“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.”
– Paul Valery
I forgot I have ping.fm to simplify my social networking and I post a note on Facebook earlier. I am enjoying a glorious day of peace and solitude – writing, reading, journaling and jotting snippets of ideas for my book.
Cleanse, tone and moisturize – facial basics for your life
Have you ever had a facial? The process not only leaves your face glowing, it also affects how you feel about yourself. You walk taller and more confident. But if you depend only on a facial for that effect, the feeling won’t last very long. You can create a platform for happiness, contentment and confidence in your life, by using the basics of a facial.
Every now and then, we get tired of the same old thoughts circling in our heads. We grow numb and complacent from the monotonous, mindless actions we perform every day. Plus, our self-destructive feelings continually sabotage our personal relationships and our professional opportunities.
If this describes your life, you may want to consider not just an external procedure, but one that starts on the inside and radiates outward. It is simple really. Just use the same basic three-step process of a regular facial.
The multitude of brands on the store shelves are enough to make you dizzy and confused about which to buy for a facial. Fortunately, the cleansing, toning and moisturising procedure I am recommending today saves you from worrying about brand names, product reviews or disfiguring side effects.
Cleanse
Experts say: Daily facial cleansing brings a glow to the skin. Failure to cleanse regularly and properly will result in the build up of oil from within and dirt, environmental and other impurities from without. They clog the pores, leading to ugly and embarrassing toxic breakouts, which can permanently damage the skin. So a daily cleansing routine is essential to free your skin of the effects of such pollutants. Never use normal soap; it is too harsh.
Your life is just as delicate. It deserves tender loving care and regular maintenance if you are to reap and enjoy the benefits. Just as daily dirt and grime can settle on your face and clog your pores, so too can daily stress, mental and physical exhaustion, and frayed emotions take up residence in your life.
They clog your mind with toxic thoughts that lead to breakouts of bad attitudes, mediocre efforts at home and on the job. They cause you to act contrary to what you know and believe. They attract toxic people whose poisonous venom infiltrates and alters how you view yourself, your life circumstances and your relationships. They dry up your enthusiasm for the beauty around you and the opportunities that grace your life.
You need to begin a regular life-cleansing regimen to remove the dust, dirt and toxicity in your mind, your body, your emotions and in your relationships. When you do, you will experience a renewed willingness and confidence:
- To face the demons in your past.
- To embrace a new and positive mindset.
- To explore opportunities that enhance your personal and professional life.
- To stand your ground and hold fast to your faith in the face of negative comments, abuse, toxic people and disappointing circumstances.
- To forge ahead in pursuit of your dreams.
- To notice and savor the good things in your life.
More importantly, your renewed confidence and bright outlook
will radiate outward and touch other people’s lives.
Tone
Experts say: Toning is the comprehensive process that includes removing remnants of make-up or cleansing lotion and restoring the skin’s natural pH balance. The astringent in toner closes the pores, tightens the skin and protects it from toxins and other environmental pollutants. Avoid those with alcohol which destroys the soluble collagen below the skin’s surface.
After you go through a period of cleansing your life of negative thoughts, destructive speech, haphazard actions and tumbled emotions, you need to tone the positive elements that remain by:
- Balancing responsibilities at home with demands at work.
- Balancing things you do for yourself with those you do for others.
- Balancing personal time with fun, leisurely times with people you love.
Moisturize
Experts say: When exposed to the elements, skin can lose its natural moisture and wrinkle faster. Moisturising after cleansing and toning improves the skin’s elasticity, forms a barrier against the harmful elements, and replenishes the skin’s natural moisture. The secret ingredient to a fresh healthy glow is water. It keeps the skin moist and slows the inevitable ageing process. Apply moisturiser lightly, working outwards from the centre.
Cleansing and toning your life is effective only if you moisturize:
- Mentally: Let this Bible verse be your motto: “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.” Philippians 4:8
- Physically: Exercise regularly and eat healthy meals that include lots of fruits and vegetables. Schedule guilt-free self-care — personal time for quiet reflection and relaxation. Prioritise your commitments to allow time for leisure activities.
- Spiritually: Make time daily for spiritual refreshing through prayer and meditation and fellowship with people who share your beliefs.
- Emotionally: Learn to say “No,” and delegate to ward off burnout and its accompanying stress.
