PAUSING FOR GREATER EFFECT: LINKING TO YOUR PAUSE BUTTON

Sports have a time-out and half time.

Your place of employment has a breaks and lunch periods.

Elementary schools have recess.

Day care has naptime.

Life offers vacation time.

Stage plays have intermission.

As humans, we are presented this pause button option throughout our life.  The “idea” of taking a break or pushing the pause button is always right there in front of us.  We are conditioned to understand that the pause button is there for good reason.

Did you know you could reduce blood pressure, stress, and improve your health and well-being by LINKING TO YOUR PAUSE BUTTON? 

It is true!  You can also prevent diet derailments (eating due to stress), and other unhealthy addictions in your life the more you connect to how you LINK to your ability to pause.

When it comes to the knee-jerk reaction of anger, frustration, impatience, or even self-doubt, humans often forget that the pause button exists. 

Reaction in the human brain/psyche becomes a blurred line with action in most daily interactions with others because it involves immediate presence in our lives as well as the ability to understand our own LINK TO PAUSE.

Where have you noticed this the most? 

Have you seen this at your work place?  Standing in line for coffee, at the dry cleaners, or in line at an amusement park ride?  In a restaurant, in traffic or at the public restroom? 

Emotions can run high when the mind chooses not to press the pause button.

A simple thought or feeling can turn into something, which can swiftly get out of control because one forgets that the pause button exists at all.

When we look at arguments for example, most of the time people are yelling on top of each other without listening to what the other person is saying long enough to ponder what is really being said.

If we were to press a pause button on heated situation, we would see that both parties involved are coming from a place of pain in recall of an old wound or situation, which triggers that response. 

However, pressing the pause button in this situation usually does not happen fast enough for most, because both people are reacting and the action becomes an escalated argument.

What if we were to take this same argument and press a pause button for a moment to pay attention to what is really happening?  

If you were to ask each person if he or she were invested in the idea of having a negative interaction, you would discover that neither person initially wished to participate, yet the participation happened.

Why is this so?  Is it ego?  Or is it the need to be ‘right’ or the desire to resolve something of the past, which has absolutely nothing to do with the fact someone, is arguing with you over taking the last bagel? 

When we take a step back and pause the situation, we are able to see much more than what is existing on the surface.  The same can be said for wherever you are in any scenario at work or at home. 

If we choose to hit the pause button more often in life interaction, we can improve upon our understanding in relating to one another each and every single day.  Suddenly, that person who cut in front of you in line at the grocery store is not a big deal, when you look at them with compassion that they did not hit their pause button.

In this situation, you begin to see you have choices – If you connect to your own PAUSE LINK:

• You can make the person aware (in a non-heated way) of their actions by pointing out where the line begins and that you’re all in the same boat having to wait, when you all have busy days and laugh about your pooled circumstance.

• Say nothing and let the situation pass, as you acknowledge your own heightened awareness of your surroundings and see that many live life with blinders through their own fight to get through their day.  It is here you can be grateful that you live life with a bit more understanding.

You begin to understand that the person cutting in front of you has nothing to do with YOU… it is about where THEY are in the present moment.  Cutting in front of you was not actually a personal selection to make you a victim of that situation – if you give them permission to do so. 

This is where you have another choice.  You can SEE THE SITUATION DIFFERENTLY.  You are not a victim and it was not their intent to make you a victim of their choice action.  Becoming a victim of their lack of awareness, courtesy or their one-lane-blinders-on-life coping mechanism is YOUR CHOICE.  

This is what you begin to see in your daily life when YOU connect to your own LINK OF PAUSE within your life chain. 

With self-awareness, we all have the ability to connect to our PAUSE LINK at any given time you choose to improve your daily life.  

It takes practice to be present in every moment, but with enough practice, we can reduce stress and negative emotional health scenarios as well as physical aftermath of health issues when our bodies respond to those blood pressure spikes and stress inducing situations. 

