask your question. Follow @BoomerAuthority on Twitter. Why not start today?

The Boomer Authority Expert Community
The Boomer Authority community of experts is alliance partners of the Baby Boomer [Knowledge Center]. For a complete listing of Founding Members click >> Boomer Authority.

~~~

For more informatio, contact:
Martin Diano─Publisher
__________________________
Email: MartinDiano@Gmail.com
Tel: 520.280.3462
Twitter: @MartinDiano
Skype: martindiano60
Baby Boomer [Knowledge Center]™
@BoomerBuzz @BoomerAuthority

Get Guidance from Your Dreams!

Mark your calendar for your “dream date!”

April 20, 2009 @ 9:00 pm PDT


Watch Joyce Mason’s lively interview with Dänna Wilberg, host of the Paranormal Connection in the Sacramento area on Comcast - Channel 17. Anywhere else, watch on the web on Access Sacramento. Click on WATCH 17.

Here's a hint: Log on early! The web stream only holds 2000 viewers - if you are unable get online, call Access Sacramento: 916-456-8600. Let them know you want to watch "Paranormal Connection."

Topics covered include tips on remembering, recording, and deciphering your personal dream code. Hear some amazing results that speak for themselves about why you might want to play with your “Dream-Doh.”

Can’t make the web- or telecast or want supplemental information on this topic? Visit Joyce’s Dreamwork page on her Writer Joyce Mason website.

Photo Credit: DREAM © Adpower99 Dreamstime.com

Spring: New Beginnings, New Blog!

Baby boomers should kiss Spring like a long-lost cousin. Every Spring, we get a new chance at life!

Spring is the “natural new year,” the time to plant the figurative seeds for what we want to grow more of in our lives between March 20, 2009 and March 19, 2010. The dormant season of winter is over. It’s time to sow our creations, whether they involve love, health, wealth, a new project, or a new point of view.

Nature doesn’t run on the Gregorian calendar. As I’ve said before in other posts, we have been off-cycle with the seasons in our January-December way of marking time for 500 years. None of us knows how many new years we have left, whether we’re 18 or 80. So, let’s make the most out of the powerful planting season spring represents and do a Cool Insights Exercise on what we want to manifest for the Natural New Year.

Exercise: Planting Your Seeds of Growth
In this activity, you’re going to create a seed packet. I like to use colored envelopes the size that fit a standard greeting card. Even if you’ve got some “plain vanilla” leftover envelopes from cards you’ve received, that’s OK, because our next step is redecorating!

Draw, paint, or collage onto your envelope whatever inspires you. You can name your seed packet for a project or something high on your list of things you want to manifest: Love Seeds, Prosperity Seeds, or in my case, the name of my new blog, The Radical Virgo. (More on that below.)

Now, find yourself some slips of paper—whatever appeals to you. My friends and I have used colorful ones, round ones, plain ones. On these, you’ll write your metaphorical seeds for growth. Take some serious, quiet, and contemplative time to do this exercise. It’s the reverse of the winter “burning bowl.” Instead of burning what you want to get rid of, these pieces of paper will contain the fiery seeds of your new beginnings.

Place your packet in a special place—your altar, nightstand, near your computer—wherever you’ll see it often enough to remind you of what you’ve planted—what you want to grow and expand this year. I take my seeds out often and look at them thoughtfully to see how they’re growing. You can also “plant” them--put them in a special box or a pot. Whatever makes the metaphor real for you.

A few tips:

~~ Seeds are simple. Keep to a few words or small phrases.

~~ If you are tempted to plant many seeds, as they germinate, you will “thin them out,” so that the most robust ones have the opportunity to grow to the fullest. Few of us can do in one year all the things we “plant” in spring, and it’s OK to set aside seeds that naturally seem to need more time to germinate.