5. Socially: Seek out and embrace people whose company is refreshing, enjoyable and inspiring. Share your knowledge, your blessings and your time with others.
Surely you know that there is more to beautiful and healthy skin than genetics. It takes persistent work to keep it glowing. In the same way, your life can have the glow that comes from cleansing the harmful toxins that plague you, toning your days with a delicate balance of home life, work life, personal time, spiritual refreshing, healthy habits and choices, good friends and fun times.
What’s the condition of your life? Has it lost its glow? Use these three basic steps of a good facial to bring back the glow.
Cultivate your life
I’m no gardener by any stretch of the imagination, but I am fascinated with the similarities between a garden and our lives. While we could put the smallest gardening effort on hold without any serious consequences, there’s no way we can put off taking care of our lives and not experience the backlash. So, like a conscientious gardener we need to cultivate our lives to reap the best fruits and enjoy the beauty.
Rainy days may keep you from heading outside with straw hat and gardening tools. But they are the perfect days to sit inside and do some work on your life. So grab your favourite drink and snack, curl up with your journaling tools and cultivate your life.
Weed
Sometimes it seems they pop up overnight. Unlike some plants that struggle to survive, lose the battle, shrivel and die, garden weeds are indomitable. They anchor themselves in any kind of soil and withstand extreme weather conditions.
Life weeds such as feeling overwhelmed with responsibilities at home and at work, financial problems, difficult relationships, health concerns and so on, rear their ugly heads and choke the good and positive things in our lives.
Some life weeds have tap roots; they burrow straight down and deep. They pierce and break our hearts. Others with fibrous roots fan out and filter through the network of our lives infecting and poisoning all that is good and positive.
They create havoc in every situation and relationship, turning our lives upside down and inside out. They loom above other minor life weeds and force us to set aside legitimate concerns so we can cater to their demands for our undivided attention.
Life weeds sprout and flourish anywhere. They cling to us like parasites. They suck us dry and leave us listless and passive in our own lives.
With a discerning eye and a prayerful heart identify the weeds that are flourishing, clogging your life pores, complicating your relationships and smothering your dreams. Don’t deal only with what is on the surface. Dig to the roots of the weeds in your life and get rid of them to allow the free entry and flow of all that is good and beautiful.
Water
We know of course that too much water can drown even moisture-loving plants. So we are often advised to water our gardens regularly with a moderate supply to keep the soil moist and the plants healthy and alive.
When we get lost in the rush of daily living, it is easy to allow our personal lives to languish in the neglect caused by whatever turmoil may be commanding our attention or the heat of busyness and burnout.
It is honourable that we take care of our responsibilities to our families, our jobs and other areas as well. However, when we don’t pay attention to our personal lives: health, leisure activities, our dreams and other personal interests, we are delinquent gardeners of the lives we’ve been given.
We water our lives when we take time to nurture ourselves with quiet time to pray, meditate, read, plan, dream and lose ourselves in the activities that we enjoy.
Are you drowning your life with too much of a good thing or killing your life slowly by leaving it to languish, dehydrated and starved of crucial life-saving nutrients?
Wait
A well-cultivated garden does not materialize overnight. It takes time so we must be patient. Once you have done your part you need to step back and wait for the seeds to germinate.
Are you anxiously pacing the floor in anticipation of some outcome? It won’t arrive any sooner because your heart beats faster, your palms sweat, you don’t sleep and can’t function normally.
Waiting is not as tough as we make it out to be. See the waiting period as an opportunity to prepare, to pray, to practice a little self-pampering, to revel in quality time with your loved ones, etc.
Wonder
When was the last time you basked in the wonder of your garden? Don’t say that you have only a small garden and a lone lime tree. Whatever stage your garden may be in today, take a moment to appreciate it, just as it is and wonder at its possibilities.
When last did you stand in wonder at your life? Of course these days, many would be quick to shout, “Wonder at what? Things are so bad I just want to crawl under a rock and not come out until 2020.”
Is there not one small aspect of your life that you can appreciate? Are there no blessings? Do you have no one who makes you happy, makes your heart sing, and makes your life better, brighter and worthwhile?
