Girls Weekend - Power up!

Irene turned out to be a pain in the ass.  The night brought darkness and we were ready for it: candles, lanterns and flashlights.  But I wouldn’t have chosen to spend this weekend with anyone else but my Goils, my best girlfriends from college.  Effie lives in Warwick, so I see her quite frequently.  Ingrid lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her husband and toddler Greta, who traveled with her up to Rhode Island.  Effie’s new house was the chosen abode for our girl power weekend.  We knew that having an almost-three-year-old there was going to require some adjustment and we planned on tiring Greta out every single day, so the nights would be spent catching up.  Hurricane Irene ended up creeping up as a tropical storm and even though we all knew that she was coming, as much as we thought we were prepared, we realized that the weekend was going to be extended a few days.  Not a bad thing, but not a wonderful thing when we, Western civilization, are used to electricity for all our gadgets and our daily and nightly comforts. 

I think one of us made the analogy of camping.  I have never camped in my entire life.  You can’t take the city out of this currently suburban girl.  I like my comfort, being a Taurus, aka an Earth sign.  So camping has never enticed me.  Effie mentioned a camper, and I had to remind her a camper has electricity, as far as I knew, and that was more than what we had.  So Ingrid’s Jet Blue flight had been rescheduled for Tuesday evening.  We lost power on Sunday at 9 am.  Turns out that Effie did not have a cooler, so even though she had stocked up beyond belief for our Goils weekend, she had not thought beyond candles, flashlights, and batteries.  So she went out and got a gigantic cooler and a few bags of ice, while Ingrid and I figured out what we were going to do with a full fridge and freezer.

I am by no means a grill master.  I usually don’t touch outdoor gadgets (unless it’s an electrical hedger that I can pretend to be a weapon), so I could imagine the operations of a grill, but was not proficient at it.  Ingrid doesn’t grill and neither does Effie.  So, I went out and even though Effie’s grill had been placed in the garage, we manually opened the garage door, and I figured out how to turn on the propane tank.  I read some of the instructions inside the tank door and realized for some reason, the ignition wasn’t self-starting as it was supposed to.  Good thing we had lighters.  In the attempt to get the grill working, I discovered that two of the burners weren’t working properly, as flames were spewing from the metal knobs.  I realized then that the grill hadn’t been properly put together, so nearly half was non-operational.  So I had one grilling area and one searing area and the side burner.  After much metal brushing to burn off and remove the crud, my MacGyver self was successful at using it to grill meats, warm up leftovers and make breakfast for the following days.

Our dependence on electricity is mind-blowing.  I couldn’t charge my Blackberry.  The lines were down for me to get internet on my phone, then the phone lines were down that I couldn’t get any reception due to the mad winds of Irene.  I couldn’t power up the phone or my laptop – I had thought I would have been able to at least do a little work at the computer, but Irene wasn’t having that.  I couldn’t even update my Facebook status to let my relatives and friends on the other side of the Atlantic know that Irene hadn’t swept me away to California.  TV and cable were down, of course, because of the electricity being gone.  Did I mention Irene was a pain in my ass? 

The great thing about not having electricity was truly bonding with my girlfriends.  Not only did we have productive and meaningful conversations, we were sharing ourselves during a state of multi-statewide emergency.  We also noticed that right after Irene’s angry winds, Effie’s neighbors were outside, doing damage control to their yards.  We even removed a gigantic branch from Effie’s pool.  and amidst all of this, we had to entertain Greta.  Neither Effie nor I have children, but Effie is a teacher and used to kids, so even though Greta couldn’t watch her habitual Curious George on her portable DVD, we were trying to tire her out physically and I ended up doing headstands in Effie’s basement and a joyful Greta trying to copy me.  I don’t remember the last time I had done headstands, but I suspect it had been more than a decade.

I imagine in the old days when there was no refrigeration, and there were no electronic distractions and dependencies that people had to actually sit at a dinner table and talk to one another.  Food was obtained the same day in the markets and the butchers, in the bakeries and the milkman would come to your door, and people talked to one another.  Here we are in the following century and we don’t need to deal with people as often.  We have alienated ourselves and electricity is the gluing culprit.  We make a call, we talk to a machine, and sometimes for longer than we wished for.  We all stare at a screen for hours, whether it’s a handheld or cinema-size.  Some of us stare at it and type the whole day, and our emotions go on a rampage when these electronic things man has invented provoke near fatal experiences in our health.  We have become slaves of the electronic era and as much as electricity is a beautiful thing, it can also be an isolating one.  So, light up a candle, open up a bottle of wine and share your soul with another and ask how their day was, face to face.  You might just get a very colorful answer.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

     As I sit here between a rock and a hard place, I think about duties, the “shoulds” of our daily lives, the “wants” and the dreams, and debate inside my head, what makes one choose work versus play.  Of course, those two categories can be very different for each person.  For me, I can technically manipulate the “shoulds” into “wants” and the duties into dreams.  Or can I?  Can I really shuffle them fast enough, so I can get past the work items and focus my energy into the play fun stuff?  Or maybe I can convince myself that I really want to finish this technical work so I can get to read my for-pleasure book, so in theory, finishing the job/chore is a priority, something I must master well and fast, so I can get to the “want” pastime.

    The question you should ask yourself is why are you doing what you are doing?  As you weigh the pros and cons of each task at hand, it can be a straightforward type of answer.  Are you comparing apples and oranges?  Should you literally pick an apple over decadent chocolate (the kind which has a tendency to sensually melt in your mouth and give you hmmm-sounding sensations)?  Or is it a career change that you are contemplating?  Or maybe a relationship change?  Are you weighing financial stability against a risky dream venture you have always fantasized about?

