Archive for month: January, 2017

Advance Healthcare Planning Part One: Not Just for Old People

There’s been a big push in recent years to educate the public about Advance Healthcare Planning (AHP). The focus has been primarily on the forms you need to fill out and why they are so important. But, there is so much more to it than filling out forms that is far more important and will be discussed in Part 2 of this article. For now, let’s focus on what Advance Healthcare Planning is and who needs it.

Advance Healthcare Planning is about providing clear and convincing evidence of your wishes in the event of a life or death health crisis when you are unable to speak on your own behalf. Here’s how AHP works. The legal requirements, forms, and recommendations for expressing your wishes are regulated by each state and vary from state to state. There are lots of great websites that will let you know what is required in your state. One of my favorites is http://www.caringinfo.org. It provides extremely clear information about AHP, what you need to know, and provides downloadable forms for each state. If you are someone who spends a significant amount of time in a second or third state, such as many “snowbirds” do,” be sure to fill out forms for both states and carry them with you when you travel. This is important because not all states have reciprocity with one another.

Generally speaking, there are two documents involved. The first is a Healthcare Proxy, which is a legal document in which you empower someone else to speak on your behalf regarding end-of-life healthcare. The second is a Living Will, which is not a legal instrument, but is intended for the purpose of giving specific information about what kinds of life sustaining treatments you do and do not want. Unfortunately, most of us have been presented with these documents as part of a package of forms that we are filling out with our attorney as part of our estate planning or we are asked to fill them out when being admitted to the hospital. As a result, we rarely understand their full implications and intricacies and fill them out in a rush.

Now, let’s look at who needs a healthcare proxy and a living will. The answer is simple – every adult who is mentally competent. I know, most people think you don’t need to worry about this stuff until you are old, but the reality is you don’t have to be old to die. Death and health tragedies happen every single day to healthy young people texting in cars, drinking and driving, on the football field, in domestic disputes, and innumerable other ways. For example, we have a new baby in our family who was just named after his mother’s brother who died at the age of 17 in a bizarre car accident.

Dealing with these realities is hard in a society that perpetuates a death taboo that makes us not want to think about, talk about, or deal with the realities of aging, dying, and death. However, educating ourselves about these normal parts of life and taking responsibility for ourselves by living with our affairs in order is a matter of personal responsibility. Plain and simple, there are two great reasons for tending to your advance healthcare planning. First, it is the only way to make sure that your voice is heard if and when a health crisis arises and you are unable to speak for yourself. Second, it avoids family trauma and squabbling over what should or shouldn’t be done for you in time of crisis. So, if you don’t yet have your advance healthcare plans in order, what possible good reason do you have? Please, please, please make this an urgent priority. And, please read Part 2 of this article, which will provide lots of the ins and outs and intricacies of how to really make sure your advance healthcare plans work for you.

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Inside the World of an Event Planner: Behind the Scenes at Tracy Taylor Ward Design

Image courtesy of Tracy Taylor Ward Design.

Where do you begin when you need to find a wedding or event planner? How do you figure out who to contact and what you need to find out about them? These are the questions that inspired me to interview and write about a number of event planners. The first is Tracy Taylor Ward of Tracy Taylor Ward Design, a smart and extremely well-organized professional who has quietly taken the event industry by storm.

When I met Tracy, she struck me as a stunning, gracious, enthusiastic woman with impeccable taste, who truly knows and loves what she is doing. A chat about her background helped me to understand why she is so well-suited for her work. It’s as though she was apprenticing for the job all her life and didn’t know it until a few years ago.

Check out this slide show of images of Tracy Taylor Ward Design.

 

The Back Story:

Tracy grew up in New York City where she developed a taste for fine food, fashion and music. Following in her father’s footsteps, as a child she discovered her passion for music and sang in television and radio commercials. She learned about interior design from her mother, Lauri Ward, the founder of Use What You Have Interiors, after graduating from Northwestern University. Upon returning to New York, Tracy worked on and off-camera as a decorator at her mother’s design firm after receiving her certification in interior decorating. She also became MTV’s dorm decorator, transforming college student housing on camera, as well as a host/decorator on HGTV’s hit series, FreeStyle.

The next building block that would eventually become Tracy Taylor Ward Design was meeting and falling in love with Matthew Carrigan, a graphic designer and illustrator, at an open mic night for singer-song-writers where they were both performing. When the couple became engaged in 2009, they decided to pool their talents and design their own wedding. It was during this time that Tracy discovered she loved researching and coordinating vendors, negotiating contracts and overseeing the entire wedding planning process.

At the same time, Tracy volunteered to facilitate planning for her best friend’s wedding in Miami so her friend could be with her mother who was hospitalized. A year later, in 2010, when both weddings took place, the pictures of the events were posted on social media sites and quickly spread. Emails and phone calls started pouring in with requests for Tracy to design weddings and within months Tracy Taylor Ward Design was launched.