~~At Summer Solstice, we will look at the seeds again, and I’ll talk about them in a post. The idea is to see how they bloom; then at autumn equinox, we can see what’s ready for harvest.

To give you an idea how the planting and culling process works: I just checked my seed packet from 2008. Of my eight seeds, one has grown into a plant—my completed book—and I’m making major progress on four others. Two need to germinate longer, and I have let one go, recognizing it isn’t important at this time.

Making Seasonal Sense
In my Calendar New Year post, Things to Bear in Mind as We Round 2009, I talked about how we need to slow down, even hibernate like a bear in winter. If you did not take that rest, don’t be surprised if your energy doesn’t rise with the tree sap as quickly as you’d like. It’s not too late to reverse it! Put on some eye shades and block out the growing light while you make up for lost winter nap time. You’ll be happy you did when your energy level bounces back for the effort. A little down time in late winter/early spring means a lot more bounce between now and the Summer Solstice in the third week of June. You’ll have high energy!

If, like me, you resemble Sneezy the Dwarf this time of year, it’s time to have a summit conference with your sensitivities, the flowers and trees—and your medicine cabinet. I hope you won’t make my perennial mistake of allowing myself to be miserable rather than to take some medication, natural or prescribed. I have missed some of the best of the spring season by being unwilling to put on my big girl pants and take my medicine. Allergies sap your energy. A head that feels like it’s about to explode will not be able to focus on gathering seed energy for a creative burst. Congestion is not conducive to springing forward into the new.

Joyce’s New Astrology Blog
Speaking of new: For those interested in or curious about astrology, please visit my new blog, The Radical Virgo. It launches with its first full post on March 21 to catch the spirit of the Equinox seed energy. Until then, there are a couple of short posts and a link to an article I wrote for Inner Sanctuary blog, “Your Cosmic Tractor Beam.” It explains how and why like-minded people are drawn together.

I am very excited that I have been guided back to writing about astrology, guidance which has been coming slowly into my consciousness over the past six months. While I am unlikely to do individual astrology readings in the future (I have been retired from that work since 2003), astrology will always remain a tool that has brought me closer to the Divine and to understanding the magnificent workings of the universe—everyone and everything that’s a part of it. I love writing about it and the lively exchanges among my fellow star trekkers. (Ironically, the woman who used to do a Star Trek radio show and headed the William Shatner fan club was also named Joyce Mason.)

In the near future, I’ll be posting an article in the SkyHints Sidebar for people whose experience of astrology is primarily reading their horoscope in the newspaper. Newspaper horoscopes are a very limited version of what astrology has to offer, so for those who have an inkling that “there’s more out there,” I hope to give you a taste of how most modern astrologers use their knowledge of the sky as positive a psycho-spiritual tool. Psychiatrist Carl Jung used astrology extensively in his practice.

Meanwhile, I hope blogging in two “solar systems” here on Hot Flashbacks and The Radical Virgo just continues to make me a better writer and blogger and doubles the benefits to my readers. This is one of the spring seeds I’m planting. Let’s share how both yours and mine bloom in summer, then reap their fruits at the autumn harvest. Hope to hear a lot of “seedy” comments, now and in the future!

Happy Natural New Year! Hoe-hoe-hoe!

