Happy Halloween!

This is the coolest squirrel ever LOL

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10 Things You Should Never Apologize For

That's right, check out the original post here.

By Andrea Speir

Sometimes it's good to apologize, but sometimes it's not...Here are ten things you should never apologize for:

1. Laughing from your core.

It seems to me that somehow, through life and social upbringing, we are taught not to laugh loud and hard like we did as kids. I have to say, how great does it feel when someone catches you off guard with something truly hilarious and you release that loud, from the gut laugh. It is such a rush of adrenaline to release such a raw, powerful and joyful emotion. Life is too short to be scared to laugh.

2. Loving someone with everything you’ve got.

The very first time you had a crush on someone, and they didn’t like you back, you got stung. They didn’t ask you to dance at the junior high dance. Your high school sweetheart moved away to college and you did as well. These moments all build on each other, each making the next venture in love more careful and well thought out. This can be a good thing. We learn to love wisely and for the right reasons in an attempt to avoid pain.  

The risk is we also build walls that shield us from great moments and people, loves and adventures. If we continue to view relationships as either risky or safe, how will we know if we missed out on letting our heart guide us?  

Love must be a risk, and we must never apologize to ourselves, our lovers, our family, or our friends for past trauma or emotions. Embrace them and move forward. Move into love.

3. Making time to read a book.

Literature is the one way we communicate with the past and present. We tell each other stories about our lives and the world. We give each other ways of escaping into different realities. Don’t feel like you should be doing something else or that you’re wasting time.

4. Looking at the moon and commenting on the shape and size.

You know you do it. The moon is completely majestic and amazing. It embodies wonder and beauty. We cannot fully comprehend it, and yet we can relish in the light it shines in the dark on everyone, everywhere.  

Stopping to “ooh and ahh” at a little crescent or a full, yellow moon is a moment of literally stopping to smell the roses. You are stopping to acknowledge beauty that is beyond yourself. 

5. Telling someone the truth, even when it would be easier not to.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think we all agree there are moments when not saying the truth of what is on your mind is the kinder choice. However, there is no need to feel guilty or apologetic for expressing what you truly and honestly believe. That takes courage and strength.

Be the kind of friend you would want to have.

6. Never speaking to an ex again.

It didn’t work out, and that is rough.  

No matter how good of a friend they were to you, your mind has an emotional weight on it when it comes to this person. If being friends is completely fine, I’m not saying cut someone out. However, there should be pressure for you to feel like their emotional well-being is your responsibility or keeping them in your life will be easier for your well-being.  

7. Asking questions.

Not knowing is one thing. Having the courage to say “I don’t understand” is another.

8. Trying something new.

Maybe you tried paddleboarding for the first time on your family vacation, cooking a new recipe, or took a zumba class and it wasn’t your thing.  Oh well! You tried it. The little decisions like that are what build up a courage in our everyday lives.

9. Watching the sparkles on the ocean.

In my opinion, there are few things more beautiful than the little sparkles on the tip of the ocean waves. Anytime you are around a natural beauty, stop and stare. Don’t feel bad for not talking, not looking at your phone or thinking about work. If something is beautiful, allow it to make you feel something, even if you don’t know what that something is.

10. Spoiling yourself on your birthday.

Why not? It’s your birthday! The one day a year you have to stop and think about you.  That’s not vain, no apologies for caring about yourself. Make it a tradition of celebrating yourself every year. Even if it’s as simple as buying yourself a cupcake or taking the time to go on a walk, reading a book in a park, or stopping for that tasty, chocolaty latte you crave. Love starts from within. If other people are allowed to celebrate you, it should start with you thanking yourself for being you.

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23 Secrets from the World's Best Trainers

These are super handy tips to read at your free time and they are really spot on! Courtesy from Live Strong

Click here on the picture below to find out more! I love their slides.

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Eat all the Junk food you want as long as you Make it Your Own

That's so simple and right coming from him. It reminds me back to the days we were trying to make tempura for dinner...as well as baking cakes! I was initially overwhelmed by the amount of sugar and butter used. But all good I manage to find healthier ingredients that actually tastes even better ;)

Tempered to get Michael Pollan's book hmmm...

 

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5 Simple Ways to Respond to Negative People

I love this article by Julie Hoyle, simple things to take care of your heart! Courtesy from MindBodyGreen
The last point is really super important "If we love and respect ourselves, we do not give ourselves away so cheaply. We do not come down from our state"

By Julie Hoyle

Many of the most valuable lessons I have learned have come from people I most definitely do not want to be like. You know the type.

