Lifestyles

I have this philosophy about shoes. Shoes are a choice. I have been observing peoples' shoe choice for most of my life. Our shoe choice reveals a lot about our personality....even if we wear shoes someone else chose for us. That can reveal something too.

All the shoes in this sketch are from different parts of my life. They all hold strong memories.

I notice that I attract friends who wear either very unusual...or else earth-toned shoes. The trend in the area I live in has been white running shoes for the last 20 years. I'm a closet white running shoe wearer, only wearing them when I work out. The dirt attraction factor keeps me from wearing them out in the world. (Yowza! What message does that reveal?)

I have watched my shoe style choices change drastically along with my careers and phases of life. It's quite fascinating to spend some time observing the shoes we all choose to wear. How interesting when you date or meet someone for the first time to see if their shoes tell you things that their words may or may not. Or if you're at a lecture...what are the lecturer's shoes telling you? 

I hope you try out this shoe-cological shoe-losophy and see what it tells you.

 What types of shoes do the people in your life wear? What kind of shoes do you choose to wear?

Choosing a More Exciting Perspective

As an artist and a coach I enjoy seeing life from different perspectives. It keeps things fresh in all we do. I didn't realize the Sears Tower had been sold and renamed the Willis Tower. I also didn't know that you can go up to the top of the Willis Tower and there are several glass rooms where you can experience viewing gorgeous Chicago. You can't help, but get a tug in your stomach walking in these glass rooms. I've heard people say these rooms are dangerous, as nobody knows for sure if the glass will be effected by weather one day and one day a visitor may get a scary surprise. My scary surprise was when the parking garage bill was twice the Tower viewing fee...but still, viewing life from a glass room was an experience of a lifetime that I'm glad I can share with you in a photo. Lesson: Life can be exhilirating when you choose to view it from a crazy, new perspective.

Nature Makes its Statement

Too early one morning, I woke up with a startled and

strange feeling of dread! Because I just had a webinar the night before with Rick Jarow about paying attention to how emotion expresses in our body feelings, I noticed my usual body expression of fear goes from the stomach down. This body feeling was from the stomach to my upper body. More of a fear of outside influence. Not understanding this feeling of fear, I decided to get out of bed and do something kind of mundane to try and fall asleep. While I sorted a chaotic mess of seed beads by color, I heard a loud bump outside the house. I looked out the window and there was this bear rummaging around, clawing at rocks searching for something. I'm not the most knowledgable about what to do when crossing paths with bears, but I knew I wasn't going to shoot him with anything but a camera. It also took much more courage to mow the lawn or even walk to the car after that.
Life is always full of unexpected surprises. That seems to be the message of the month for me. We make plans and have this picture in our mind's eye what the outcome of our plans will look like, then life comes along and adds its brush strokes to the picture. Another message from this....sometimes things look so cuddly...but get too close and watch out!

A Comedic Truth

 Anyone who has been to a therapist can relate to this MAD TV skit that still sticks in my memory from a few years ago.
 A big phrase repeated in one coaching school I attended was, "Don't be stuck in your story."  I don't exactly coach with that philosophy of making story wrong. Story is important. It's the "stuck" part of that sentence that I would focus on more.
It's hard to keep intellectualizing and trying to figure out why things happened to us....or how we can heal a past wound. Sometimes we can intellectualize a situation so often that we begin to feel like we're in a Woody Allen movie .
Wouldn't it be nice if we could just detach and "stop it?" Wouldn't it be nice if therapy cost $5 and lasted 5 minutes? That skit was ahead of its time.
It's those little things called feelings that make letting go difficult....especially when a current situation pours salt on a past wound.
So far, with a lifetime of experimenting with how to "stop it," I find Eckhart Tolle's philosophy of living in the now to come the closest to detaching, letting go and keeping on the path. But, as the skit says between the lines...it's simple, but not always easy.

Taking a huge risk

On a recent trip to NYC, while peering out my hotel window, my heart lept into my throat! I saw this man washing windows with no protective safety gear! I just had to capture that Kodak Moment. I thought, "Is he fearless, confident, or ignorant?"


This sure is a perfect metphor for how we can feel when we face change or start a new venture. And don't we have that same feeling in the back of our mind when we are brand new at something? "Can I be fearless doing this foreign new action? Can I trust it will succeed? Or am I just being ignorant?"

I see that this window washer felt very used to standing out on a ledge. So maybe facing change is just about getting used to doing that uncomfortable or scary thing with lots of practice. I know he is very focused on his task at hand and nothing else. There's a lot to be said for keeping our eyes on the prize no matter what potential dangers lurk below.

Action

Do you think Danny MacAskill intellectualizes reasons for not getting in action about what he loves to do? Does he give up after falling down, feeling pain or having to hammer his bike back into riding shape? He just keeps on going, trying new things....seeing potential in the environment around him. Setbacks are only temporary when you love what you're doing enough to keep going.
I love, in this clip, how people come running after Danny to see if he made it through certain feats. He shows us all to keep on riding it out...no matter what you come up against. This is one video clip I watch over and over on those days I find a million excuses not to work on my dreams.  I hope it does the same for you.

Creating Our Future

Long ago, I was given the gift of a phone appointment with a psychic. During that call she said to me, "Look at the palms of your hands. Are there lots of "x's" in them?" I had never noticed it before, but there are lots of "x's" in my palm. She told me that "x's" in our palms are a sign of creativity and I should honor that gift because creativity is one of the highest powers in the universe.

I believe everyone is creative. Just the way we get out of bed in the morning is our own creative ritual. "X's" in our palms are not a requirement to create. Not every Sneetch has a star on their stomach, but they're still a Sneetch!

The creativity of people, animals or nature (ever see a plant grow around some obstruction?) have always sparked a flame in me to go to my studio and create.

A few years ago, an instructor told our teleclass that animals aren't creative. I was so upset with that judgment! Apparently, this instructor never credited when a cat turns a box or a drawer or some tight space into the perfect place to squeeze itself in like a puzzle piece to take a nap! Animals are creative visionaries too. To me, creativity is observing one thing and giving it a different meaning. It's about shifting how things are perceived or done. It's about choice and going beyond limitation.

Kudos to the designer in this video clip who looked at stoves and found new meaning to the way we could be using them! Imagine not having pots and pans to clean any longer!!!! More time to create!!!!

Is there an item or belief...that if you play around with its meaning...it could change the way you perceive or do things forever?