~~~

For those who also want to plant the real thing this spring, here are a few seedlinks: Burpee (largest and oldest), Seeds of Change (organic), and Victory Seed Company (heirloom).

Auntie Mame: A Tale for Today, Tomorrow, and Always!

“Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.’ –Auntie Mame



Who’s Auntie Mame?
She’s my heroine and mentor, a larger-than-life character. The movies, Broadway plays and musicals that tell her madcap story are based on the novel by Patrick Dennis, a book inspired by his real-life aunt. However, it was Rosalind Russell who brought Mame to life most in her 1957 stage performance and the 1958 movie, “Auntie Mame.” Her message? “Live, live, live!” She was an adventurer who advocated opening new windows and doors every day.

Mame has a lot to teach us, not only about getting the most from life in all its stages, but also how to deal with our current hard times. To quote Mame in the lyrics from the musical:

"We need a little Christmas right this very minute!”

We could use a lot of Auntie Mame--now.


The Basic Story
1928: Mame’s conservative stockbroker brother has just written his will. To his dismay, he is forced to leave his only son, Patrick, to Mame, his crazy sister and only living relative. He knows it’s just a formality, because he’s in perfect health. But just in case, out of concern for her influence on the boy, Mame’s brother names a conservative banker, Dwight Babcock from the Knickerbocker Bank to be Patrick’s trustee and to handle all the money.

As fate would have it, Mame’s brother drops dead at his health club the next day before the ink is dry on the will. Soon Patrick and his dad’s loyal Irish housekeeper, Nora Muldoon, arrive at the door of Mame’s apartment on Beacon Place in New York City. Their first encounter sets the stage for the rest of the story.

Mame is hosting a wild party with all kinds of bohemians and foreign dignitaries. Her close friend, flapper, and actress, Vera Charles, is suffering the latest effects of Mame’s free-flowing bootlegged booze. Being “hung” after one of Mame’s nightly parties and sleeping the next day past noon is par for the course at Beacon Place.

Patrick’s companion and former housekeeper, Nora, thinks she has brought the boy to a den of iniquity. Mame, though, wins him over immediately, and her bond with Patrick is instantaneous. “Come to me, my little love. I’m your Auntie Mame!”

But it’s not all fun and games. Mame’s worst hour is when she is caught defying Babcock’s edict to send Patrick to a stuffy, snooty boys’ school. Babcock discovers Patrick has never shown up at the school of his choice. Rather, the boy has been romping naked at an “experimental” school in the Village run by one Mame’s bohemian friends. Babcock arrives just as the kids and staff are acting out the way fish spawn. Not impressed by the spirit-freeing practice of nudism or such hands-on biology lessons, Babcock sends Patrick to a far-off boarding school. It breaks Mame’s heart.

Feast before Famine, a Tale for Tough Times
Soon, Mame’s heart was not the only thing broken. By now, it’s 1929—and you guessed it—Mame and all her wealthy friends are broke with the stock market crash. (Sound familiar?) How does Mame’s philosophy of “live-live-live!” cut it during the Depression? What does this heartwarming story tell us about living through tough times and flourishing in life all the way to the finish line?

For starters, Mame is not too proud to go back to work and open her mind to new ways of making a living. She tries three things—all disasters. When Mame goes back to acting and turns a Shakespearean style play into an episode of “I Love Lucy,” the star, her friend Vera Charles, is not amused. It just intensifies their ongoing rivalry since they acted together in days gone by.

Next Mame tries her hand as a switchboard operator. Remember, those were the days when the operator made the connections. Soon her board looked like a bowl of spaghetti after an earthquake. There were so many hang-ups and disconnects flying, she probably caused several international incidents.

But as they say, the third time’s a charm. The final job was still disastrous—an attempt at being a clerk at Macy’s during the holiday season. Mame couldn’t get the hang of writing anything but a COD order, or of how to keep her carbon paper from trailing out of her sales book. But here’s where the charm comes in. Mame nearly botches a sale with a rich, handsome Southern gentleman named Beauregard Jackson Picket Burnside. They fall in love and marry. Happy and prosperous days are here again!

Unfortunately, Mame’s bliss with Beau was short-lived. A shutterbug, during one of their trips around the world, Beau falls off an Alp stepping backwards for better perspective while taking Mame’s picture. After a lengthy gig as a melodramatic widow, Mame finally takes heart in writing her memoir, “Live, Live, Live!” This new project brings more amazing adventures to Mame, nephew Patrick, and their family of friends.

Mame’s Message for All Seasons
Whether life was up or down, Mame believed we should always, “open a new window, open a new door,” those juicy lyrics from the musical version, “Mame.” (Mame was played on Broadway in the musical version by Angela Lansbury and the movie musical by Lucille Ball.) Mame was rich in friends, an exchange that never crashed. Her loyal staff paid her bills with their savings when Mame was penniless. While we can’t all marry a rich Southern gentleman, Mame oozed integrity. She married Beau because she was in love with him, when her easy out, earlier, would have been to marry “dear Lindsay,” her prosperous beau before Beau. Mame refused to do in hard times what she hesitated to do during good times.