For example, I have a family member who is the embodiment of cynicism, doom and gloom. He rarely has anything positive to say and his dark jokes revolve around someone else’s misfortune.

Whenever asked, "How’s it going?" he details his latest job woes in a manner that reflects his view that the world is out to get him. He can also talk for hours about his dark conspiracy theories.

Being around him can be draining, to say the least. Most family members suffer in silent resignation, head for another room, or step out into the garden for some fresh air to get away.

I often do the same. At other times, I feel compassion and attempt to share the benefits of seeing life from a more elevated perspective while also hinting at the importance of taking ownership of one's shadow.

There are also times when, if I am not careful, I find myself getting drawn into the gravitational pull of his dark energy. When this happens, he unloads his grievances and walks away with a light spring in his step while I am left feeling like I need a shower.

In other words: this man is a fantastic ally. He has taught me incredible lessons about where and why I allow myself to be pulled off center and out of my heart. Through him, I have woken up to when this happens.

As a form of protection, I have created an internal checklist to respond to people both at work and at home who are negative or stuck in a dark mood. The checklist goes like this:

1. What does this person need?

Is there a chance that a positive input is being sought? If the answer is yes, then share something to lift the mood. If the answer is no, keep the interaction brief and walk away.

2. Are they acting as a mirror?

The answer is yes if we are being sucked in. When there is a pull, there is a resonance. Someone or something "out there" shows us where we are resisting the flow of life. When this is the case, we canbreathe in deeply and accept what is.

3. This too will pass. 

While we can offer compassion and point to other alternatives, we are not responsible. Suffering is a choice. When we maintain our state, we are part of the solution rather than adding to the illusion. In this way, we create space for an opening of awareness to happen, which is more than enough.

4. Avoidance is O.K.

We can protect and safeguard the sanctity of our internal state by making sure we are with people who nurture us. On other occasions, when we have no alternative as a consequence of work or family obligations, we can remain upbeat and keep turning every negative comment into a positive. Do it for long enough and it works wonders. If the other person cannot get you on his or her negative side, they will eventually give up.

5. Love really is the answer. 

Everything always comes down to love. If we love and respect ourselves, we do not give ourselves away so cheaply. We do not come down from our state. We do not concede who we are for the sake of someone’s need to off-load. We can listen with love. We only get dumped on when we allow ourselves to become part of the drama.

**

The next time that person comes your way, be grateful. No matter how mean, dark-spirited or negative they may be, they are here to teach us how to love, honor and respect who we are and what we have to offer the world.

I would say that is an invaluable gift wouldn’t you?

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Courtesy of MindBodyGreen,this wonderful article was written by David Arneson (Original article here). Enjoy!

9 Ways to Deal with Stress

By David Arenson

Stress is known as the greatest cause of illness. What do we know about stress, and how can we overcome it to reclaim our magnificence?#end snippet

The greatest cause of blockage in the natural energy system of the body is emotional stress. Stress is physically held in smooth muscle. When energy becomes congested, the natural healing ability of the body is impaired. Stress literally causes a breakdown in the body's natural self-healing mechanisms

From the initial stress of childbirth, we arrive into a world that at some point will deny us our basic needs. How often this occurs, and how we experience and respond, is key.

Stress is a natural current that will be with us our whole lives--it's unavoidable. It's how we deal with stress that makes all the difference. 

Our true self is the self that handles stress like water off a duck's back. This is the self that shines authentically, without doubt or blockage.

From the purity of potentiality, many of us break down at impending stress, the thought of stress is often worse than the stress itself. We subconsciously protect ourselves from the expectation of suffering. This “armoring” is a defense mechanism that holds us back from experiencing life and ourselves to the fullest.

When energy is not flowing optimally, energy blocks result. These create an array of symptoms fromdepression and anxiety to illness, pain and suffering. Beneath the layers of protection and blockage lies your core self, your true self.

If we resist feeling our emotions and releasing them, energy blocks will ultimately form deep layers of protection, emotional scarring, trauma and fear.

Negative memories (emotional stress and trauma) are suppressed or buried often outside of conscious awareness. Perhaps the only way of knowing these emotional issues exist, is the presence of illness.  

It is not the stress or the stressful emotions themselves causing a problem, it's how we suppress and resist feeling these emotions that causes problems. The stress just increases when we suppress it. The secret to finding where you hide your hurts, is in where you feel an absence of love. This shadow self is where you repress your needs and wants. 

It is always okay to express emotions. 

How to reclaim your authentic self (the spontaneous, loving, open, expressive being you were born to be) and stand in your pure magnificence...

