Where Do Broken Hearts Go

When your heart is broken, truly, devastatingly crushed, or even just tossed around, there is a physical pain that is very real.

It doesn't matter if it was a lover, a friend, a confidante or a child who did the breaking, the pain is still real.

It doesn't matter if the relationship was a flash, a season, a year, or years.

What matters most, is that you don't stop being open to new experiences.

A ceremony for healing broken hearts:

1. On a piece of paper, write down everything you feel about this heartbreak. Allow yourself to just babble from the heart. 

2. Fold up this paper and set aside. 

3. Collect up 1 or more items, photos, or reminders that have sentimental meaning related to this person. 

4. Light a candle and set an intention to release any residual feelings you have about this heartbreak. 

5. Say a mantra of releasing, repeat 9 times. 

6. Throw the items, and the paper into the fire. 

7. Let the candle burn until gone. (put in safe place)

8. Live your life. There's no better revenge for a broken heart than to move on and enjoy your life. 

How to manifest anything

I've spent the better part of the last 18 months creating a new reality for myself. It began a long, long time ago, but it didn't really pick up momentum until I started yoga teacher training a year ago January. This is when everything I had learned and experienced previously started to come into sharp focus.

I have been on this journey for as long as I can remember, but what I didn't understand then, that I understand now, is that until you create new patterns of behavior, you will generally respond to situations from your default settings, and my defaults needed to be reset.

If you Google "Manifest" you will likely find an entry from WikiHow on "How to Manifest Anything". It is bizarre for me how readily available this information is, yet how few people realize how simple changing your life can be. One of my teachers explained to me that you can read something a hundred times, but until you are ready to understand it, the knowledge will not take root in your mind. 

Over the course of my lifetime I have had countless experiences with manifesting results by the sheer power of my thoughts. Being the skeptic I had been, I generally perceived the results to be either a fluke, a coincidence, or possibly the result of some unseen force that chooses to allow some events to happen, while disallowing others. Often the result would lead to some less than desirable situations that left me feeling like maybe I was wrong in thinking I could create a wonderful life for myself. Even more often, this would lead to depression and/or anxiety, filling me with regrets that I had even attempted to change my fate. 

So what changed? My brain did. I have been fully immersed in a course in changing my life, by changing my mind. I have been surrounded by teachers that have helped me to "see clearly now." I have tested the theories and repeatedly gotten the same results and I can safely say, you CAN create a wonderful life for yourself, too!

Here are the simple (easier done than said!) steps to creating a new reality for yourself, according to the WikiHow page:

1

Accept and acknowledge that your thoughts are forms of energy that contain the seeds of your future experience.

2

Learn to still your mind. Meditation is both easy and difficult. Once you master the meditative state, begin to introduce a specific word like 'happiness' or an image (sort of like your personal logo) in which you have invested some meaning (like a check with a specific amount on it).

3

Reinforce this technique by keeping a new reality journal. In it write accounts in the present tense (as if happening now) of what you do, say, think in the experience that you are manifesting.

4

Make way for new experiences by consciously changing old habits and routines. Take a new route to work. Get up earlier. Have something different for breakfast. Give up some things.

5

Create rituals to symbolize your expected outcome. If you are manifesting a new car, buy something small that symbolizes it.

6

Enlist the support of all supportive forces: trusted friends, favorite places, inspiring music, or even your own created talismans.

http://www.wikihow.com/Manifest-Anything

Facebook Wisdom of the Day #2

And in the case that you don't accept that this is my philosophy, well then, I revert to the old Marine Corps toast:

Here's to you and here's to me

and if we ever disagree,

here's to me

and @#$% you!

Peace, love and applesauce!

Peer Proofing Our Essays on Banning Offensive Language In Public Spaces

So, last Wednesday, my English Comp class was divided into groups of 4 students each and we were tasked with reading one another's essays and "proofing" them. We were asked to evaluate the essays based on 7 criteria the instructor posted on the board for us to review. Not too difficult, I should think. Then I read the first one.

All I can say is...Oy to the Vay! (insert face palm here) I was once again reminded in painful detail just how inadequately secondary educators are preparing students for successful college careers. The first essay was technically correct in appearance. It consisted of 5 paragraphs, the first of which was an intro, followed by 3 evidential, or supporting, paragraphs, followed by a concluding paragraph. Each paragraph consisted of the minimum standard 3 sentences. For all intents and purposes, the paper had the look of an essay.