Inside Tracy Taylor Ward Design:

Beneath her gracious demeanor, Tracy seems to be a very determined, proactive individual who accomplishes what she sets out to do. She takes tremendous satisfaction in making her clients happy by providing great value, both with her in-house services and industry connections. While the company is growing rapidly, Tracy is careful to limit the number of large events the firm contracts to ensure that she and her staff can provide unparalleled customer service. Although the company began as a wedding planning business, satisfied clients have brought Tracy and her team into producing a variety of other events as well. The business has grown predominantly by word of mouth. Typically, new clients have attended one of her events or have received her name from someone in their social circle. The firm’s clients are successful professionals with discriminating taste.

Based on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but producing events worldwide, Tracy Taylor Ward Design develops, coordinates and delivers full-service, full-spectrum design rather than outsourcing most aspects to various vendors. While Tracy handles all design consulting and planning with her team of coordinators, Matthew heads Paper With Benefits, the company’s graphic arts division, which helps clients create one-of-a-kind designs for their invitations, reception stationary and artwork. Tracy’s in-house production team handles all styling, flowers and décor, including customized furniture.

The company’s style would best be described as elegant, classic and chic. Tracy sees to it that each event is so personalized that guests leave feeling they know the couple better than they did before attending. Her clients are able to look back and feel they would make exactly the same choices, again.

One of the things I liked most about Tracy was that she is as focused on the quality of the planning process as she is on the event itself. Clients quickly learn they can trust her because she removes any uncertainty by keeping them well informed each step of the way. She saves her clients time, helps them to establish and stick to a realistic budget, and then secures the best value with each of their vendors. Above all else, she strives to make the process fun and relaxing for her clients; from the day they hire her until the event is over. Recent bride, Christy Ely, said:

I cannot tell you the number of people who told me that it was the most beautiful wedding they had ever attended and who called it ‘magical.’ It truly was everything and more than I had hoped it would be. I knew that the day would not be anything less than spectacular with Tracy’s hand guiding it, and that gave me the security to relax up until the very last minute!
There is no doubt that Tracy Taylor Ward means business and by consistently exceeding her clients’ expectations; it’s no wonder that her sought-after firm has quickly earned a stellar reputation.

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Can You Trust Yourself?

Trust is an interesting concept — and far more exciting as an action. Trusting yourself involves the willingness and confidence to rely on your own integrity, abilities, and character to meet the challenges of a particular experience, or all of life for that matter. For me, trust is not only a psychological factor, but has a spiritual component as well because God is very much a part of my worldview.

I believe that the ultimate gamble with the greatest potential gain in life is to trust yourself and that in so doing, you gain a level of freedom, authenticity, and peace that is unreachable any other way. Trust requires living in your own skin, recognizing your own authority as the very best arbiter of what is for you and what is not. We may have learned as children to trust and rely upon the authority of others to tell us what to do and when to do it. But there is a profound and authentic inner voice that lies dormant within us all until we start to listen to it and recognize its ability to express our deepest truth and to guide us with the most precise discernment of what will serve our highest good — whether we like it or not. Some call this their “inner” or “true” self, and some suggest this is the spark of the divine that resides in each of us. Either way, just as with physical exercise we are trained to strengthen our core muscles, we must strengthen this core self as well by exercising its voice. That’s how we learn to trust ourselves. Otherwise, we remain at the effect of external sources of authority and simply react to them, usually with the intention of getting their approval or affecting their perception of us in some way.

In my second doctoral dissertation, I focused on the topic of trust because I had become profoundly aware of the fact that whenever I felt out of balance, the bottom line was that I wasn’t trusting myself. As I explored the internal wiring of my consciousness, I discovered something remarkable — my lack of self-trust was so fundamental to my way of being that I was living my life built upon the intention of avoiding pain and suffering. I knew that it was fairly normal to minimize our distress, but my behavior was an all-encompassing way of being whereby I sought to anticipate and avoid perceived sources of suffering.

There was an ironic and fundamental flaw in my approach. In my effort to achieve greater happiness by avoiding pain and suffering, I was actually attracting them to me by focusing upon them rather than on the happiness I sought. I was equating happiness with an absence of pain. In fact, our minds act like great magnets attracting to us what we focus upon, which in turn makes our intentions and focal points self-fulfilling prophecies.

Inherent in my approach was the fact that I neither trusted myself nor God, and so I played God by attempting to write the script of my life. I recognized this as the most pivotal shift I needed to make in my consciousness to improve my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being, and I wanted the joy, ease, grace, and abundance that it would bring forth in my life.

So, what about you?

Do you trust yourself?

Do you tend to live at the effect of people and events outside yourself?

Or, alternatively, do you experience yourself as capable of living your life with all its unanticipated twists and turns?

Here are three keys that really helped me make this wonderful transformation of my inner experience. First, I practiced keeping my consciousness focused in the present moment until that became a good habit. This replaced my previous habit of worrying so much about the future. It empowered me to take appropriate action in the only time frame that affords us that opportunity — the present.

