Horizons Magazine

More about Andrea

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Hello and welcome to the August 2004 issue of Horizons Magazine. In this issue,
on page 35, I've written an article entitled THE END OF DEATH AS WE KNOW IT:
What The Crossing Over Experience Was Like, As Reported By Those Who Made
The Transition. This is excerpted from a compilation of personal case histories of
people I've read for. I chose to run it at this time because many friends I know are moving into caretaking roles with their parents and/or spouses and death is a topic that comes up as we approach middle age. My philosophy about that - in a nutshell - is: "What a caterpillar calls death, we call a butterfly."

I'll bet, if you asked them, that not every caterpillar looks forward to making the transformation to the butterfly stage. We're the same way. We don't always look forward to transition so when it comes, if we're not prepared, the transformation hits us hard.

STEPPING INTO THE HORNET'S NEST
Last week I was playing in my yard and managed to stir up a hornet's nest, and I got a few good stings on my leg before I could get out of their way. Stuff like that rarely happens to me, so I asked myself, "what's the lesson here?" I didn't really have to think about it, I knew right away what it was.

In the last month, I'd felt guided to offer constructive suggestions to 3 different friends, to guide them toward income opportunities and career advancement. One was just under-utilizing her potential, something lots of us do. Another didn't realize how her catty and critical attitude held her back from receiving more good stuff into her life. The third was drinking too much, and letting anger and resentment of things long past prevent him from dealing in an honest way in his divorce, and he was getting repercussions he should have known he would attract. All 3 of them took it personally and all are miffed at me now. Hornet's nests, for sure!

FRIENDS CALL FRIENDS ON THEIR STUFF
I love it when friends call me on my stuff. If I'm acting or reacting in an un-conscious, un-mindful way, I want it pointed out to me. If I am who I say I am, I want a chance to nip it in the bud and correct my course. And my close friends do just that. It helps me stay on course. It helps me practice what I preach. I've had friends tell me things that were not easy to accept at the time, but later I was glad for the advice. I've never resented anyone telling me how to improve myself, unless I wasn't ready to make the change yet.

MY LIFE WASN'T ALWAYS SO EASY
It's taken a lot of conscious work to get here. I went through years and years of family stuff and marriages and caretaking, so I know it's not always easy to keep it all together when you don't have a moment to yourself.
But when we wake up to the fact that we are singularly responsible for ourselves, the choices become easier. We learn pretty quickly that one way to keep an easy flow going is to develop a personal practice of setting goals and working toward them. This is easy to do - right, if you're one of those rare self-motivated types!

STAYING MOTIVATED
It's not always easy to stay motivated. Friends remark how motivated I am and how much I motivate them, yet it took me a long time to train myself to be that way. It took years of me cheering myself on to get out of bed on days I didn't feel like working or interacting with other people. It took me years of every day psyching myself up for the next project or the next day's To Do List. I didn't always just wake up raring to go, and jump into each day eagerly with a smile on my face. There were lots of days I had personal problems on my mind yet had to show a happy, brave face at work when dealing with dozens of others who depended on me. There were lots of days I would rather have skipped work and stayed home, although I did plenty of that, too.

I learned early on how important it was - in motivating me - for me to make a list of the next day's work. That helped me turn my focus there and do a little pre-paving of my next day's experience, although back then I did not call it that. If I thought of the next day's work as "the big game" and became my own cheerleading squad, it was easy to psyche myself up for it.

I learned that if I could flow some attention toward the event before it happened, it was always easier to get through it. If I didn't make a list the night before, often I'd come sit at my desk and shuffle papers around and take new calls without retrieving voice messages and returning prior calls. New mail would come in before previous mail was processed, and I always had to search for everything because nothing made it into a file.

When I began making a list the night before, I'd get motivated to wake up, check voice mail, return calls, open mail, log in payments, make up a bank deposit, drive to the bank, go to the post office for new mail, and by the time all that was done, half the day was over and most of my list was crossed off.

But I had to motivate myself. I had to be my own cheerleading squad.

Periodically a friend would check my progress and cheer me on, but for the most part, I was the one cheering others on. And because others weren't doing it for me, I could either do it for myself, or stay unmotivated and not accomplish the things I wanted to do. It was my choice. And if I did nothing, then that was a choice to stay unmotivated.

I didn't want to be one of those people who waited until later to have a good life. I didn't want to wait until the kids were grown (I didn't have any) or until I retired (ha! like that'll happen!) or until I won the lotto (that's still a possibility...) I wanted to have a good time now, no matter what else was going on in my life. I knew that I could find fun in what I was doing, and make time for fun where I could find it. And most times I had to do it with no one cheering me on. So becoming my own motivator was a survival technique!

Even now, before I go to bed at night, I run through my mind what needs to be done the next day. I may go through it a few times, and make myself feel excited about getting to do it. When I wake up, before I get out of bed I'll bring to mind the things I'd like to get done that day. I'll imagine going into the office and sitting at my desk and going over the To Do List and getting everything done quickly and effectively, and I'll get myself excited over getting to do those things. Even though I let myself sleep as long as I want to, before I know it, I'm ready to hop out of bed and get into work.

WAKE UP AND GO TO BED
I love living alone. Living alone allows me two extremely important pleasures: going to sleep when I want to, and waking up when I want to. I used to hate hearing the words "Get up and go to bed" and "Time to wake up". I could never see the reason for waking someone up to make them move to another sleeping place. I am a big nap taker. I like to have a nap in the afternoon when I can. I have my best burst of energy right when I wake up, so when I nap, I get two segments each day of that fresh burst of energy!

When I reached my forties, my sleep habits changed, and if I listened to the media buzz around me, I would have thought I'd fallen into insomnia because of menopause. Not so, I found out. It was simply that my sleep needs had changed. Because I was still stuck in the old programming of "Oh, no, I need 8 hours of sleep or I can't function," I was experiencing just that.

I found I didn't need to get a 2 hour nap in order to feel refreshed - two hours that I would be frantic about getting. All I needed to do was, when programming myself ahead of time, to tell myself that I would nap until I was refreshed. It took about a dozen times before it actually started working, until I actually changed my belief system.

Up until then, I believed the propaganda: that we need the same amount of sleep on the same schedule at every stage of our life. All I needed to do was change how I perceived my sleep pattern, and change my perception about how much sleep I thought I needed, or how much sleep I thought I got.

I also believed the propaganda from hairdressers for 40 years about my hair: that I had babyfine hair that should always be cut in layers. I was 48 before I decided to grow my hair out, only to find I have really good hair! It's fine but I have lots of it, and when it's not cut in layers, it is much fuller and more manageable - who knew!! Now I can do lots more with it than I ever could when I'd kept to the advice of the "experts". And if I hadn't questioned their authority to see if it really applied to me anymore, I wouldn't have found out that it did not.