4/19/2020

Day 11: Indoor Pruning

Live in the Orange Zone - Day 11

30 Days of Self Study, Meditation and Reflection

Day Eleven Living in the Orange Zone

For 30 days, we've committed to doing short, small, sacred practices to help us move towards transformation and spiritual growth. We compared it to walking the Camino, doing a pilgrimage, but committing to some time, making shifts in our thinking, making shifts in our external world to create shifts internally.

Yesterday we were pruning outside. Today, I've come back inside to do some pruning inside.

Let's look at it through the lens of energy. I am energy. Older practices like Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, all understand meridians and Nadis and how we are a living being and that we have energy. Everything has energy. So to study Feng Shui we understand that this room has energy, the things in the room have energy.

We study this every year, every time we get out our book Clear Clutter with Feng Shui by Karin Kingston, we also added Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I have been doing workshops with Kathy Orr and working together on helping people clear energy that’s not working for them so they can bring in new vibrant energy into their lives, which is the same as pruning. Exact same principle energy of cutting off things that are either dead or need to be trimmed back in order to let new growth full flow through like energy through the branches of a tree or bush.

Inside, I would like to invite everyone to join me this week to look around your home and see where you need to do some pruning, where there's some dead branches or things that are stagnant that aren't growing because they're kind of stuck.

If we're following Marie's method, the Kondo Method, this is the thing I love most about her method, is she always asks us to take something and to hold it and see, do I love this? Because if I don't love this, it's plugging up energy that could be flowing and to let it go, to release it. Which is what we were doing yesterday with lots of plants and different things like that. So inside it could be books, it could be clothes, shoes. It could be the joy that you throw everything in and you realize there's just a bunch of junk that could be thrown away or discarded or put in its proper place.

It seems daunting, but if you just start with little bits, it is so liberating, like pruning. It feels so good to release things that just are stuck that you want to do more, you want to keep pruning.

So my suggestion to you is this, today just choose one little area of your house. Something that's been like “this is stuck for me for sure, this drawer has a bunch of junk in it”. Just do that one little thing today, and let that be a representation to you to just let it be in your mind that as you're going about your days, there might be something that you see and go “This. I have not put a candle in for a very long time. Do I want to still have it on my mantle? Is it beautiful? Does it bring me happiness? Do I love it?”

And if not, either put it somewhere away or give it away. Such a beautiful time to let things go and give things away, and only keep the things close to us that bring us happiness that we love. So do some pruning. Let go of the things in your life that just need to be shifted out and moved around and just notice you do one little thing today, how liberating and how good and how much energy you now have from just that one thing you did.

Then just continue throughout the day of pruning. Tomorrow you might see something else and pull that out. And it's just going to become a way of being. And during this powerful time, our 30 Day Orange Zone is going to be a time of clearing up things that aren't working for you physically, and your physical world, to bring you more energy so you can have those shifts we're looking for in your spiritual world and transformational for you, just the way that you're going to be moving into your future and living your life.

I highly recommend this book. I highly recommend Clear Clutter with Feng Shui. It’s such a great time to read these and get excited about letting go of things and moving your energy.

Day 11 Inspiration
Today's inspiration comes from Henry David Thoreau

Today, what do you see?

The question is not what you look at, but what you see.

Click the links below to find out more:

The Orange Zone - A 30 Day Practice - YouTube Playlist
Daily Inspirational Quotes for 30 Day Meditation

Blog Post: What is the Orange Zone?

4/18/2020

Day 12: Move the Furniture

Live in the Orange Zone - Day 12

30 Days of Self Study, Meditation and Reflection

Today is day 12 of living in the orange zone.

We have a sacred time, a sacred space for doing gratitude, setting intentions, blessings, writing in our journals, reading beautiful sacred texts, and we're pruning inside and out to move some energy around.

I want to share with you today one of my favorite quotes that I use for all of the orange zone programs. It's by Thomas Jefferson and he said, “If you want something you've never had, you must be willing to do something you've never done.” And this is the heart of Orange Zone. It's about stepping into possibility, transformation and self-growth.