Have you been enjoying fruits of your labour? Did you talk to a friend, receive a smile or kind word from a co-worker, a fellow commuter or a stranger today? Did your children kiss you goodbye before they left for school? Those are things to wonder at, to appreciate.
Don’t take your life for granted. Don’t neglect it either. Luckily, you don’t have to wait for a sunny day to do some gardening in your own life. With the discerning eye of the careful gardener, rid your life of the weeds that are running rampant, water regularly with time for the things you enjoy and the people your love. Wait patiently for new growth of opportunities and wonder at the blessings that abound.
Be a diligent gardener and cultivate a purposeful, productive and happy life.
Fear can be a useful enemy
Despite my belief and insistence that we can and should rise above our fears, I don’t advocate a reckless approach to doing so. Instead, I believe that we should tackle our fears with the kind of careful thought that goes into understanding and accomplishing any other project.
Our fears hold us captive and inhibits our ability to transition from the negativity of the past to the joyful appreciation of the present and then to entertain realistic expectations for the future. To combat that, we should face our fears head on, do battle with them if we must, salvage whatever positive value we can and get on with the business of living a meaningful and productive life. But when fear continues to stand as a seemingly impenetrable wall, keeping us stuck in an “I can’t” cycle, we have to find new ways of breaking through and moving ahead. In our zeal to rid our lives of our fears, we must be careful to not “throw the baby out with the bath water.”
If you agree that fear is our enemy, would you also agree that even an enemy can be useful?
Here is how:
Fear establishes our weaknesses.
We are no good to ourselves and our dreams if we don’t recognize and acknowledge our weaknesses. For, it is there, sitting in the company of our actual or perceived inadequacies, past failures and other life experiences that we can grapple with our weaknesses.
Walk through your fears. Trace where they began and how they have progressed and intensified. Pinpoint the areas in your life where they have wreaked the most havoc and crippled your development. That is where you will find your weakness.
Let’s say, for instance, your fear of exams have kept you away from further study, taking specialized classes to satisfy an interest in a hobby or a small business idea. Where did that fear originate? Could it be from failure or only mediocre scores in previous exams? Maybe your fear stems from an inability to fill out application forms, comprehend exam questions or an inability to read at a certain level? Reading and comprehension might be your weakness. But that is not the end of the story; it doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to settle for a life of dreaming about goals that never see the light of day because you are fearful.
Use your weakness as a springboard to plan an escape route and launch an attempt to take at least one small definitive action that will help you extricate yourself from the strangle hold your fear has on you.
Let your fears serve as a springboard from which to launch out on a new adventure or re-launch an old attempt.
Fear enhances our strengths.
It may sound like a cliché, but it is true; trials build character and make us strong. The problem is that instead of acting on our strengths we surrender to our fears and allow them to control and dictate our lives.
You probably think that your life or one aspect of your life, like your education, your career or relationship has been ruined by some past experience. And you live in fear that a similar situation waits around the corner. So you remain cloistered in your self-imposed cocooned, never venturing beyond the boundaries of your comfort zone.
Have you ever stopped to consider that you have survived and may even triumphed over the experiences that brought you to this point? What strengths did you discover dormant within you? What character traits were you forced to develop in order to deal with the situation, maintain your sanity, and carry on with your life?
Fear elevates our potential.
Being fearful doesn’t mean that we don’t think about goals we’d like to accomplish or dreams we’d love to pursue and achieve. Ideas, goals and dreams run parallel to our fears. On one hand, we lament the fact that we are afraid to take a chance, step out of our safe places and take risks, even small ones. Then on the other hand, deep in our hearts there is the longing for the mildest courage to step out from behind our fears and forge forward with confidence.
Dare to look beyond fear’s deceptive whisper, “You can’t.” What do you want – education, mortgage, job, travel, marriage and family? The longer you sit with your fears, the more impossible your dreams seem, but that doesn’t alter your potential to achieve them.
So when fear says, “No, you can’t,” look beyond its limiting borders and declare that you will try; you will give it your best shot.
Fear equips us with tools to move forward.
Every task or project requires tools for it to be accomplished efficiently and successfully. These are just three of the tools that fear provides.
(1) * Insight to understand problems from the inside out as opposed to dealing with semantics, feelings or personalities.
(2) * Perspective to see the whole picture and not just the individual aspects of difficult situations.
