Flexible Persistence: A Key to Better Endings

A major underlying principle for maintaining a ‘better endings’ mindset is FLEXIBILITY.   My personal analog for the sort of flexibility needed to foster better endings derives from fencing.  As a foil fencer on a successful intercollegiate tournament fencing team in the 1970’s, I learned quite viscerally how “movement” is all important for creating, recognizing, and acting upon opportunities to “score.”

ADVANCE – RETREAT – FEINT – ADVANCE – BEAT – RETREAT – DOUBLE RETREAT – DOUBLE BEAT – DOUBLE ADVANCE – PARRY- DOUBLE DISENGAGE — RIPOSTE-LUNGE! (Et Lá!)

The above choreography is an example of the sort of on-your-feet (LOL) maneuvering that might happen in the Moment of a fencing bout for one ‘touch’ sequence. (Dear Ro, my former Teammate: I hope you are reading!)

In fencing as in life, if you are too rigid with your plan of attack, for instance; or, if you freeze on the piste (fencing strip), you are quite likely to be hit (touché!) by your more fluid opponent.   But if you remain in constant motion, both physically with your footwork and mentally with your awareness, you stand a good chance of creating the opportunities, at least, for scoring. 

Better Endings shift as your awareness expands.  One day you might consider one hopeful new direction only to realize an even greater goal the next.  The process of moving in the direction of your goals helps you to understand the deeper reasons for seeking these ‘better endings.’  So, you benefit from remaining open and attentive to your own needs and the needs of those around you who might benefit from your actions as well.

I find myself working constantly on self-improvement, which I believe is true for most people, especially once one starts to see how the process of self-improvement really can produce positive results.  I like to try new approaches to situations in life that may not have worked out great by earlier means, then to learn from the new results.  

images are from pixabay.com

One quick example: rather than taking personally potentially hurtful statements someone might make in an online Zoom session, I am learning how to truly forgive and forget…well, if not to forget, at least to accept and move on without countering or reacting negatively myself. 

In fencing terms that is called fencing “with absence of the blade!”   Et lá! 

Better Endings Story Seed:

Flexibility: Your Key to Better Endings

How about you?  In what arenas of your life do you find that being flexible helps promote your higher awareness and illuminates your deeper goals? How might this lead for you to ‘better endings’ in a situation with which you are currently engaged?

What are Your LIFE THEMES?

Here is a very simple and effective way to identify your Life Themes, those recurring situation and relationship types that form the “stuff” of much of your life activity within the Life Chapters of your Life Story:

• Reflect and write a LIST of 10-15 significant events that have “shaped you as the person you have become.” This does not have to be an exhaustive list, and the events or situations on your list do not have to have been earth shattering, just significant.
• After you have composed your list of significant “shaping” events or situations, read back through this list several times and SORT your events into KINDS of events. Assign personally meaningful NAMES to these Kinds of Events. These are your LIFE THEMES.

You may list your LIFE THEMES below and you can print out this post to remember them:

Now if you like, you can compare your list of LIFE THEMES with the twelve monthly Themes I have selected for us to focus on this year at Better Endings for Your Life Path. (You can also find these by clicking on the Monthly Topics menu tab.)

January –     Health

February –   Romance/ Relationships

March –       Vocation

April –          Work

May –           Family

June –          Adventure/ Travel

July –           Friends

August –      Relocation/ Moves   

September– Education

October –     Spirituality

November – Pets

December – Life Lessons

images are from pixabay.com

Are some of your LIFE THEMES similar to the monthly Themes listed above? You might benefit from associating your LIFE THEMES with some of these monthly topics, then I encourage you to focus on YOUR Life Theme issues and lessons as we focus on these topics this year. I will provide active imagination and journaling prompts to help you to reflect on your own experiences.

I welcome your Comments and Stories!

Celebrate Your Everyday Miracles

“Life is a bowl of cherries” is a metaphor that acknowledges the blessings in our lives every day.

Life in this dualistic universe must always have its Ups and Downs that help us grow and learn–when we choose to–through hardships and problem-solving. Yet I find myself reflecting on this past month’s plus road trip—tonight on my final hotel stop en route back to Colorado—and contemplating about several miracles I have witnessed and been the recipient of over this past five weeks.

How do you define a miracle? This varies somewhat for each of us but to me a miracle manifests the extraordinary in a manner that protects, or intervenes, or heals such that Divine or spiritual/ universal intervention appears to be fortuitously playing Its hand.

Miracles might be small or large, life-saving or sometimes even playful. My sister rolling her second all-aces Yahtzee within just a few turns while the lyrics “Do it again!” were playing was enough to capture our attention and for me and two of my sisters to call into question the Law of Probability, especially when just two turns later I also rolled the same all-aces Yahtzee. We wondered if our father, who had always been a gaming sort, was trying to communicate from the Beyond!

Then there was my dear Mother, who is experiencing late stage Parkinsons disease, sitting up in her wheelchair to eat a hearty, pureed meal at her nursing home on the very same day she was subjected to multiple tests and a procedure to drain fluid from around her lungs at a hospital; this was a miraculous, joyful blessing indeed. I have learned to appreciate from Mom’s patience with her condition how the smallest kindness from others in her physically incapacitated state is itself a blessing of universal, divine love.

