In only
I will be Mrs. Daniel Tobin!
Reversal
So, after yesterday's post when I was all set on a big wedding with all the extras, I got into a conversation with FMIL today. I think after the pricing discussion we had yesterday, she was thinking more about how to make
this more affordable. Discussing it we decided that what would really make us all happy is a little tiny intimate wedding. Immediate family, close friends, a few select extended family members on both sides.
We were offered use of the dining room at the Holiday Inn Meadowlands for 3 hours, which is doable but might be rushed. We might also try and put together something more formal, but still intimate.
I am so much more excited about this than I was about the big wedding. I will know most of the people there; it'll be small and fun and lovely. We'll have a great time.
Productive day
Today was a productive day - or at least it felt like it.
I started off with walking 2 miles on the treadmill, and praying the Rosary. I really like that combination of activities - something about it just starts my day off extremely well.
Other things I did today were: filled out the application for our new apartment in lynchburg, packed one suitcase full of warm clothes, called a couple of hotels about weddign packages, emailed a caterer about pricing and options, talked to a wedding planner about possibly engaging her services, and got emails from 2 DJs about their services.
I also spent a good deal of time talking to FMIL about wedding planning in general, what I want, and why I'd like it to be as worry free as possible. She's all about the saving money, and I'm all about the lowering stress - so there's some conflict there. There will be more phone calls tomorrow to caterers, florists, etc. to figure out pricing and timelines for putting the wedding together myself vs. getting the all-inclusive package from the hotel.
Conclusions reached today:
I want a wedding - not just a fancy dinner for the friends and family who show up. However, if the guest list were limited to the very select few, i.e. less than 30 people, then I would prefer the 'go out to a nice restaurant' option. If there are 50 or more guests, though, I want the special dances, the cake, the whole package.
I definitely want a day-of-wedding coordinator. If I decide to go the DIY route rather than opt for the all-inclusive, I will probably also hire a full-service planner to keep track of the details for me. I figure paying someone $1000 is worth it if she can save me over $1000 worth in money and avoided stress.
I definitely want red and gold as our colors as opposed to a more general fall theme. And I definitely don't want a country fall theme.
... I'll probably think of more stuff later, but that's what I know for sure right now.
That 'run off to Vegas' option still looks pretty tempting...
Moving
Moving is supposed to be one of the most stressful things people go through. Our move is not stressful as much as it is complicated, since Dan is in State College, I'm in Pittsburgh, and a lot of our stuff never got unpacked from when we moved here last summer. My FMIL and I packed a good dozen boxes this morning with dishes, pots, pans, etc. as well as several boxes of non-perishable food.
I spent the rest of the day pacing my room trying to decide what to do next. Something like a GTD nextaction list would come in very handy here...
I think my first step will be doing a couple of loads of laundry tomorrow, so i have all my clothes clean and can decide what i want to move immediately vs. what can wait until the real move. (Dan starts work the day after Memorial day, so we're thinking we'll just take the bare minimum down right now, and then organize a big move sometime in the summer.) I will probably start packing winter clothes up first, since I won't need them between now and moving day. Depending on what vehicles we use to move, the clothes I will need to wear now and soon after the move might even be able to be moved on hangers rather than in luggage, which will be much faster and easier.
After that I will probably start filling small boxes with books. Between the 2 of us, Dan and I probably have close to a thousand books, most of which we will want to move at some point. What I will probably do is pull out all the books that I've flagged to be on the top of my reading list, and put them in one box. That way, if we do have room for a box of books in the first move, they'll be the right ones. The rest can be moved a couple of boxes at a time if need be.
Besides clothes and books, there's not a whole lot else that will need to be packed - art supplies, toys, stuffed lovies, computer stuff, odds and ends. Again, nothing that absolutely must be moved immediately or that couldn't be broken down into multiple carloads if need arose.
Sigh... all those books....
Update: Life's purpose
I resumed the
exercise I mentioned below about finding your life's purpose. This time I broke through whatever unconscious resistance I had in just about 10 minutes. I was building on what I had done before, and I'm sure I did need that initial time, even though it seemed unproductive then. Thankfully, and not particularly surprisingly, it is a reaffirmation of the insights I have gained these past few weeks.
The purpose of my life is to surrender entirely to God, to
accept his unconditional love for me, to let his spirit set my soul on fire,
breaking the shackles on my heart, letting his love flow into my body, mind, heart and spirit and through me into the
lives of everyone I encounter, bringing them healing, joy, peace and love.