When the going got tough, Mame got creative. She wasn’t too proud to pawn her belongings. When her spirits needed lifting, she insisted that her little family celebrate Christmas early, because, “We need a little Christmas, right this very minute!”
Mame’s spirit was indomitable, her mind and heart both as open as the great outdoors, she had principles and a lust for life rarely matched. These are just some of the reasons why she’s my role model, but add one more. As a person not blessed with children of my own, auntie has been one of my most beloved roles in life. My nieces and nephews, no doubt, see me as their “unusual” Auntie Joyce, too.

Finally, like the baby boomers who read this blog, Mame just got cooler as her hair was touched by gray and she had a great-nephew to “open new worlds” for.

Mame Is Eternal
Recently on Facebook, I was asked to answer “44 Odd Things about Me.” Since I believe life doesn’t end with physical death, it was easy for me to answer the question, what song would you like played at your funeral?"

Open a New Window, Open a New Door …”

~~~

If Mame’s story inspires you, why not rent the DVD today? If you’re on Netflix, it’s available as a download right to your computer screen. Don’t underestimate the power of a funny movie with a fabulous message to uplift you during trying times or anytime.

Affirmations: Part 2, Column 2

My last post, Wall-to-Wall Inspiration, covered the topic of inspirational words, especially affirmations. There is a powerful second step to making affirmations work. It seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle in the smiley-faced enthusiasm of some of our more eager metaphysical go-getters. I’m making fun of myself, because I used to border on being one of them.

The Complications of Over-Simplifying

While I’m on the subject, there is a real danger in our culture of oversimplifying things to the point that they—or we—become caricatures. This is exacerbated by a culture that relies heavily on video as a medium for information and entertainment—always entertainment—even on the most serious topics. Everything is reduced to video clips and sound bytes, and the more we live media-driven lives—we micro-blog on Facebook and Twitter in a sentence or two—the more we are apt to lose the core nugget of truth for brevity.

For example, there is fabulous information in the movie, The Secret, which claims to reveal the most powerful law in the universe; however, if you don’t listen to it with a discerning ear, it comes off sounding like a very materialistic form of magic, one without heart and soul. As I say often, it’s not the tool; it’s how you use it. Knives are instruments of nurture to a cook, and in the hands of a skilled surgeon, a lifesaver. In the hands of a serial murder—not.

I don’t want to get into the controversy that has sometimes surrounded The Secret; it has its pluses and minuses like all people and things. But I do want to say this: affirmations are another one of those things that will either not work, backfire, or sound really stupid to seriously grounded realists if you don’t know the second step. The reason the smiley-faced metafoofoo types never seem to have gotten it? It has to do with negatives. They don’t like them. (I didn’t invent the expression metafoofoo for airy metaphysical types, but I do claim to have added the smiley-face! :) I think the perennial positive thinkers haven't yet found the positives in negatives.

The Positive of Negatives
Here’s the second step. You must spend time writing down the negative mind-chatter that pops in as you affirm your new way of thinking, your positive statement. If you do not get it out in the open on a piece of paper where you can face it squarely, it will sabotage you.

