Mental Solutions & Be Like Water Mindset

  When the gym takes a back seat: 

Easy maintenance strategies. 

Meditative walking. Gentle core or ab or  stomach work using toe exercises. 

Loaded carries – yes you already do this every time you carry a load. Do you know how many muscles you work during this deceptively simple exercise? 

Try it with kettle bells. Even water bottles. Something almost easy so you can examine how your weight is distributed. Shift it. Feel how you compensate for lack of strength and circumvent future injuries by correcting your form. (Personally I like to work on awareness and balance and principles of falling safely first.) 

Animals do not go to the gym – we are not animals. Altho sometimes we like to pretend it seems. Lol. 

Point is, many animals stretch when they get up, they walk around, they hunt, lurk, climb and they sprint. All kinds of movement. 

I’m excited about wearables because I love hands free work. 

I like to use my hands for other things. 

Dancing, gesturing, note taking. 

Not holding my phone. Or having to pull it out of my Perfect mesh iPhone holder to write things down. 

So that might be interesting (the wearables) but sometimes everything needs to just go off. 

Everything, electronics. Just connect with the earth. 

I feel that’s coming up for me. 

So I’m creating a personal solution. I want to share it in case it inspires you as you explore your journey.

I’m going to talk a lot aboot my story. (Haha, I said aboot. 😘) 

Because I feel that to promote transparency properly I need to be transparent. 

It is much better to show by example but talking and writing works too. 

I get tired of rhetoric and when I think people are not being accurate with speech. 

But I have gone through periods in my life where my voice was silenced and I felt trapped and terrified. This resulted in a condition I refer to as “word salad”. I learned this from Alan Shore, played by James Spader. Love him in The Blacklist too. 

He got so stressed out in the episode that he made no sense. I was so frustrated when it happened to me. Lost my voice is so hard for this Gemini – but kidding aside, for anyone. We are made to speak and live our truth and be authentic and aware. That’s how we preserve health. 

I had a very interesting experience right when I found out I had cancer. My land lady who has become a good friend, gifted me a spa treatment at the Venetian. She got me an energy session because she knows I’m into that. 

The session was amazing. At one point the massage therapist made a snapping motion at my throat and I coughed and the quiver in my voice that I could feel just vanished. 

I’d been working on finding my voice for years. It felt so buried. 

More about that energy session later. It was amazing. 

Another favorite for finding my voice is the movie The King’s Speech. Colin Firth is great here, as he always is to me. Helen Bonham Carter too. And Geoffrey Rush. Sometimes we need to get out that hidden anger – I think trump reflects how a lot of people feel about America and things in general.

In 2000 with 9/11 as a country we experienced a trauma. 

Working through trauma takes time. 

Fear, anger, human emotions that people choose to respond to differently. But sometimes it’s visceral. 

But what I think is always a big red flag is a lot of rhetoric, or more hilariously put, “yackety smackety” that sounds nice but whose usefulness ends there. 

We do need more nice in this country – autocorrect said nude and I think that too. Seriously, let’s stop being negative aboot bodies. Lol. 

Shame is so old – it’s debilitating and just uncreative now. 

This is part of the nice. I heard someone say in a religious talk that we need more shame in America regarding sex and specifically porn. 

We need a better more classy example of sensual living. Luxury brands often communicate this but with their fancy things that cost a ton (rightfully so because beauty and creativity is priceless) and the way the media (including social media which is a lot of everybody now) totally divides our attention with pushing external focus. 

Look over here and there and here – that’s totally me a lot of the time. 

But I believe that if your roots are strong, metaphorically speaking, then you can be bendy in the wind like a willow. 

To help myself be more bendy or flexible in my life, I once gave myself the nick name Aka Willow. 

Aka for baby and red in Japanese. 

Red is my favorite color. I love babies. And I am happy to be someone’s baby love. 

He said I was bendy like a willow. 

I once bought a weeping willow for my yard. I wanted to make it a garden but my attention was so split. Real estate boom riding through lead generation and my partner’s contacts. Tax fiascos, all kinds of fiascos.

But the weeping willow was my present to myself. So pretty. 

Kind of rather be a willow dancing in the wind than weeping though. 

But weeping is cathartic I believe, allowing us to express that part of us  which is like water. 

Bruce Lee fans remember, be like water? 

Heart like water is a Japanese saying, and the concept behind the kata I created for my black belt test. 

I felt the only way to navigate the chaos was to ride the wave – and then I thought, no better, become one with the wave. Be the water.

Yes if I’m a still pond rocks might sink when thrown, unless you know how to make rocks skip on water. 