The long-term effect?  While health and wellness is the largest benefit, you can also improve your own lifestyle by eliminating daily annoyances, inconveniences and negative thoughts and feelings so that every day is a happier one.  You are no longer connected to the auto-defensive response to situations which create anger, frustration or impatience (all of which are not good for your psyche). 

We have the ability to improve our own well-being with this one LINK TO PAUSE to think rather than react and mirror what the other person is doing.  By making this change and tweaking this LINK, we can create our own daily peace in recognizing our ability to co-exist and manage our own thoughts, reactions, and actions.

Namaste.

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LINKING TO YOUR INTUITION

Have you ever had a ‘feeling’ that you should go somewhere, do something, or turn away based on a moment where you had a feeling ‘in your gut’ that you should take said action?

Have you ever had a conversation with someone asking you for your opinion of what you ‘really think’ or they asked you to participate in something you felt queasy about doing and something told you not to comply? 

Your intuition was present.  If you happened to catch yourself in that moment, you were tuned into your intuition, paying attention to acknowledge the signal you were given.

How often we pay attention is debatable, because it depends on our level of awareness.  See LINKING TO AWARENESS https://linkronicity.blogspot.com/2015/09/linking-to-awareness.html

 

Once we are aware and choose to be present, our state of mind and senses are elevated.  When this happens, we can see that we are LINKED to our intuition and have more clarity about things. 

The minds of animals and babies are “less cluttered” than ours, and their intuition may be more connected to respond and react on hunches more often than ours. 

In our world today, we have so many distractions pulling us in many directions.  It doesn’t matter how many apps you have on your phone to make you ‘more aware’ of things happening around you, as those very apps can be the culprit as to why your intuition signals are scrambled. 

Think back to when you were a kid, and you were going back to school.  You didn’t need to look at the calendar or pay attention to the fact your parents may be doing a happy dance. 

You may have been playing all summer, not paying attention to the advertising on television announcing back-to-school sales.  BUT – you knew summer was coming to an end, the weather was starting to change a slight bit, the energy in the air was different and your radar told you things were going to change…SOON.  This is intuition.

If you have ever watched a dog wait for someone to come home, you’ll see slight movement in the tail, eyes will widen and ears will perk up a little more.  They can’t read a clock, but they pay attention to the signals in their body which tells them someone is going to be walking through that door… SOON.  This is intuition.

Our intuition as humans as we know it, has this capability.  Too often as adults, we dismiss our intuition.

Have you ever thought about someone and within the hour, that person called you on the phone?  This is intuition. 

Maybe you chose not to attend a party, because you knew it was a place you really shouldn’t be, then you heard the next day that something terrible happened.  This is intuition.

How many times has this happened in your lifetime?  This is your intuition at work.  Your senses, when they are working at their best capacity, plug you into your own LINKED connection.  

But….How many times have you ignored a red flag when your gut kept telling you to pay attention to it?  Did you ever kick yourself after-the-fact when you did not pay attention to your intuition?  

Maybe you knew you shouldn’t have driven your car past a certain point in a storm, or maybe you knew you should have gone to the doctor sooner, because you sensed something was wrong with your health, but ignored your gut telling you to go. 

These are just a couple of life moments where we ignore our ‘red flag’ alert.  Most often, we see red flags in everyday life situations, too.  Sometimes there are so many, humans condition themselves to turn a blind eye. 

Intuition can also be used to help us do things.  But again – sometimes we do not always follow it for a variety of reasons _______ (fill in the blank).  You probably have heard stories from people in your life who have said “Gee, I wish I had gone to visit this vacation spot before nature destroyed it. I had a feeling I should have gone…” or  “If only I had ________”

While we cannot change the past, what we can do for ourselves is allow our minds to quiet down, shut off the noise in our environment.  When we decompress, sit back and allow a peaceful space to help our minds take a break for a ‘tune-up’ so that we can LINK back to our intuition again and pay attention to it. 

Now there is a point where we get that TUGGED LINK... that tug of intuition where we know something is going to change soon or that we should get out of a situation because something will cause us to take action to leap. 

