Friday, June 26, 2009

Age is Just a Number

My little boy just turned 33! I remember some 35 years ago when I was driving a semi across country. It was suppertime and all of the families were sitting in their houses around their tables eating together. I could see them through their patio doors as I drove down the freeways behind their houses. I made a wish. I wish I could find someone to marry, have a child and retire from the road. Less than a year later the wish was beginning to come true. Probably because most of my wishes are made whimsically and then I forget about them. Lots of people make wishes and then hang onto them, change them around, remake them (not realizing every time they remake a wish they are really making a new wish and sabotaging the old one they already made), and basically not leave the wish alone long enough for it to come true.
I've been thinking a lot about the intensity one puts into wishes and wondering why some take so much longer, until I realize that I, in my great wisdom, wrote in The Wish Factory "sometimes everything in the world has to move over a fraction of an inch before your wish can come true". I've got one wish I made a very long time ago that still hasn't come true. Most of it has always been true, but the culmination of it may take a little longer to happen. At this point in my life, I am content knowing it will come true. Perhaps that's the entire secret to wishing. Perhaps its all in the "knowing" that a wish is going to come true that makes it so. Manifestation is difficult to predict, and if you ask your "spirit guides" they will say "soon", they will say "patience" "very soon"...but how relative is their idea of time and ours? Perhaps time in the spirit realm is not at all relative to our time here. Maybe that's why they don't understand our impatience. Here I am musing again. Check out the book Fountain of Youth by Peter Kelder. Amazon has it. I've been doing it for 20 plus years. It seems to be working pretty well. I'm still 68 going on 10.
love and kisses. Jana

Monday, June 22, 2009

What Mindset--Being Happy With Yourself

Creating a "mindset" for losing weight takes many years of trial and error. What it all boils down to in the long run is learning to love yourself, just exactly where you're at. About 25 years ago I was listening to some self-esteem tapes (I'd been in a relationship where I'd found my self-esteem slowly being eaten away, and I began to wonder what had caused it. I don't normally let the opinions of others effect the way I feel about me.) I would listen to those tapes while I walked on the treadmill (I've been walking treadmills for daily exercise for nearly 25 years. You should see my muscles! My niece, a body builder, envies me my calf muscles.) One of the things on the tapes struck a chord. It told me to find a picture of myself as a child, and then talk to that person. I found a picture of my Mother and me sitting on a fountain at Belle Isle near Detroit when I was about 3. My mother has always been beautiful. As I looked at that picture of us, I realized I looked exactly like my mother! I'd never felt that way before. Instead I remembered when I was small, about five or so, hearing my mother telling a friend, "when J--- was born I cried, she looked just like her Grandfather B." Well, my Grandad B was a very sweet man, but he had red hair, a bulbous nose and he was very heavy. That's the mindset I got about myself at an early age. When I looked in the mirror the only thing I saw was the similarities to my Grandfather.No red hair, no bulbous nose, but a round face, skin tone, and other things I can't put my finger on. It didn't matter that I had a knock out figure and the boys were crazy about the way I looked! That was my mindset for years. After I saw that picture of my mom and me, however, I changed the way I looked at myself. My favorite song is Kellie Pickler's "Don't you Know You're Beautiful" I knew at that moment my marriage wasn't long for this world! I knew my life would change dramatically. By that time I'd already managed through hard work to lose about 40 pounds. I struggled to lose another 25 or so. Then I found Nutrisystem and managed to lose 18 pounds rather quickly. Then I got stuck. Despite walking an hour a day on the treadmill, daily yoga, and use of the Bowflex, I was stuck. My motto is, It's Always Too Soon to Give Up. I'm a winner. Nothing will stop me from achieving my goals, be they weight loss or anything else. And yeah. I'm beautiful. Listen to Kellie's song. I love it!

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Poppy Hannah - Paralegal series

To see excerpts from my Poppy Hannah go to the archives and look for January 23, 2007 post which is an excerpt from the first Poppy Hannah mystery.