No matter how old I am, no matter where I am in my life, I always want to be a student of life. I want to continue to grow. I want to continue to change. I want to continue to reach for more happiness, more joy, to feel awe, to be silly, and wisdom and strength.

This particular orange zone program is about giving us small, little, simple, easy practices that will help us grow in our Camino, on our path, on our pilgrimage. Today is one of my favorites that I have given my yoga students for years, as well as the people that I do personal coaching with. And that is “move the furniture”.

Moving the furniture is about in your physical world, in your house, in your office, wherever you spend a lot of time, is to move things around. It could be a chair that you switched from here to there. It could be this plant. So this plant behind me was at the wellness center. It lived at the wellness center for almost a year and I brought it home to live with me. It's been here for two weeks now. I used to have flowers up here. It feels like a great shift in this kitchen, living room area.

It's as simple as moving books. Sometimes, I take my psychology books and move them to somewhere else and the yoga books on another part of the shelf. It can be moving a painting to another place. Moving something and some things (plural) in your physical world that changed the way you shift, the way you see them.

What you'll realize is unconsciously, we are in patterns in our body. This is how I walk around the chair. This is how I hold my body. This is how I sit. This is where I sit. This is always what I'm looking at. This is how I breathe. This is how I think. This is how I react. By a simple act of moving things around, you will find that it not only shifts the way you need to walk or the way you see, but it'll shift the way you begin to think and it'll create new possibilities like flipping something upside down and getting a different perspective.

It’s an unconscious way to affect your energy and the way that you're seeing and doing life. It's fun. I do it when I'm feeling a little bit stagnant or stuck in a way, or sometimes I've just noticed like, Oh, I've been looking at that the same way for so long and, and moving it around just brings a little bit of a lightness. You'd be surprised at just the simple thing and how effective it is to shift and bring your energy up and elevate your mood.

I also like to add, I have the colorful flowers right here now, to add fresh flowers to, um, to different parts of your house and to change that around as well. Don't always have your flowers in the same spot, use little bud vases. Sometimes take the little buds themselves and place them in different places of the house. You see color in places where there wouldn't normally be color, like in front of a painting or on top of a towel. Different things of this sort.

Shift your internal by changing your external. Have fun.

Day 12 Inspiration
Today's inspiration comes from a Sioux poem called "Let Me Walk in Beauty"
The dawn brings a gift of a new day.

Spirit who comes from the East, come to me with the rising sun. Let there be light in my word. Let there be light on the path that I walk. Let me remember always that you give the gift of a new day. Never let me be burdened with the sorrow by not starting over.

Click the links below to find out more:
The Orange Zone - A 30 Day Practice - YouTube Playlist

Daily Inspirational Quotes for 30 Day Meditation

Blog Post: What is the Orange Zone?

4/17/2020

Day 13: Self Reflection on Appreciation

Live in the Orange Zone - Day 13

30 Days of Self Study, Meditation and Reflection

We are on day 13 of living in the orange zone.

We have been pruning, cutting back, moving the furniture and shifting out of patterns. Not that all of our patterns are bad, but just shifting out of patterns so that we can create growth, possibility, and transformation in our lives.

I would like to add to that today, some self reflection. Oftentimes, one of the things we're breaking out of with breaking out of patterns is this idea of being an autopilot. I automatically do and think and say the same things, where I walk around my furniture the same, or the way I see things the same. Shaking it up a bit, now is a perfect time for me to introduce this idea of self reflection. Giving us something today for that self reflection is one word, which is appreciation.

This is a time where we have given ourselves some silence and some listening. In that silence and listening, it allows us to let some things come up and emerge that are already there, but they get neglected or forgotten because we're so busy in the external world. I'm doing, I'm creating. I'm being. I'm always on the go. This pull back and pause, pressing the shift in our normal patterns, has created an opportunity for us to see what we truly value.

I just love to play with words sometimes. When I started, I looked up what appreciation is in the dictionary and it said, “Appreciation: recognition and enjoyment of the good qualities of someone or something. Valuing, respecting, prizing, cherishing, treasuring, admiration.”