What we can do in moments like this is prepare as best as we can for that opportunity.  This can include taking care of our health and well-being so we can handle the extra energy we need to expend in order to be ready for that huge jump.  We may want to clear space at home or clear space at work or get more sleep/take vitamins or sometimes we may want to do other preparations for the 'just in case' scenario so we have a plan B for what our intuition is telling us to prepare for.  

Yes, life is busy… but using our intuition link can be for our highest good and help us live our own lives much better, improving our own connection to our gut instinct once again.

We are then able to recreate healthier scenarios from an organic and authentic place of knowing which resonates with us from the inside, rather than ‘reacting’ or going into the constant mode of catching up to constantly be in crisis clean-up mode to situations which could have been prevented had we been tuned in a little better. 

Linking to our intuition can have a healthful benefit, too.  We can pay attention to what we truly need and what makes us happy.  If we respond truthfully to what our gut tells us, we are aligned better to cope based from a place of authenticity, rather than only responding to influence.

Namaste.

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LINKING TO NATURE’S HEALING

“Go outside and play.” 

How many times in your childhood did you hear that?

Do you think you heard that more than your peers or less?

Were you an indoors-y child or an outdoor enthusiast?

Did you not hear “go outside and play” enough?

The very command, “Go outside and play,” has a lot to do with your LINK to being outdoors and where you lived growing up.

If you lived outside in a warm climate year round, you might have played outside more so than children who lived in colder climates.  Your connection and your mental LINKS to nature were created long ago, regardless of where you lived geographically.

For some, sports activities outside link adrenaline to nature. If this is how you connected to nature, chances are you have the recall factor of wind in your hair, sun sizzling with the sweat you are working up on your skin and maybe burns on your knees from falling on sand catching a volleyball, or grass while catching a football.

While for others, quieter activities like reading outside may have you recall the wind blowing the pages of your book or magazine, smelling freshly cut grass or blooming flowers from your neighbor’s yard or hearing birds chirp or rustling leaves of the trees while playing board games on your porch.  These memories of being outside bring more of a mental connection to nature than physical.

Whether you are a daily hiker, climber, cyclist, skater/skateboarder, surfer, runner/jogger or yoga person or a beach chair lounger, nature has its role in your life.

LINKING TO NATURE stirs up emotional and psychological wellness just as much as the physical activity you attach to it.  “Going outside” to play has been taking all of us to a place of familiarity where we find another piece of ourselves, and who we are.

Whether you’re taking in a sunset or watching the moon, getting rained on or hit in the face with a leaf blowing off a tree, nature has its contact with you and you are connected to what it brings to you, even if your connection to nature is not just playing outside, but actually WORKING outside.

Now take this very idea of being linked to nature and ask yourself if “going outside” brings forth energy in your mood.  Chances are you will say that it does. 

The late Karen Carpenter sang the lyrics, “Rainy days and Mondays always get me down.”

Does rain get you down?  Or does rain feel like a cleansing fresh slate to you?

In Justin Timberlake’s “Cant’ Stop the Feeling,” he sings, “I got that sunshine in my pocket,
got that good song in my feet” – and he is happy about it.  

Does sunshine make you happy?  Or is it something you do not think about unless you actually have plans outdoors? 

Just like high tide and low tide, moon cycles and planetary shifts, our LINK to nature has the power to affect us wellness and our own personal cell system of energy is sometimes affected by what nature brings.

Our connection to Mother Earth is also something that literally keeps us grounded or moved depending on what is going on with the planet.  We are forced to shift our minds and bodies by the force of nature.  In other words, nothing stays the same.  Even if our lives may feel stagnant or complacent, they are changing daily, just like nature changes.

The four seasons occur for reason and purpose so that life itself can grow and flourish.

If we look at the season of flowers growing, seeds sprouting, trees reaching for the sun upward in the sky, wind blowing to scatter debris away in the same breath it may bring volunteer growth from seeds scattered, we see change.  If we examine the nesting of birds utilizing what nature provides for the birth of new life to build their nest or watch the bees pollinate and do their magic, we understand our food source, which sustains life connects us to nature on a whole other level.