Here are 9 ways to overcome stress:

1. Allow yourself to fully feel and experience your emotions. 

 

Feel every part of you, especially the parts you previously resisted, such as you fear, your anger, or your anxiety.  Move your goal from removing, escaping, or blocking, to allowing (non-judgment). The Gay Hendricks Method advises when you have stress or pain, ask yourself: I wonder what I am angry or anxious about?

2. Accept and integrate your past.  

 

Invite an ongoing process into your life, a process of letting go of your past. Clear your history. How? By journaling.  Examine your life, your history, your stories...allow and accept it, and then gradually let it go. Acceptance is the most liberating step you can take for clearing away stress. 

3. Find your source.  

 

Life energy is expressed through our essential self, which is the wellspring of all healing, joy, creativity and wisdom. Understand your unique gifts and talents. Reclaim and reactivate your innate self – your capacity to shine. 

4. Let your inner child out to play. 

 

Renew yourself. Find the playful expressive being who is open to sharing his or her truth and standing in pure magnificence. Play! Dance! Listen to loud music! Do whatever works to bring out your inner child. Express yourself. 

 

5. Exercise. 

 

Movement has been proven by countless studies to be the key in improving our stress threshold, our ability to handle stress. Move in any way you like, and do it regularly. Take a walk in the park, go for a swim, or sign up for a boxing session at your local fitness club.

6. Be here now. 

 

Once we have integrated our past experience, set the past free, and dealt with our shadow, we can now come into full embodiment in the present. Bring the fullness of your being and awareness into the now. When you are truly present, and able to bring yourself into the here and now, then any stress that you do encounter will be something you're able to handle. If you're present, you can usually deal with whatever comes at you. (Unless, of course, it's a tsunami. In that cause, run!) 

7. Expand your brain.

Increase your ability to handle stress by expanding your access to “whole brain” functioning. How? Practice Yoga and Meditation. The possibilities are endless when you have an expanded awareness of yourself and the world in which you live. Yoga and mindfulness meditation have proven benefits for overcoming stress, and are based on thousands of years of practice.

8. Share with friends and family. 

 

Share your life with loved ones. Don't suffer alone. Let people know how you're feeling. Engage with people via social interactions in community forums, religious centers, clubs, sports, etc. We are part of a community of people, and nobody needs to ever feel alone. Spending time with friends and family is an important way to deal with stress, and promote health and wellbeing.

9. Love unconditionally.

Love is a heightened state of awareness where personal boundaries melt. Love is the bedrock for your authentic self. Beyond all self-protective armoring, love is where you come from, your true essence, the ultimate truth about who you are. Love releases stress and fear. Reclaim your love for yourself and your loved ones. Love is truly going home.

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7 brilliant Quotes

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Wishing you a 'cuddly' weekend :)

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Importance of Water

A picture is worth a thousand words...Remember to Drink!

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Arnold Schwarzenegger - Who do you want to be in life?

"You can't find the ladders of success if you leave your hands in your pockets!"...Arnie

 

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Follow a Career Passion? Let it follow you

Let's start off the first post with a bit of reality! Taken from the New York times, this article is superbly useful for those who are their semi comfortable stage in their careers unsure of what to do but is not satisfied with what they are doing so far.

Here is the entire story by a man called Cal:

Cal Newport, a computer science

 professor at Georgetown, says many

 people lack a “true calling” but have a 

sense of fulfillment that grows over time.

IN the spring of 2004, during my senior year of college, I faced a hard decision about my future career. I had a job offer from Microsoft and an acceptance letter from the computer science doctoral program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I had also just handed in the manuscript for my first nonfiction book, which opened the option of becoming a full-time writer. These are three strikingly different career paths, and I had to choose which one was right for me.

 For many of my peers, this decision would have been fraught with anxiety. Growing up, we were told by guidance counselors, career advice books, the news media and others to “follow our passion.” This advice assumes that we all have a pre-existing passion waiting to be discovered. If we have the courage to discover this calling and to match it to our livelihood, the thinking goes, we’ll end up happy. If we lack this courage, we’ll end up bored and unfulfilled — or, worse, in law school.

 To a small group of people, this advice makes sense, because they have a clear passion. Maybe they’ve always wanted to be doctors, writers, musicians and so on, and can’t imagine being anything else.

But this philosophy puts a lot of pressure on the rest of us — and demands long deliberation. If we’re not careful, it tells us, we may end up missing our true calling. And even after we make a choice, we’re still not free from its effects. Every time our work becomes hard, we are pushed toward an existential crisis, centered on what for many is an obnoxiously unanswerable question: “Is this what I’m really meant to be doing?” This constant doubt generates anxiety and chronic job-hopping.