Apparently, the key insight here that I didn't have in my earlier iterations was the unconditional love of God, and the implied acceptance of my imperfect self as being worthy of that love. That's been a big issue for me for years and years, the feeling that I was not good enough to be loved by God. Even though, in my head, I knew that I would never be good enough and that God loved me anyway, in my heart there were still things that 'good girls don't do.' And if someone (especially me) did any of them, even God would not love them anymore.
But God does!! And every once in a while, he will beat me over the head with this message, since I don't quite seem to be able to get it and make it stick.
So to anyone who was wondering as to the efficacy of the exercise - it does work. It might just take a lot longer than you expect it to. It's very worth it though.
Quote to ponder
Here's something Fr. Jack quoted to us in today's homily - from the homily a friend of his gave at the first Mass he celebrated.
"Sometimes God breaks our hearts so we can love even more."
I'm still thinking this one over, and I'm not sure how to take it. It makes sense in the same way that 'what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger' makes sense. What I am not sure of is how much I believe that God tests/tries/toughens us up this way.
I will probably have more to say about this, but for now I'm just thinking it over.
God and our life purpose
An exercise from
Steve Pavlina's blog archives is titled '
Find your life's purpose in about 20 minutes.' It was an interesting idea and I wanted to try it. I closed the door to my room, maximized a Word window and started writing down possible purposes as he suggested. There were a couple of things that resonated, but nothing hit the jackpot. After over an hour, it was time for me to leave for Mass, and I hadn't yet gotten anywhere. I was a little discouraged but hopeful that Mass, prayer and reflection could only help in my getting an answer. I haven't yet continued the exercise, but intend to later tonight, and will post an update when I'm done.
Here's what I have thus far that is sparking emotions:
healing, sharing God's love, healing people's pain, trusting God's plan, learning the depths of God's love
I didn't expect to have this much trouble with the exercise. Steve does mention that if you are resistant to the idea it might take longer, but I didn't think I was resistant at all. I see two possibilities for why this might be happening. One is that I am on the right track but just missing some piece of the puzzle that is important. The other (and more disturbing) possibility is that I am still only just regurgitating conditioned responses - that my true life's purpose is something so completely alien to my upbringing/education/belief system that I am unable to imagine it, or unconsciously refusing to see it. Something that didn't involve God at all, or that involved a faith/belief system that was contrary to what I believe would fall into this category. I've tried throwing some weird outlandish stuff in there to get my mind off the entrenched patterns, but I keep coming back to the stuff I listed above.
Am I ready to consider a life in which God is not central to the purpose of my existence? I don't know, and considering I just got back into an active faith that strengthens me as opposed to a neglected faith that kept me bound, I don't know if it's even a good thing to attempt. Nonetheless I do want to finish this exercise, to see what I end up with.
I will update when I am done.
Thoughts On Goals, Discipline and Momentum
I'm still reading the archives on
Steve Pavlina's blog, and the article I read this morning was about
goals and values. Steve talks about how he sets goals first and then determines which values to focus on to get him there. This seems like a useful strategy, so I started the day with writing down a list of big goals - everything I want to do in my life. I also sorted them into the broad categories I like to think of things in - body, mind, heart, spirit. And I think my most important goal for the near future is still focused on health - to develop a habit of exercising every day, eating healthy (which for me means lowcarb), drinking 8 glasses of water daily. Other things I really want to do are journal daily and pray and read the Bible every day.
See a common thread in these goals? These are all habits I want to form and things I want to do everyday. So the values I need to focus on are discipline, persistence, and focus. And my main area of focus is health - both physical and mental health. There's other stuff I want to do, and a lot of it is short to medium term stuff. I want to develop a health-related website, and develop it into a source of income. I want to be married in November - even though I really do not want to think about the planning that will be involved in getting there. I do want to move to Lynchburg and find a job there. Nonetheless, the health related goals are the ones I want to be focusing on primarily.
These are all also habits I've unsuccessfully tried to develop in the past. And here's why I think this time it'll stick when in the past it hasn't. In the past, I'd go all out for a few days, and then, I would miss a day or two, and never go back. But the reason I never went back is because my attitude after I missed a day was that I had failed; that I might as well give up. This time, though, I'm focused on developing the habit, not on achieving some ideal weight, or fitting into some skinny clothes, although those would be good milestones. This time around, the important thing has been to develop the mindset that a healthy lifestyle is important to me. So, even if my exercising has been limited to sucking in my gut while sitting on the couch, that's a step in the right direction, and a way to get back into my habit of walking 3 miles on the treadmill everyday.