It's a perfect time for us to quiet ourselves, go inward and reflect on what we truly value, what we truly cherish and appreciate. Slowing things down, going inward, mixing up our old patterns, we start to, it's like a sifter and we sift through all the things we realized weren't as important, didn't matter as much that we put so much time and energy into.

What's left when we shift all, sift and shifted all out, are the nuggets of what we cherish and what is important.

I really want to invite all of you to take a little bit of time in your journal today, in your meditation the next few days. Sit with this idea of ``what do I truly appreciate?” It could be things that you've been missing right now. You appreciate time with friends. Going to your favorite restaurant and sharing a meal with someone. It could even be the opposite. I know a lot of people are saying that they used to have to drive to work and now that they're home and have more hours, they're just spending more quality time with their family. You appreciate something that's maybe new to you right now.

There's so much possibility in us, sitting with the things that we oftentimes are on autopilot and take for granted, to quiet ourselves and truly say, this is important to me.

This is something that is so meaningful to me. It can change the way again, that we move forward into the next chapter of our life. Letting go of those things we sifted out that weren't as appreciated, to value and bring up and spend more time with the things we do appreciate.

Join me for this very simple self-reflection on appreciation. Allow this to make your life more rich. It grows your gratitude and it also extends out in a way that could possibly change the way we do and spend our precious time.

As always, I welcome you to join me in another opportunity for growth.

Day 13 Inspiration
Today's inspiration comes from Anais Nin
What are you ready to blossom and open into?

And the day came when the risk to remain in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Click the links below to find out more:
The Orange Zone - A 30 Day Practice - YouTube Playlist

Daily Inspirational Quotes for 30 Day Meditation

Blog Post: What is the Orange Zone?

4/16/2020

Day Fourteen: Practice Appreciation & Feel Blessed

Live in the Orange Zone - Day 14

30 Days of Self Study, Meditation and Reflection

Welcome to day 14 of living in the orange zone.

We have been doing some sifting, shaking it up, moving things around and getting our energy flowing in a way that we're moving towards self growth and transformation.

Yesterday, the word was appreciation and we're spending some time on self-reflection, listening and bringing more appreciation into our life into the next chapter. Today's two words and it is going to be a practice. The two words are, I appreciate.

It's similar to the gratitude practice in that we're going to be scanning our world throughout the day, scanning our lives, the moments of our life and picking out and being able to articulate what you value and what you appreciate, what's important and meaningful to you. To speak it in your mind or to say it out loud is to create a strong neural pathway.

We understand how neural pathways work. If I'm thinking a thought over and over and over again, that path becomes very deep. My mind will automatically pull me down that path once it gets really strong and deep. If I'm thinking critical thoughts and constantly criticizing, my mind will automatically pull me there and I become better and better and better at being critical. If I worry and I worry and I worry, it becomes automatic and I don't realize how often. It's very unconscious. I just become a really good expert at worrying.

We all want to become good at is love, happiness, joy, kindness, appreciation and gratitude make us feel like we're so lucky and blessed. Practicing this as simple, this is how it goes. You can either do a journaling reflection time where you think about and allow yourself to surface what you appreciate and just fill a page with one, two, three, four, five, 10 things that you appreciate every day.

Like the gratitude practice, it becomes a way of thinking about your life in valuing and respecting things. Also, you can start scanning throughout the day and just saying in your head, “I appreciate being able to teach this class today from my own home. I appreciate having a zoom date last night with my friend and we got to support each other and laugh and just feel good. Oh, I appreciate I got to go to the beach last week.” You start to begin to see your life, and even sometimes when I think of something I appreciate, then I begin to think of why I appreciate, and it digs even deeper, that neural pathway of feeling lucky and grateful.

Bonus points, if you can say it out loud, if you can tell someone else you appreciate them or something that they did, or that you value about your relationship or an experience, or just to have a good friend, or a partner that you can share other things in life that you appreciate and say that out loud all the time.

Gosh, I appreciate this beautiful day. I appreciate living here. I appreciate this music. Whatever it is, the more we think it, speak it, write it, we create strong, strong pathways that pull us down there automatically and make us grateful, lucky, blessed people.