     Life decisions are not easy all the time.  Sometimes the simplest decisions are the hardest ones to make.  And you should ask yourself: what makes me happy?  What makes my heart sing?  Is my decision going to impact others?  If so, how does it impact me?  Should I sacrifice myself in the process?  Is this decision perpetuating a continuity of a vicious cycle?  What is the best course of action?

     These are all great questions.  And the decision scale needs to tip more to one side than to the other.

It all comes down to two things: you being proactive and you being in balance.  When you are working towards those goals (and they complement each other beautifully), you are going to make a decision that is right for you, for your peace of mind, for your balance to reach full potential, and ultimately for your health.  When you are confused, or feel like you are going down the wrong path, you need to look within and evaluate your ingredients.  Are they all healthy?  Are they in sync?  How do you feel about it?  What is your gut telling you?

    When making your pros and cons list, pay attention to your intuition and not just what’s on the piece of paper.  Never stop questioning and know that the right answers are always the ones that make you feel whole in the end; they are always the ones that remove you from the rock and the hard place into a place of complete health and freedom, where you heart sings in perfect harmony along with the chirping birds.

Halt the gavel, dear Sir or Madam!

Being judgmental is a very dangerous thing.  Let’s admit it: we are all guilty of it.  Some people I know are highly hypocritical (like the Catholic who goes to church on Sundays to ask for forgiveness for the conscious “sins” acted out during the week) and I try to stay clear of them, and others can’t help themselves (I think that is a conscious choice).  We make judgments every day.  The word judgment has mostly a negative connotation, but judgment is really an opinion or a conclusion about something or someone.

I may come to a certain judgment if someone who comes for a Reiki session has their throat area energetically blocked and shares with me he/she is afraid of talking about feelings.  The throat area is all about communication and self-expression, so the judgment about one’s difficulty of communicating their feelings is made by me as a logical conclusion.

When you are around someone who is highly judgmental in a negative sort of way, always forcing their opinions on you, hardly listening, and being obnoxious about their righteousness, it is a clear indicator to me they like the sound of their own voice and they are not willing to hear your point of view.  They come across as narrow-minded, sometimes arrogant and are normally ignorant.  People like that have sometimes taken the opinion of their peers, or their parents, without really exploring their own ideas or doing the necessary research to formulate their own independent conclusions.  My friend’s husband is guilty of that.  Similar to a colorful peacock, he flaunts his multi-decade-old judgments proudly, and they are normally so far off from everyone’s opinions and show that he lives in another planet, that no one dares to say anything.  What’s even worse about this guy is that his own friends have decided that they cannot stand his company and prefer my friend’s, so they put up with him because they have to.

I’m a little guilty of having strong opinions, but as assertive as I have become, I have earned the right to my opinions, as I used to have none.  When I came to this country, I didn’t know who I was.  It took a lot of exploring and I realized that some of the judgments I had made were fruit of what I had been brain-fed by my parents.  Occasionally, I’ll joke with people that I’m always right, but I know that I am not.  I don’t know everything and I admit it.  Sometimes, I don’t have enough information to draw conclusions, so I need more time to explore how I feel about a given subject.  Do I force my opinions on others?  Sure, I may try, but I realize that the person next door can be as assertive as I am, and being a stubborn Taurus is not ammunition enough to bypass personalities or change people’s minds, just because I say so.  

One needs to come out of one’s shell, almost like a spirit hovering around their own body, to be able to become objective and really figure out if their judgment is sound, deserving, timely, or even appropriate.  So, if my client has indeed communication challenges and that has been my conclusion based on different sources of information, it’s not my call to force my opinion on them, but it’s my job to try and come up with tools that could help them.   If it’s something they can do on their own, they decide if it makes sense for them to implement it or not.  So before you slam that gavel, think and ask yourself a couple of smart questions.  Happy judging!

How to become a superhero in 30 days

The book read “How to become a superhero in 30 days.”

Hmmm, I thought, what an interesting title.  Then my brain digested this.  If everyone can pick up this book, then the whole world would be filled with superheroes.  And I thought superheroes were supposed to be special and powerful and fearless.

Evidently, this book is an infomercial on paper, just like those exercise machines that say if you do it ten minutes a day, you will look like an unwrinkled nonstretched-skin bodybuilding supermodel, housing a set of perfect pearly whites.  Yup, that is definitely bound to happen and the power of positive thinking or some heavy-duty drugs can aid that state of illusion.  You will be impatiently waiting for the day when you glance at the mirror and see the perfect you!  Because, believe me, without drugs or some sort of hard liquor, that ain’t happening.

As I stroll around the bookstore with my Spanx on, which by the way are probably one of the best inventions of this past decade, as they suck everything in, creating that ideal trompe l’oeil of a flawless body shape, the closest to mimicking the superhero body you will ever come close to, I wonder at the most elemental truth.  Aren’t we in essence all superheroes?  We have overcome obstacles we never thought we would be capable of.  Some of us have had different degrees of trauma in our lives, from child abuse to which outfit to wear to a business dinner.  I’m not poking fun.  I know there is a range of traumas and people experience things differently.  But, getting back on track, literally, from exiting clinical depression to being able to live with a physical impairment to have been wounded in war or being homeless, people continue on their paths, wherever those may lead, and we still persevere.  Everyone has their gifts, their talents, the things they excel.  I think that is a form of super-heroism, don’t you?