Secondly, I observed myself and developed a list of my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual experiences and expressions during the presence or absence of trust in my consciousness. Creating this list helped me to recognize what it looks like and feels like to be trusting — to put flesh on the bones of the concept of trust. For example, I noticed that when I was experiencing trust, I was physically relaxed, comfortable, open, with fluid and graceful movements. In contrast, when lacking trust, I became rigid, tense, stressed, and pushed others away. Mentally, I was not feeling attached to my point of view, worrying, judging others, or avoiding anything. Instead, I was paying attention to what was present and cooperating with it. Emotionally, trust allowed me to go with the flow, confident that I could meet whatever came my way. This was an enormous contrast to my previous experience of anger, fear, agitation, resistance to whatever I did not like, and doubting my ability to be happy in life. Spiritually, trust brought an attunement to the highest good of all concerned and the desire to surrender to “God’s way” rather than demanding “my way.” Rather than playing God, I learned to recognize God’s wisdom and presence in my life.

Finally, I practiced, practiced, and practiced doing more of the things that brought greater trust, and breaking the habit of doing those that did not. I came to believe that there is nothing “wrong” that I have to try to fix. I discovered that trusting is about letting go of “should”s, “have to”s, demands, expectations, fears, illusions, and delusions. The more I surrendered into trust, the more it became my automatic response. Rather than closing down and retreating in response to pain and suffering, I built skills in experiencing them and learning from them. This built my openness and trust that God’s infinite wisdom is present at all times — not just in the experiences that I like.

What lessons have you learned about trusting yourself that you could share here with others?

Please feel free to leave a comment below or to email me at judithjohnson@hvc.rr.com.

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Are You Strategically Living Your Life?

Strategic planning is typically thought of in terms of how large businesses and nations design a plan of action to accomplish their specific goals — but it is a fabulous tool for individuals as well. If you find yourself disappointed by your life, consider taking a look at how strategically you are living it.

Some people worry that being strategic is about being manipulative. Certainly there is a fine balance between passivity and trying to live life according to the “my way or the highway” approach to influencing the course of events. I think of being strategic as actively engaging in shaping and directing your life. It is about being thoughtful, careful, and purposeful — the antithesis of simply drifting along being caught up in whatever situations and circumstances you happen to bump into in the course of your life. Strategic living means being smart enough to embrace the opportunity of playing an active role in determining what you are creating, promoting and allowing in your life.

If you were investing in a business, wouldn’t you want to know that it was being run by individuals who were well versed regarding the opportunities and challenges they faced? Wouldn’t you want them to use their resources (people, money and time) in such a way that they maximized the company’s short- and long-term return on investment? Most likely, it would be important to you that these returns be measured not just in terms of money, but relative to such other factors as alignment with the company’s mission, and their commitment to such values as integrity, social consciousness and the quality of their relationships with employees and other stakeholders.

Now, let’s apply this thinking to how you assess your own life choices. Being strategic is about getting off autopilot behavior and being thoughtful about the choices you make in your life. It means living within the context of having a good understanding of who you are, what matters to you, and what resources and options you have available.

As a life coach, I work with this perspective as a means of increasing my clients’ self-awareness, wellbeing, enjoyment and creative self-empowerment. Making thoughtful and strategic choices about how you live your life can have an enormous impact on your level of satisfaction and enjoyment.

There are three fundamental, ongoing, and interrelated activities involved in strategically living your life. They are: creating a plan, keeping track of results and altering your course based on those results and the unanticipated surprises life brings your way. A good strategist needs a great sense of humor and an appreciation for the power of the unknown because no matter how thoughtful and thorough your planning techniques, life will throw you curve balls. It’s humbling, but the alternative of having no plan means being at the effect of your life rather than being an active participant and driving force.

Our lives tend to be very complex and to include conflicting priorities and demands on our time. A seasoned life strategist is like a juggler trying to simultaneously stay on course with specific plans for each major aspect of his or her life. For example, you might have plans for your spiritual life, family, career, finances, etc. For a novice planner, I suggest picking the one area of your life where you are experiencing the greatest challenges and starting there. As you stabilize one area of your life, develop a plan for another aspect and learn to develop skill in making the tradeoffs that are necessary between the various aspects of your life.

Whether strategically planning for your entire life or just one area, here are some suggestions:

When developing your plan:

    • Begin by identifying what you value most that is essential to your success and happiness.
    • Take stock of your resources.
    • Set one to three measurable goals that are in alignment with your values and realistic in terms of your resources. For example, “I want to lose five pounds by November 1, 2013” rather than “I want to lose weight.”
    • For each goal, develop a plan of action — what specifically needs to be done, when, where, and by whom to achieve success?
    • Consider who else will be affected by you pursuing your plan and enlist their support.
    • Always remember that reality will never match your plans — be a good sport and expect unanticipated occurrences.