Building habits is all about momentum, and this time, even though I've lost the physical momentum, I've kept up the mental momentum. That makes it easier to get back into the physical routine when I get back to something resembling a normal schedule. At least, that's how I'm hoping it will work out. I'll keep you posted as to how it turns out.
Thoughts On Goals, Discipline and Momentum
I'm still reading the archives on
Steve Pavlina's blog, and the article I read this morning was about
goals and values. Steve talks about how he sets goals first and then determines which values to focus on to get him there. This seems like a useful strategy, so I started the day with writing down a list of big goals - everything I want to do in my life. I also sorted them into the broad categories I like to think of things in - body, mind, heart, spirit. And I think my most important goal for the near future is still focused on health - to develop a habit of exercising every day, eating healthy (which for me means lowcarb), drinking 8 glasses of water daily. Other things I really want to do are journal daily and pray and read the Bible every day.
See a common thread in these goals? These are all habits I want to form and things I want to do everyday. So the values I need to focus on are discipline, persistence, and focus. And my main area of focus is health - both physical and mental health. There's other stuff I want to do, and a lot of it is short to medium term stuff. I want to develop a health-related website, and develop it into a source of income. I want to be married in November - even though I really do not want to think about the planning that will be involved in getting there. I do want to move to Lynchburg and find a job there. Nonetheless, the health related goals are the ones I want to be focusing on primarily.
These are all also habits I've unsuccessfully tried to develop in the past. And here's why I think this time it'll stick when in the past it hasn't. In the past, I'd go all out for a few days, and then, I would miss a day or two, and never go back. But the reason I never went back is because my attitude after I missed a day was that I had failed; that I might as well give up. This time, though, I'm focused on developing the habit, not on achieving some ideal weight, or fitting into some skinny clothes, although those would be good milestones. This time around, the important thing has been to develop the mindset that a healthy lifestyle is important to me. So, even if my exercising has been limited to sucking in my gut while sitting on the couch, that's a step in the right direction, and a way to get back into my habit of walking 3 miles on the treadmill everyday.
Building habits is all about momentum, and this time, even though I've lost the physical momentum, I've kept up the mental momentum. That makes it easier to get back into the physical routine when I get back to something resembling a normal schedule. At least, that's how I'm hoping it will work out. I'll keep you posted as to how it turns out.
Happy Birthday to...
...me!!!
Yay!! It's my birthday! I'm uhh.... 24! (again)
In case you have not yet heard, my evil plan for immortality requires me to stay 24 forever, or as long as I am capable of pullig it off. (Thus far it's working pretty well...)
So have a happy my birthday, and go eat some cheesecake, drink some wine, shoot some guns, or do something else fun and exciting to celebrate the special day =]
The Power of Thought
I found my missing post! Turns out I had the 'publish as draft by default' option selected, so everything was being saved as a draft rather than being posted here. I'm glad I didn't have to rewrite this post, though.
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It is amazing just how much your reality is shaped by your thinking. In
Joel Osteen's book that I mentioned below, he talks about an example of a man who froze to death in a room temperature environment because he believed it was actually below freezing.
Here's an example that happened to me a couple of days ago. I've been following this
free course from Motivation123 (they also have one on
attitude and one on
goals). Well, Day 2 of this particular course requires you to identify at least 7 negative thoughts and beliefs you hold about yourself. As I was thinking of these and writing them down, I could already feel the negative energy they were bringing with them. I was tempted to skip ahead and get to the next day, so I could deal with getting rid of them. However, part of what I'm working on is self-discipline, and I told myself to do these courses over 7 days as they are meant to be done.
So, having finished my motivational reading and exercises, I went off to do my physical exercise of walking on the treadmill. My initial goal is to develop the habit of walking 3 miles every day, and I had been easily walking at least 2 and making progress every day. Well, this day I got on the treadmill, and I just felt really sluggish, really tired. I was feeling the effort even before I'd walked a mile. Suddenly I realized it was probably from the negative energy of thinking those limiting thoughts about myself earlier. I decided to try telling myself positive affirmations like 'you can do anything you set your mind to.'
