Occupy Your Life

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Slowing down and embrac­ing the spa­cious­ness of the un-scheduled moment has been an increas­ingly impor­tant and elu­sive goal over the last few years as I expe­ri­ence too-regular cal­en­dar over­whelm and a daily Sisyphean bat­tle with my in-box.

Thomas Merton artic­u­lates the prob­lem per­fectly in a quote I’ve used here before and will no doubt come back to again:

“The rush and pres­sure of mod­ern life are a form, per­haps the most com­mon form, of innate vio­lence. To allow one­self to be car­ried away by a mul­ti­tude of con­flict­ing con­cerns, to sur­ren­der to too many demands, to com­mit one­self to too many projects, to want to help every­one in every­thing is to suc­cumb to violence.

More than that, it is coop­er­a­tion with vio­lence. The frenzy of the activist neu­tral­izes his work for peace. It destroys her own inner capac­ity for peace. It destroys the fruit­ful­ness of his own work because it kills the root of inner wis­dom which makes work fruitful.”

To begin to redress the vio­lence I’ve been doing to my soul and restore the ten­der roots of my own inner wis­dom, I’ve decided to begin this new year by re-claiming some­thing I’d almost for­got­ten — the weekend.

No small thing as — slowly but def­i­nitely — the week­end seems to have migrated from rest-time to work-time in the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion. Turning the tide appears to require a per­sonal dec­la­ra­tion of some kind, a stance against the cul­tural pres­sure to over-work. Therefore, I have ordered home deliv­ery of Sunday’s New York Times and hereby pub­licly pro­claim that I can no longer be relied upon to read email over the week­end.

Yes, you heard that cor­rectly. I’m embark­ing upon a “occupy my life” cam­paign in 2012 that kicks off by fully occu­py­ing my week­ends, so unless we have arranged oth­er­wise, you can pretty-much fig­ure I won’t read any­thing work-related after 5pm Friday until Monday morn­ing. With the accu­mu­la­tion that’s sure to have piled up by then, you may not even get a response til Tuesday!

Even God didn’t work 7 days a week.

Originally posted by Amy Lenzo on www.BeautyDialogues.com

Springing Forward: Cleansing, Fasting and Detoxification Explained

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Traditionally, a change of sea­son calls for a change of diet and lifestyle.

Spring has finally come, and with it new begin­nings and new life. Birds are singing. Trees are blos­som­ing. Bulbs are sprout­ing up. Spring foods such as mus­tard, dan­de­lion, aspara­gus and straw­ber­ries are back in sea­son. Spring is an excit­ing and deli­cious time as our fresh food options will increase for  the next six months.

During the win­ter sea­son, in a north­ern cli­mate, we sen­si­bly eat warm­ing foods. It is easy to overeat pro­tein, fats, snack foods, sweets and treats to stay warm and feel secure dur­ing the dark, wet and cold sea­son.  Physical activ­ity dimin­ishes. Read the rest of this entry »

Brene Brown on The Power of Vulnerability

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The feel­ing of fear is often much big­ger than the things we think we are afraid of. You know that old say­ing that it’s the fear itself we fear. We have become mas­ter dis­trac­tors from what we really feel, intel­lec­tu­al­iz­ing and label­ing and sweep­ing under the car­pet those big dark scary things inside our­selves. Those things that we are cer­tain will be judged, pun­ished, out of con­trol or just too big to han­dle. Read the rest of this entry »

a nice horizontal line A sanctuary where the body can rest and the soul can reveal itself.

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