Opinion Stress: What You Think of Me Is None of My Business

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achieving goals, acid stress, at choice, Effective living, Kebba Buckley Button, Letting go, moving on, Releasing, UpBeat Living

© 2015 Kebba Buckley Button, MS, OM. World Rights Reserved.

 

Fotolia

 

Now be honest: how many times today did you consider someone else’s ideas about you? How many decisions did you make because someone else would or would not like exactly what you did? If your hair is royal blue and forms a peak across the center of your skull, maybe this isn’t you. Or maybe it is.

 

As a stress management expert, I want you to navigate as freely and joyfully through your life as you can. I want you to find the greatest health and fulfillment you can. And that means dealing firmly with the things that cause you stress, pain, and fatigue.  The results are a lifestyle I call Upbeat Living, always emphasizing the Up beat, like the music term.

 

One of the things I see most draining people is the desire to make a choice that is harmless to others, but there is fear of others’ opinions. So many of these fears are small. For example: you’re having lunch with a vegetarian, but you really crave a burger, and that’s better for your metabolism; you’re afraid to order what you want, for fear of disapproval. Or you want to cut your hair short and dye it vivid red, but you’re afraid of negative feedback in the workplace or that the one you’re dating will be less attracted to you. But some of these fears are bigger: maybe you want to leave your current financial career that’s sucking your soul dry. But you’re afraid your family will disown you if you become a chef.

 

Argue for your limitations and they are yours.

~ Rev. Terry Cole-Whittaker

 

If the vegetarian expresses disapproval of your lunch order, the message is that you are wrong—not worthy. If your workplace expresses disapproval of your hair color, the message is that you are wrong—not worthy—for their group. And if your family would disown you for quitting your draining job and becoming a chef, the message is that you are wrong and not worthy.

 

Several decades ago, I encountered a book by (Rev.) Terry Cole-Whittaker, with the most amusing title: What You Think Of Me Is None Of My Business. Cole-Whittaker believes firmly that each of us is already a complete person, with nothing missing. So we cannot be inadequate.

God does not make junk!

~ Rev. Terry Cole-Whittaker

So according to Cole-Whittaker, other people are not our source, the Divine is. Since God/the Universe/the Divine is completely infinite, all options are open to us, and the sky is the limit. Or not even. She encourages us to think very freely about why we’re attached to what and whom, and to be open to just releasing those attachments. We often have a very strong sense of possession: MY job, MY hairdresser, MY beloved. She tells of realizing she was hanging onto her first marriage, long after it was no longer working or salvageable. She finally got honest with herself and saw she didn’t want anyone else to have her husband!

 

Try this: find 15 minutes of you-time in a quiet place. Or find it in a charming coffee shop where you plug in your laptop, with the hum and chatter of the place creating happy white noise. Now free-write to yourself and the Universe about your life—what you like and don’t, what’s working and what isn’t, what and how you would have things in your dream life. Do you see ways in which you’re feeling stuck? Now: YOU are the only person who can choose differently.

 

What I think of you is none of your business. And what you think of me is none of my business. But what you think of your life, what nurtures you, and what would make you happy and fulfilled—those things are entirely your business. Create some you-time every day, as you can, and keep writing to yourself and the Universe. Keep adding to the “discussion” you have going with you and the Divine. Notice what makes your heart dim or race. Notice you’re beginning to make small changes. And maybe you’re starting to make big ones.  Now, that’s Upbeat Living!

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Energy – Peace – Meditation

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Kebba Buckley Button is a stress management expert.  She also has a natural healing practice and is an ordained minister. She is the author of the award-winning book, Discover The Secret Energized You (http://tinyurl.com/b44v3br), plus the 2013 book, Peace Within:  Your Peaceful Inner Core, Second Edition(http://tinyurl.com/mqg3uvc ). Her newest book is Sacred Meditation: Embracing the Divine, available through her office. Just email SacredMeditation@kebba.com.
• For an appointment or to ask Kebba to speak for your group: calendar@kebba.com .