(3) * A voice to defend ourselves and our dreams when confronted by human or situational obstacles.
Don’t underestimate fear. It is a formidable enemy able to defeat our best intentions and thwart our most inspired and determined efforts. But when you launch an expedition to excavate its usefulness, you can walk away with life-altering tools, aware of your weaknesses, confident in your strengths and excited to explore your potential.
What useful purpose do your fears serve?
Revamp your enthusiasm in three steps
Routines help to keep us organized, focused and driven. Without them, our lives would be chaotic and unproductive. Nothing is wrong with creating routines for living and working. Yet those same daily routines turn around and slap us in the face. And when they do, we could find ourselves sliding down the despair chute so fast, that we lose our enthusiasm. And, when our enthusiasm runs low, our productivity levels suffer. Then instead of finding ways to recharge our enthusiasm, we despair and surrender to the overpowering feelings of frustration. Depression is likely to set in and keep us in a dark hole.
I’m a stickler for routines myself. I set my own and follow them religiously. Although they help me stay on track with my responsibilities and meet my commitments, every now and then, I get bogged down and overwhelmed with my slavish adherence to them. That is when I slowly lose my enthusiasm not just for my work but for the other activities that I enjoy. Forcing myself back doesn’t always work, but a step-by-step process as I describe below usually does.
Are you looking for a way to recharge your flagging enthusiasm and slip back into the rhythm that helps you to manage all your responsibilities?
These three steps will help you to whip your enthusiasm back into shape.
Revamp yourself
Contrary to what you might believe, while you are in limbo and not functioning at your optimum level of enthusiasm, you are not really resting. Rather, you might be working yourself to a frazzle and growing mentally exhausted, trying to determine what is wrong. In that state, you also struggle with a sense of guilt for not giving your best to your usual tasks. These feelings easily overwhelm you and if not checked and remedied, could send you into a state of depression.
To get back to your former energetic, enthusiastic and high-efficiency self, start by taking some time out.
A short vacation particularly alone is the ideal way to recharge your batteries and prime your mind for the climb back to the place you want to be. Most times work and family responsibilities are not designed to give you the kind of time you need. But you can still slowly and steadily get the kind of rest that is necessary if you make good use of whatever time you can salvage out of your busy life.
A few moments here and there in the midst of a tight work day, a home renovation, packing to move, tending to a baby or running after toddlers, if used wisely can add up to enough time to pull yourself together, refocus on your goals, commune with God, pamper yourself a little and get a fresh perspective on the circumstances that might be playing out in your life right now.
Rested, you will be in a better position to tighten your bootstraps, straighten your shoulders and enthusiastically return to your daily routine with the kind of vivacity you once had.
Revamp your space
No matter how much you may insist that you can work in the midst of clutter, eventually, it gets to you. And when the external clutter translates into mental clutter, your life and your enthusiasm goes awry.
Clean up your surroundings. Re-organize your storage systems and practice returning things to their designated space after you use them. Try it first with one shelf, one corner, a desktop, countertop or dining table. You might even be inspired to work your re-organizing and decorating magic throughout the house, room by room. Give your desk at work a personal touch with a photo of your family, pet or best friend. A photograph from your last vacation or one of the location you dream of visiting will help to ease work-day stress. If you don’t believe you can pull off this step, ask a co-worker to help you.
The smallest revamp to any space equals a major overhaul of your outlook on life. Try it. Start small and notice the difference.
Revamp your priorities
If you simply jump right back into the fray, you could soon find your renewed energy and revamped enthusiasm plummeting again. To avoid that, prioritize your duties and other projects at home and at work.
If there are chores and other responsibilities that have been lagging, sort through them and assign them a place on your To Do list to reflect how urgent they are. Once your priority list is complete, review it and make changes if you wish. As you work your way down, ticking off the ones you complete, rearrange the order of the remaining tasks or add new ones that are bound to come up.
Ordinarily, when you lose your enthusiasm, people may tell you to snap out of it, get up and get cracking. But our enthusiasm declines slowly and a slow but steady process will ensure that it rises again and sets you up to resume your home and work responsibilities with the kind of vivacity you once had. Revamp your enthusiasm with rest first, de-clutter and organize your home and work space and draft a priority list to accommodate all the tasks and commitments that make up your life.
