Katy on Wellbeing

Holding Haiti in Our Hearts

When we see a disaster like the one befalling the people of Haiti, we feel terrible and we want to help.  Many readers will already have made a donation to help ease the suffering.  But it is easy to become numbed to the tragedy by the barrage of horrific images in the news and the sheer foreignness of the place.  I asked my good friend Kathleen Moynihan to write this post because she is not numb.  Kathleen has visited Haiti many times, and raised money for, worked alongside, and enjoyed the hospitality of the Haitian people.  She has volunteered to return for three months to help with the rebuilding, but in the meantime is watching with the rest of us as this catastrophe unfolds among people she knows and loves.

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The news and pictures from Haiti are heartbreaking!  The people of Haiti are truly the poorest of the poor and I cannot imagine how they will be able to survive and recover from this latest tragedy, the earthquake that has totally destroyed what little they had. 

The poverty in Haiti is overwhelming. . . worse than you can imagine.  There are so many people . . . people who often have no food to eat or clean water to drink. . .children who don’t have clothes to wear. . . and there is garbage everywhere. . . and no sanitation facilities.  I have seen commentators on TV talk about what will happen as time passes when the people don’t have running water, or electricity, or sewers and I think to myself, “but they didn’t have any of those before the earthquake”.

I have been to Haiti many times.  To see the extreme poverty firsthand brings a whole new reality to what it means to be poor and the challenges that the poor face every day, just to survive.  You see the faces of the children and their haunting eyes that give you a glimpse into what it is like to wonder if you will have food to eat or a house to sleep in.  Most children can only dream of going to school.  The smells of poverty are terrible and are something that you don’t easily forget.  I can only imagine how bad the smell has become with so many bodies lining the roads and trapped in the wreckage of the collapsed buildings.

The people of Haiti are the nicest and most faithful people and they are filled with hope.  Even in their own adversity they are always willing to help each other and share whatever they have.  They believe strongly in God and have an incredible amount of dignity.  You can see this in the images on TV.  There has been no rioting in Port au Prince and everyone is peaceful, even after  days without any aid following the earthquake.  They do their best to make do with what they have in a graceful way, and they continue to pray to God.

I always try to look at the good in everything and believe that things often happen for a reason, but it is hard to do that in this situation.  I can only hope that this tragedy has finally brought the world’s attention on the extreme poverty in Haiti.  I hope that the good people of this world will respond and help the poor of Haiti rebuild their country with the infrastructure we take for granted.  I hope the good people of this world will help the people of Haiti develop their agricultural resources and economy so they can have clean water to drink and food to eat ... and schools and jobs so they can become self-sufficient and don’t have to rely on aid to survive.

Please keep the people of Haiti in your thoughts and prayers and donate to organizations that will provide the aid that is needed.  If you don't know where to donate, I would recommend Food for the Poor.  They have a large presence in Haiti and will get food and water, as well as building supplies, to the people.  Food for the Poor will ensure that all your donations will get to the people who need it most.

Much love and many blessings,

Kathleen

 

Free Ebooks Galore!!

Books have always been essential to my wellbeing.  Perhaps it's surprising that I haven't blogged about them more.  But the flow of books in and out of my life is like the flow of air in and out of my lungs -- such a natural part of me that it's easy to take for granted until there is some sort of disruption.  My disruption arrived last week, in the form of a Sony Pocket Reader.  And here is the best part so far: FREE BOOKS!!! 

I knew that the Sony device gave access to free books, which could be found through Google Book Search.  But the reality of that was somewhat disappointing.  Overwhelming volume and tons of irrelevant crap to pick through en route to any interesting "public domain" book.  So imagine my delight when last night I found Many Books.  Fantastic site!!!  Extremely well organized (by author, title, genre, language, etc.), it also allows you to search by series, popular downloads, or recommendations.  Books are easily downloadable in 24 different formats to suit a mind-boggling variety of applications and devices.  Here you will find everything from the Bobbsey Twins to the Kama Sutra, from Rabindranath Tagore to Georgette Heyer.

For parents whose kids received electronic readers over the holidays, and are looking to populate them without taking out a second mortgage, I found many dearly beloved books from my childhood.  The Anne of Green Gables series.  The What Katy Did series.  Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Princess and Secret Garden.  Black Beauty. 

I've also been stocking up on Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Edith Wharton, and Arthur Conan Doyle.  Many Books' most popular downloads list includes The Art of War by Sun Tzu, The Art of Public Speaking by Dale Carnegie, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Alice in Wonderland, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button!  And I love that you can also find a list of the series they carry -- Sherlock Holmes, Scarlet Pimpernel, Tarzan .....

In short, I feel like I've just stumbled into Aladdin's Cave, or the Leonidas chocolate factory.  Thank you, thank you, thank you to Matthew McClintock who runs the site.  It makes me wonder what else is out there.  Are there other fantastic sites for free ebooks?  Well apparently so, and here's a list!

