LifelinkCoaching - Bring your best self to light

The taste of happiness

Today I feel happy. I can feel my usual nebulous cloud of anxiety floating around me. But underneath that, there's the happiness....the sense of space, amazement at the gifts in my life, an awareness of the swirling abyss of intolerance and impatience that is just below the surface. it's like "wow". I don't have everything I want. My relationships are not perfect...although I have a theory about relationships...(I believe they are intrinsically imperfect...for fear we get complacent and forget that we must move on beyond this life..). I am not beautiful or slim (and so should be miserable!). But the sun is shining. I can see the Twelve Bens (Connemara) from my window. My immediate family loves me dearly...Life is good and kind.

Whenever I doubt the presence of abundance in the Universe. I look at Nature..wanton, profligate Nature...generating hundreds of seeds from one flower, lavishing thousands of different types of flowers on us, giving us endless patterns of clouds...how can we doubt the presence of abundance..it's all round us...

Sometimes loads of people annoy me

yesterday, I went to Galway for some shopping. It was an interesting experience for me. I've been really working lately on feeling calmer, developing my spiritual self...but it looks as though my inner grumpy old woman has just been lurking!

I found myself feeling annoyed at old people (so slow, so doddery), small children (howling, whining and non-stop demanding), SUV's (feeling inadequate...get an SUV!...inadequacy in inverse proportion to size), teenage girls (what's with the flocking and squealing?), banks (do they really need to have so much information and why do I have to queue for 20 minutes?). But this time I spent at least some of the time watching myself as opposed to toying with Terminator fantasies...but I must admit it's somewhat disconcerting to see the dark side of one's thought processes...I'm just hoping that I'm learning to stand on the edge and watch as opposed to letting myself get swept away...

Why Apple is really celebrity culture

I've had a long drawn out detestation of Apple computers. This was borne from having to work twice with a suite of networked Apples that even now bring me out in a cold sweat. Each one worked on average for 5 minutes. Then they froze and had to be re-booted. This happened when the second suite was installed to replace them. I had the same experience with an iMac. And re-booting usually meant pulling the plug out of the wall..

When I got an MP3 player, my motto was simple. ANYTHING but Apple. Apple is like a celebrity cult. Plenty of style but not much substance. Their products are not that wonderful...they just look pretty and Steve Jobs can do that charismatic woo-woo thing very well. (Ask people who have problems with their iPods and need to get them fixed).

...However I am willing to concede that some of his speeches have been inspirational. I've actually featured one of them in my ezine. What seems to me to drive Apple's popularity is a burning desire to be "different" and NOT microsoft. You see, I think there is a reason why Microsoft is on 90% of the world's desktops and it's not all to do with their dominance. The Office suite is an excellent piece of software...otherwise why do so many people use it? For me, Apple is the technological equivalent of the celebrity culture (which I quite enjoy at times). It looks good but scratch beneath the surface and it's not quite so pretty...whew, got that rant off my chest...

Who reads this?

Today while I was at the vets, I noticed a magazine for blind owners of Irish guide dogs...who reads this? The dogs or their blind owners...suggestions on a postcard please...

Awareness - Anthony de Mello

I picked up this book (Awareness - Anthony de Mello) a long time ago and thought the first time I read it that it was one of the biggest heaps of S***** I had read in a long time. In fact I tried to give it away a couple of times and couldn't...shows what sort of people I was hanging with at the time! I picked it up again last night and found myself blown away by it. The wisdom, simplicity and sheer wit of the man was extraordinary. At this point I feel a bit like Mark Twain who described how his parents were so much wiser when he reached 21....

Awareness is a strange thing. I'm beginning to realise that I am growing more aware but also that I'm like someone wearing a cotton wool body suit swimming under water (OK, let's not go too far with that analogy!). I'm more aware but I'm even more aware of how much more aware I need to be, on how I need to get beyond my kneejerk reactions to the deep wise response underneath...somewhere..

Building your friend's self esteem

Yesterday, I had great fun using Wordtracker and inventory.overture.com to locate regularly searched for keywords. One rather dreary aspect of it was the number of people who were searching for a particular type of job...and it wasn't one that involved paid employment..in fact it was the second highest term including jobs.

Anyway, the title of this post was a much searched for term (that and "new career training for older women" and "careers for older women". ). I  found it quite touching that so many people would look for help with OTHER people's self-esteem. But how would you build self-esteem? I mean it can be hard enough to do it for ourselves at time. Personally I reckon self-esteem is about thinking that basically you are OK...not perfect, not beautiful perhaps, maybe not even that bright, but OK. Because thinking that fundamentally you are OK, perhaps a bit flawed is a sign of high self-esteem. It's what Michael Neill calls the respect due to you as a human being, as a fellow member of the human race..so if you were going to be your own best friend and build "your friend's self-esteem", what would you do?