Well, it’s time to write the weekly aggregator article and I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out a way into the week’s topics. It’s been almost an hour and I have absolutely nothing to show for it. So, I decided to try a trick Ellie had mentioned (to me) several times in the past – free writing.
According to Wikipedia “Free writing (also stream-of-consciousness writing) is a writing technique in which a person writes continuously for a set period of time without regard to spelling, grammar, or topic.” Although I will defer to their superior knowledge of the issue, for me it was just a bitch session in print. (BTW, although free writing does not care about spelling or grammar, Word still keeps pointing out all my mistakes. So, I close my eyes and just type.)
Continue reading » Surfing the Wave of Grief While Coaching Thyself
Send us some metaphors for your life, your trials and tribulations, your joys and your passions.
In my last post I shared a reader’s description of grief over significant personal losses:
Think of my grief as a wave and I’m on a surfboard. I must watch that I don’t lose my balance and become engulfed by the water. Water has power and can drown me. But I don’t want to drown, so I will stay on top of the wave of grief and let it carry me to the shore where I will be safe and feel stable. This wave will crash and I will have survived. I will be stronger for having made it to shore unharmed. But I will never forget the ride.
Besides touching my heart, our reader demonstrated how potent Metaphor can be as a tool for understanding and working through our personal challenges. Jose Ortega y Gasset, a prolific Spanish philosopher says this about metaphor: “[It] is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its [power] verges on magic… a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of his creatures when he made him.”
Continue reading » You Too, Can Make Metaphor Magic
For the last two weeks we’ve been giving you ideas on how you can change your response to things that happen to you, thoughts that come into your head, bad moods, etc. The one thing we have neglected to give you is a methodology for learning these new skills. The fact is that learning a new skill can be challenging and one of the reasons that people hesitate to try new things is that they don’t know how to coach themselves.
When I was a kid, I never really participated in sports. I was the oldest and until my younger siblings came along, my parents thought that sports were an unnecessary complication of their lives. I went to Catholic school in Illinois. This means that there was no gym period – because we poor Catholics didn’t have a gym and those Illinois winters are brutal. Also, having gone to school in the Pleistocene period, there was no law requiring that we be exposed to physical education of any sort, thus the beginning of “secretary spread” in first grade.
Continue reading » Coach Thyself
Often we experience personal losses (big or small) as if they were physical blows to our psyches, they wobble our equilibrium and give us pause – and enduring this period of grieving is a very personal and unsettling experience. How we bounce back is also a very personal thing. Here’s a glimpse into one person’s encounter with grief and relief.
After reading my post In a Pickle a few weeks ago, one of our readers (who prefers to remain anonymous) wrote me an eloquent email describing their own A-B-C-D-E. S/he wrote (bolding by Ellie):
I just wanted you to know that your blog is helping someone else through some grief. While my grief is different than yours, I feel we share some similar pain in the process of healing. Your ABCs inspired me to write my own. It really helped me to focus on moving on, but at the same time [I could] allow the grief to be there. Grief is useful and temporary, but I need help reminding myself on that aspect.
But what blew me away was the “D” – Distract and Dispute passage:
Continue reading » Riding the Wave of Grief
We are wonderfully made. We were created to survive in a hostile environment and are designed for quick reactions to new or unfamiliar situations. These reactions take place in our limbic system. This is the instinctual part of our brain and it serves us well for knowing when things aren’t right and we may be in danger.
In My Stroke of Insight , Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor explains that physiologically speaking, reactions by this part of our brain occur very quickly. What this means is that we perceive something, our limbic system changes our physiology to deal with the perceived situation, flooding our system with the appropriate chemicals, and just as quickly, our body drains those chemicals from the system. The entire cycle takes 90 seconds.
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