Any awesome sites you want to share?  Any book gems you have found?  To my surprise, the device itself is almost incidental -- the real fun is in the treasure hunt!!

 

Digesting our Experience

Yesterday was my first day back to "normal life" after an extended holiday period.  Though I was full of good ideas for how to make 2010 even more fabulous than the year before, the best I could do was go to the gym then spend the afternoon lying on my couch reading The Economist.  This morning, I sat poised to write my first blog post in months, but nothing would come.  I felt blocked.  Like a river clogged with branches and leaves.  The image was a perfect one, because it showed the solution as well as the problem.  I needed to begin dismantling the debris that was blocking the flow.  I needed to digest the backlog of recent experiences, to make room for new ones to come in.

Just as we digest our food, we must digest our life experience in order for it to move harmoniously through us, nourishing us then making way for more.  Otherwise it stagnates, taking up permanent, dulling residence in our bodies, closets, thought patterns and habits.  So how do we "digest" our experiences?  Through ACKNOWLEDGMENT.  Pleasure revolutionary Regena Thomashauer (aka Mama Gena) explains it like this:

"Acknowledgment works in a similar way to chewing and swallowing.  If you are eating dinner, you have to chew and swallow your mouthful before you can have another.  When you acknowledge, you consume, or chew and swallow, the wonderful bite you just received, and you are ready for the next one.  No chewing and swallowing, and there will be no next bite -- your mouth is only so big."

Though rarely described in these terms, practices for acknowledgment or digestion are found in many creative and spiritual traditions.  Here are a few that are simple, but deeply powerful:

1. Morning Pages.  This was the tool I used this morning.  Popularized by Julia Cameron in her Artists Way and subsequent books, this involves three 8-1/2 x 11" pages of long-hand writing each day, just spitting out whatever stuff comes to mind.  Yes, long-hand.  Yes, every morning.  And what comes to mind?  Scraps of your life: what you did yesterday; how you feel about something; a worry; a hope; an idea.  For lots more on morning pages, follow this link, then click on Download The Basic Tools PDF.

2. Bragging and Gratitude.  I learned these from Mama Gena.  Both provide a systematic way of reviewing and releasing your experience with appreciation.  Bragging is the practice of listing and sharing things that are going well for you, or that you have done that you are proud of.  E.g., I brag that after I crashed my car last week (yes, I did), I jumped on the train instead and visited my friends anyway.  I brag I signed up for some workshops that look interesting in Florida in February.  I brag I'm blogging again.  Gratitude is listing and sharing the things you are grateful for.  E.g., I am grateful I walked away unharmed from the crash, and they can fix my car.  I am grateful for all the friends I saw last week.  I am grateful for my family / friends / chiropractor, etc.  It's wonderful if you can share these practices daily with friends or family, or a like-minded community.  Or why not post regularly on GratitudeLog.com?

3. Vipassana Meditation.  In this practice, the meditator sits quietly and observes anything that arises -- bodily sensations, thoughts, emotions, etc. -- but does not engage with them.  She does not begin thinking about them, but instead simply notes and releases them, allowing them to float away.  And so on with the next thing that arises, and the next.  This type of meditation is meant to provide insight into the activities of our minds, and teach the experience of impermanence.  But the byproduct is that, when practiced over time, it uses the lightest of acknowledgments to clear our life experiences and give us glimpses of the great still realm beyond.

One thing that years of yoga has taught me is that our bodies quite literally hold emotions and experiences.  In any big, week-long yoga workshop, you will always see someone crying.  I've found myself in tears folded over in a forward bend, and hanging backwards in wheel.  What happens is that during the deep, systematic stretching of yoga, parts of our bodies that were holding experience open up and release them, with the accompanying surge of emotion.  Though it does not acknowledge experience intellectually like the practices above, yoga is very good at helping us digest and release it from our physical bodies.  Prolonged, steady exercise like walking, running, and swimming can have a similar effect.  The combination of movement, deep breathing, and a relaxed mind allow us to start letting go of the branches and leaves, the memories and emotions and logistics.  And this letting go, this digestion, opens us up once again to the fresh and the new.

How do you digest?

Why Diana Gabaldon Rocks

Tonight I went to hear Diana Gabaldon speak as part of her publicity tour for her newest book in the Outlander series, "An Echo In the Bone".  And while it's fresh in my mind, I must write about why she's so fabulous. 

But before I get to that ..... it's lucky she is/was so good, because the PR geniuses at McNally Robinson had staged the talk OUTSIDE.  TONIGHT.  Temperature in Toronto hovering around 2 degrees celsius.  Fifty minutes of sitting outside freezing our tails off when they have a huge store with a large restaurant area inside that could easily have been reorganized to accommodate the reading.  I mean, come on people.  It's more than an hour later, and my hands are still shaking.