I also had with me the 'Your Best Life Today' book since I hadn't yet finished reading it. So I went back to the page that had most inspired me the previous day and started reading from that point. The combination of the affirmation and the inspiring words in the book renewed my energy and I easily walked the rest of my time. In fact, I made my goal of 3 miles (which was more than my goal for that workout) and could have gone further but decided to stop as part of that discipline building goal.
Had I gotten on the treadmill first thing that morning, without either the negative or the positive affirmation I would probably have walked just over 2 miles, maybe 2.5 if I had pushed myself. With the negative affirmation, I doubt I would have made it past 1.5 - it was just so tough to make myself keep going. With the positive affirmation, I blew past my goal, and didn't even feel the strain. And I went from the one to the other in a matter of minutes, just by changing what I was telling myself.
This is why my 'positive' playlist has been on a continuous loop for the last few days.
Travel tip
I'm flying back to Pittsburgh in the morning after a 3 week vacation to Texas, and then we're driving down to Lynchburg, VA to look for apartments, so I might not be posting much in the next couple of days.
Here's a packing tip for when you're returnign from vacation and are trying to cram a lot of stuff into your suitcase. Rolling up your clothes makes them take up less space than folding them. This also works well in dresser drawers.
I fold the garment enough that I have a roughly even rctangular shape and then starting at one short edge roll it up tightly into a cylinder that I can then sort and stack in the suitcase in order to best use the available space. This is especially useful for bulkier items like jeans or jackets, which don't really lie flat when folded. They can still be rolled up pretty tightly, and are much more compact this way.
The other tip, of course, is not too overpack, which I always tell myself, but never seem to be able to follow, expecially when visiting my parents.
Daily Bible Readings
Something I have meant to do for a while now is to read the Bible daily. I have tried several times to begin, either just picking a book and reading a chapter a day or finding a list or workbook of daily readings. Somehow though it never stuck, because even when I kept my study Bible under my pillow, I just never quite developed the habit of taking it out and reading it every day.
Yesterday, while I was exercising and praying - which combination I really like and think I will continue - the thought occurred to me that there are probably websites that have put online daily Bible readings. I thought I might even be able to find one with an RSS feed that I could subscribe to. Something that puts the daily reading in front of me without my having to go search for it. Yes, this is the lazy way to read the Bible, but it is more likely to work in the long run than the other methods.
Well, I didn't find an RSS feed, although I am toying with the idea of trying one of those services that develops a feed out of any web page. I did find this site however:
http://www.usccb.org/nab/today.shtml.These are the daily Mass readings from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops' website. So it's also a step towards going to daily Mass, which is a goal for when I am in a stable living situation. There were a couple of other sites with daily Bible readings, a couple of which would also send them to you over email. But since I am leaning towards filtering all but the most important stuff out of my email inbox, those didn't appeal to me. This site had the nicest (simplest) interface. Plus I like that it's a Catholic website and that the readings are from the lectionary rather than arbitrarily picked.
So I added this website to my opening Firefox session (using
Tab Mix Plus, a free extension that I am finding extremely useful). Hopefully, I will be successful in maintaining my habit of daily Bible reading.
Lost post and Savage Garden
So I wrote this great post about the power of thought, and it seems to have disappeared into the ether.
I'm going to chalk this up to God wanting me to develop patience and rewrite it - just not right now, since blogging time is over.
But here's a thought I just had. Actually I've had this thought several times, but it is relevant to that discussion of motivation, attitude and positive thinking.
In the Savage Garden song 'Affirmation' there's a line that says "I believe the struggle for financial freedom isn't fair. I believe the only ones who disagree are billionaires"
I have long thought that this line is true but not in the way the writers meant it. Refusing to believe that the system is rigged, and believing you can make it despite naysayers and obstacles in your path is a necessary condition for achieving great success. If you believe the system is unfair, you will never be a billionaire. But if you believe in yourself and refuse to give in when things get tough, you might very well become one.
So, if you want to be a billionaire, don't sing that line of that song ;)
Truly, we have an awesome God!
Sometimes we just need to let go and realize that God really is in control of our lives. He knows exactly what we need and how to take care of us. It's when we get impatient and try to do things on our own that we mess things up. And then we wonder why God doesn't seem to be around in our times of trouble.
So, what brought this on?