Seasonal foods are vital to our health in the very time they appear and are produced for us to enjoy them… we are talking the NON-GMO foods which grow naturally in their own time/season.  Certain fruits and vegetables are NOT available all year long and that is for purpose.  Eating watermelon in the winter is not necessary.  However, it presents itself seasonally to be available to humans when we need to consume it most, compensating hydration so our bodies can function properly.  

Nature LINKS us to what we need, when we need it as we need it.  It has a very essential role in our lives to our existence.  It has the power to give us life lessons, too.  We learn that change is something we can count on, even if life may feel the same, just like nature it is always changing.

As we examine constant change with nature and its seasons, we learn that we can adapt as things change and this has the ability to empower us to be strong because we see that change is possible.

When the California drought took hold, many lives were affected as a domino effect of this change.  Food crops became more expensive, some businesses went under altogether and water, which is life … changed life.  California is a major crop source provider and provides 2/3 of the nation's fruits and nuts (easy now... I'm talking crops, not people!)  The domino effect of change occurred for more than just humans, but animals who took to the city desperately looking for water, their life source in suburban neighborhoods and urban landscapes, where they are not usually seen. 

When the snowfall and rain finally arrived to replenish Mother Earth, many lives were affected as well.  While most are grateful for this rain, there are many in their paths who were changed by life and property loss, tragedy and livelihood in one swoop.  While others relished the snowfall and took to the slopes to ‘go outside and play’ in what was a very long-awaited event in nature.

This is just one example, but again we are shown – nothing stays the same.  Nature brings change to us.  We ourselves are shown what nothing is permanent and nothing is temporary either.  Nature teaches us to savor what we have when we have it and be grateful; and shift gears to becoming stronger when we may not be aware what we possess internally.  We can learn from our experiences, see our worth, and become aware of endurance we did not know we even had.

Nature’s LINK to life on Earth is about change.

What else can we learn from our LINK TO NATURE?  

Nature has the power to heal.  Sometimes without upheaval, we stay in ruts, which stunt our own growth, and exploration of what could be possible.  The changes nature pushes us to explore help us examine other sides of life that we would not have experienced without it.

Think about many of the natural disasters we have had from weather.  We learn that these disasters can bring together a community, neighbors, friends and rebuilding is possible.  We learn about the kindness of strangers and those offerings of assistance we may have felt didn’t’ exist because we were too jaded toward in embracing humanity to believe it was possible. 

When we have a season change, people do “go outside and play” and this brings fellowship and gatherings, we make new friends, share the outdoor space, connect with something as simple as the words “Isn’t it a lovely day?” to a total stranger in passing. 

When the weather is rainy or cold, sometimes people gather under an awning or share an umbrella or gather inside a warm coffee house and connect indoors when the outdoors is not cooperating.  

As the sun blazes, people may complain, “It’s too hot today” and begin conversations in camaraderie waiting in line for ice cream or share sunscreen or shade from a tree. 

From watching crashing surf waves, birds fly, squirrels scurry up trees and insects fly and crawl – we get to observe life around us in motion.  We can gather inspiration from the fact that everything in nature is about adaptation, survival, acceptance, growth, emerging from all that nature throws at us, and there will be a bright, breezy sunny day once again.

Taking our cue in adapting transforms us, as we begin to see that all things have a time, reason and season for the moment.  Just like nature, we can LINK our own mental, emotional and physical wellness to the idea that change happens naturally whether we choose to take action to change on our own or not.

It is in nature, we are linking our lives to evolution and transformation whether large, or small bits at a time no matter the weather or how we ourselves weather our own life storms.

As we move forward, we can be thankful for every drop of rain or sunshine and see the rainbow of opportunity to embrace the gifts of what nature gives us to be open to the process.

Go outside and play… and thank nature for all the healing it brings you in your connection to understanding its magical gifts provided and how life wouldn’t evolve without it.

Namaste.

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