Sliced tomatoes from garden
Michael Jackson days
Color Your World: Red
Challenge for Growth Prompt #12: Honoring My Body
I honor my body
This week’s challenge is:
“Today I eat and drink food and beverages
that honor my body.”
Most of us know which foods and beverages are healthy for us to eat and drink. However, when fast food restaurants, sodas, desserts and junk snacks call out to us, we succumb, much like an alcoholic giving in to the call of alcohol.
As alcoholics in recovery know, unhealthy habits are changed one day at a time. This week, for 1, 2, 3 days or longer, eat and drink only food and beverages that honor your body. Treat your body as if it is a temple, a temple worthy of great respect.
Sometime during the week, write a post about some aspect of this topic or about experiences you had when you focused on eating food that honors your body. Feel free to use whatever form you desire: i.e., prose, story, poem, photograph, etc. (If you don’t have a blog, please share your thoughts and experiences in the comment section below.)
General Prompt Information:
(Note: This will be the last Challenge for Growth prompt.)
Since it is easier to make behavioral changes if we focus on them one day at a time, each of the weekly challenges will start with “Today, I focus on…….” It will be up to you to decide how long you want to focus on a particular challenge— one, two, three days or even longer. At some point during the week, publish a post that relates in some way to the subject of the week.
Link your post back to this prompt post. If the pingback doesn’t work, then leave the link to your post in the comment section below. Be sure to include “Challenge for Growth Prompts” as one of your tags.
Throughout the week, I will publish the links for the posts that were created as the result of this prompt. I will also post the links from those who participated the previous week. That way they will be seen by anyone who comes to this page.
This week’s contributors to: Honoring My Body
Challenge for growth prompt/honor my body- Annette’s Place
Physical Education in the 1960’s- Living, Learning and Letting Go
E is for Eating- Traces of the Soul
How about you?
Last week’s contributors to: Overcoming Resistance
A Little Bit of Clarity- Where Love Meets War
Dealing with My Resistance- The Seeker’s Dungeon
Challenge for growth prompt/resistance- Annette’s Place
Wordless Wednesday
Utterly Amazing
To say I am amazed by this video would be a major understatement. I had no idea that this was possible.
Laughing with God
My favorite joke is- Question: Do you know how to make God laugh? Answer: Tell him your plans for your life. I believe I gave God the chance to laugh last week.
My story actually begins early last December. At that time I started writing a post for The Seeker’s Dungeon, a post about my resistance to doing a spiritual practice that Amma, my spiritual teacher, asks us to do every day. That practice is to chant the Sri Lalita Sahasranama, a sacred Hindu text that consists of 1000 names of the Divine Mother, the female part of God. Amma says that chanting that text will benefit both the person chanting it and the world. Because of some past experiences, I have no doubt that it would be beneficial for me to follow Amma’s direction, but I still don’t do it.
I worked on writing the post, while attempting to overcome my resistance at the same time. I soon became very frustrated. Part of my frustration was because I wanted to end the post having happily vanquished my resistance. I saw no such ending in sight. After years of reinforcement, my resistance was solidly mired. The second week in March, I finally accepted the fact that the post was going to end with me as fully entrenched in my resistance as when I started it. I published “Dealing with My Resistance” in The Seeker’s Dungeon on March 11.
About the same time, I received an email from my spiritual group in Seattle saying that during our weekly meeting on April 9, we would be chanting the Sri Lalita Sahasranama not just once, but three times. Since each round would take 45 minutes, I believed we would not be singing any bhajans (devotional songs), which is my favorite part of the gathering. My immediate internal response was “I’m not going.”
Following hot on the heels of this new opportunity for resistance, came the due date for the weekly Challenge for Growth prompt I offer to the blogging community. It occurred to me that “resistance” would make a good topic as I knew I wasn’t the only person with this issue. What might other bloggers write on the subject? I decided the challenge for the week would be for participants to do something they were resistant to doing. I posted the new prompt on March 16.
On March 17, I started thinking about what my response to the prompt would be. All of a sudden the answer was clear. Even though the April 9th Sri Lalita Sahasranama chanting was more than three weeks away, it felt right for me to respond to the prompt by declaring my commitment to attend.
As I thought about my decision, I imagined God laughing. I fancied that I had been a pawn in a game of chess and had been outmaneuvered by a force much bigger than myself. What could I do but join the laughter, and appreciate the synchronicity of all that had occurred.
Barring something happening that is out of my control, I know where I will be at 3 p.m. on April 9!
Written for Challenge for Growth Prompt #11: Overcoming Resistance
Weekly Photo Challenge: Dance
This week’s Weekly Photo Challenge: Dance brought two set’s of photographs to mind.
I took the first set in February, when I went on a nature walk at Loon Lake in British Columbia. The photos are of a downed tree. It seemed to me that one of pictures made it look like the trunk was spinning, as in a whirling dervish.
The second set was from last December when I was in India watching a storm approaching. It was “ready to rumble.”
Cigarette Butt Pickup!
Last Saturday, on a cold, windy, wet day, some members of the Pacific Northwest Litter Project held a cigarette butt pick-up work party in the International District of Seattle.
