Choose Your Life Mondays #6 – The Holiday Edition

Jennifer — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 01:42:23 +0000

Choose Your Life Monday is an invitation to name what pattern you will lovingly notice this week and to do so in community. Of course, you can do it any day you want- you don’t have to start on Monday. Join in when and whenever suits you.

It’s been snowing for hours and hours.

Our neighborhood is playfully transformed, wild shapes (my patio table is covered with what looks like a giant coconut cake) and no borders (where is the curb?) and dogs chasing each other everywhere. Neighbors visiting in the street, kids sledding, and a series of igloo forts complete the holiday sweetness.

My sister flies in tomorrow. Bob’s mom and dad drive up on Christmas Eve. His sister, her husband, and his mom arrive on Christmas Day. It’s our first holiday blending our families and we are both preparing with care to avoid stepping on our emotional toes when if we get a bit stressed. I won’t divulge Bob’s holiday blindness but mine is to either try too hard as if it were up to me to make help everybody have fun or my other pattern is to fall into a “nobody loves me” story.

Argh, those are ugly. But hey, you got to see it to notice it to shift it.

Choose Your Life Mondays is about choosing one pattern to lovingly notice, not two, so I choose… ini mini mini mo… the winner is… “nobody loves me”

This week I will lovingly notice when I’m feeling like a victim or abandoned. I will simply notice my thoughts and what my body is doing and if I chose, I might speak to myself kindly, I might look for a need of mine I could better meet, I might go outside and watch the wind in the trees

or I might just notice.

Feels good to me.

What do you want to notice that might ease or buoy or lighten your holiday week?

Oh Let’s Us Not Forget the Recap of Last Week’s Noticing

Last week I declared I would lovingly notice when I was feeling overwhelmed and I remind myself there is another way and that overwhelm is fear in another form and fear can teach me lots but it does not get to run my life or dictate my choices.

Oh yeah, this was good one!

Noticing my pattern of overwhelm and its oh so cozy relationship to fear was highly instructive. It never fails to astonish me when I peel away another layer of my own shit… it always feels both embarrassingly obvious and wonderfully freeing.

All by simply stopping to remind myself that I don’t have to believe what fear has to say as in I don’t have to believe:

that I can’t write anymore or
that my writing about fear and uncertainty don’t make sense or
that I’ll never be able to get all my work done to launch The Virtual Retreat and the Comfort Cafe and Life Spa the way someone who was smarter or younger or more evolved would
that I haven’t cleaned the windows or painted the dining room chairs or finished shopping and thus I am a bad mom (that one really makes me chuckle)

Just noticing, along with a little mindful questioning from The Life Organizer, and listening to my own Mood Changers (I usually hate the sound of my own voice) helped me have the most aware and pretty creative week.

I bow in awe to the power of attention.

Want to join me? Name your pattern in the comment section. You can name the same pattern from last week, if you played last week. Or you may want to tweak yours a tad.