This takes some emotionally painful and rather time-consuming work. My spiritual teachers taught me that it takes writing the new affirmation and coughing up the negative self-talk 77 times before the new idea “sets.” Hopefully, it sets firmer than squiggly Jell-O and takes root in your mind like an oak tree. Remember, mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow. These little seeds of self-discovery will yield big.

I was taught to do this exercise by folding a standard piece of notebook or other 8.5 x 11 lined paper lengthwise. You set up two columns. You can call them whatever works for you. I usually marked them, simply, with the plus (+) and minus (-) symbols.

You need 77 lines, so use as many pieces of paper as necessary. Maybe it’s not a magic number, but it’s enough writing to do the job. You don’t have to write all 77 affirmations and your inner responses to them in one session, but if you can make the time, that’s ideal.

Here’s an example. I wanted to work with the affirmation: I am lean, fit, centered—energetic. For starters, I realized it’s a four-in-one, and I’d have to do those declarations one at a time, starting with “I am lean.” Here is some of what popped out in my process, with the Column 2 Minuses in parentheses:

1. I am Lean. (That’s a laugh. Just look at you!)
2. I am Lean. (You lean over cuz you’re so fat! That’s your “lean.”)
3. I am Lean. (Well, maybe under several inches of pudge.)
4. I am Lean. (But you had a fat mother; her mom and sister were fat. You come from a fat family!)

I don’t want to bore you with my obnoxious, personal demons, but I do want to report that at some point the talk in Column 2 will begin to change. It happens quite naturally:

18. I am Lean. (Maybe deep within)
19. I am Lean. (Hmm, well, OK, I think that’s probably who I really am.)
20. I am Lean. (Your uncle is fit and in control of his eating. He’s 82 and still traveling and having fun!)
By the end of this exercise, you will have actually downloaded the barriers to your beliefs and put them out in front of you where you can deal with them. I have lost 9 lbs. since affirming “I am lean” and dumping out my negative mind chatter for examination. I’m sure affirmations aren’t the only reason—I was using multiple tools—but I can’t deny they factored into it.) For some more excellent examples, especially about blocks to prosperity and manifesting money, read Using Affirmations to Uncover and Transform Negative Beliefs and Attitudes by Douglas Bloch, a profound self-help author who speaks from having walked the path from pain to wholeness. Also, here’s another similar spin on how to do affirmations with some additional and delightful twists, including singing them: Motivation Tips by Carla Valencia.

Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative
That peppy old tune by Johnny Mercer, Accentuate the Positive, sung by Perry Como, tells us not to mess with “Mr. In-Between.” In order to eliminate the negative, we have to find it! Rout it out like the rat infestation in my garage and turn the whole mess over to Mr. Clark, the namesake of our pest-control service. When we affirm without finding and eliminating the negatives, we haven’t finished the job—or the paper work. We are, indeed, messing with Mr. In-Between. We can’t get anywhere, because we are laying a foundation on faulty ground, one with potholes, sinkholes, and a host of hidden pitfalls and pratfalls.

Try this process, and please share your success stories with our Cool Insights family. It’s profound and practical!

