To a Nourishing 2017!

“New Year’s Day. A fresh start. A new chapter in life waiting to be written…and lived in this transformative year of delight and self-discovery. Today carve out a quiet interlude for yourself in which to dream, pen in hand. Only dreams give birth to change.”

– Sarah Ban Breathnach, Author and Philanthropist

As is customary here, the last post of the year is a look back. Not to “best of”—as it had once been—but to theme. When we look back over the articles that have made the most impact, created the most interest, or been the most enriching, we find the theme of self-nourishment. Not simply “self-sustaining” our lives, but developing a bold perspective on ourselves and our work while deepening our connectedness to the things that restore our hearts.

Enjoy these brief boosts of information or click-on through and reread each article and meet the New Year refreshed and ready.

Our Wolf’s Bounty 7/28/17 – Developing a positive perspective

Especially in American culture, “positive thinking is a soft and fluffy term that is easy to dismiss,” wrote author and speaker James Clear, “In the real world, it rarely carries the same weight as words like ‘work ethic’ or ‘persistence.’ But those views may be changing” (2013). This is because the benefits of positive thinking are being studied across the globe and the practice has been overwhelmingly found to be the key to living well. We all have a positive and negative perspective wolf inside us and it’s common to think of the qualities that the positive wolf embodies as great in theory, but having little place in the “real world” that Clear references. Yet that is only because it is less fed. The negative wolf’s qualities may make it seem stronger, but that’s just brain wiring and marketing. Both can be changed because in the end we choose which wolf we feed in our hearts and in our world. The brain, once in a positive cycle, will begin to self-reinforce the behavior, knit together new neural pathways that tend toward the positive and feed that growth with a bath of positive emotion inducing neurotransmitters.

Sailing Through Stress 6/2/17 – Harnessing the benefits of stress

But stress, like wind, can be harnessed. It just involves trimming our sails; cutting our tasks into just the right shape that we soar, balancing our load so that we move with grace. Trimming our sails is vital to our wellness long term as “occupation stress increases the risk of heart attack…accelerates the aging process, raise[s] women’s risk of diabetes” and the poor coping habits that go into managing stress like overeating, excessive drinking, lower frustration tolerance and worry can damage our daily lives (Huffington Post, 2013). If we can trim our sails and harness the stress, what can feel like painful pressure or racing against the wind can actually give us the energy for a joyful ride toward new horizons.

Work Sucks! 2/24/17 – Re-creating our job in our image

It’s Friday! The joyous finish line of the work week, harbinger of weekend bliss when we can turn our broken backs on the toil and frustration and really live again for two days. Then the dreaded “Monday blues and Terrible Tuesday…” because “the negative mentality that ‘work sucks’ is embedded in our way of life,” According to Jacob Morgan, author and work futurist. “It’s all around us,” he says “and it needs to change” (2013). But as this article shows, through re-crafting our jobs, seeking flow and reminding ourselves why our work matters, even the worst job can be improved by the best perspective. This is the future of work according to Jacob Morgan (2013) and he has thousands of best-selling books to prove it. Workplace happiness is becoming the focus of administrators across the country. But we don’t have to wait for the bosses above us to catch the wave. We can be momenteers today, we can jobcraft now, and a rising tide will lift all our ships.

Our Endless Resources 11/3/17 – Mining the strengths of our lives

Some weeks, some days—some moments, even—are exhausting. Exhaustion could have occurred as a willing and worth-while gift of our efforts, or as a sudden draw from an already dry well of willpower. Perhaps what we feel isn’t exactly exhaustion but that of being overwhelmed by burdens or by an emergency or crisis. Either way, we find ourselves at what feels like the end of ourselves. Resourcing is the verb form is more widely used in trauma therapy, somatic therapy and anxiety management, but really can apply to any situation in which we are taxed or face a challenge. The noun is essentially the same, according to Bill Bowen, MFA, LMT, founder and director of Psycho-Physical Therapy, who said that “therapeutically, resources are defined as those actions, awarenesses, and abilities that support a person in maintaining a sense of self and a feeling of competency, regardless of what is occurring in his or her environment.” Truly, anything can be a resource if it A) is healthy, moral and legal B) restores or sustains us and C) can somehow, in some way, be brought into a present situation to help us.

These four articles are the paragons of the theme of self-nourishment, but 2017 has been a year of gems, so please use the mind-field or search box to revisit your favorites. Just typing “2017” into the search box will garner a list of them all.

There are big things in store for 2018—the logo has been teased on the front page for a while, but that’s just the beginning!

And that beginning will wait until 2018. For now, as this year closes, let’s reflect, let’s restore and let’s be nourished.

Happy New Year.

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Bowen, B (2009) What is Somatic Resourcing? Psycho-Physical Therapy.com. Retrieved from: http://www.psychophysicaltherapy.com/ppt/somaticresourcing.html

Clear, J. (2013) The Science of Positive Thinking: How Positive Thoughts Build Your Skills, Boost Your Health, and Improve Your Work. HuffingtonPost.com. Retrieved from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-clear/positive-thinking_b_3512202.html

Huffington Post (2013) Work Stress On The Rise. Healthy Living. Retrieved from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/10/work-stress-jobs-americans_n_3053428.html

Morgan, J. (2013) Why Does Work Suck? Huffington Post. Retrieved from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-morgan/why-does-work-suck_b_4178795.html