When keeping track of results:

    • Set up some consistent method of keeping track of how well you are doing as you move forward in time. How will you know if you are on course or not to achieve your desired result?
    • Create a visual measurement tool. For example, if you are working to lose weight, you might record your weight every morning.
    • Be honest with yourself, pay attention to results, and respond and adapt accordingly.

When altering your course:

    • Use your feedback as feed forward. You will never know ahead of time what is going to happen. Don’t give up because life is different or harder than you expected. Just alter your expectations and plans as needed and expect that to be part of the process. After all, it’s not so much about reaching the finish line as it is a matter of developing your skills and abilities and doing your best.

Ultimately, strategic living is an organic process of fully engaging in your own life. So dream, imagine and plan for your heart’s desire to manifest in your life. Our dreams are much more fun when we actually bring them to life.

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Obesity, Addiction, and Repression – Part 2

Part 1 of this article http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judith-johnson/addiction-recovery_b_1929196.html addressed the dynamics of excess body weight being a side effect of addiction whereby food is used to repress and numb unbearable (often unconscious) emotional content.  In other words, in order to really understand the dynamics of weight gain and loss, we need to shift our focus away from obesity as the result of the simple physiological equation of calories in and calories out.  Instead, we need to consider that the real problem is the emotional weight that put the physical pounds on in the first place.  In order to maintain a physical weight loss, we have to lose the corresponding emotional weight as well.

 

Part 2 now speaks to emotional weight loss.  There are all kinds of physiological theories about why the vast majority of people who lose weight regain the lost pounds and then some.  My own experience on this journey has given me a different answer.  As mentioned in Part 1, I engaged in deep inner work using NET (Neuro-Emotional technique) http://www.netmindbody.com/for-patients/an-explanation-of-net for two and a half years before being ready to begin my physical weight loss. Since writing Part 1 of this article, I went on to cooperate with ease and grace through the process of losing a total of 126 of the 144 pounds I wanted to lose.  Then I hit a wall and suddenly began to revisit my addictive behavior of acting out with chocolate and becoming less rigorous with my weight loss program for a period of five months. I regained about 20 pounds. The good news is I am not horrified!  I know this is not simply a matter of me lacking discipline and being helpless and hopeless.  I don’t believe that it is just a matter of time before I regain all 126 pounds and then some.  Instead I have a new perspective that has to do with the correlation between my physical and emotional weight loss.

 

Throughout my weight loss, I continued to work with an NET practitioner.  Then, some events in my current life triggered yet another pile of deeply repressed emotional issues coming up for release.  I think my addictive acting out was an act of self-protection whereby I was trying to keep these emotions at bay as I had in the past – that was my go-to method of self-protection.  Much like pulling up a blanket when cold, I had lost 126 pounds of physical weight, but only 106 pounds of emotional weight and felt the need to pull back on those 20 pounds to protect myself while catching up with my emotional weight loss.  I simply wasn’t ready to maintain the smaller physical body yet let alone to lose the additional 18 pounds that would have brought me to my target weight.  It freaked me out at first until I recognized that my “acting out with chocolate” was happening for a very good reason.  This was simply a red flag letting me know that my physical weight loss was getting ahead of my emotional weight loss and I had more inner work to do before I could continue to lose more pounds.

 

I no longer see this as gaining or losing weight or the battle that typically represents.  Rather, I am inhabiting my life’s journey with greater conscious understanding and compassion.  I see now that when I entered into addictive eating again (which had been gone for a year and a half), that was an act of self-protection in relationship to emotional content I had not yet released that was being triggered by events in my current life.  Seen in that context, it’s far less scary and far more manageable.  The answer was NOT to stop eating the chocolate, but to figure out what emotional experience I was attempting to protect myself from.  The good news is I am finding my answers and beginning to drop weight again.  I have come to realize more deeply than ever before that this entire process is FOR me – even the regaining of lost weight.

 

I strongly suspect that I am not the only one challenged with body weight issues for whom this is true and perhaps this is a key to all addictive behaviors.  We seem to focus too much on stopping the out of control behavior and not enough on what throws us into these coping mechanisms and why.

 

I think it is interesting to note that we live in a society that doesn’t even have lingo for emotional health.  We speak of physical and mental health, but not of emotional health.  We are highly complex creatures with conscious and unconscious physical, mental, and emotional dynamics all intertwined.  Unraveling the knots takes courage, willingness, time, patience, wisdom, and in many cases – competent help.

 

Here are some of the specific things I have learned on this journey of releasing my excess physical and emotional weight:

  • Sometimes the experiences and emotions that were repressed from childhood look very minor through our adult eyes, but at the time may have been overwhelming to us, and so we buried them and have avoided them ever since.
  • Rather than freaking out at a backslide, it helps to explore its origins with self compassion and the assumption that it is simply feedback that you have some more inner work to do to prepare yourself to be able to sustain further physical weight loss.
  • Long-term weight loss is a balancing act of physical, mental, and emotional dynamics.
  • Don’t give up because of a backslide or if the rate of your weight loss isn’t keeping up with your desired timetable.   Stay present in the reality you are experiencing and work with that reality rather than trying to change reality.

