Ready for Change

Things around the interweb that I’d like to share with you:

• As usual, lovely and moving words from Danette Relic over on Roots of She: A sobering story: The darker days of value play. “It can be confusing for the self-aware soul who knows what her core values are but finds herself dishonouring them again and again.”
• Jonathan Franzen in the New York Times piece, Liking is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts. He starts off talking about “liking” on Facebook, and by page two is diving deep into what it means to love, and finally arrives at: “But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.”
• Dara McKinley at Elephant Journal on When Gratitude is B.S. For anyone who has heard themselves say, “I have so much to be grateful for, I don’t know why I feel this way.” 
• And, for a sad sort of wistful laugh, one of the many exceptional xkcd cartoons. “The sheer number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I’m sitting here refreshing my inbox.”

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Things around the interweb that I’d like to share with you. This week, I went with ones that have been personally meaningful to me over the last month. I hope you find something here for you.

• From the June 6 Religion Outside the Box newsletter: “After decades of trying to improve myself one would think I would be getting more things right than I do. … Instead, I find myself simply repeating the same old foolish things I had done for a long time… Practice has not made me more perfect. It has, instead, made me more discouraged and weary.”
• Fleur Hanlon McGregor of Kai Balance posted on how we can use the body to shift out of a mental feedback loop of stress and depression.
• On the same day, guest writer Stuart Watkins posted at Crazy Sexy Life about how addictive brain chemicals are, even the ones that get produced in states of stress and anxiety. “Just like a drug, the feelings of stress and anxiety are extremely addictive, and the transition between being super wound up on stress and worry, to becoming calm and present may be a foreign feeling and withdrawal symptoms may come along with it.”
• Richard Moss’ When Thoughts Attack! – Tips on Taming Your Ego. “The ego simply does not know how to deal with challenging feelings like vulnerability and feeling out of control. When the ego is running the show, you can notice a dynamic: One thought generates an emotion that leads to another thought that generates another emotion. Round and round you go like a dog chasing its tail—well, in this case tale—becoming increasingly agitated and upset, even if in that moment you are otherwise actually fine, safe, and secure in your bed.”

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Things around the interweb that I’d like to share with you:

• Chris Corrigan explores What It’s Like to Make Change: “Social change is not easy.  Asking for it to be made easy is not fair.  Leadership in this field needs to be able to host all of these emotional states, and to help people hold each other through very trying times.”
• Karen Kimsey-House of the Coaches Training Institute writes on Failure: “In my experience, there are two things that are guaranteed to kill aliveness, authenticity, creativity and innovation: Looking good and Getting it right.”
• Elisha Goldstein, at the Mindfulness and Psychotherapy blog, delves into How Do We Get In Our Own Way: “[M]any of us are afraid of our own light. Something in us heavily guards against it, saying, ‘I can’t do that,’ or ‘I’m no good at this,’ or ‘That’s not important.’”
• Danette Relic of Radical Creative Sanctuary visits Roots of She with an ode to Sensual Self-Care: “I imagine the woman I know I can be when I feel loved, cared for, and empowered for taking wonderful care of myself… When I treat myself with sensual care, my mind is clear, my heart is open and my bones feel alive. I am a better friend, lover, coach and a more generous spirit.”

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Things around the interweb that I’d like to share with you:

• Tanya Geisler on how to bust through patterns: Patterns, Patterns Everywhere
• Terri Cole on choosing less constriction in your life — “What makes up the quality of your life is your daily existence, not only the peak experiences or significant epiphanies”: Flip Over and Float
• Elisha Goldstein, at the Mindfulness and Psychotherapy blog, on three simple words that allow us to drop into the present moment: A Phrase to Change Your Day: Jon Kabat-Zinn
• Danette Relic of Radical Creative Sanctuary visits Roots of She with a post about how the superpower of metaphor helped her clear up a big messy conflict with someone she loves: J’adore le Metaphor
• The talented, mindful, and political Feel Good Food activist, Emily Van Halem, points out what we’re losing when we eat food we can’t identify: Emily’s Whole Foods Rant

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Every Thursday, Ask Laura answers a question from readers. Got a question? You can submit it here.

As a follow up to last week’s Ask Laura post, Can I Change?, here’s a link to a different perspective: Danielle Laporte’s sweeping affirmation: you can change.

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While I’m rounding up things to read on the web, here are a few other posts that have caught my attention recently:

• Danette Relic’s Welcome to the Grief Hotel, a beautiful, heart-searing meditation on welcoming Grief into her life.
• Kate Swoboda’s The Spaciousness of I Don’t Know — “Transference, in this sense, is taking experiences from the past and transferring those old ways of thinking onto the people/situations/environments that are current in our lives.”
• Diane Chung’s 4 Ways to Deal with World Crisis, Global Tragedy, and Planetary Anxiety — “It’s seductive to allow fear, anger, guilt, regret and hopelessness to take over. To engage at the extremes of active despair, or alternately, to be numbed, passive and disconnected. I invite you to choose another way.”
• Elisha Goldstein’s Your Destructive Mind Habits in 5 Short Chapters: catastrophizing, exaggerating the negative and discounting the positive, mind reading, being the external expert, “shoulds”, and blaming.

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