~~~

Photo Credit: TORN BLUE PAPER FROM NOTEBOOK © Loraliu Dreamstime.com

~~~


NEW FEATURE: Cool Saging Conversations

Check out the new feature and sidebar on Hot Flashbacks, Cool Insights! I’m participating in a meme on Pop Art Diva’s Saturday Soapbox on various issues near and dear to baby boomers. Memes (pronounced meem, long e like beam), are a way of propagating culture, analogous to the biological transmission of genes. Anytime we communicate by whatever means about culture, these conversations propagate cultural evolution from one mind to another. In other words, if we talk about our culture, we change it! I will post Cool Saging Conversations beside my regular posts, not just in response to the Saturday Soapbox, but on all kinds of cool saging topics. Today’s inaugural post is response to the Pop Art Diva’s Saturday Soapbox on March 1, “Are We Wasting the Resources of Our Elders?”

Wall-to-Wall Inspiration

I have been on a spiritual quest most of my adult life. I have considered affirmations to be among my favorite tools for cool living ever since I first heard of them. I thrive on inspirational quotes, too.

Affirmations
As for dictionary definition, an affirmation is: Something declared to be true; a positive statement or judgment. These positive sayings recognize how the mind and spirit work to help create in synchrony with Higher Power. They are like magnets of attraction—positive thoughts and beliefs attract positive experiences. Most of us have had life-long training in how to find what’s wrong with things—or ourselves. How ‘bout declaring a whole day where you only look at what’s right? I’ve been amazed at how many situations have taken a U-turn toward much better outcomes when I have done this simple attitudinal turnabout.

Inspirational Quotes
Being a “word bird,” as one friend used to call me, I am probably more inspired by written language than most. I use a Franklin Planner, and I love the daily quotes. This year I’m using the Simplicity filler. (Simplicity is something I’m desperate to have more of!) Here’s one: The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are. –Stephen R. Covey

I feature Simple Inspirations here on Hot Flashbacks, random quotes that pop up on the bottom of my blog. If you’ve never scrolled down that far, check it out! Sample quote: Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction. –Antoine de Saint-Exupery. This saying has long been one of my most trusted measures of right relationship.

One of my favorite sources of words that keep me on track and often amused are the Quotes of the Day that I have activated on my personalized iGoogle page. Example: Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business. - Tom Robbins

There are mountains of quotation sites online. Try some, if you haven’t already: The Quotations Page, Think Exist (my personal fave to date), or Quotations for Creative Thinking.


On and Off the Wall
We are living in a time of economic distress. Favorite stores and businesses are closing by the droves. My own State of California has been hovering on the brink of bankruptcy. Several cities here that have already gone under. During this kind of bad-news bombardment, affirmations and inspirational words are more important than ever.

Wanting to take time for more of those pump-me-up words, I figured what better way than to “clock” them! I was in dire need of constant inspiration, so I visited Pop Art Diva’s Store at Café Press and bought the clock in the picture on this blog post. It reminds me to take the time to: Imagine, Trust, Believe, and Receive. Affirming these realities and feeling their truth activates the invisible stuff from which all substance flows. Our creativity helps draw to us ways to meet our needs through a variety of sources. We were given such blessings of ability, made in the image of the Creator. When we focus on universal abundance rather than believing that the latest distribution issue has to be our personal experience, we remain in the flow of divine substance. Substance comes in many forms, and it all begins with an open mind to tap into the source of all creativity and solutions.

God Helps Those …
The expression God helps those who help themselves could sum up the purpose of this post. Those who are less religiously inclined can think of it as, Good begets good.

What a piece of work is man. How noble his reason. How infinite his faculties. Shakespeare wrote it, and the cast of “Hair” sang it to us. When we can unite our minds with divine order or that which is good in humanity—the natural desire to seek our own perfection—we can really go places.

We can also get out of some really bad places like a blue funk, self-pity, poor self-esteem, and the down-spiral of a day going downhill or one pessimistic thought leading to another bad thing happening. Bad luck multiplies when our magnet is sending out bummer signals.

So, I say plaster the walls with good words … paper them, plaque them, clock them. Don’t be afraid to wear them on your person, even! I love word jewelry. When I turned 60, my friends and I created a croning ceremony as a positive rite of passage. During this acceptance of my sage role, I received a necklace that says on one side, Heals, and the other, With Words. You can order a necklace customized with anything you want on it from my friend JoAnna at Light Drop Jewelry.