 

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When Your Wedding Doesn’t Go As Planned

Photo Credit: Ullysses Photography

If you are like most brides, you might be micro-managing your wedding to avoid unwanted surprises. But, guess what? Your wedding day WILL NOT go 100% according to your plans. There are a thousand tiny details and what actually happens will be an amalgamation of the input of many vendors, guests, the weather, and your best laid plans.

While you might not be able to control the weather or Uncle Charlie’s drinking problem, you do get to choose how to react to whatever the day presents to you. So, lighten up and have a beautiful day no matter what happens.

Here are some suggestions for how to have a great time on your wedding day:

Expect the Unexpected: Remind yourself that there will definitely be some surprises and you might not like them all. Decide ahead of time not to let anyone rain on your parade. This is YOUR day – choose to make the very best of it.

Bring Your Sense of Humor Along: The picture above is from a recent wedding. As I handed the bride’s wedding ring to the groom, he dropped it. He immediately put a big smile on his face, raised his hand and announced “I got this!” and everyone had a good laugh. It became a memorable moment with a great photo to remember it by.

Leave Bridezilla Home: Some brides have turned themselves into the dreaded bridezilla. They foolishly think that by demanding their way they are more likely to get it. But, guess what? The more typical response of any vendor dealing with a bridezilla is to give her less rather than more and to not be so willing to go above and beyond the call of duty. Besides, remember that your wedding pictures will tell the truth about how you look!

Keep Your Priorities Straight: If the shade of pink of the table linens is slightly off, you’ll probably be the only one who notices. If you are a tyrant micro-managing your wedding in progress, or out of sorts because something happened that you didn’t like, then everyone will notice.

Enjoy Your Day From the Inside Out: Your wedding is a celebration of the fact that you and your partner have found each other and want to spend the rest of your lives together. Own that and let it reverberate throughout every cell of your being. Let your partner feel your love. Let your joy radiate and be contagious to everyone who gets to share your special day with you. A radiant bride never takes a bad picture!

Remember to Say Thank You: Be lavish with your gratitude when it is earned. Most vendors really want to make a significant contribution to your having a wonderful wedding. Remember how important on-line reviews and referrals were to you? Take the opportunity to give credit where it is due and to warn future couples of what to look out for with vendors who did not serve you well. You can have the last word without spoiling your day.

Do plan thoughtfully to create the wedding of your dreams and then remember to let go and let it happen. Be the guest of honor and have a wonderful day no matter what happens.

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Obesity, Repression, and Addiction – Part One

For many of us who struggle with excess body weight, “success” in losing weight is soon followed by regaining those pounds and then some.  Just now, at the age of 64, I am recognizing why this has been happening to me and perhaps to many others.  I have long suspected that the answer that would break me free of this yo-yo pattern is psychological rather than a matter of finding the right diet.  We are told that fat serves as a protection.  I found that it was not the fat that I was using to protect myself, but rather my food addictions were my method of protection.  Obesity was a byproduct.

Since self-judgment only adds fuel to the fire, I choose to view this issue with curiosity and without judgment.  To support myself in figuring out what I was doing to sabotage my ability to maintain a healthy weight, I have worked for 2 ½ years with a practitioner of NET (Neuro-Emotional Technique).  According to www.net.com, “NET is a mind-body technique that uses a methodology of finding and removing neurological imbalances related to the physiology of unresolved stress.”  For me, NET offers an amazing way to bypass conscious and unconscious defense mechanisms to get at the originating cause of an issue that is currently manifesting in my body and my life.

I began working with NET for the sole purpose of finding out why I had been unable to remove and keep off my excess body weight.  Essentially what I found was that the repression of emotions is a survival mechanism held in place through addiction.  In my case, since my addiction of unconscious choice was food, the byproduct of this pattern was obesity.

Here’s how it worked for me – from my infancy until my father’s death, the psychological message I consistently received from him and internalized was that I was somehow fundamentally unacceptable.  This same message came from one of my siblings as well and continues to this day.  As an adult, I have done everything possible to heal these relationships but whenever coming face to face with this rejection, and the absence of love from them it hurt at the core of my being.  While I am able to cope with the occasional, yet always unpleasant, encounter as an adult, as a child they were a devastating and constant barrage.  As a matter of survival, I repressed my feelings and fears about being deemed essentially unworthy, unlovable, and unacceptable.  Over time, I accumulated an enormous reserve of repressed, unmanageable emotions.  No matter how I worked on myself as an adult and how well I learned to cope with current encounters, I never recognized or acknowledged the emotional pain and stress I had been unable to endure as a child nor the fact that I was carrying this trauma around with me like a beach ball held under water.  Apparently, not being aware of this nor feeling safe to feel what had been emotionally life-threatening to me as a child, I unconsciously held it below the surface.  What I have come to realize is that I accomplished this in two important ways through my addictions.  First, they were my way of numbing the pain and keeping it on an unconscious level until I was ready to deal with opening Pandora’s box.  No wonder I would regain the weight whenever I lost it – I had been depriving myself of my addictions which were my protection – my repression mechanism!  Secondly, I had been embodying the message of my unworthiness through obesity – perhaps the most shameful and socially visible of all unacceptable, albeit taboo, ways of being.  Other addictions you can hide, while obesity is in your face.

