Your Abundance Camera

Sometimes the tyranny of the urgent can overtake the important...

...and that's what happened to me.  I got busy.  So apologies out of the way, I have so MUCH to report to you.  

If you are in the move to improve, the most important thing to focus on is your TOTAL being.  Your mind, your body, and your emotional heart-feelings.  I have had to fight the urge to scream back at all the people who have been asking me about my weight loss, as if my journey or anyone else's is all about size.  I got a few emails from folks following this blog asking if I'd fallen 'off the wagon' and wondering if that's why I hadn't been blogging.  But screaming...just wouldn't be nice.  Or southern.  So in a word, YES!  (said emphatically, but not inappropriately loud)

I have lost 15 pounds in 5 weeks.  I have lost inches in places I didn't expect.  (1 inch off my neck????) 

Here are some great groove-back lessons I've learned:

 

1.  Ordering food from a favorite restaurant, and taking it home allows me to portion it out in a reasonable healthy manner.  Portion control is HUGE in lifestyle health management.

2.  Having lots of easy to create 'safe' foods on hand, help me stay on a healthy path and not give in to higher calorie convenience.  (Salad greens and frozen cooked chicken breasts are a mainstay for me!)

3.  Making sure I don't skip meals and don't get sleep deprived are big in protecting my moods and my life plan. (small meals and healthy snacks throughout the day help keep me from getting too hungry and rushing to eat more than I need)

4.  Healing activities like group meetings, reiki, spending time in the sun (gardening/yard clean-up are great mood boosters), doing things that bring my heart joy even in busy times keeps me sane. Keeping up with my supplements like Vitamin D, Cinnamon, turmeric, magnesium, and flax seed oil are important to my health. Message me if you'd like contacts and information on some of my choices and the practitioners. 

5.  Living in abundance is a mind-set.  The reason people fall back into old destructive patterns is often because there is a deprivation mind-set.  We focus on the calories we can't have or the things we can't do.  How do we practice an abundance mind-set?  Here's a small but mighty exercise I began this week.  In the mundane moment of dog walking, I stopped and closed my eyes in the middle of a great big field.  I chose to experience the moment as if I lacked the gift of eyesight.  I paid attention to the songs of birds, the swell of the wind, the feeling of the crisp cool of the morning on my skin...and the moment suddenly got bigger.  I breathed deep and long filling my lungs with life, and breathed out any negativity that had found a home in my heart.  I smelled earth, new growth, freshness of clean air... As I opened my eyes, I used them as a 'camera' taking pictures of my life in a 360 degree circle.  What was in my point of view in a circle at eye level?  Click...a huge woodpecker that I would have missed.  Click...a mom walking by with her child who was chattering away about life.  Click...a tree that had fallen during a recent storm.  Ok, a 360 survey of my mind's eye looking down at the ground.  Click...a stone shaped by wind, water and time into an art piece.  Click...a frog just escaped from hibernation, trying to hide from me.  Click...my own feet, that oddly enough I realized didn't hurt because of a new pair of running shoes that were a gift from my best friend. 

Now, let your abundance mind-camera look up.  Mine saw clouds, a cable line, and a tree that used to be an acorn.  Hearing, seeing, smelling, and even tasting life differently is a step toward abundance living that will change your moments, your days, and eventually your life.  Noticing the small things helps you notice the life you are missing.  When you live in abundance, gratitude follows.  It's just how it is.  My journey back to me, is so much more than weight loss.  It's discovering the lost moments that busy-ness has stolen.  Life...steal it back! 

Now for an abundance moment - here is a picture from WIRED magazine that showed a tiny dot of plain brown sand under a microscope.  Wow...here's a treasure we often miss.  Each gem represented is also a testament of the beauty wrought from troubled seas, high winds, and turbulence that polishes away the outer hardness to reveal what's underneath it all.  How much more are we missing in our own days?  What is our life turbulence sanding away from us?  What beauty underlies our tough exteriors? Turn on your 360 microscope on your life and trust the beauty that is you.