Your Well Being Tip of the Day


Focus on forgiveness. Forgiveness releases the past. It heals the pain so that you are free to dance and love again.

Delicious Raspberry & Apple Crisp

Filling:
6 cups apples, peeled and sliced
300 grams raspberries, unsweetened frozen (or 1 ½ cups fresh raspberries)
1/3 cup sugar or honey
2 Tbsp whole wheat or spelt flour
2 tsp cinnamon

Crumble:
1 cup quick cooking oats
¼ cup brown sugar or brown rice syrup
1 tsp cinnamon
¼ cup soft butter or cold-pressed walnut or safflower oil

Pre-heat oven to 350 F (180 C). Place the fruit in a large mixing bowl. In a separate bowl mix the sweetener, flour and cinnamon. Add to the fruit and mix in well. Place the fruit mixture in a large baking dish.

Using the same large bowl, mix together the crumble ingredients (oats, sweetener, cinnamon, and oil) using your fingers or two knives to mix thoroughly. Sprinkle over the fruit mixture.

Bake in the oven for 50-60 minutes. Serve warm or cold. Serves 6.

This yummy and nutritious dessert recipe comes from the National Best Seller by Sally Errey: Staying Alive: Cookbook for Cancer Free Living.




 

I Meant To Do My Work Today

I meant to do my work today,
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,
And a butterfly flitted across the field,
And all the leaves were calling me.
And the wind went sighing over the land,
Tossing the grasses to and fro,
And a rainbow held out its shining hand --
So what could I do but laugh and go?
... Richard Le Gallienne

The Only Difference between a Flower and a Weed

As I write this I'm on a bus returning to Vancouver from Seattle, where I joined my best friend for some fun, retail therapy and an evening with the incomparable Byron Katie. Byron Katie is the founder and master of The Work, a brilliantly simple yet powerful way to explore painful thoughts and exchange them for peaceful thoughts.

Katie is well known for her “Katie-isms”, otherwise known as a collection of simple and profound statements that cause us to pause and think ... is that true? One of my favourite Katie-isms goes like this: "The only difference between a flower and a weed is a judgment". When I first heard this it took me back to a time several years earlier.

One of my neighbours and I were standing in a corner of her garden admiring a tiny new tree that she'd planted a couple of days earlier. The soil below the tree was rich and black and it seemed clear to us that the tree held the promise of steady and beautiful growth over the coming years. We stood there smiling at the gift of Mother Nature. Then, suddenly something shifted. My friend had noticed a single small weed about a foot from the base of the tree. She frowned and said "oh, there’s a weed, I should take that out". I remained silent. Then she added "it seems a shame to take it out though, it’s so pretty". I agreed and asked her if she felt that the weed would harm the tree. She said "oh no, not at all". So I suggested that she could perhaps leave the weed right there. Well, I'll never forget the look on her face at that moment. Her eyes widened, she smiled widely and said "Exactly! Why take it out? It's so beautiful and I like it ... so I'm leaving it in!" And she did.

Somewhere over the course of her lifetime my friend had adopted the thought "weeds are bad and must go". I think most of us can relate to that thought – like so many others ideas we’ve internalized without questioning. Few of us were taught to question our thoughts. And yet we can start anytime by choosing any thought and asking "is that true?" Is that always true? For example, is it possible that weeds are good and must stay? That day in the garden provided us with one good example to support the thought "weeds are good and must stay". Perhaps sometimes it's good to let the weed stay and other times it might feel better to remove it. The point of Katie's work is to simply question the thoughts we have and choose the ones that we believe help us to feel better. We get to choose.

On that day, in that garden, my friend and I literally discovered the truth behind the Katie-ism "the only difference between a flower and a weed is a judgment". To learn more about Katie's process "The Work", visit her website ... there you can watch her do the work with a wide variety of people experiencing a wide variety of painful thoughts. You can also start the work online. And if you prefer to do the work face to face, you could book a session with me ... I've been gratefully using the work to help myself and my clients for years – what an immense gift!

Thanks for listening and in the words of Louise Hay, "life is good, all is well".

Love and blessings,
Lee

A Warm, Fuzzy Practice

Michael Neill is one of my favourite people! He’s an actor, life coach and creative genius extraordinaire. And, he’s funny to boot. Enjoy … Lee

In the early 1970's, a graduate student named Candace Pert discovered that every cell in our body contains what she called 'opiate receptors'. She found these receptors were particularly in tune with one special kind of chemical messenger called 'endogenous morphines', more commonly known as 'Endorphins'. Endorphins (or, as my six year old daughter calls them 'en-dolphins') are your body's natural opiates, the neurotransmitters that control pain and create pleasure. They are the bio-chemical source of that happy, glowing feeling that Claude Steiner calls 'the warm fuzzy'.