So, here’s an irony to this – if my sibling had not continued to treat me with such distain, I might never have put this pattern together and found my path to freedom.  So, thank you to all those who have pushed this button to get me to this point of liberation!

You might wonder, how do I know I have broken free of this pattern?  The answer is simple.  First, for three months now, I have not experienced any food compulsions.  I have been to a wedding reception attended by my sibling and on vacation for a week recently and neither one triggered the usual desires or excuses for “treating myself.”  Secondly, I am steadily and easily losing weight without the fear of regaining it.  For the first time, I am confident that I will be able to sustain a healthy weight.  Third, I am going through an emotional release very similar to grieving where weeping simply rises to the surface and spills out of me seemingly unprovoked.  The tension and stress of holding down this childhood trauma is finding expression and finally being replaced by a profound sense of inner peace.

If you can relate to my story and suspect that something similar might be going on inside of you with whatever your addiction(s) of choice might be, here are some suggestions:

-Set the intention of compassionately understanding and freeing yourself.

-Make time for introspection to explore your own situation and to get below your storyline.  Be a non-judgmental, curious detective and ask yourself questions like: “What awful truth do I suspect is true about me?” and “How did I get the idea that that was true about me?”  “How did I cope with this as a child?”

-Believe and affirm to yourself that it is possible for you to be free from your addictions.  Don’t tell yourself that you are an addictive personality, or that you are too far gone but rather be open to the idea that your addictions have been serving and protecting you in some way until you can get to the place where you don’t need them anymore.  See them as a survival mechanism rather than as your downfall.

-Find someone wonderful to facilitate and bear witness to your journey.  This might be a personal coach, therapist, NET practitioner, etc.  Just be sure it is someone you feel emotionally safe with and whose skill impresses you.

-Be patient.  This may take longer than you would like, but know that it is possible.  On the way, avoid judging yourself and the ongoing expression of your addictions.  The healing process can often be invisible at times, but trust that it is happening.

When we are children, we don’t have the psychological resources to protect ourselves from the atrocities that others may inflict upon us.  This trauma is often stored somehow in our bodies.  Repression and other defense mechanisms help us to survive until we can hold our own in the world.  However, the damage done to us while children must itself be healed and released in addition to understanding and freeing ourselves from the related difficulties experienced in adulthood.

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7 Tender and Magnificent Lessons That Death Can Teach Us

Judith with her Mother

This is a picture of my mother, Grace Mundy, six months before her death in 2006. We shared a home during the final nine years of her life. Being her friend and caregiver through to her death was a walk through the valley of the shadow of death. It taught me the following life and death lessons that I will always treasure.

1. It’s okay to be afraid. It is perfectly normal to have fear about your own death or that of a loved one. Every fiber of our being has been acculturated to survival and to fear of the unfamiliar. So, don’t deny your fear — you can’t move past it until you own it and realize that it is just one of several possibilities of how to view the situation. Fear can either stop us in our tracks or be used as a steppingstone to learning and growing and strengthening ourselves. The choice is ours to make.

2. Let nothing be more important than loving each other. When all is said and done in our lives, most of us find that our greatest treasures were tender and heartfelt moments shared with others. So remember that as you journey through your life. Next time someone you care about is feeling blue, receives a terminal diagnosis, or is simply getting really old, make time to share your heart with them. Override the inclination to buy into your own excuses about how you don’t have the time or energy or don’t know what to say or do or it simply isn’t convenient to show up for them.

When my mother was dying, there was one person she kept asking to see because there was unfinished business between them. Four times she asked — one when in intensive care with a 50/50 chance of making it through the night. Each time I called this person and shared my mother’s request, she showed up four days later with an entourage that minimized the opportunity for them to have one-on-one time together. The resolution never occurred between them, but my mother made peace with the situation in her own heart before she died. Ego positions prevent the flow of love between people.

3. Everyone who is dying needs an advocate who loves them. When someone is critically ill or simply frail, they need their own energy just to cope and to heal if that is an option. There may be all kinds of specialists being called in to consult on the case and all too often the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Someone needs to keep track and connect the dots.

In my mother’s case, for example, she kept getting infections commonly spread in hospitals. Each infection brought on yet another antibiotic with another set of side effects that would make her susceptible to yet another opportunistic infection and another antibiotic would be prescribed and so on. I used to spend seven to ten hours a day with her when she was hospitalized just to keep track of all the things they were doing to her and I was busy all the time. It wasn’t until after it was all over that I realized I should have kept a notebook handy and that the specialists were myopically focused on treating her symptoms.