Day 14 Inspiration
Today's inspiration comes from Guruji
Question- Why Hurry? Use this time to slow down and feel appreciation and gratitude.

Why hurry?

Click the links below to find out more:
The Orange Zone - A 30 Day Practice - YouTube Playlist

Daily Inspirational Quotes for 30 Day Meditation

Blog Post: What is the Orange Zone?

4/15/2020

Day 15: Why Hurry?

Live in the Orange Zone - Day 15

30 Days of Self Study, Meditation and Reflection

Day 15, living in the orange zone.

On my many trips to India, there was one in particular where I got a great teaching from my yoga teacher Pattabhi Jois, just through a simple interaction that happened during class one day.

It was a full class, it was packed and our mats were next to each other. Pattabhi Jois was calling out the class, the way he normally does, those that do yoga, he would say “inhale”, we all raise our arms, and “exhale”, we all bend forward. We're going through these sun salutes.

One person was always just a little bit ahead. If he's saying inhale your arms up, she's already bending forward. If he's saying inhale into up dog, she's always bending into down dog. One of the ways my teacher would correct someone in class, he would just simply say, “Hey.” I'll look around like, who's, who's in trouble? Right?

This went on a couple of times and she kept being ahead of the class and at one point he just stopped teaching. Everyone was dead silent. We'd never had this happen for you. He just stopped teaching. We all stopped practicing. At the time he was older, he was in his nineties. He shuffled up to the front of the room and he got right up, right next to this lady, like right in her face, and he said to her two words, I will never forget. He said, “Why hurry?”

I've taken that teaching from that yoga practice years ago in India and applied it to my life.

I love John Kabat-Zinn’s book Wherever You Go, There You Are. I sometimes think how I'm in such a hurry to get to the next place, only to find myself there and in a hurry to get to the next place. Sometimes it's a place or it's just a mindset. Rather than just sitting, being content and enjoying what's around me at this moment in my life, I'm constantly thinking of what do I have to accomplish next? What am I in lack of that I need to try to do?

I especially think about our 30 day living in the orange zone. It's been such a great time to pause and have time for reflection and silence and listening. And in that listening perhaps to really value this time in our life where we were forced to slow down. Or we chose within this time to slow down a little bit and evaluate what is precious to us, what we value. In that, making decisions on how we spend our energy of time. Also to how we just slow it all down a bit, and take in what is available to us in this moment, and really enjoy that fully in that slowing down.

I invite you to ask yourself the question throughout the moments of your day. If you find yourself running around here or running around here, is to simply say, “Why hurry?”

Wherever you go, there you are.

Day 15 Inspiration
Today's inspiration comes from unknown
Reflecting on the small but profound inspiring wonders of the Universe.

Inspiration is everywhere. If you are ready to appreciate it, an ant can be one of the wonders of the universe.

Click the links below to find out more:
The Orange Zone - A 30 Day Practice - YouTube Playlist

Daily Inspirational Quotes for 30 Day Meditation

Blog Post: What is the Orange Zone?

4/14/2020

Day 16: Energy Banking

Live in the Orange Zone - Day 16

30 Days of Self Study, Meditation and Reflection

There's a cool breeze running through the property right now that feels like what we're doing in the orange zone. We're shifting, moving out of old patterns and bringing new energy, a new way of moving into growth and transformation in our life.

Energy is all around us. We are energy. Every morning, you wake up and have energy. Today we're going to talk about energy banking.

This isn't my idea, this is Caroline Myss. She wrote a beautiful book called Anatomy of the Spirit and in that she describes energy banking. Every day I have this opportunity to take my energy and make good investments that actually gives me more energy. My investments have a good return. But I can also make decisions throughout the day to spend my time and my energy on things that drain my energy and take energy away from me.

The thing that I'd like to ask everyone to do today is to be an observer. So again, we're shifting out of old patterns. We’re normally on autopilot, not even realizing when we might be making decisions that actually drain us. It's usually after we've already done it and we already feel drained that we realized, “Oh, that drained me”. You know? The idea is to observe right in that moment when we're just about to make these decisions.

