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• GINGER'S UNIQUE METHODS FOR HOLISTIC HEALING
• HOW TO DO LESS AND HAVE MORE
• FINDING (AND KEEPING) PEACE IN YOUR LIFE
• REDUCING "BUSYNESS" WHILE STAYING PRODUCTIVE
• FINDING THE MYSTERIOUS BALANCE BETWEEN WORK AND FAMILY TIME
  

Guts & Glory: More Than Surviving

“I don’t want to survive, I want to live.” Wall-E  

Such a simple statement from the futuristic children’s movie Wall-E, but its meaning carries seismic paradigm shifting consequence. Survivors, at some point in the very midst of their crisis seizing body, mind, and spirit decide…they are not going to fight, flee, or freeze. No, survivors will tell you at some point, they decide they will not give in to instinctual, autonomic, involuntary reaction. Survivors will tell you they want to do more than survive, they want to live.

“It is not the situation that matters, but how you react to it”. Epictetus

In the midst of mortal danger, or even repeated mundane daily stressors (which over time can cause as much damage or even more that one incidence of mortal danger), we have a golden opportunity for glory. 

With each daily stressor (or if you are THAT person experiencing mortal danger or threat) we have a decision to make, which will change our lives. Although sometimes we do not think or accept that suffering through life is good, I believe it is. Suffering allows us to learn and if not mortal, gives us a second chance to make the right decision. Making the right decision determines whether we will be “bitter or better”, and whether we will stand or fall. Adversity and struggle really ought to be our best friend, our greatest teacher. 

The question is this: will we allow ourselves to be dictated by the world’s definition of success or failure, or will we seek success in a new light? This light, which some call enlightenment, allows you to forever refute the world’s definition of success, and instead embrace an eternal definition of success.

Much of our fear and worry comes from caving in to seeking approval and expectation from others. It also comes from thinking that this “world” is all that will ever exist for us. This type of thinking creates a fear-based poverty mentality where a person may act out of character and good reason because they are making decisions based on fear of loss, poverty, or death. However, who is defining or telling us that loss, poverty, or death are “bad” things? The world tells us that loss, poverty, or death are bad. Those with what I’ll call “Eternal Wealth Philosophy”, make the decision and choice to not succumb to the world’s definition of “wealth vs. poverty, success vs. failure, or pleasure vs. pain”. Those people hold a belief that is dear and sacred to them. They believe that they are in no position to “judge” pleasure from pain or success from failure but instead they live by faith that in all things they endure – ultimate eternal wealth will come.

We can take this a step further and say that once the survivor has made the choice to endure and overcome, staying full of expectant hope and refusing to be confined by the finite world’s view of success, they can choose to help others who have similarly suffered. This is called the golden rule or the rule of karma and dharma, do unto others as you would be done unto and act for the sake of action’s sake, not just to reap the reward of the action. 

We should pursue, with great compassion and love, those activities which ultimately “build up”, instead of “tear down” relationships. I believe the greatest act of resilience is to love others, which leads others toward a life of expectant hope and demonstrates that eternal wealth is a birthright and exists through love and its actions. 

I believe all things work toward a common good for all who believe in a life of eternal wealth. It becomes easier to shed “poverty and fear” based thinking when we have something to look forward to beyond this life. It also becomes easier to shed doom and gloom thinking when we realize what we suffer through can ultimately help another person survive.

What also makes survivors resilient is their exercise of choice (either knowingly or unknowingly). By choice, they overcome. And each time they undergo adversity and survive, they become stronger and draw on faith from past experience, as well as from being supported by others who have suffered similarly they will again survive.

In many cases, belief in a Higher power is where people derive that core "faith,” because they believe there is a cloud of witnesses who have gone before them who have survived similar ordeals and are surrounding them with support. Those people also draw on faith because they believe nothing is left to chance and that everything happens for a reason and can work for the good of all.

John Donne' said, "No man is an island...do not think for whom the bell tolls, the bell tolls for thee."

As a result, our life experiences, our “surviving”, is never in vain. We can always use our situations of survival to aid and assist others. Ultimately, our pain can be our best teacher. We can further harness lessons, and be of help to ourselves, by helping others through their similar pain and suffering - by sharing in the human condition. Someone else's pain becomes our pain. Someone else's joy then becomes our joy.

