And that’s okay.

Choosing Your Life Monday is an invitation to name what pattern you will lovingly notice this week.

As you may know from this post I recently set a BFHG and it’s going very well although I did hit a snag on Friday which is good as it requires me to lovingly notice my-hurry-up-you-should-have-been-done-a-year-ago pattern.

Although, of course, I hate (stamping my foot now) slowing down.

Anyway… my BFHG is about offering you lots of ways to be comfortable and  uncertain times and it’s about creating a place where we can hang out and support each other in never giving up on ourselves. A sort of comfort cafe. Virtual. With live events a few times a year.

But For Now, Back to Patterns

Patterns are something I’m always learning about (aren’t we all?) especially from my Writer’s Retreat guest Havi Brooks. In the shower today I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could write your own owner’s manual?”

How cool would it be to have a way to record your wisdom, and have it replayed to you just when you need it as in when you are about to repeat a pattern you always repeat? (Note to self: invent software for this).

Then I remembered: I had created a guide to writing your personal owner’s manual: the Life Organizer! (Got a lovely note yesterday from Rachael, “Last night I had trouble sleeping and came across your book The Life Organizer at just the right time to reconnect & recommit to trying it out. Then I came across the book’s website and now, your invitation to join you on Facebook. Thank you!”)

(Hi Rachael, hope the book helped!)

I started wondering: what Life Organizer ideas would be good to practice together?

I decided on insight, which I define in the book this way,

You’ve got the gray hairs to show for them, so why not find a way to benefit from your life insights? Remembering and applying them is perhaps one of the reasons you were put on the planet, and even if it isn’t, using these insights can save you from wasting time (years!), money, energy, and love. Yet most of us were never taught to track, record, and refer to what we learn in life, or to hone these insights as they change and grow with us.
Life insights are gifted to you through therapy, coaching, reading, studying, meditation, prayer, spiritual practices, and listening to something larger than yourself. They tend to become clear on retreats, during long walks or runs, while rowing or folding laundry, during conversations with perceptive friends and sometime enigmatic strangers, and when we are writing or creating art. Sometimes we spot them in our journal, on our canvases, and in our complaints. We learn them through living, and often in a painful way, especially the third or tenth or thirtieth time around.

Here’s a really simple way of saying what I want to do with Choose Your Life Mondays: what pattern do you choose to pay attention to this week?

We choose our lives through awareness.

We change our lives is by becoming aware of our patterns and then changing our habitual reactions when those patterns are triggered (well, that’s one way we change).

But we cannot change our reactions until we lovingly become aware of our patterns and we cannot lovingly become aware of anything until we are paying attention and one way of paying attention is to name in community what we will pay attention to.

Another is to chunk down what we are lovingly paying attention to one thing at a time.

So Choosing Your Life Monday is an invitation to name what pattern you will lovingly notice this week.

I’ll start – heck, I may the only one doing this although I really hope you will join me -

This week I will lovingly notice my pattern of jumping into action without asking myself what I want or what feels good.

I won’t try to change what I’m doing, I’ll simply notice.

Want to join me? Name your pattern in the comment section.

Then next week when you name another pattern or the same one, you can reflect on what you noticed this week. Or not!