Defining Wellness

Headlamps are useful before dawn.

This morning I woke my nine year old at 5:00 a.m. for a sunrise hike to a pond near our home. We didn't actually get to see the sun rise due to an overabundance of clouds, it was cold and the pond was still frozen, but we enjoyed our first hike of 2013 anyway. It was as much an acknowledgement of my own return to wellness as it was a celebration of the start of mud season in the Adirondacks.

My husband is not a morning person. When I announced our planned hike, he noted that my idea of wellness is someone else's idea of insanity. This had me thinking that it is impossible to define wellness in a broad sense. We each have to define wellness in our own terms, and we only can by knowing our own bodies, minds and spirits.

This is very evident whenever I get together with the Bona Fide Butterflies, who include myself and my two friends and partners Annie Gregson and Beti Spangel. Together we facilitate empowering retreats and workshops for women. We strive to help women design and live authentic, inspired lives based on their individual values.

Individual values - that's the key. Society likes to tell us what to value. Media gets paid to tell us what to value. But it's our individual values, the ones that come from the heart, that make us unique, that keep everyone from being the same and living the same life according to the same plan. It's our individual values that make human existence diverse, colorful and fun. 

The BFBs

Annie and Beti are incredible women living joyful lives of their own design. Neither one of them is likely to start training for a marathon. Neither one wants to teach yoga, although they enjoy their own yoga practices. Annie, a life coach, also makes incredible art. She has lots of time in her life for long walks in the woods with her dog, and she throws fun, seemingly spontaneous parties. Beti has horses and chickens on her homestead, and she makes yummy cheese. She can drive a tractor. She's also an awesome writer.

Our differences are what we have in common. All three of us have taken the time to figure out what's important to us and we've created lives that honor those things. Unique, diverse, authentic lives. Our own definitions of wellness. 

The other thing we have in common is a road in Schroon Lake, where we're neighbors in the "I'll drive a few miles up the road to your house" sense of the word. I think fate had something to do with that.

Take a look at the Bona Fide Butterflies website and see the workshops and retreats we offer. We're also on Facebook. 

I'm heading to a yoga class to stretch out sore hiking and running muscles, and to honor my own idea of wellness.

Head Space

enbiggen v. to grow a small job in your head until it's too overwhelming to deal with; a technique used by master procrastinators to avoid starting tasks

I am highly skilled in enbiggening. One day I left a few pieces of paper on my desk and when I looked the next day I saw this:

The problem with enbiggening is that after avoiding what would have taken minutes for a few weeks, my desk actually looked like that. That picture was taken this morning, along with this one:

My home office is where much of the non-teaching part of running the yoga studio happens. It's where I do my bookkeeping, create flyers and plan workshops. It's also where I write my blog posts, answer emails, schedule my son's homeschooling assignments, write letters and, occasionally, play on Facebook.

When my office gets messy, I don't want to use it. My brain doesn't focus well when surrounded by clutter. I need open space for my head to function at its best. Besides, my laptop wobbles when it's perched on piles of paper.

I've been putting off cleaning it up, because I'd enbiggened the large job into something monumental and I just didn't have three straight days I could block out on my calendar for office cleaning. But my dear friend and life coach, Annie, stopped by the other night and happened to see the office. She immediately put on her life coach hat and said something very profound like "no wonder you aren't getting anything done!" only much more eloquently and life-coachy.

Then she offered to bring me a big basket to hold all the stuff on the top of my desk. I knew I had to tackle the job, even if I didn't have three straight days, to get my head into a better space, and to avoid dying of embarrassment the next time a friend drops in.

This morning I got out of bed (an accomplishment in itself lately) and started in right after breakfast. Thirty minutes later it looked like this:

An hour later it looked like this:

All I had left to deal with was this:

Those papers were filed or put in an organized "to-do" pile in less than thirty minutes. The job I had enbiggened into a three-day fiasco actually took ninety minutes.

That's the way it is with procrastination. There are so many things I put off because I assume the time I have to give them is more than I have. And some of them are fun things I'd really like to do. Like writing blog posts.

This is where I'm writing now:

Better, right?

And here's a picture of my dog in my office, because she was there and looking cute:

K.I.S.S.

sim-plic-i-ty (noun) The quality or condition of being plain or natural.

I like to tell people I'm living the simple life. And the people I tell like to raise their eyebrows at me, especially if they've seen my to-do list.

I'll admit, trying to grow a fledgling yoga studio in the conservative and economically depressed Adirondacks, launch a personal training business, take care of a husband, two kids, two dogs and a cat, train for the upcoming running/triathlon season, knit, bake, plan a kitchen garden and spend time on my own yoga mat doesn't sound simple. I do feel a bit overwhelmed at times. Every now and then I want to crawl into my bed and hide until the world goes away.

Thanks to the work I've been doing with my life coach, I recently had a realization about the things that sent me diving for the cover of a down comforter. And it goes right back to simplicity.

Have you ever thought about what you value? I've thought about it quite a bit lately, thanks to pages of life coaching homework. And I have a pretty good idea of what's important to me.

When I live simply - naturally - I spend my days doing things that fit with what I value. When I'm overwhelmed, I'm trying to do things that feel unnatural, because they are out of alignment with what's important to me.

I'd really been struggling with some of the day-to-day mundane "have-to-dos." Things like paying bills and filing papers weren't in sync with values like "adventure" and "freedom." For the record, "I didn't feel like paying bills" is not an excuse the credit card company will accept, and monitoring the caller ID to avoid the credit card company does not create a sense of freedom. However, once I realized that financial independence would give me the freedom to pursue more adventurous goals, I made a plan to pay off all our debt except the mortgage within five years. Suddenly paying bills lined up with a value and I've been on top of that task ever since. I'm also free to answer the phone.

When each thing on my to-do list reflects my values, life flows naturally. And that's how to keep it simple, sunshine.

Gremlins and Glitter

Tomorrow I am going to meet my gremlin. At least, that's what Life Coach and artist Anne Gregson promised me. She's leading a workshop at the True North Yoga studio called "Make a Mask, Meet Your Gremlin."

We get to play with plaster and gauze to make a mask, then decorate it with color, glitter (I love sparkly stuff!), feathers and magazine cut-outs. Our masks will give a face to our inner gremlins, those voices that tell us we aren't good enough, we don't have enough time, nobody is interested...

Not only will we get really cool masks to take home, but we'll also have a plan to send our gremlins packing. Playing with glitter AND making potentially life-changing discoveries? I can't think of a better way to spend an afternoon.

Anne has a great mask that she made in the likeness of her gremlin, Howie (as in "How-ee you think you're going to be able to do THAT?!?!?!?").

Check out the blog Anne recently started called An Irreverant Whirl. You can also find her on Facebook.