I am outside. It's a beautiful day. You can hear the birds singing. If I take a few minutes out of my day to come here, it fuels me. I have more energy. If I am watching a little bit too much stuff on the phone, the TV, our devices, news, or maybe I'm having an interaction with someone that's a little bit negative or critical, I realize that can be draining for me.

The first thing is to observe. The second thing is to start making decisions around where you want to invest your energy today. If you would know that, like how my energy is really low right now, you want to make a good investment and bring that energy back up. If you're just about to do something and you're like, that is definitely going to SAP some of my energy, shift how you want to approach that. Maybe move the furniture around a little bit, or flip it upside down so you have a different new creative way to deal with that, that feels less straining and more fueling.

Caroline Myss said this, “How we fuel our body fuels our spirit and what drains our body, drains our spirit.” Just knowing these two are always connected, as we make decisions throughout the day of how we're going to fuel and nourish ourselves, both body and mind, is also how we fuel our energy and really walk into our day with a good investment.

Join me today and first, be an observer and second, let's start making decisions that put more and more and more energy into our body mind bank.

Day 16 Inspiration
Today's inspiration comes from Louis Pasteur
Tenacity & Strength

Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength is in my tenacity.

Click the links below to find out more:
The Orange Zone - A 30 Day Practice - YouTube Playlist

Daily Inspirational Quotes for 30 Day Meditation

Blog Post: What is the Orange Zone?

4/13/2020

Day 17: Start Your Day with a Healthy Breakfast

Live in the Orange Zone - Day 17

30 Days of Self Study, Meditation and Reflection

Day 17 living in the Orange Zone.

We have been looking at how to keep our physical body healthy, our spiritual or emotional body healthy, through the lens of energy. Understanding the value of energy.

Yesterday's quote by Caroline Myss said, “What fuels your spirit, fuels your body.” For years we've all heard this, eat a healthy breakfast, and I agree. The breakfast is in this bowl, this gratitude bowl, where we have been doing gratitude and we have been blessing other people. We've been spending time in silence and listening and reading sacred text. I think this is the best, most healthy way to fuel yourself to have a good day.

If we do it every day, we practice doing it every day, we get better throughout the day of remembering to eat healthy snacks of appreciation and love and gratitude and raising our vibration.

I'm wearing my ring and my bracelet as always for these 30 days to remind us throughout the day of making good energy choices and all the things that we've been practicing. Kind of pulling that together today, at this halfway point, to say how important it is to fuel yourself with the things that will help you make good decisions when you're faced with a situation where you are angry, you are worried. Those are real things. Those are in the human spectrum that makes our lives full.

The question for myself, and for you, is how long will we stay in that vibration of anger or that worry or criticism? Can we have that little window of perception and observation where we see it, acknowledge it, and then decide how much energy do I really want to put into that? The longer I do practices like the gratitude practice, the more I realize how I'd much rather stay in a state of being loving and happy. I'm better able to make choices around that. and just the small moments of my day.

Continue to have a healthy breakfast with me and, throughout the day, eat healthy snacks.

Day 17 Inspiration
Today's inspiration comes from John Wooden
Focus your energy on what you can do.

Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.

Click the links below to find out more:
The Orange Zone - A 30 Day Practice - YouTube Playlist

Daily Inspirational Quotes for 30 Day Meditation

Blog Post: What is the Orange Zone?

4/12/2020

Day 18: Space Training

Live in the Orange Zone - Day 18

30 Days of Self Study, Meditation and Reflection

Day 18 of living in the Orange Zone.

Today, we're gonna do some space training and I don't mean outer space training or Feng Shui training. I mean in the head creating space training.

The quote comes from Victor Frankl from the book Man's Search for Meaning, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. And in our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Stimulus and response; stimulus is life and it's always happening. We can never press a button and turn it off. Life is always going on. Response is how I'm reacting to whatever's happening in life right now. It's not always what I say or what I do, it's also what I'm thinking when I'm feeling. I can never turn that off either. It's always at play.

Oftentimes, as we've been talking about this past week, it's on autopilot. I might not even realize that something happened and it made me start to feel worried and think worried thoughts. I might not realize that someone said something that hurt my feelings and I spend the rest of my day replaying it and being angry about it. Stimulus and response.

