Healing Health Hope

Healing, Health, Hope: Power Down

When I decided to adopt the concept of healing as a focus for the year 2021, I realized it would mean adding some healthier practices to my life, practices like meditation, which you can read about in this post. I knew it would also mean eliminating others, changing long-standing habits that had become nothing more than ways of numbing myself to the realities of life I didn’t want to deal with.

One of those was my obsession with social media. Specifically, my obsession with Facebook.

Time for True Confessions, friends.

Healing, Health, Hope: Being Still

I used to think that being “successful” in meditation meant clearing the mind of every scrap of thought, sitting still and motionless, the mind as pristine and empty as a cloudless blue sky on a summer’s day.

“You’ll never be any good at that,” I told myself. As an over-thinking Enneagram 6, my mind revs as fast as the engine on my husband’s high-powered sports car. I feel like it’s perpetually “pedal to the metal” in there, even in the middle of the night.

And yet I kept feeling a deep hunger to quiet my mind, to shut down the engines of anxiety and worry, to silence the incessant odometer of things-I-need-to do that clicks off like the miles on a cross-country trip.


Healing, Health, Hope: Some Things I'm Learning

(From my morning pages notebook last week on my birthday.)

As I enter my 66th year, I’m learning to….

1. Take it slow…Spend the time it takes to do things – walk Lacey, read books, write about books, cook new recipes, fold the laundry, watch the birds. There’s hardly ever a rush anymore, so just be still.

2. Be curious instead of afraid…what if everything didn’t have to be scary?

3. Notice what you notice. Pay attention.

Click to read more…

Healing, Health, Hope: Seeking Comforters

As we age, our need for comforting doesn’t disappear. If anything, it increases with the demands and stressors of modern living. The difficulty is finding satisfaction in those kinds of sweet comforts we had as children and not turning to more insidious ways of feeling safe and calm and less isolated. Overeating, drinking too much, shopping, hours on the internet – those are some of the most acceptable “grown up” ways to self-soothe.

Believe me, I know. I’ve tried them all at one time or another in the past 50 years.