Okay, so I was a week off last week. My inner calendar was telling me this was the first weekend of July, not the last weekend of June.
Since we are halfway through the year, this is a good time to take stock of where we are and how far we have come (or not) since the year turned.
At the beginning of the year, we started with a bunch of questions to gauge where you are now, what is important to you, what your satisfaction levels were in the areas of overall well being, physical health, spiritual health, finances, career, and relationships and how your personal prose is affecting your satisfaction level.
We worked through the Circle of Perception exercise and discussed values, goal setting and the 5 Whys and manifestation boards.
We talked about identifying roadblocks and assessing the true risks to achieving your goals.
We discussed moving from unconscious incompetence to conscious competence, giving up bad habits, and getting back up after following off the wagon.
We worked on developing our follow through, moving through fear, and spring cleaning.
Finally, we discussed growing our best lives before starting the specific areas of finances (April posts), physical health (May posts), and spiritual health (June posts).
During the last six months, I've also thrown out several challenges for us to work on, starting with manifestation boards and including the following:
Sharing positive energy and eliminating negative energy
Tracking your expenses
Analyzing what we truly need
Tracking your input (diet) and output (exercise)
Fine-tuning your input (diet)
Believing you are enough, you have enough, you do enough (meditation)
Three pages a day (journaling)
Now I challenge all of us to review the material and the challenges we've accepted (or ignored), and see where we are right here, right now.
Has anything improved in our lives?
Have we truly committed to MaXIMIzing ourselves, MaXIMIzing our lives, and living our best life now?
If you've fallen off the wagon, remember you can always get up, dust yourself off, and get back on the wagon that will take you down the path of your best life!
For additional inspiration and support you can keep at your fingertips, I offer my book, Take Your Life in Your Arms and Kiss It!, available here.
Next week, we will tackle the topic of career, starting with is this just a J.O.B. or is this truly W.O.R.K.
Until then, Namaste!
Showing posts with label growing our best life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label growing our best life. Show all posts
Sunday, June 29, 2014
Sunday, June 1, 2014
MaXIMIze - The Importance of Spiritual Health
This month's focus is spiritual health, and we're going to start with the difference between religion and spirituality.
According to the dictionary, here is how those two words are defined, as well as the word "spirit":
Religion: 1. the service and worship of God or the supernatural; commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance. 2. a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices. 3. scrupulous conformity. 4. a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith.
Spirituality: Of, relating to, consisting of, or afflicting the spirit
Spirit: 1. an animating or vital principle held to give live to physical organism. 2. the immaterial intelligent or sentient part of a person.
Religion focuses on the outward; spiritual focuses on the inward.
The only person we can truly change is ourself, and that change, to be lasting, has to come from the inside out. Our outward actions come from what we think, feel and believe within.
Therefore our spiritual health is at least as important if not more so than our physical health.
In order to nurture both, we need to set aside time and space devoted to our practices. For spiritual health, meditation and/or prayer and reflection, preferably on a daily basis, helps bring clarity to who we are inside and can help transform us into our best being now.
Even if it is just five minutes of sitting quietly and clearing our minds by focusing on our breathing, that small amount of time letting go of the outer world helps bring balance back to our inner world which we can then share with the outer world.
We cannot give what we do not have ourselves, and we cannot know what we DO have if we do not know ourselves and how we fit into the greater scheme of life.
Tending the garden that is our spiritual life enables us to know ourselves on the deepest level.
What are you doing today to bolster your spiritual health and bring balance to your life?
Namaste!
According to the dictionary, here is how those two words are defined, as well as the word "spirit":
Religion: 1. the service and worship of God or the supernatural; commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance. 2. a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices. 3. scrupulous conformity. 4. a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith.
Spirituality: Of, relating to, consisting of, or afflicting the spirit
Spirit: 1. an animating or vital principle held to give live to physical organism. 2. the immaterial intelligent or sentient part of a person.
Religion focuses on the outward; spiritual focuses on the inward.
The only person we can truly change is ourself, and that change, to be lasting, has to come from the inside out. Our outward actions come from what we think, feel and believe within.
Therefore our spiritual health is at least as important if not more so than our physical health.
In order to nurture both, we need to set aside time and space devoted to our practices. For spiritual health, meditation and/or prayer and reflection, preferably on a daily basis, helps bring clarity to who we are inside and can help transform us into our best being now.
Even if it is just five minutes of sitting quietly and clearing our minds by focusing on our breathing, that small amount of time letting go of the outer world helps bring balance back to our inner world which we can then share with the outer world.
We cannot give what we do not have ourselves, and we cannot know what we DO have if we do not know ourselves and how we fit into the greater scheme of life.
Tending the garden that is our spiritual life enables us to know ourselves on the deepest level.
What are you doing today to bolster your spiritual health and bring balance to your life?
Namaste!
Sunday, March 30, 2014
MaXIMIze - Growing Our Best Lives
The Bible tells us as you sow, so shall you reap. Karma tells us what comes around, goes around. What we put out in the world is what we get back, directly or indirectly. What we planted in the past is what we are harvesting now. What we plant now is what we will harvest in the future.
Here are some questions to ponder:
What are you harvesting now? What is showing up in your life right now?
What do you want to harvest in the future? What do you want to show up in your life from now on?
Are you planting the right seeds in the right soil to be able to harvest what you want to in the future instead of growing weeds?
The parable of the mustard seed illustrates that last question very well. The seeds sown in the well-prepared soil and tended appropriately grew and provided a bountiful harvest. The seeds sown in barren soil with no preparation or tending did not even germinate to be able to die on the vine.
So, are we willing to do the work to ensure that what we are sowing now is really what we want to harvest in the future? Are we willing to till the field, remove the rocks and cobbles, plant the seeds, water the field, and pull the weeds while the seeds we planted grow into a bountiful harvest?
Over the coming months, we will go into each of the six areas we looked at in the Circle of Perception post, discuss bringing in the harvest, express our gratitude, and finish the year by celebrating ourselves and our successes.
My sincerest hope is that you will continue to read this blog through the rest of the year, and if you feel the need to go deeper on any topic at any time, please feel free to contact me.
Next week, we will explore the topic of finances and examine our personal relationship with money.
Until then, namaste!
Here are some questions to ponder:
What are you harvesting now? What is showing up in your life right now?
What do you want to harvest in the future? What do you want to show up in your life from now on?
Are you planting the right seeds in the right soil to be able to harvest what you want to in the future instead of growing weeds?
The parable of the mustard seed illustrates that last question very well. The seeds sown in the well-prepared soil and tended appropriately grew and provided a bountiful harvest. The seeds sown in barren soil with no preparation or tending did not even germinate to be able to die on the vine.
So, are we willing to do the work to ensure that what we are sowing now is really what we want to harvest in the future? Are we willing to till the field, remove the rocks and cobbles, plant the seeds, water the field, and pull the weeds while the seeds we planted grow into a bountiful harvest?
Over the coming months, we will go into each of the six areas we looked at in the Circle of Perception post, discuss bringing in the harvest, express our gratitude, and finish the year by celebrating ourselves and our successes.
My sincerest hope is that you will continue to read this blog through the rest of the year, and if you feel the need to go deeper on any topic at any time, please feel free to contact me.
Next week, we will explore the topic of finances and examine our personal relationship with money.
Until then, namaste!
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