4. Death is not a popular topic among doctors. The medical model for terminal disease and death is a work in progress. Many doctors, having taken an oath to preserve life, perceive a patient’s death or the need to surrender them to palliative care as a personal failure. So expect most doctors to do everything they can think of to keep your loved one going and don’t expect them to broach the subjects of palliative care or death.
Between hospitalizations, my mother paid a lot of visits to the ER and it was there that one brave doctor finally took me aside and told me that there was really nothing further medically that could be done for her and suggested that we consider hospice care. I burst into tears, he held me, and comforted me until I was over the shock of hearing what no one wants to hear — that your loved one is, indeed, going down a slippery slope toward death. I will always be grateful to him for telling me the truth so we could adjust our plans accordingly.

5. No matter how anyone else’s behavior looks to us, they are doing the best that they can. I’ve adopted a favorite expression that we are all doing the best we can and this is what it looks like. Each of us is a complex assortment of skills, abilities, fears, traits and preferences. Compassion comes forward when we realize that how we think another “should” behave is of no significance, for indeed, if we walked in their shoes, we would likely behave no differently than they do. Particularly in stressful times, compassion for one another goes a very long way.

6. When someone you love is dying, it is their dying not yours. No matter how smart you are or how certain that your own ideas of what should or should not be done are the “right” way, your job is not to lead the way but rather to follow the lead of the one who is dying. Let them die their way, not yours. If they want to be alone, let them. If they don’t want to eat, let them. If they want to change their will, let them. If they want to talk about dying, let them. Your job is to support them not to direct them.

7. Don’t leave yourself with any regrets. Whether you are the person dying or the one loving and supporting the dying to their death, your job is simply to do your best to be true to yourself without hurting others. Pay attention inwardly and be bold about honoring yourself. If there is unfinished business, let the one who is dying decide whether or not to tend to it. Don’t forget to practice forgiveness and to lavishly let those you love hear you tell them so or to experience that love through your actions.

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Don’t Be Afraid to Touch Death

Beautiful purple rose in a cemetery

The centerpiece of the American culture of death is a taboo that inhibits our ability to encounter the territory of dying, death, and bereavement with wisdom, competency, and discernment. We are acculturated to fear and resist death. However, this inhibition also deprives us of some of the greatest intimacy, tenderness, and depth of connection available in the human experience.

Our culture sanitizes dying and death, not only by diverting our attention to the technological medical gymnastics that just might avert death’s approach, but by juxtaposing death to life as though one is inherently bad and the other intrinsically good. We live in a polarity consciousness of good versus bad, right versus wrong, rather than both/and. While there is a place for optimism, there is also a place for reality where death is concerned.

All too often we flee into the illusionary safety of denial rather than accepting that we, or one we love, is dying. Under the influence of the death taboo, we are far more likely to enter the room of a dying loved one with a cheerful “your color looks good today, honey” than to express our unbridled truth of “I think you are dying and I’m scared and don’t want to lose you.”

We assume the truth would be too unbearable. Under the guise of protecting one another (or perhaps ourselves) we silently comply with the overriding belief that it is better not to give voice to death. However, when we don’t tell the truth to each other about death’s presence, we buy into a kind of dishonesty that contaminates our relationship and fosters a gulf of separation and isolation even between the most loving partners.
Why underestimate each other? What if the other person doesn’t want to be protected?  What if our statements of false hope, intended to protect the other person from our truth, instead tell them that we can’t handle the truth? What if that prevents them from fulfilling their need to draw closer, in deference to our apparent inability to cope? What if buying into our fear is depriving us of a depth of loving we have never known before?  What if this is our last chance to bridge a gap between us, to make room for greater honesty and intimacy?  What if this is our last chance for forgiveness or learning about truths previously withheld that will die with our loved one?  What if a brave step into the vulnerable land of honesty in the face of death would open the door to unimaginable treasures? How sad to live in a lie at the end of one’s life. How sad to risk regrets, not realizing the blessings that come with the alternative – a depth of intimacy that we may never have experienced before and that will never be available again.

Being vulnerable at these times and willing to go where we have never been before allows us to be of service to one another in handling unfinished business such as saying goodbyes, extending or asking for forgiveness, letting go of secrets, asking for answers, expressing our love, putting our affairs in order, and tending to whatever we feel the need to attend to before death comes. I remember how my mother and I consciously embraced her dying process by giving each other the freedom to express whatever was present for us. We drew our hearts together rather than letting a wall of withholding come between us. We had profound conversations about the meaning of life and death and our respective beliefs about God. She filled in the blanks about pieces of her history that never quite made sense to me. She told me what mattered to her most and whom she wanted to see. I got to know dimensions of her that I never noticed before. We dropped all masks and pretenses and shared an intimacy we had never broached before in those final months. I am so bountiful with her love and was left with no regrets.