 I think that’s how Jesus walked on water, with that concept, like martial artists and wushu. Deep understanding of physics and energy. 

And when he said “I am the way the truth and the life” I think he was mirroring – reflecting – our potential. We have within us the way, the truth, and the life map we wanted to live. 

But we get stuck with other people’s interpretations of that. 

In 2013 I watched Helping Hands, I think it was called, the movie about Ben Carson, on Netflix. 

His mother told him, “you have everything within you.” 

He overcame so much. 

I think we get a deeper understanding of issues when we are able to not only feel but see things from another perspective too- that is “opposite” our own. 

Sun Tzu said in the Art of War that the man who knows himself and his enemy will not be in peril in a hundred battles. 

The first step in content planning that I read from Joe Pelluzi’s Content Marketing Institute was: 

1) Know Thyself

Step two is: 

2) Know Thy Audience

I might be paraphrasing but I’m in flow now – and you have Google to verify. 

We became such an externally focused society that we barely do step one (yes it is very challenging), 

And then we are not as well positioned to do a good job of step two. 

This is where I wanted to focus: on a solid foundation, robust solutions that are agile and scalable. 

I saw huge potential and opportunities for good when I became involved with the data industry. 

What scuttled that ship was the short term mentality I encountered.

The tricksy language (some LOTR speak for those fans)… 

The whole concept of stated income mortgages! Why is this a great idea??? 

Inviting people to fudge things, creating murky water in the data world. I think there are other solutions besides that, and it blew up just as it was going to without proper adjustments and much less lying. Lol. 

I investigated data journalism as a potential solution to more clean content creation and possibly more buy-in. 

I was met with confusing responses and I figured, eventually, that I would just lie low and explore things from another angle. 

I think being unethical in business is beyond “bad boys and girls” – it’s inefficient. 

This is the human experience though. Learning about how we are in all kinds of circumstances, otherwise why do we all share choice and change as constants in our lives? 

I’d rather be agile and robust and resilient. I figured the easiest way is to align with my nature, and blend with my environment to the extend it harms no one – including me. 

But there is such a thing as sacrifice and this is a big deal for many belief systems. 

Sacrifice is something done from the heart with honor, in my opinion, and we value this so much in some corners that we expect it from the people who seem to value it in themselves, and we deplete them. 

I think it helps to pause for some time to examine things carefully. 

A nervous breakdown, PTSD symptoms and cancer diagnosis will challenge anyone I feel – including me.

I’ve looked death very squarely in the eye before and I have seen it whisk people away. To me these people are immortal so long as their memories fuel us to honor their existence in new ways. 

When I thought about my approach to cancer, I told some of my friends that I seriously considered not doing anything medically. I didn’t feel that my exploration of my new condition was complete without also considering a radically alternative treatment. 

What I decided to do was follow the “open doors” and my instinct about those doors. 

And to harness the power of the unknown in a way that promoted faith not fear, 

I said one way or another I am going to change so many things on this momentum. 

I’m going to run into the opposition, braveheart style energetically – knowing that as pogo quotes famously, 

“We saw the enemy and he was us.” 

I decided if I lived I would celebrate the death of the energies that no longer served me – the death being they’re transformation and their release back to where they feel more comfortable now. Where they belong. 

This is a mantra I use when I feel things that I know I can release – both “good and bad” – with gratitude and conviction. 

“Any energy that no longer serves me, please leave now. Thank you for your presence, now I am sending you home.” 

This is supported also by the belief that as Louise hay puts it, “the new person does not need the old disease.” 

This is a topic life coaches talk about sometimes too. How people have developed different diseases for different mentalities, like people with split personalities etc., blood tests coming back different for diseases based on what people believe. 

The mind is so powerful. It is about consciousness which is forever from my view. 

So back to the first step, 

Know thyself. 

To change it helps to know yourself, but you actually can get around the challenges easier I think by enjoying yourself and exploring unique strengths and belief systems others might find helpful to compliment theirs. 

I’ve been in a lot of situations where I had the exposure to some very low level human emotions. Shame, debilitating fear, anxiety, depression, guilt. 

Sometimes I think that’s a way to understand the concept of Jesus going to hell for 3 days, to empathize with humanity.

I hear Kanye is a lot of ego but I like the song Jesus Walked. (You have to be in ego to see it FYI)

So why people who follow him aren’t strong enough to do that always? 

Because we’re human and we ebb and flow in everything. Flatline is death, I’m told. 

How to navigate life when the ebb and flow looks more like the movies The Perfect Storm or the White Squall. 

That’s water too. 

Be like water. 

– Miko xo