When it comes to seeing the writing on the wall, Café Press is just once source of an abundance of products and ideas. It’s one of my favorites. Here’s one good reason why. In my post, Cool ‘Phinsights about my experience swimming with a dolphin named Eva in Hawaii, I mentioned what a baby boomer diva she is—the oldest at Dolphin Quest (38), but also the spryest because she is the highest jumper among her mates. My blog readers were all ready to adopt her as our dolphin diva mascot. I discovered that Café Press has a whole line of “Dolphin Diva” products. After that, I figured you could find just about anything there!

Dive in! Consider decorating your personal space with words to inspire. Make it a womb where you gestate the life and feelings you want to create and celebrate.

Information Indigestion

Information overload is the new Alzheimer’s. It makes us fuzzy-headed and mentally bloated. It feels like a bellyache in the brain. We stuff ourselves, day and night, at the All You Can Eat Info Buffet. We are glutted with mental stimulation, luring us with its delicious aromas of fun, friendship, news, games, and get-rich schemes. There’s more information to digest in a day than most of us used to swallow in a month, maybe even a year. If someone can invent an Alka-Seltzer for the mind, that genius will be laughing all the way to the bank.

At least once I week, I think I have entered senility early, a prospect that is very worrisome to a baby boomer. The symptoms: I have misplaced yet another important piece of paper or lost track of some file, on- or off-line. I’m constantly asking people to re-send things or tell me something over again. (I know we have a close working relationship when I’m no longer too embarrassed to ask.) I used to track so well. Now I forget names and details. Where did they go?

If the Industrial Revolution changed our lives, the Information Revolution is changing how we live and process data more than any paradigm shift in recorded history. Supposedly, we use only a paltry percentage of our brains. That’s not only embarrassing to me, anymore; it’s a handicap. The need to process more information faster has me doing daily mind aerobics—word games and puzzles to stoke the fire of my synapses. I’m bent on shaking up a few memory cells and leaping around cyberspace more limber and muscular in my gray matter.

Even the brightest people are having a hard time handling the bombardment on all sides by info, info, info. You’ve probably heard the initials TMI. A couple of decades ago, it sadly stood for Three Mile Island and a terrible nuclear disaster. Now when someone says TMI, it means Too Much Information. The meltdown is a state I call Advanced Overwhelm.

We are not losing it. Now that we have computers, which, after all, are modeled after our own brains, the analogy is easy. We have just run out of RAM! (Would someone please put out a missing person’s report on my Random Access Memory?) By the time we’ve lived three or four, much less five to seven decades, the part of our brains that retrieves stored data and makes all the programs work is nearly full. We need an upgrade!

At the rate info is flying into our lives, we have to store and retrieve it at speeds we never have known before. We’re still operating like antiquated 286 computer, that relic clunker we plunked on before we even used a mouse and everyone was on the Internet. Our machines run at gigahertz speeds so fast, our brains can barely fire in the same range. Am I the only one who’s a little creeped out by this? Remember “2001, A Space Odyssey” and how HAL, the computer, attempted to sabotage and take over the mission?

We are now bionic. Computers are extensions of our minds. But we have to let our heads catch up with this break-neck evolution. (Is this why my neck hurts so much, so often?) We are being overwhelmed with voice mail, e-mail, faxes—websites, fancy phones that integrate this entire communications smorgasbord—and, yes, blogs, Tweets, Face Bookings and more! Ah, for the good old days when there was lag time. (Remember letters? Days to arrive and no one expected an answer for a week or two.)

Now that everything is instantaneous, we expect each other to do 100 more things, right now, all at once. All those requests and communiqués in your face … all those senders knowing you got it right away. No wonder we’re stressed out. Truth is, most emergencies—unless you happen to work as a 911 dispatcher—are of our own making. We are so impatient. Sometimes I feel like we’ve regressed back to the toddler stage when it comes to social graces. Gimme, gimme—want it now!

A new and improved high-tech species will only evolve out of the latest revolution if we exercise our minds a lot, lower our expectations a little, and remember what happens when a system tries to do more than it’s built for—it crashes. Before we have a collective nervous breakdown, go meditate and/or do something mindless ... and remember well-rounded people who play as hard as they work are the most creative and productive. And when we get those extra moments to rethink things a little, bear in mind that “information is not knowledge,” one of the great catchphrases of the New Millennium.

Last but not least, if you can’t slow down and simplify … if Advanced Overwhelm gets the best of you, take an Info-Seltzer and call in sick in the morning … then turn off the TV, computer, cell phone, handheld, and all the communications gismos and listen to yourself think. You might be amazed at how this low-tech, retro practice can heighten spirits and your put your brain back in gear!