Martin Luther King, Jr. penned from an Alabama jail, "We are all interconnected...I cannot become what I am supposed to become until you become what you are supposed to become...."

Learning the lesson of using pain as our teacher to help ourselves and others can ultimately be what empowers us and others to choose to survive, and overcome. By your suffering, you can save two lives – someone else’s and your own.

Sighs of Relief

There is a distinct difference in attitudes at our house when my husband and I take our boys and stay in our cabin, deep and high in the mountains of NC. A slight fraction of the size of our full time home, where we run our family, our business, and our technologically laden lives, the mountain retreat is a place where we early on decided there will be no invited technology or fussiness. This means no movie watching, tv's, computers, internet, or even phones. We are always in a constant state of stocking the place with books for kids and us adults, and we have our favorite family photos for art, and plenty of music for therapy. We do have our cell phones in case of emergency only - we never use them for chatting. Like my grandfather always said, phones are not for entertainment. Say what you need to say and get off of it (phone). I have always stuck to that informal rule.

Our house sits on a ridge overlooking the Blue Ridge mountains, and although the house is ultilitarian, practical, and homely, the view is excessively majestic.

Funny enough, in our humble abode high above the clouds, is where we feel most grounded. Without the influence of the world, and our email - our family operates in greatest harmony. We spend time communicating more fully, working harder (there is wood to be chopped to stay warm, for example), and leaving a smaller carbon footprint. When we pull back from the fast paced lifestyle we deliberately inject ourselves into every day - we realize how unimportant our daily pursuits are compared to the eternity of our souls.

It begs to ask the question - if we are most content in a house 75% smaller, if we are more family focused, in harmony with nature, with the earth, with others around us (heck, we know all our neighbors in the mountains!) - then what good is staying on the fast track?
As my husband wrote to me today, and as so many wise people and ancient spiritual texts will agree, we know how to recognize contentment through enduring adversity. In other words, we have to mire through the "bad" to know how to recognize and enjoy the "good".

We all have the opportunity to enact radical change in the world by making careful decisions about our own individual life. As I race forward through this workweek and enter into a nonstop work filled weekend, only interrupted by the thousands of miles I must fly to get there; my husband and children will be entering into the simplistic enigma of a more monastic type life. I wonder how we will interact when they return from their retreat weekend and the auto-adjustment of priorities that it provides, while I return from a fast paced 7 day work week, having flown thousands of miles after giving a 16 hour lecture over 2 days in a captivating super stimulated big city.

I would like to say that I should be grateful that I have work, that we are blessed to have a mountain retreat, and that I do not have the right to complain about anything. This is true - but the heart of the question still exists - the question we must all ask ourselves. Are we living the best lifestyle that we can, in harmony with the earth and others, are we over-consuming and under-appreciating, are we spending time doing what we should be doing, or what we think we should be doing, are we wasting time trying to please others, or are we working toward a greater good?

A close childhood friend of mine recently found me online and reconnected with me. Surprised as I was, I was grateful for this reconnection, as I always have wondered what happened to him through the years. I learned that in these decades that have passed, he has now come full circle (like so many of us). He is a minister and missionary. If you can think back to some of your childhood friends, you would probably be as shocked as I was to learn this about him. I was thrilled. Thrilled for him and for his journey. This weekend as I jet off to my urban work and as my husband travels into serenity, my long lost childhood friend now minister will be traveling to a remote town to give a week of his life helping Native American Indians rebuild their community. He is a missionary, and when I or anyone else hears of someone doing work like this - they breathe a sigh of relief. Ahh, we collectively say, here is the man or woman who is fighting the Good Fight, doing Good Work, and not for his own gain.

So I realize that what I am really wanting for me and my family - heck, for the whole world - is not so much a "permanent mountain retreat lifestyle" but a permanent attitude adjustment. An attitude of gratitude, that no matter what size my house is, or if I am covered up with work or out of work, whether I am working for a paycheck or working for free, whether I get to take a vacation or not, I will be content. We will all recognize that at any time, we have the control to relinquish micro-control over our lives and enjoy the view (no matter what the view is).

We can breathe a sigh of relief.

*a view from our mountain cabin, 2005