Gliding Into Your Fabulous New Year

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change, Effective living, exhaustion, goals, Guilt, Negative stress, resolutions, stress

 

© 2015  Kebba Buckley Button, MS, OM.  World Rights Reserved.

© Daniele Depascale-Fotolia

So it’s a whole fresh new year—a blank slate to be written upon. Happy New Year 2015! Whoops (sound of brakes screeching)! Are you happy? How do you feel right now? If you need to move the ice pack off your head before you can operate the keyboard, that’s okay. I’ll wait. Open your iPad or your iPhone Notes app, or get out that pen and paper. Let’s take just 5 minutes together, or more, if you find this interesting. Today is the perfect day to ask yourself some questions:

• Is your body comfortable, your heart full, your mind clear and at ease, your spirit at peace? No one is going to see your answers unless you choose to share, so jot down key words, cryptic phrases, or even write out your feelings at length.
• And what about your life and livingness? Do you have the relationships you want? Do you feel loved?
• Is money working for you the way/s you would like?
• Are you and the Divine on friendly terms?
• What about your environment? Does it look pleasant to you? Does the flow work for you? Or is it dull and messy, the closets overflowing and files impossible to navigate?
• Today, how does your life look, compared to what you envisioned on January 1^st a year ago?

 

Notice I have not yet used the R-word. I want you to forget the guilt and forget being hard on yourself. Most say we should jump powerfully into our new year with a renewed sense of discipline and determination. Today, as a stress management expert, I’m supposed to talk enthusiastically about goals and resolutions, why they work and don’t work, blah blah blah. But we can cover those tomorrow. And please come back for that piece. As usual, my recommendations don’t go where others usually go. I want your life and work to be as painless and as satisfying as possible.

 

So for today, please forget all the resolutions you made a year ago. Forget how you’ve been eating and drinking and not-exercising the last several weeks. Forget what the scale said this morning. (You had to look, didn’t you?) Today, you are behind on last year’s idealized ideas of who and how you and your life should be. Some of you are feeling really guilty about the gap. Guilt depresses your parasympathetic nervous system and leaves you more open to illness, so it’s the worst strategy to nurture your guilt.

“Guilt is anger directed at ourselves.”

~ Peter McWilliams

 

May I boldly suggest you stop guilting yourself right now? Instead, today, do what your body-mind-heart-spirit system needs: gentle transition from holiday health into the vigor you want and need for a powerful New Year. Do these things today, and continue this week:

• Drink lots of extra filtered water. This detoxes.
• Eat less sweet stuff today. Sweetness is yin and makes you yin: swollen, weak, slow and quiet.
• If you can, walk for 20 minutes or tread on your treadmill, at walking speed, for 20 minutes. More detox.
• Schedule some energy therapy like Jin Shin Jyutsu ® for balancing. This can eliminate the aches and unclarity.
• Take some time in Nature. This pumps up your master hormone, DHEA, making you stronger and more resilient. The effect is immediate. An upcoming article will expand on this amazing phenomenon.
• If you like God, pray, or just find a quiet place and moment, and talk. You may be wonderfully surprised at what you hear.
• Start a journal, in your iPad or the like, your iPhone notes section, or in a disguised document on your computer. As you finish reading this article, take 5 minutes to write down some of your realizations. Notice how much lighter you feel?

“It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”

~ Oscar Wilde

 

I would like you to enjoy your New Year! And to start making the most of it, consider gliding into it gently. Forget the advice to jump in forcefully. Create a transition from the Holidays, treat yourself kindly, and your pzazz will be back in mere days. Now: Happy (and Fabulous) New Year!