The space inbetween is where we create this opportunity to get a bigger perspective and to see what the stimulus is and how we want to respond to it. It's like a doorway into your internal self that can give you this opportunity to respond with how we'd like to respond, with maybe more joy or more compassion or happiness. That is our liberation. Our ability to choose is where we're liberated to really live the life that we want to live in the moments, not just the big days, but the little moments of our life to make those choices, to respond in a way that creates more happiness and love.

I have an example because I think it's helpful to hear a story. One of my students who's been studying with me for a while, he’s a great surfer, who was out surfing one day and it was just packed. There were tons of surfers out that day and he was paddling out. He was already in his response going, oh, crap it's not going to be a fun day. It's going to be filled with people cutting me off, and all those kinds of things. He's paddling out and thinking these thoughts. Sure enough, he gets out there and sure enough, people are being aggressive towards each other and an angry out in the water. And he does this thing where he creates a space in between reacting to that. He realized, I am out here surfing because I want to enjoy nature. I want to be in the water. That's what makes me happy. I don't want to be out here just trying to get a wave and trying to get more than the guy next to me. In that space he created, he chose a different response.

As people were coming up to catch waves, he said he just started waving them on and waving at them, saying “hey, you take this wave” instead of trying to get in front of them and get the wave. He said he had one of the best surf sessions he's ever had. He had so much fun. He caught a few ways. He had so much fun and he felt liberated.

I just want to invite all of you to join me in creating this space in the moments over our life where we don't even realize we're in a pattern of reacting. That if we could just pull ourselves out enough to give us this much, we could create even more happiness, even more joy, even more compassion in our lives.

Let's do some space training.

Day 18 Inspiration
Today's inspiration comes from Rumi
Unfold your own myth.

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins? Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?

Who comes to a spring thirsty
and sees the moon reflected in it?
Who, like Jacob blind with grief and age, smells the shirt of his lost son
and can see again?
Who lets a bucket down and brings up
a flowing prophet? Or like Moses goes for fire and finds what burns inside the sunrise?
Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,
and opens a door to the other world.
Soloman cuts open a fish, and there’s a gold ring. Omar storms in to kill the prophet
and leaves with blessings.
Chase a deer and end up everywhere!
An oyster opens his mouth to swallow one drop. Now there’s a pearl.
A vagrant wanders empty ruins.
Suddenly he’s wealthy.
But don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold
your own myth, without complicated explanation, so everyone will understand the passage,
We have opened you.
Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy and tired. Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you’ve grown,
lifting.

Click the links below to find out more:
The Orange Zone - A 30 Day Practice - YouTube Playlist

Daily Inspirational Quotes for 30 Day Meditation

Blog Post: What is the Orange Zone?

4/11/2020

Day 19: Breath- Our Instant Medicine

Live in the Orange Zone - Day 19

30 Days of Self Study, Meditation and Reflection

Today is day 19 of living in the Orange Zone.

Let's start off this particular session with breathing.

Take a long inhale. And a longer exhale. Breathe through the nose in. And out.

When Iteach breath, I go in, all the way up through the body, top their head and out, exhale exhale exhale.

How do you feel?

You feel calm, relaxed, at ease. I have been teaching yoga for 25 years and in the field of psychology for 35 years. I have helped people with anxiety, depression, people that have trouble sleeping at night, digestive issues with different breath techniques.

There are breath techniques to help us raise our energy. Breath techniques to help us calm down. Breath techniques to get us ready for a performance.

There are as many breath techniques as there are songs in the world with just four notes:

Inhale
Exhale
Inhale-hold
Exhale-hold

There're so many different ways that we can change our own body's chemistry, physiologically, and also our thinking bodies, and our feeling bodies, and our gut bodies, just by the way that we breathe.
It is something we do automatically. It's part of our autonomic nervous system. So when we're anxious or we're stressed or we're excited or being chased by a tiger, we breathe with our mouth and we breathe short.

We need to. It fires us up. It fires everything.

When we need to calm down and rest, we breathe slowly, long breath, long exhales through the nose. We can change up the techniques of breathing depending on what we want to accomplish, how we want to feel, what we want to do with our moods.

