Here I am, just letting you know …
- Image courtesy of Cutest Paw
♥
Muchaluva,
Stace.
♡ I have a personal chauffeur. Not many out there have that kind of luxury. My family and I have also decided not to waste my energy driving on the road to work every day. For the past 3 months, people have been wondering why I would rather drive by myself than get driven.
Aside from being a control freak, driving amidst Jakarta’s traffic never fails to remind me just how patient we all need to be in these changing times. Most of the time, we just need to slow down and take notice who are the ones really needing the luxuries we possess and give away those we carry around in excess. Only by slowing down can we realize for ourselves that all of us are mere human beings, and the crippled person outside your car window is no different from you after all.
As for my decision to let go and get driven, I was propelled when I received a message mid-week that basically said I, like everyone else, am no longer allowed to have the convenient parking spots like I always do. Thankfully, I will be saving my monthly parking fee from now on and have a chauffeur who drops me off and picks me up whenever I wish. This blessing teaches me to treasure how much physical and mental energy I will be saving from now on in order to produce better results while at work.
♡ I have just enough time to do God’s will. I think I’ve mentioned this a couple of times before, but it’s always wise to refrain yourself from trying to do it all. It’s an energy-draining habit to keep up being a people-pleaser, and let’s face it – it’s humanly impossible to do everything. The only way to get around achieving anything at all is to focus on doing one thing at a time instead of being the jack of all trades.
The greatest time management tool ever invented is the two middle letters in the alphabet: N-O. The term is positive because it allows me to simplify my schedule and stay focused at any given time. I believe God does not give me anything I can’t handle, much less anything that might exhaust me out to the point that it can lead to permanent damage on my health, a natural blessing He has given every one of us.
♡ I am acknowledged in the workplace. I must have done something right, haven’t I? Whatever it is, I am thankful to be recognized so, and becoming smarter at work (I’m already working very hard) shall be the least I can do to pay back that gratuity.
♡ My dream to have a dog. Or a puppy. Like this hiccuping fella. It’s gonna come true guys. That ‘one day’ is already scheduled on my calendar.
♡ Family hug: My mother is going to meet my eldest brother. I’m just happy that for the first time in at least 3 years, they’re finally going to meet. I’ve met him last year when he came to visit San Francisco, and God, he’s become so thin I knew my mother’s going to freak out.
Mom’s boarded on an Alaskan cruise right now, as well as a trip around Canada. Then she’ll be stopping by the States to visit him. Of course it’d be more awesome if my dad, my second brother, and I are there too with them. But I’m happy just knowing two of my family members are going to see each other.
My mother asked me whether I have something she can pass on to my big bro. Two words, bro, two words (and this message probably applies to everyone else’s lives too): Hold steadfast.
♥
Muchaluva,
Stace.
When I was small, maybe seven or eight, I noticed some crinkled leather boots in my mother’s closet, some I knew I had never seen her wear. She told me they were for horseback riding, and showed me some funny-shaped pants. “They’re called jodhpurs,” she said, and spelled it for me. She said she’d ridden when she was in college. She had taken archery, too. She had planned to major in journalism so she could meet with world leaders, and she had interviewed the university president for the school newspaper. She had taken Spanish, and sometimes spoke phrases of it around the house: “You’re loco in la cabeza,” she would say to my father, and she had taught me to count from uno to diez. She also knew another language: shorthand. Her mother had made her take it because it was practical and my mother had use it when she worked as a secretary at the truck line. She wrote her Christmas list in shorthand – and anything else she didn’t want me or my father to read, like her diary. It was a little red leather book with gilt-edged pages, and I was most intrigued by its little gold lock. As I remember it, my mother showed it to me, and maybe even read some passages to me. Looking over her shoulder I could see that some parts were in shorthand. When I asked what they said she just laughed and turned the page.
My mother seemed to treat the diary – and the boots and jodhpurs, the glamorous pictures of herself that she had sent to my father overseas, her becoming a famous journalist – as relics of a distant past that no longer had much to do with her. she had left them all behind for life with my father, and me, and eventually my two brother. I love my mother, and thought she was beautiful. I was grateful for the sort of mother she was – she had milk cookies waiting when I came home from school, packed my lunch box each morning. every holiday was fill of treats and surprises: a present by my plate on Valentine’s Day, eggs hidden all over the house on easter morning, Kool-Aid in my thermos on my birthday. Yet at the same time that I basked in the attention my mother lavished o me, I was haunted by the image of the person who seemed to have disappeared around the corner just before I arrived.
In anticipation of Miranda Kerr’s second book, Empower Yourself, I’m actively seeking the best practices to cultivate compassion and contentment.