You get a natural endorphin release when you do physical exercise, make love, laugh a lot, and relax deeply. And not only does the presence of endorphins in your system make you feel better, but it can make you smarter and more capable as well. As Paul McKenna says in his new book Change Your Life in Seven Days:

Because endorphins are neuro-transmitters, they create more bonding in the brain, so every time you experience an endorphin release, they actually make you more intelligent. And every cell in your body has receptors for endorphins. How great a design feature is that? Not only can every cell in our body experience happiness, but the more often we choose to be happy, the more intelligent we become!

The best thing about understanding the phenomenal role of endorphins in our health, happiness, and well-being is that we don't have to wait for spontaneous releases of endorphins in order to experience their benefits - we can cultivate the endorphin response through practice. Here are two of the key elements to benefiting from the endorphin response in your day to day life...

1. Think a Happy Thought

"When the dog bites,
When the bee stings,
When I'm feelin' sad,
I simply remember my favorite things,
And little by little my heavy heart sings,
And suddenly I feel glad."

-Oscar Hammerstein II, from The Sound of Music

Marlon Brando and James Dean were among the first to become known as 'method actors'. Through his work with The Actor's Studio, Lee Strasberg taught actors to develop their emotional sense memory - that is, by vividly recalling a past emotional experience, they could recreate the emotions in their bodies now. While 'the method' is most often associated with recalling experiences of emotional distress, we can also use it to recreate positive emotions and release endorphins into our system.

Here's all you have to do:

• Think a happy thought
   
• Make the thought more and more vivid in your mind until you begin feeling the associated good feelings.

2. Feel your Feelings

"Our strength will continue if we allow ourselves the courage to feel scared, weak, and vulnerable."

-Melody Beattie

One of the oddest things I have learned in my quest for happiness is that I experience it most easily when I first allow myself to really feel my unhappiness. Rather than distracting myself from my discomfort or trying to 'fix' my sadness, anger, or fear, I simply close my eyes and focus directly on the feeling in my body. As I go deeper into the feeling, I find to my amazement that within as little as 30 seconds, the stuck feeling begins to dissolve into a gentle flow of endorphins.

This simple trick brings with it an incredible gift - when you feel your feelings instead of fearing them, you reconnect to your body's natural wisdom and experience new levels of guidance, freedom, and joy.

 Experiment:

1.  Take a few moments to scan your body with your mind. Notice that there are parts of your body that feel more relaxed than other parts. It may be that your head or your forehead feels more relaxed than your jaw. Maybe your jaw feels more relaxed than your shoulders or maybe your shoulders feel more relaxed than your chest. Maybe it's your chest that feels more relaxed than your stomach. Maybe your stomach feels more relaxed than the tops of your thighs, the tops of your legs. Maybe your thighs feel more relaxed than your calves. Maybe your calves feel more relaxed than your ankles or maybe it's the tips of your toes where you can really feel that feeling of tingle, really feel that feeling of relaxation, really feel that good feeling inside you.

2.  Continuing to be aware of your body, think a happy thought. Allow yourself to really indulge in the experience until you become aware of the fact that parts of your body feel good. You might have a really nice feeling in your tummy right now, or maybe you've got a really nice feeling in your hands. Maybe you've got a really nice tingle in your hands, or you've got a warm, fuzzy sensation in your heart. Find a part of your body that feels especially good and feels especially nice and hold that part of your body with your attention. It's feeling relaxed, feeling particularly good, feeling particularly nice.

3.  When you're feeling that warm, fuzzy feeling inside your body, begin to look around, keeping part of your attention on that good feeling inside you. If you notice the good feeling starts to go, close your eyes and just go back to the good feeling. When you've got that good, warm, fuzzy feeling back, you can open your eyes and start to look around again.

4. Now when you get comfortable looking around and holding that good feeling, then go ahead and stand up. Begin to walk around the space you are in, still keeping part of your attention on that good feeling.

5. Now when you get good at this, you get to go to the next step, which is to find some other people and interact with them. But again, part of your attention is staying with that good feeling in your body. If you notice the good feeling start to go while you interact with people, pull back just enough to get back to the warm fuzzy, wherever it is in your body. And then you're ready to engage again with other people.

What you'll find with practice is that you can begin to maintain that good feeling in your body whatever you do, whomever you're with, and wherever you are. Why, it's almost like being happy... :-)

Have fun, learn heaps, and think about this:

Happy people want what they want.
Unhappy people just want to be happy.

… From Michael Neil, The Genius Catalyst