 As I considered my options during my senior year of college, I knew all about this Cult of Passion and its demands. But I chose to ignore it. The alternative career philosophy that drove me is based on this simple premise: The traits that lead people to love their work are general and have little to do with a job’s specifics. These traits include a sense of autonomy and the feeling that you’re good at what you do and are having an impact on the world. Decades of research on workplace motivation back this up. (Daniel Pink’s book “Drive” offers a nice summary of this literature.)

 These traits can be found in many jobs, but they have to be earned. Building valuable skills is hard and takes time. For someone in a new position, the right question is not, “What is this job offering me?” but, instead, “What am I offering this job?”

 RETURNING to my story, I decided after only minimal deliberation to go to M.I.T. True to my alternative career philosophy, I was confident that all three of my career options could be transformed into a source of passion, and this confidence freed me from worry about making a wrong choice. I ended up choosing M.I.T., mainly because of a slight preference for the East Coast, but I would have been equally content heading out to Microsoft’s headquarters near Seattle. Or, with the advance from my first book, I could have hunkered down in a quiet town to write.

 During my initial years as a graduate student, I certainly didn’t enjoy an unshakable sense that I had found my true calling. The beginning of doctoral training can be rough. You’re not yet skilled enough to make contributions to the research literature, which can be frustrating. And at a place like M.I.T., you’re surrounded by brilliance, which can make you question whether you belong.

 Had I subscribed to the “follow our passion” orthodoxy, I probably would have left during those first years, worried that I didn’t feel love for my work every day. But I knew that my sense of fulfillment would grow over time, as I became better at my job. So I worked hard, and, as my competence grew, so did my engagement.

 Today, I’m a computer science professor at Georgetown University, and I love my job. The most important lesson I can draw from my experience is that this love has nothing to do with figuring out at an early age that I was meant to be a professor. There’s nothing special about my choosing this particular path. What mattered is what I did once I made my choice. To other young people who constantly wonder if the grass might be greener on the other side of the occupational fence, I offer this advice: Passion is not something you follow. It’s something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world.

 Cal Newport is the author of “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.”

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What to Do After Eating Badly

So....I had a HUGE as buffet at the wedding dinner last night. It's entirely, absolutely OKAY. Here are some soft tips to help with control next time ;)

Courtesy of MindBodyGreen

By Sarah Sturgis

So, some jerk left out the double chocolate cake and you had your way with it. Or, maybe you fell head first into the punch bowl with your mouth wide open and after that, anything fried seemed like a great idea. There are many ways to fall into some bad eating traps, but one day or even three days of badness doesn’t have to spiral into a habit.  Here are some tips to minimize the damage and get you back on track.

STOP. Don’t let one bad meal or one mouthful of cream sauce send you spiraling into the abyss. Regain control of yourself by accepting what you’ve already eaten and making your next choice a sensible one.

Hydrate. Give your body the ammunition it needs to work through the junk you’ve just eaten. Drink plenty of water and give yourself at least 3-4 hours before eating anything again, so that your digestive system can focus on processing.

Move. Go for a brisk walk or hit the gym. You’ll feel better about yourself and get your blood flowing. Fresh air will clear your head.

Be honest. What was the reason you ate whatever it was that has you feeling gross now? Was it in response to a stressful situation? Were you bored? Did you feel pressure to eat what everyone else was eating? Figure it out. Write it down. Understand the why.

Green juice. It really is the ultimate panacea. Don’t drink a green juice directly after eating badly – rather, wait until the next day and start your morning with one. Perhaps have several green juices through the morning and early afternoon and waive food until late afternoon. This will allow your body some time to rejuvenate itself.

Understanding the WHY behind your decision to eat badly is really the most important thing. If your current eating habits are leaving you feeling unfulfilled and deprived, then of course you’re going to continually rebel against whatever restrictions you’ve put on yourself.

If you know you have an event coming up where you’ll be tempted to overeat, take control of the situation. Tell yourself: Okay, I love the Fettuccine Alfredo at that restaurant. I will make sure to have my green juice that morning, eat a big salad with plenty of nutrients for lunch, and start my dinner with a small salad and ask for a half portion of the pasta. Enjoy the heck out of it and feel great because you planned it. It’s not out of control in any way.

Remember, life is too short to be constantly stressed about what you’re putting in your mouth. Take control, understand your decisions, and enjoy yourself!

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