I often break down in ways that most people who know me in real life would never imagine. Unless given work to do, fulfilling its tangible result, and going the extra miles, I feel useless most of the time.
“You haven’t done enough,” the voice curtails as I edit my writing pieces. “You can do better than that. You should’ve done that differently. Why can’t you be perfect?” Well, I am not God, for one, and two, I am merely a human being. It’s this persisting inadequacy I often succumb to that constant self-criticism ensues, which is natural because I hold that an excellent writer is someone who’s simultaneously a good listener, a fair editor, and a just reporter.
So often I, without realizing it, have one way or another been conditioned to reduce myself to believing in the illusion that I am powerless, when the root of the problem is precisely this underlying pattern of negative thinking that blinds me from the fact that every thought that gets digested through my head, as well as those that merely passed without my analysis, is all within my power.
Clearly, at the heart of the problem is the problem of the heart.
In honor of one of Miranda’s many influencers, I want to share Deepak Chopra’s practical approach to cultivating self-compassion in life, which is one surefire way I’ve tried and tested to allow myself to feel empowered.
The mind-body guru, who recently co-authored with Harvard University neurologist Rudolph E. Tanzi on Super Brain: Unleash The Explosive Power Of Your Mind, asserts that there are five fundamental practices we can all exercise regularly to set our minds free from perceived limitations and preventing them from discouraging our self-esteem, as he has written in the February 2013 issue of Psychologies magazine:
1. INCREASE SELF-AWARENESS
I call this practice a “What would Jesus do?” moment.
Every time you to take yourself out of any context, whether from your environment or from other individuals when you’re in a group, you are increasing your capacity to recognize yourself as a separate entity, utilizing the power of observation without judgment, opening your eyes to neutral grounds in the situation you’re in, and gaining a whole new level of understanding of your own emotions, as well as your responses to different situations.
Increasing self-awareness is a practice that forces you to recognize that you are always responsible for your actions. As you increasingly perceive yourself independent of your subjective experiences, you will also conceive the quiet power to redirect your immediate thoughts and feelings to achieve desired results. In my case, it is turning self-criticism into a constructive one.
2. SELF-REFLECTION
Chopra stated that both Tanzi and him have laid the groundwork of their book under the principle that “you are not your brain – you are the user of your brain.”
On a day-to-day basis, the stream of thoughts that go through your brain requires some serious filtering, lest the incessant stream runs your day and burns you out.
Instead, Chopra invites you to challenge every incoming thought and reflect upon it with the following questions: Why are you afraid of this? Is this true? What is this belief doing to me? Who would I be if I didn’t have this belief? What is the opposite of this experience?
3. MEDITATION
This is where you put on God’s giant spectacles and observe what’s really going on.
When self-awareness is about recognizing your thought patterns, meditation is all about silencing your head and hitting the pause button for a moment – be it a 10-minute period or a single second.
Thanks to my Alkitabku app, I receive a daily devotional of Bible verses to meditate upon. On days that I keep my mind wide open to let in insights related to the verse, or chant the words from the verse repeatedly as I run, it becomes easier over time for me to secretly pray for myself and for others in my daily life without the need to do a yoga pose or take a timeout and sit down in some quiet space. Wherever you are physically, meditation allows you to relax, focus on your breath, and say a prayer simultaneously.
4. CONSCIOUS CHOICE-MAKING
When you have conditioned yourself to think outside the box and become the objective observer of your daily life, you would start to see that, with time, it gets easier to stop yourself from reacting to unpleasant situations and divert your immediate negative thought-pattern as quick as the flip of a switch. You realize that there are a sea of options for you to act for and against, by which, you can choose to erase completely out of your system or, better yet, adopt as your second nature.
Why not learn a good habit and incorporate it as your default mode? As motivational speaker Jim Rohn once said: Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.
5. REALIZING THAT YOUR PERCEPTIONS OF THE WORLD ARE SHAPED BY YOURSELF AND YOUR BRAIN
In a perfect world, you are living in an environment that reinforces your strengths, and minimizes stressful conditions, and encourages personal growth.
But the truth remains that we cannot change anything but ourselves.
Chopra calls readers to remain aware and alert of the thoughts that knock on your head, as “most of us operate on autopilot, letting our brain lead us; we assume our brain is teaching us. The super brain, on the other hand, is what you create consciously, so you have more insight, intuition, creativity and choice.”
It’s a relief to be reminded that we all have the power to recognize, reflect, meditate, choose, and reshape every thought that enters our mind, and see how it all affects our treatment to ourselves and to others in our daily lives.
Now you tell me: What’s your take on feeling empowered?
♥
Muchaluva,
Stace.
Ever wonder what you can do to touch another’s life?
- Image courtesy of @awwclub
♥
Muchaluva,
Stace.