When I was a little girl I heard it over and over again, “use your common sense.” And you know what? We did. We had and used common sense. How would you define common sense? Do you depend on your own life experience combined with what you’ve learned from outside resources? Or do you depend solely on the ‘experts’ or the latest ads on TV and in the magazines? Many of us have abdicated our own experience, trading it in for those ads or the opinions of others. What use to be called common sense has now become uncommon sense.

Here’s a partial list of the things my grandmother use to tell us:

   ◊ Eat your fruits and vegetables
   ◊ Pay attention
   ◊ Eat the brown stuff – bread,
      rice, grains
   ◊ Take your vitamins
   ◊ Drink water – you don’t need
      soda, it’s bad for your teeth
   ◊ Go outside and play!
   ◊ Sleep eight hours every night
   ◊ Be nice
   ◊ Poop every day
   ◊ Tell the truth
   ◊ Don’t drink coffee, it will stunt
      your growth (I haven’t seen  
      any studies proving this one
      yet J)
   ◊ Don’t eat too much sugar – it
      will give you sugar diabetes

Here’s a thought – when I was a little girl I don’t remember any children in our neighborhood or even our school that were obese; now it is an epidemic.

Today we see study after study proving the efficacy of the instructions our Grammies gave us as children. But we are also adding to the list based on the incredible amount of information we now have because of the internet and subsequent research and books. I’m going to add two more important tools to the Grammy list:

   ◊ Meditation
   ◊ Energy work in the form of
      touch therapy/acupuncture or
      movement (yoga, qi gong, tai
      chi)

You might be asking yourself what does this have to do with my wanting to change my job or learn a new skill. Wellness is fundamental to our ability to function in our lives, to engage in our society. When we decide to make a change in our lives, we want to have a good foundation and the energy to carry through with the process of the desired change. It’s possible that the change we are seeking is not what we truly want or not what is right for us, but because of our sense of wellbeing--or lack thereof--we seek the change to distract ourselves from simply taking  better care of ourselves.

Check in with yourself – do you hate your job because you lack energy, don’t sleep at night, get through the day fueled by caffeine, have chronic constipation, don’t eat breakfast, and can’t remember the last time you exercised or even took a walk? It could be that the job would be tolerable if you were simply taking better care of yourself. And if the job is not tolerable then at the very least you want to be at your best while you are looking for that perfect job – the one you were meant to have.

Life at the beginning of the 21^st century is stressful, more so than at any other time in history due to a myriad of issues – it’s not likely to change in our lifetime. It’s up to us to find and create ways to have more balance in our lives. Energy work and meditation are valuable tools to counter the stressors in our lives. Add them to your own Grammy list and you’ll see immediate results.

Questions:


  What steps to I take to insure
  my own and my family’s
  wellbeing?


  What do I do that is fun?