It should be simple, remembering what matters today. We should be able at any moment to tune into what is important and not get distracted by what is temporary, irritating, or irrelevant. We should be able to read a book and apply its wisdom to our daily lives. We should be able to go to a workshop, have a transformational experience, and weave our new learnings into our daily lives simply and easily. It should be easy to remember what is important to us, but we all know it is not.
What happens to our good intentions?
After reading this new book or attending this terrific retreat or after listening to a fabulous tele-seminar, we make a resolution to change our lives for the better. We have learned activities, attitudes, behaviors, habits that we KNOW will bring us more freedom, joy, connection, and even success.
We all know we need to take action to change our lives, but even when we know better and have taken some steps to move our lives forward, we fall back into our old habits, and within a few days or a few weeks we are right back to living our lives in our old limiting patterns. Perhaps we have made a small shift toward a life that is more joyful, more meaningful, and more connected to what really matters to us, but for the most part, we are back to same ol’, same ol’.
How do we remember, how can I remember, what matters today?
This is a question I’ve been living with for the last twenty-seven years and I have come up with an answer and that answer is my WHAT MATTERS program.
Yahoo!
And how did I come up with this simple system, you may well ask? How did I consolidate all I have learned in the last twenty-seven years, making it simple and doable for anyone at any point in their journey?
I am the most creative when I have a specific audience and purpose in mind, and this specific audience came to me as a new client. She had a daunting list of challenges: ADD, PTSD, panic attacks, depression, meth addiction, sexual abuse — she had every excuse to be curled up in a fetal position sucking her thumb.
But she came to me to find more joy. She already had a team to support her, a psychiatrist and a therapist, but she wanted someone to catapult her out of her past and into a present and future free of anxiety, depression, poor boundaries, and hateful self talk.
As I held her in my heart and mind, asking the Universe how I might best support her Quest for Joy, a plan came to mind. I have been in recovery for twenty-seven years. Recovery is not sexy, there are no instant cures or any cures, but Recovery works. Every day you get up, put your feet on the ground, tell the truth, take responsibility, and absorb and exude gratitude. You do your work, reminding yourself that it is all about progress, not perfection.
You do the work. No magic cures. No magical thinking. You do the work and it works. It is messy. Some days you slip back into old, unloving habits, but every day in Recovery you get a clean slate. You own your own farts, clean up your messes, celebrate life, and take that the next step you are called to take.
The work of Recovery is hard to sell. It is easy to sell magical thinking –”Just imagine your weight is off and it is! just imagine a million dollars in your bank account and it will be there! It’s all up to you! Whatever happens to you is your fault. You caused it and you can cure it just by changing the way you think! Pay me a bunch of money and I will show you how easy it is!” This is a multi-billion dollar industry I’m talking about here.
There is enough truth in this to make this pitch very seductive. We do create much of our own reality by what we choose to focus on. Our imaginations are very powerful. Being able to imagine a positive future for yourself is a better predictor of college success than SAT scores. What we think does matter.
But what we do matters even more. Putting our intentions into action and sustaining that action in spite of defeats, set backs, doubts — this takes daily discipline and support. In short, a Recovery Program. So when my new client came to me, I applied what I knew about how I have crafted my childhood experiences from living in raging disfunction with a violent alcoholic father and a codependent, high school dropout mother — into a life with deep, honest relationships, first and foremost with a husband I adore and two adult children of whom I am inordinately proud.
I thrive on traveling all over the world with my message, my songs, and my puppets, inviting people of all ages and cultures to step out of their fear and into the lives they have been called to live. A comment I frequently hear is: “I can’t believe you got this group up on their feet singing and dancing!” Or “That boy has never written or volunteered to read his work, and you got him to write and be eager to share in one lesson!”
I took what I have learned through my own recovery and asked the questions: “How can I put this into a simple, easy to remember form? How can I take the practices I have used over the years that are proven to work and make it easy for people to weave Recovery habits into their daily lives? How can I help all of us remember what matters today?”
I asked the Question and I was given the Answer and that is the WHAT MATTERS TODAY Reboot Camp.
Yahoo!
I collected practices I use, arranged them in a meaningful acronym, and created a simple system to weave quick, effective, and fun habits to help people remember WHAT MATTERS. This is, if I must say so myself, brilliant!
Want more? Next week I will show you what I created. I’ll be at The Natural Singer workshop, so I’m getting my newsletter ready ahead of time. This weekly newsletter matters to me.