Yes, I realize it is still winter, but it has been such a rough winter. I’ve seen more snow in the last few months than I’ve seen in my entire life! I feel like I made the best of it, and actually learned how to relax during my enforced inactivity on those snowy weekends. But yesterday I heard one of my most favorite sounds ever: peepers!

I’m reading a great book on body-centered coaching, and it has caused me to become more attentive to my own body signals. We tend to ignore our body unless it signals us in very dramatic ways: Back aches, stiff necks, viruses, and worse. Then we usually react by resenting our body, filling it with medicine and trying to ‘get better’. So, I figured I would try to tune in to see what my body is telling me.
Signal #1 – stiff shoulders and neck. Hmmm…. What does “stiff neck” bring to mind? I looked it up in the Thesaurus and was unpleasantly surprised by the results:

Last weekend we had our second big snowstorm of the season. We rarely get snowstorms here, and even more rarely accumulate anything lasting more than a day or so. But these storms have been monsters, relatively speaking, and the snow has lingered, icing over and road-dirty, for days. It’s hard (and dangerous) to drive, my small dogs have a tough time walking on the deep, crusty snow, and I really miss seeing grass!

I was listening to Echart Tolle this morning, driving in to work. In talking about being in the present moment, he said that hope can quickly turn to fear: “Everything will turn out well” morphs into “but what if it doesn’t?” Being an optimist, this gave me pause. I do tend to expect everything to turn out well, and am always full of hope. I’ve always thought of hope as a good thing, something that keeps us going when things around us are dark. But, hope does pull us out of the present moment to think (obsess) about the future. And Tolle is right, at least in my case.

So much has been written about bringing abundance into your life, and it seems that most people think that means if they think about it hard enough, it will miraculously appear. But, although it does seem miraculous, it’s interesting how abundance tends to manifest. What I’ve found, when I start concentrating on abundance, is that I suddenly start getting opportunities or good ideas. Most of these entail work, some of them entail very hard work, but all of them are opportunities to bring abundance.

There’s a lot of hype about New Year’s Resolutions. People make them and break them, having good intentions to lose weight, or get a different job, or stop smoking. Some people rebel against setting such goals, saying that they’re hypocritical and useless. However, I’ve found taking time once a year to plan out a path to be a very powerful exercise.

I was listening to an Ekhart Tolle presentation while driving into work today, and he mentioned that nature truly comes into its own when appreciated by man. It brought to mind the old adage, “When a tree falls in the woods and no one is near, does it make a sound?” Of course, we know via the law of physics that it makes a sound, but the point is that the sound has no meaning unless it’s heard. And when walking in nature, it’s interesting to start paying attention to what you see.

Driving into work this morning a little earlier than usual, I was amazed at the sparse traffic at that time in the morning. It was so much easier driving into work than usual, without all those “idiots” that drive slowly in the left lane, and generally slow me down. Did I ever mention that I tend to drive fairly fast? It’s not like I’m in a hurry (usually), it’s more that I simply enjoy driving fast. And I feel that if you’re not going to drive over the speed limit, you need to stay out of the fast lane, out of the way of those of us who do drive over the speed limit.

I recently happened upon a website that I found very thought-provoking. Transformational Processing seems to encompass many of the fundamentals of coaching. It uses the following suppositions:
• Truth is relative
• Truth is simple
• A belief will prove what it assumes
• The map is not the territory
• The natural state is wholeness
• The person is creating her own reality
• A person is not her behavior
• A person is basically good
• Any part of a person is there for a good purpose
• The natural state of life is to have fun and learn

It’s finally over – voters have spoken, new officials are elected, and the country breathes a sigh of relief. Relief, not so much that there will be new people in power, but relief that we no longer have to put up with negative campaign ads. What has happened in our country that candidates feel that the only way to get elected is to smear the other guy?