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Photo Credit: BUBBLING MEDICINE, © Wizdaz Dreamstime.com

The Converse Golden Rule

For some of us, the Golden Rule is not difficult: Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. Treat others as you want to be treated.

If you’re anything like me—if you have the Golden Rule nailed—you might be such a giver and so other-oriented, you might want to learn its complement. I call it the Converse Golden Rule: Do unto yourself, as you do unto others. Treat yourself as well as you treat others.

I pour myself whole-heartedly into every job, friend, family member, committee, club, and project to the point that I often drain myself of my own life force. My first job was as a social worker, and I admit, I have always done some sort of social work ever since, whether in my day job, avocation, or part-time work on the side. It might have been called something else and the purpose may have appeared to be something else. But it was still “social work.” I am a do-gooder and helper through and through.

When Giving Hurts
Unfortunately, like anything done to an extreme, excessive “doing unto others” can be damaging to both the giver and receiver. There are often hidden psychological issues behind too much giving. One possibility is a need for love and approval. Another can be that we are mimicking an intense nurturing style from a parent. We tend to do as we are taught until we consciously break the cycle, whether it’s being abusive or smothering a kid with rib-crunching hugs till he yells, “Uncle.”

Whatever the cause—and, if it applies, that’s for each of us to examine and work on—helpers need to learn to help themselves. There is nothing wrong with caring about others, but when it’s at the expense of your own health, accomplishments, joy and fun in life, it’s time to meet the Converse Golden Rule.

I was finally able to turn around some of the more destructive aspects of my Giving Tree behavior by deciding to treat myself like I’d treat one of my closest friends. What a concept! I wish I had thought of it sooner. This I knew how to do—well!

My reference to the Giving Tree is a book I remember discussing at my women’s consciousness-raising group in the ‘70s. (Remember those?) While many would find Shel Silverstein’s children’s story endearing about an apple tree who loves a little boy so much, it gives and gives till it has nothing left to give; some women on the cusp of liberation were not amused 35 years ago. They were righteously indignant. They felt this was the wrong message to be sending our children—to give and give with no regard for themselves. It touched too close to the bone as the traditional role women were expected to play. They were tired of being nothing in and of themselves and only regarded as valuable in their role as compulsive givers.

On Balance
Boomers have had to integrate some true extremes in our lifetime. Most of us were children in the ‘50s but reached young adulthood in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Could any two eras differ more? Ozzie and Harriet meets Michael the Meathead and Gloria. My struggles with being pulled in these two opposite directions are full of both humor and pathos when I flash back on my life. I felt schizoid in the ‘70s trying to sort it all. I did not understand who I was or who I wanted to become as the palette of possibilities expanded, thanks to the Women’s Movement.

But one thing I learned the hard way, while stumbling all over my own self-discovery, is that I had to love myself more—a lot more. This is what nurturers ultimately have to realize. If our joy is in giving: we will have nothing left to give once we are completely wrung out … a dish rag killed in its prime by constant overuse, cleaning up other people’s messes. Who gave to the Giving Tree kid once the giving was all gone?

Loving You
Doing nice things for yourself will get easier, once you live by the Converse Golden Rule and become your own best friend. Soaks in a hot tub, days to yourself declared and taken behind shut doors or away from home, weekend spiritual retreats—they are all yours for the taking. Sorry, but most of your excuses are lame. So are mine.

But I think it has to go even deeper than R&R. You have to resonate to and vibrate outward a deep love of your own being. Self-love is not vanity. It’s knowing your own magnificence as a reflection of Creation and Creator.

Whatever you have to do to find that connection with your spark of the divine, give yourself that Valentine.

Whether it takes journaling, talking to your best friend until her ears burn, or years of therapy: give yourself a gift this year and the same one to your loved ones by creating a wellspring of self-love from your innermost core. It’s a wellspring because it emanates from the Ultimate Source.

Now for my gift to you. Here’s a clip of the most beautiful song I have ever known that celebrates self-love. It’s called How Could Anyone Ever Tell You (you are anything less than beautiful), written by Libby Roderick and performed by Shaina Noll. The album it comes from, Songs for the Inner Child, is something your own inner child would love on Valentine’s Day or any day.

Now, go hug yourself!


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Photo credit: WOMAN SHOWS HEART, © Foto.fritz Dreamstime.com