My Light Side

One of the marvelous things I’ve noticed about my life these days is an awareness of the approach of darker moods.  I’ll have periods of light and joy that can last for days or weeks, followed by a more contracted period during which I feel heavy and burdened, moody and even haunted.  The marvelous thing, the true miracle, is that I’m actually aware of the dark period and cognizant that it, too, shall pass.

 Better still, the dark periods are lasting a shorter and shorter period of time.

 (And to think, this is the stuff I used to take prescribed medication for – "correcting" or avoiding the normal cycles of my life!)

 I am SO GRATEFUL.

 I think that I am very fortunate – blessed – to be on the life path I have created.  So how are some of the ways I help to ensure that my blessed life path stays (more or less) even keeled?

 Well:

•  Each day I do a form of yoga for an hour.  I say “form of yoga” because – to date – I have no formal training and merely utilize my own intuition to do “poses” that my body enjoys, desires, or needs.  In addition to “yoga” I also throw in some push-ups and crunches.
• When I remember to – or when I am stressed that I am driven to – I meditate.  I practice Transcendental Meditation because that is the method in which I was initiated (in the early 1970s).
• Though I don’t really pray, I do use affirmative thinking and shamanistic techniques to assert a fine reality (and/or to accept the reality I find myself blessed with on a given day).
• I try to remember that “bad things” don’t happen to me.  Rather, they are offered up to me by Spirit (God, Goddess et al.) as opportunities to learn.  Practice makes perfect. Okay, a LOT of practice (hopefully) will make perfect one day!
• For my diet, I rely on the Atkins/South Beach approach.  This is a good diet for me because I tend to be compulsive with sweets (e.g. I can’t eat one Pepperidge Farm cookie – I have to eat the entire box in one sitting!).  So if I cut out the carbs (noodles, potatoes, rice, pies, etc.) I do much better.  (And for those who are wondering, the cravings for those items actually go aware more or less completely after about two weeks into the diet.)
• I make a concerted effort to constantly practice staying focused on the joy of living.  I do this by staying aware (conscious) (hint: read the Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment and A New Earth: Awakening to Your Higher Purpose by Eckhart Tolle) and by watching the more upbeat movies and reading the more upbeat books.
•  I try not to watch the news or read the newspapers.  Like sugar, I have a tendency to over-indulge in the media circus.  I’m better off laying off the junk altogether.  (Plus it’s kind of fun in a wicked way to see all the chaos you missed during a one period away from the “news.”  People die, get thrown out of office, scandalize themselves and, what’s worse, this stuff gets dragged out day after day after day for human consumption.  I remember one time I found out the Pope had died, then died again (they only thought he had died the first time!).  When you step away from the “news” – you realize just how much madness it contains, how much negativity it reinforces, and how unimportant most of it truly is in the long run.
• Alcohol is a plant medicine that has a negative spin for me.  Though, in general, I'm not entirely opposed to imbibing once in a while, it tends to leave me feeling darker in mood and spirit than when I avoid it.  I'm not obsessed with its use or non-use, but I am extremely aware that it opens up portals to darker places in me.

I know that a lot of these items make me look and sound like a prude or just plain dull.  So be it.  I know that I’m not – and I also know that I lived a non-prudish, exciting life in my “past.”  Given the choice between the two, knowing what I know now, I’ll take prudish and dull anyway.

And so it is.

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