But I digress.  And I've just poured a small dram of Lagavulin 16 to take the chill off.  So here's why she rocks:

3.  She's a terrific speaker.  A legacy, perhaps, of her years as a university professor.  Warm, funny, ribald, smart.  And she's a bloody good sport.  Standing there in the bitching cold, with a throat worn painfully hoarse from last week's flu and the speaking tour, cheerfully holding forth on everything from why women love men in kilts ("you can be up against the wall in three minutes"), to the current Lord Lovatt, head of the Fraser clan ("32, very handsome, and seven feet tall"), to her writing process ("no outline, no straight line, I write in pieces where I see things happening").

2. She's a great example of someone who had a perfectly good academic career in biology (dissertation topic: ‘Nest Site Selection in the Pinyon Jay, Gymnorhynus cyanocephalus’), but had always wanted to write a novel.  So at the age of 35, she decided to start one on her next birthday.  And she did.  And the result, eventually, was Outlander and a 3-book publishing contract.  I love it that she had the courage to imagine herself doing something completely different, and the tenacity to get on with it.  I also appreciate how she started with a basic "core competence" in research, and used it to bring extraordinary historical events, from the Jacobite rebellion to the American revolution, alive for her readers.

1.  She gave us Jamie Fraser.  Every woman who has read Outlander, never mind the entire series, has fallen completely in love with Jamie.  A man who, if among us today, would be sitting his kilted ass in jail with a book full of restraining orders.  But nevertheless the hero who has single-handedly done more for the romantic prospects of red haired guys, Scottish guys, and red haired Scottish guys than anyone else in history.  Plus, I am sure, he has contributed billions of dollars in revenue to the romance publishing and Scottish tourism industries.

If you want to hear more from Diana Gabaldon, here's a recent interview, and a link to her blog. 

If you are a woman who has not read this series (are there any?), run don't walk to your nearest bookstore and buy at least the first two books: Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber.  Then clear your calendar for the next two weeks and retire to your couch with a heap of chocolate and a box of Kleenex.

And if you are somebody who dreams of writing a novel, making a film, picking up a guitar .... give it a shot ....

Becoming a Portfolio Person

Sometimes an idea comes along that lodges in your imagination, that you recognize as speaking directly to some part of you.  It may lie dormant for years, before taking expression in your outward life.  Or it may take up residence deep in your psyche, becoming a strange attractor for certain experiences, or acting as a lens through which perceptions are filtered. 

For me, British management guru Charles Handy's prediction that more and more of us would become "portfolio people" was such an idea.  In his own words:

"If, rather than think of life as work and leisure, we think of it as a portfolio of activities - some of which we do for money, some for interest, some for pleasure, some for a cause - that way, we do not have to look for the occupation that miraculously combines job satisfaction, financial reward and pleasant friends all in one package. As with any portfolio we get different returns from different parts and if one fails the whole is not ruined.

"I am trying to make such a lifestyle respectable for career people. If somebody asks what you do, and you can reply in one sentence, you're a failure. You should need half an hour."  -- Charles Handy in Global Ideas Bank

I still remember the shiver of excitement I felt reading about these diversified portfolios of activities in the mid-1990s, in Handy's book The Age of Unreason.  I wanted the creative autonomy that this kind of life would provide, the license to pursue different interests in different directions for different reasons.  Yet shortly after that, I embarked on a virtually all-consuming career as a management consultant.

It is only now, more than a decade later, that I've found the confidence, courage, and financial stability to begin putting together a portfolio kind of life.  The initial pieces are starting to fall into place.  Some are purely frivolous and fun.  Others share my business and consulting experience in ways that benefit selected causes or people.  Still others flow from my interest in happiness and wellbeing.  Some are paid work; others are not.  All the pieces have creative elements, and all contribute in their weird little ways to what I imagine to be the highest good.

Applying the portfolio approach to one's life generally seems pretty low-risk.  But applying it to work can have both its benefits and its drawbacks.  

Benefits:

1. Allows you to do multiple interesting, worthwhile, and/or fun things at pretty much the same time
2. Places explicit value non-paid endeavors, including volunteer work and projects that are at an early stage of development
3. Enables you to create a "couture" life -- one that truly fits you -- and change elements in a flexible way as needs and circumstances evolve
4. Offers a high degree of personal freedom
5. Unusual juxtapositions of activities create new skills and opportunities -- just as they provide different perspectives and meaning in collage art

Drawbacks:

1. High degree of financial uncertainty -- no full-time paycheck, pension, or health benefits -- and also uncertainty with respect to time and schedule
2. May result in a level of scramble and busyness that is at odds with wellbeing
3. Unnecessarily complex if you don't actually have multiple interests you want to explore
4. Implies that you're always on the lookout for what might come next
5. It may indeed take half an hour to explain what you do, making you the scourge of cocktail parties

So all this to say that not everyone will want to be a portfolio person.  It probably works best for people who have a high personal and financial tolerance for uncertainty, and strongly value having freedom to pursue diverse interests.  I'd love to hear from others who are trying out the portfolio approach.  How long have you been doing it, and why?  What activities make up your portfolio?  What do you love about it, and what do you struggle with?