Today, I'd like to give you this particular technique. It’s very simple. If we're talking about creating a space in between for us to make better choices about how we want to show up for situations in our life, for the precious moments of our life, if we're talking about energy and wanting to make good decisions on how to spend our valuable energy, then breath is the key.

Let's begin today with being able to modulate from a sympathetic system where we're excited about something. It is what's happening in our modern cultural lobbies, where oftentimes just throughout the day anxious about work, money, our health, the news for watching. We're not modulating out of it to feel restful at night, to feel restful throughout the day, to be calm.

So the space in between is wonderful because it gives us an opportunity to first see that. And once we see that we're still in that anxious state, we can then do the simple breathing technique where we're going to inhale for four and exhale for five or six. Inhale for four and exhale.

Just by doing that, you feel peaceful and calm and it gives you that space to start to make decisions. Do I want to keep being upset about this? Do I want to be anxious? Do I want to be worried? You also move your body, not just your thinking self, but also your feeling self. It’s your body's medicine cabinet where you can dump some medicine into it that will help you be more calm and relaxed.

Join me today to just remember throughout your moments of your life, to just take this simple technique. It's like pulling a little pill out of your pocket and taking it. The great thing about it is the effects of this are instant.

Day 19 Inspiration
Today's inspiration comes from the poet Hafiz
Today, vote for love and happiness, let your breath work assist you.

When all the desires are distilled, you will cast just two votes. To love more and to be happy.

Click the links below to find out more:
The Orange Zone - A 30 Day Practice - YouTube Playlist

Daily Inspirational Quotes for 30 Day Meditation

Blog Post: What is the Orange Zone?

4/10/2020

Day 20: Create your Own Garden

Live in the Orange Zone - Day 20

30 Days of Self Study, Meditation and Reflection

Today's day, 20 of living in the Orange Zone.
I'm here with my mother, Patricia, who's prepared the inspiration for today.

Hello. I'm standing in front of this grandmother of a rosebush. We rent here. I don't own this rose bush. I'm a stewart, I'm a caretaker for the rosebush. We moved in last summer and I really didn't spend much time or energy taking care of this. When Howard passed in January I came out and pruned the rose bush to about waist high and it started doing better. Then Diana went to the Dana Point Nursery and got this magic potion called SuperThrive.

With that and a little fertilizer, the rosebush did right and thrive. Within days, it started blooming. Every week it has more and more blooms. I prune that every week by cutting the blooms and sharing them with the neighbors. You can see I have 20-25 blooms on here.

I also read this week a book called Dancing with Elephants and the rosebush was an inspiration to me. It fit in with what I'm learning from the book. There is a chapter in it called Mandela's Garden and I'd like to share a few paragraphs.

The paragraphs I'm sharing, actually is Richard Stengel from his book Mandela's Way. Mandela was in prison and he started the garden in 1970, he started the garden while in prison. In 1982, he was moved to another prison and he started a rooftop garden. He used oil drums filled with dirt. These are the words from that book, Mandela's Way:

“While others were playing games, Mandela was gardening.” Well, Mandela had very little time and very little energy, but he chose to start. “He shared produce with prisoners and guards. He quieted his mind. Surrounded by death and decay, Mandela found a place to touch beauty. Gardening was life affirming and creative. This was not a retreat, but a renewal. Mandela's gardening was not the hobby of a retired person. Rather, it was a powerful mindfulness training ground for one who would become a beacon of love, courage and renewal. In it, Mandela tells us you must find your own garden.”

I invite you to find your own garden. Be it a single plant or a huge vegetable garden or flower garden, whatever the case may be. Find your own nourishment as we go out into a changed world.

From my heart to your heart I send you blessings and love. Thank you.

Day 20 Inspiration
Today's inspiration comes fromT.S. Eliot
Stretch wide, take risks and dream big find live your possibility.

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far it is possible to go.

Click the links below to find out more:
The Orange Zone - A 30 Day Practice - YouTube Playlist

Daily Inspirational Quotes for 30 Day Meditation

Blog Post: What is the Orange Zone?

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