But five nights ago, a miracle was needed in a life-threatening emergency, and there it was.  I could have been injured terribly when I stumbled and fell from my sister’s stairway, falling full-body backwards into her dining room furniture, landing on my back. Fortunately—no, in retrospect miraculously, fortuitously—I had set up a stainless steel, 5 foot tall pet gate, wrapped into several overlapping layers, at the base of my sister’s stairs to provide a boundary between house floors for my dog Sophie. When I fell, I landed squarely upon the central gate panels, which crashed down with me into my sister’s dining room. The several overlapping steel gate layers bent from the weight of my fall but cushioned my back and also somehow prevented me from hitting my head. I laid there on my back for several minutes, both me and my horrified sister fearing the worst but then I got up, my back, left ankle and knee sprained a bit but I was not seriously injured at all. A great “energy-healing” massage a couple days later and I am fine, gratefully aware of how this ‘convenient’ gate possibly saved my life or bodily well being.

Reflecting later on the “anatomy” of this miracle, I realize what a “set up” had occurred in advance. My sister and I had talked at length when I arrived about whether I needed to set this gate up, and overlapping the panels was done in a way that would protect her wooden floor which, in the end, was also miraculously not marred by the crashing fall!

******   ******

So I invite you to take some time to reflect and count the everyday miracles in your own life that have helped to put you where you are right now. Even unforeseen difficulties can count as miracles if they lead to greater personal awareness or understanding. I mean, even if my fall would have turned out badly, that could also have had a miraculous element to it if it would have led to later experiences I would grow from.

I believe we are all in the hands of loving care, if only we ask to be and/or if we can remember to recognize the value of even the smallest “set ups” or shifts of conditions in our own and in others’ lives.

So let’s celebrate our tandem connections with Spirit/ the Universe; what Jung would call Synchronicity.

I value and welcome YOUR Comments and Stories.

Encounter with a Mystic Seer

Twenty-two years ago almost precisely this week, I had recently finished graduate school and  I applied for two university positions that were open, one in Colorado Springs, Colorado and another in Austin, Texas. On the short list of applicants for the Colorado job, I went there to interview from a Tuesday through a Thursday in March and then I returned to where I then lived, in Phoenix.  That Sunday my friend Cam invited me to go with her to the first Renaissance festival I ever attended, near Phoenix.  Just inside the gates, the very first booth I noticed and was drawn to check out was for a palmist, named Madam Carolyn (You can click to see her web site). My great-great Aunt Bessie, one of my favorite relatives while growing up, had been something of a gypsy and she had read palms; because of her I had even studied about palmistry while in high school. I was intrigued; it would be fun, anyway. I paid fifteen dollars and sat for a reading.

The very first words Mme. Carolyn said to me were:

“You’re going to get the job.” [I had not said a word to her, at all, nor had my friend.]

Followed by:

“And you’re going to work in one of the other two places I do Renaissance fairs; either Colorado Springs, Colorado or Austin, Texas.” [You can imagine my shock!]

“But, you won’t believe anything unless you’re hit over the head with a two-by-four.”

 

I was flabbergasted, especially the next Monday when I was offered the job in Colorado, where I have worked ever since.  That next summer I went to the Renaissance Festival in Larkspur, Colorado (near Colorado Springs), and sure enough, there was Madame Carolyn. I thanked her profoundly and have visited her for a reading every summer since that astounding day in Phoenix.  Although I might say that I have long believed clairvoyance is possible, never in my wildest imagination would I have expected such true, clear awareness from someone I had never even met. A two-by-four it was [She was right about that, too]!

I have often since wondered WHY I stumbled upon such an accurate mystic in my encounter with Mme. Carolyn (BTW she still reads at both the Phoenix and the Larkspur events, where she is understandably very popular!)  Why did I need to receive this astounding experience? Perhaps it was to show me that it is possible for a Mystic to accomplish true, untrammeled perception.

To be clear, I am not one who generally seeks out any form of psychic reading. I mainly believe that we are the best interpreters of our own dreams and the clearest visionaries for our own lives, or should be. Maybe as I was just about to embark upon an “academic” career, I needed a bit of an eye opener as to what more there is to know than book knowledge; a proverbial carrot being dangled before me as an invitation—or an admonition!—to keep my mind OPEN to the mysteries of life and to strive to explore the deeper truths on my own, as well.

So, how about you? Have you been struck on the head by any two-by-fours lately? I welcome your insights and stories!

You are the Dreamer

God grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

–Reinhold Niebuhr

Last Sunday I shared how using Life is a But a Dream as a mantra the night before led me to a receptive state so that my inner guidance could communicate with me about stopping my habit of drinking soda. Then a few nights later, after having stayed away from sodas but thinking I could still drink IZZE drinks (carbonated natural fruit drinks), guess what? I dreamed I was drinking one of these then read the label; it said SODA in big letters on the front of the bottle. I poured out the rest in my dream and woke with chagrin. No more fooling myself; if I want this inner help, I need to follow it!

So here’s a technique many use, called the “15 times technique”. Write out a positive affirmation fifteen times every day. Let’s try this with our weekly Life Metaphor:

“Life is But a Dream”

Life is but a dream

Life IS but a Dream

LIFE is but a dream

Life is but a DREAM

Life is but a dream

Life is BUT a dream

Life is but A dream

LIFE IS BUT A DREAM

life is but a dream

Life Is But A Dream

LIFE… is but a DREAM

life IS BUT a dream

Life is but a Dream

Life… is… but… a… Dream!

What does this statement evoke, for you?  For me, it opens a realm of unlimited freedom and possibility. As in a nightly dream, all things are possible in your waking dream as well.  As some nightly dreams recur–but can change as we alter our awareness—our daily life reveals patterns of thought and behavior that we  can also change by becoming more aware or mindful of our recurring attitudes and habitual behavior.

 

As YOU are the DREAMER of your own life, you have the license and the responsibility to change or improve what you can. So, take stock of where your current waking dream is taking you.  Where would you like it to lead?  Dream it and it can BE!

I welcome your comments and stories!