Sadly, if the approach of death is not acknowledged then the dying and his or her loved ones are denied access to the very resources, such as Hospice care, that can provide maximum physical and emotional comfort. Hospice and palliative care workers are skilled in supporting and mentoring us through to the end of life, showing us the path to the very wisdom, competency, and discernment that our death taboo stifles in us. Ironically, there are blessings at death’s door that are only available to those who accept death’s presence. So, don’t be afraid to touch death – enter this territory with your heart wide open and partake of the full range of its sweetness and its sorrow, its wisdom and its blessings.

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Do challenges devastate you or define you?

As a life coach, I spend a lot of time helping clients to pay close attention to their autopilot reaction to challenges in their lives. What you consider to be challenges and how you respond to them are defining factors in the quality of your life.

Next time your sense of well-being is disturbed, try the following 5-step process and see if it leads you in a better direction. Don’t be surprised if you get stuck on the first step. This is profound work and doesn’t happen overnight. The key is to keep practicing with deep personal honesty until this response comes naturally to you.

1. Attitude: Your attitude will pre-determine your ability to work with and learn from life’s challenges each and every time they show up. If you tend to think of them as ‘wrong’ and as ‘things that shouldn’t happen’ then you will automatically be thrown into a defensive and confrontational posture. On the other hand, if you receive them as simply calling you or the situation into question, a more relaxed, self-trusting, and open response is possible. If the same pattern happens again and again, rather than going into high drama defensive victim mode with such thoughts as ‘here we go again,’ ‘this always happens to me,’ ‘everyone else . . . ’ or ‘what’s wrong with me?’ try another point of view. Rather than suffering through the challenges that come your way, consider embracing your life as a perfectly customized journey of learning, growing and healing. Give yourself permission to be vulnerable and to explore your own behavior without trying to justify it as ‘right.’

2. Feel It, Name It, and Rename It: Once you have opened up your attitude and are ready to learn from your experience, take a few deep breaths and focus inward to what it feels like inside of you meeting this unexpected and perhaps undesired experience. Are you scared? Mad? In shock? Be really honest with yourself and name your feelings and name the challenge. For example, I am working through a challenge with my downstairs neighbor. She complains about things like the fact that she can hear my cats running down the hall. This triggers anger in me and I tend to fly into judgment of her as a small-minded person with a princess complex. My mind reels with anger at her choice to make an issue of everything and anything I do that she doesn’t like, rather than choosing to acknowledge all the things that are good about having me for a neighbor and/or choosing to contribute to creating a harmonious shared living environment.

When I look below the surface I see that this trigger relates to a much deeper issue I am working on that has to do with feeling profound sadness when I encounter all the big and little ways that we choose less than the goodness, kindness, and caring that is available to us in our relationships with one another. When I see any presenting irritation in that context, I am better able to respond in a way that encourages my own learning and growth rather than falling into the same old pattern of judgment and self-preservation. When I redefine the true issue at hand in this way, I take ownership of it by recognizing the difference between the deeper issue and the outer trigger of the situation at hand. By renaming the true issue, I can respond more appropriately.

3. Neutral Observation: Neutrality means not belonging to or favoring either side in a challenge. It is the opposite of analyzing and judging the behavior of others as a way to feel righteous or good about yourself. Neutral observation occurs when we choose to activate that part of ourselves that is not IN the situation involved, but rather is able to move around it and look at it and ourselves from many points of view, free of our triggered feelings and thoughts. This is how we gain insight instead of just running the same old reactions from our past. When we are open to a new point of view rather than automatically making the situation, other person, or ourselves ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ our imagination and deeper insights can lead to entirely new and more rewarding ways of seeing what is really going on.

4. Inner Work: Always do your inner work as described in steps 1-3 above before deciding how to respond to the outer situation. Think of the outer situation as merely the hook or trigger that is calling you to finding greater inner freedom. When you have done your inner work, rename the challenge as your own personal learning opportunity as in the example in #2 above. Trust that what comes your way in life is FOR YOU not against you.

5. Outer Work: Having stepped free of your autopilot, knee-jerk reaction to a given challenge by doing your inner work, it becomes fairly easy to choose how you want to respond to or engage in the situation at hand. As tempting as it is, for example, for me to say something judgmental and unkind to my neighbor like ‘get a life,’ or ‘you better be careful or your mind is going to get so small that you’ll lose it altogether,” I have learned that it serves me far better to say something like, ‘yes, isn’t it a happy sound when my cats run down the hall,’ or to quietly say a prayer for the highest good in the situation and to go do my own inner work.

I know these steps seem simple when you read them. I’ve heard many a client dismiss or become irritated by my guidance towards one of these steps, defensively thinking they already know this. But, the name of the game here is not intellectual knowledge, but application. It is in the doing that we learn. Practice, practice, practice and then challenge yourself to take this process deeper and deeper until you really get free.

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