Cigarette butts are the most common form of litter in the world and they are more toxic than you might think. The filters are NOT made of cotton, they are made of cellulose acetate tow and they can take decades to degrade. Investigators in a San Diego State University study once discovered that if you put fathead minnows and a single cigarette butt in a liter of water, half of the fish will die.
We pick up the butts to keep them out of landfills, waterways, the stomachs of animals and birds, and away from plants and children. The butts are sent to TerraCycle where they are turned into plastic pallets. Since the summer of 2011, we have picked up almost 300,000 butts!
As the result of last Saturday’s two hour work party, 23 pounds of cigarette butts are on their way to TerraCycle.
The Pacific Northwest Litter Project is part of GreenFriends, the environmental arm of Amma’s Embracing the World.
On the Road with Sreejit
My son Sreejit has been working in the kitchen on Amma’s South Kerala and North India tours. Most of the pictures below are of Sreejit’s kitchen friends. As you look at them, consider that the temperatures in these cities range between 90 and 100 degrees!
All of the pictures are from Sreejit’s Facebook page.
The YouShare Project
One morning during my last trip to Amritapuri, India, I woke up to find this notification on my blog:
Dear Karuna,
My name is Ashlee. I’m co-founder of the YouShare Project, with the mission to connect people around the world through true, personal stories. I recently stumbled across your blog and read the above post entitled “Tearing at the Fabric of Racism.” It’s honest, beautifully written, and incredibly compelling. I think it would make a wonderful YouShare, because it offers a personal glimpse into a time that younger generations only hear about and usually through the lens of third party history books and documentaries. It’s always important to look back in time as a means for moving forward, and I think your story is especially important in today’s racially tense climate.
If this sounds interesting to you, I would love to email you directly with more information and formally invite you to share your story with the project. You have my email address and website. I hope to hear from you soon.
Best,
Ashlee
http://www.youshareproject.com
ashlee@youshareproject.com
I was intrigued by Ashlee’s request and opened her website. I learned that the project was started by Nick and Ashlee Blewett who believe that “exploring different perspectives—and embracing our commonalities as well as our differences—is the only way for humanity to reach our full potential.”
This is their vision for the YouShare Project:
“To create a more conscious and thoughtful global society—by publishing personal stories from people around the world.”
“Each of us has an individual story, our own personal narrative of events and experiences that shape our personalities, our opinions and biases, the way we dress and act, and the customs and traditions in which we take part. Stepping outside of our personal bubbles to explore different perspectives and engage in meaningful dialogue enriches our lives and cultivates a more conscious and thoughtful society.”
I read through many of the stories on the blog and found them to be very inspiring. I was also impressed by the wide variety of topics.
I was delighted to share my Tearing at the Fabric of Racism post with them and have enjoyed reading many of their posts since then. I hope some of you decide to check out their project. And while you are at it, consider submitting one of your own life stories!
Thank you Nick and Ashlee for providing such an important service to the world.
Challenges for Growth Prompt #11: Overcoming Resistance
Overcoming Resistance
This week’s challenge is:
“Today I do something I’ve been resisting.”
A co-therapist I used to work with often told clients that it may take 75% of the time one is in therapy to do 25% of the work that needs to be done. The remaining work is likely to be completed much faster. I also remember hearing Amma, my spiritual teacher, say that we ask her to clean us up, but then we won’t hold still for the bath. The common factor in these two circumstances is resistance.
Resistance isn’t all bad. It would be unhealthy to walk into a new situation and turn ourselves over to the whim of other people. Blind faith can be dangerous. It also takes time to determine a correct course of action. However, when we know that there are changes we need to make, holding on to resistance often results in us holding on to, or creating, pain for ourselves. It may also stifle our growth.
This week, for 1, 2, 3 days or longer do something you’ve been resisting doing.
Sometime during the week, write a post about some aspect of this topic or about experiences you had when you focused on overcoming something you’ve been resisting. Feel free to use whatever form you desire: i.e., prose, story, poem, photograph, etc. (If you don’t have a blog, please share your thoughts and experiences in the comment section below.)
General Prompt Information:
New prompts will be posted at 5 a.m. (PST) every Wednesday.
Since it is easier to make behavioral changes if we focus on them one day at a time, each of the weekly challenges will start with “Today, I focus on…….” It will be up to you to decide how long you want to focus on a particular challenge— one, two, three days or even longer. At some point during the week, publish a post that relates in some way to the subject of the week.
Link your post back to this prompt post. If the pingback doesn’t work, then leave the link to your post in the comment section below. Be sure to include “Challenge for Growth Prompts” as one of your tags.
Throughout the week, I will publish the links for the posts that were created as the result of this prompt. I will also post the links from those who participated the previous week. That way they will be seen by anyone who comes to this page.
This week’s contributors to: Overcoming Resistance
A Little Bit of Clarity- Where Love Meets War
Dealing with My Resistance- The Seeker’s Dungeon
Challenge for growth prompt/resistance- Annette’s Place
Laughing with God- Living, Learning and Letting Go
How about you?
Last week’s contributors to: Preventing Food Waste
Challenge for growth/food waste- Annette’s Place
Food Waste: More Information to Ponder- Living, Learning and Letting Go
Living, Learning and Letting Go 