Then there's the content. To begin with, the student never took a position. It is her belief that since there is no real way to prevent people from saying offensive things, we should all "just get over it." That's all I'm going to say about that essay.

The next poor child was under the impression that "free speech" is someone standing at a podium and speaking, for which the listener is not required to pay a fee to hear! AAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!! Once I got my blood pressure back to a livable level, I wrote a few quick notes and passed her paper back. I couldn't really begin to give her advice on how to fix the technical aspects of her paper when she obviously slept thru the past 10 years of her education!

The last young lady in my group wrote an eloquent thesis on the importance of protecting the rights of all, including bigots and nut-jobs (or are those titles inter-changeable? lol) rights to express themselves. She went on to discuss how although freedom of speech gives one the right to express one's ideas, it does not mean one should haphazardly exercise that right. She discussed the moral obligation each one of us has in censoring our own selves and impressed upon the importance of considering how our expressions may effect others.

I was thoroughly impressed that she was able to articulate her thoughts and backed them with a few references, although she failed to site them in her rough draft. I was able to leave a few notes for her on places where the technical aspects of her essay needed to be tended to, as well as leaving a few devil's advocate gems for her to think about when doing the final draft.

Then I received my own paper back from the team. Other than two spots where they noticed (as I had already discussed with the BFF) that the content wandered a bit off topic, they didn't have anything critical to say. They jotted down a few encouraging comments about how much they liked my essay and that was it. Well, except for one comment. I nearly fell over with laughter when I realized what she was trying to say. She was commenting on a line in my essay where I describe how campus restrictions on language would make for a "kinder, gentler learning environment" and my "peer" wrote down a suggested alternative as "could be 'more gentle learning environment'" - okay, I had to remind myself that anyone under 35 years of age would not be apt to get the George H. W. Bush reference there. So, there's that! lol

I will post up my essay as soon as I get the graded on back from the instructor and have had an opportunity to correct any major failures.

Thanks for listening!

The First Amendment

Bill of Rights
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

So, I am in the car with my BFF (best friend forever) and we are on our way to her middle son's first football game of the season. As we turn the corner to get into the parking lot, we realize there is some kind of protest going on. The protesters are brandishing yellow ribbons, parade-sized versions of Old Glory, and signs bemoaning our president and the new health care plan. They even have a sound system amplifying patriot melodies. Whatever group this is, they have a statement, and they want to be heard.


So, bff huffs and gets disgruntled about them being in her way. Understand that she is 110% a football mom (and that topic is for another post) and these people are in the way of her getting to THE GAME! Her 7 y/o daughter asks what those people are doing. Again, bff huffs, and makes some snarky comment about them being stupid and wanting to spread their stupidness or something to that effect. At this, I had to interject and explain to her daughter that those people were exersizing their first amendment rights. To which bff replies, "Listen, my children are entitled to my opinion, and my opinion only."

Now, under any other circumstances, I would have jumped at the opportunity to jump on my soap box and let her have it with both barrels. Instead I laughed it off, because I know her well enough to know that even though she encourages her children to share her political views, I also know that she is the kind of person that would never prevent her children from developing their own political views. But she isn't alone in her agitation of people exersizing their rights to peacable assembly and free speech.

The current topic of discussion in my English Comp class is "Do you think there is some language that is so patently offensive that it should be banned from public discourse despite our Fisrt Amendment guarantee of free speech?" We read an article today about how Mob Rule has taken over liberal college campuses across the nation, allowing certain political groups to harass and even cause to cancel certain invited speakers if the group doesn't agree with the point of view of the speaker.

What will happen to us as a people when only the politically correct views are allowed to be expressed? Or when only those ideals that are popularly held are allowed to be expressed? Don't forget, slavery and nazism were popular views during their respective times in history. This is not a good direction to be going in. The irony is, that the campuses were this is running rampant have always been known as liberal institutions, once the basteons of open discource on controversial ideas and topics.

This topic hits right to the core of who I am and what I have always tried to stand for. I'm not going to get into it all right now. I have to save some for class. Our first writing assignment is going to be based on this topic. I'll post the finished product here. Come back in a few weeks and check it out.

Thanks for listening...