Well, I've had some spiritual issues I've been struggling with for a while now. While I still
believed in everything the Catholic Church teaches, I was having trouble
practicing it. And I was discouraged and had slowly drifted away from the more fervent faith I had previously. Honestly, I was barely acknowledging God's existence, and bemoaning his lack of presence in my life. I knew it was my own fault, but I couldn't seem to be able to take the steps to get myself back on track.
In all the extra free time I've had recently, I've been reading a lot of new sites I hadn't heard of before. One of them I've been finding useful has been
Steve Pavlina's personal development site. Steve talks a lot about specific techniques that are useful for improving your life in several areas including self-discipline, productivity, etc. I've been reading a lot, implementing a little and generally being quite inspired by this site.
One post of his that caught my attention in particular was his
Million Dollar Experiment, an attempt to manifest $1000000 in the life of each of dozens of participants. Reading about this, I was inspired to try it, and found all sorts of resistances in my mind - not because I didn't think it would work but because part of me felt that asking for money, especially a lot of money, was just wrong somehow. Regardless, I decided to give it a shot, and spent a couple of minutes meditating on this intention for a day or two. Now I was also working on implementing a daily workout as part of a general self-improvement strategy. So I started repeating this intention to myself as I walked on the treadmill. And very quickly I realized I could also add a similar intention for a fit healthy body, and a couple of days later for a fit and healthy body
and mind. So, even though I haven't manifested any money yet, the experiment is leading to positive changes in my life.
A couple of days ago, Steve's new post on
how to make money from your blog was posted to a lot of major sites. Reading that got me inspired that I too could parlay my interest in all things health related into a money generating website. This is something I would have never considered prior to starting the $1M experiment. I also read a few posts from Steve's archives that were updates on his experiment's progress, and some that talked about manifestation of intentions in general. Coincidentally, I saw an ad in
an organizing newsletter I receive for the
Motivation123 site, which was offering me 2 books on motivation for less than $20. I bought these and started skimming one, called 'Motivated in Minutes' to see if it was worth my investment. (I think it is.)
The next morning, I woke up feeling really hungry and thinking I needed to eat something right away, rather than workout, shower and then eat like I had been doing. While I was eating, I decided to go through the 3 freebies I had received as part of the signup to Motivation123. These are 3 little e-courses on attitude, goals, and confidence that are meant to run over 7 days. The first lesson of all 3 courses was basically that attitude is more important than anything else in determining whether or not you achieve what you want to. This empowering belief was a great way to start the day. Once I was ready to start exercising, I decided to try a book my Mom had been nagging me to read, called "
Your Best Life Now" by Joel Osteen. So I took it onto the treadmill with me and started reading as I walked. The book talks about how we block God from showering His fullest blessings on us because we are mired in negative attitudes about ourselves, our lives and the people around us. If only we let these things go, we will be amazed at the good things God wants to bless us with.
And somewhere in the middle of the first chapter of that book, I made a breakthrough. I realized that all the negative energy in my life was coming not from sins (either bad things I had done or good things I had failed to do) but rather from my discouragement and despair over those sins. Far bigger than my failure to live a perfect life was my sin of believing that I had to pass some arbitrary standard of goodness for God to love me and bless me. God wants me to have an abundance of joy, peace, hope, happiness, and yes, riches. To paraphrase the book, I was living in a self-imposed prison, thinking I had no hope, when I didn't need to at all. God is not limited by my present circumstances. Why should asking God for a million dollars for the good of all be any worse than asking for my daily bread? Suddenly, all the doubt and fear and shame of the past few years had gone away - I know God loves me, regardless of my imperfection, and the measure of blessings He showers on me is limited only by my faith or lack of it. I even realized that I could pray while exercising, including a prayer for a healthy body and mind, a million dollars, or anything else I could imagine wanting in my life.
So, what is my point with all this? I could not have gotten to where I am right now if all these things hadn't happened. I just wasn't ready to read Joel Osteen's book until I had already read the motivation materials. And I would never have bought the motivation materials had I not been thinking about starting a business. And I wouldn't be thinking about the business if not for the $1M experiment and other inspirational materials I found on Steve Pavlina's site. Steve proudly describes himself as a 'vegan ex-Catholic' so there's a lot of differences there, but that didn't stop God from using him to get me in exactly the right frame of mind to hear His word in my heart. So, truly all things happen for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose. And our God is an awesome God indeed!