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Energy, Peace, Meditation

 

 

• Kebba Buckley Button is a stress management expert.  She also has a natural healing practice and is an ordained minister. She is the author of the award-winning book, Discover The Secret Energized You (http://tinyurl.com/b44v3br), plus the 2013 book, Peace Within:  Your Peaceful Inner Core, Second Edition(http://tinyurl.com/mqg3uvc ). Her newest book is Sacred Meditation: Embracing the Divine, available through her office. Just email SacredMeditation@kebba.com.
• For an appointment or to ask Kebba to speak for your group: bookings@kebba.com .

 

UpBeat Living: Unintentional Role Models

Tags

achieving goals, Effective living, effort, focus, goals, passion, Role models, The life you want

© 2014  Kebba Buckley Button.  World Rights Reserved.

 

Microsoft

I love FaceBook!  It has literally created changes in my life. Through FaceBook, I have been re-introduced to people from many different times of my life.  My high school ballet mates and ballet teacher, a sister’s old boyfriend, my high school boyfriend, a woman who created a lucrative business with feather ornaments—each left impressions as our lives overlapped.  From college days, two particular women I knew at Vassar inspired me in ways they never knew.  One has become prominent and the other very famous.  I recently relocated the first in a roundabout way, through FaceBook.  Her name is Suzanne Palmer Dougan.  The other is everywhere in the media.  Her name is Meryl Streep.

 

I met Suzanne Palmer (now Dougan) through a friend, and then ran into Suzanne in the Vassar Theater Department.  I was a freshman taking Theater 101.  Suzanne was beautiful and had a stunning smile.  She was energetic, vibrant, passionate, and creative.  She never seemed to sit down.  One week, Suzanne asked me if I would sub for her, doing moving set crew for a play.  She wanted to take the weekend off for a special trip, and there were several performances for which she would have had to be onstage.

 

I was excited to agree!  I would have an amazing experience while she pursued one of her non-theater passions.  One of my jobs was to “blow up the Parthenon”, using a white-exhaust fire extinguisher behind a model of the Parthenon.  At other points in the show, I made other things appear from behind painted panels portraying ancient Athens.  Suzanne had designed and painted a great deal of that set. She gave me gifts of a lifetime, modelling joyful passion and giving me the set crew experience.

 

Two years later, she went to Yale Drama School, a high honor.  Now I know that she found her soulmate through her passion for theater, and she is now married with a grown son at Yale.  She is also now a professor of theater at Amherst College.

 

You do something good now, and you’re not always around to see the difference it makes later. 

–Leroy Jethro Gibbs, comforting Abby, NCIS

 

The same play in which I blew up the Parthenon was actually Meryl Streep’s senior play.  But I didn’t put that together at the time.  I met her in the costume shop, since I was required to do 12 hours a week of costume crew that semester. The director had asked Meryl to bring in bikini panties and a bra, to have a bird-theme costume built onto.   In that play, she was to portray “Peace”, dressed in a bird-clad bikini, coming down center stage doing hip pops.  Meryl was the selfless soul of focus.  She had a quiet manner.  In the costume shop, after introducing herself to the costume mistress, she asked where she should stand.  She put on the pieces and the costume mistress proceeded to attach feathers.  Meryl made herself totally available to the moment and to the staff who needed to do their jobs.  I saw her absolute commitment to Getting It Right in other moments, too.  She changed me with that commitment, with her quietude, and with her intense focus.

 

Meryl Streep went on to Yale Drama School several months later.  And several years after that, she starred in the movie, Sophie’s Choice.  The world was astonished by her performance.  I wasn’t.  I had seen her egoless, intense focus and her incredible work ethic.

 

These two powerful, amazing women affected me deeply, infusing me with images of what is important in how we live our lives.  Each was simply living as she saw best, not meaning to be a role model.  Neither ever knew how they affected me, but their influence was powerful.

 

Occasionally, people tell me that I have inspired them in some way.  Probably you have inspired others, and often, in ways and times you never knew. We need to live our lives by our values and passions, each be our unique selves, and let the right people be uplifted by who we are.  Who knows what greatness we may each inspire?

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● Kebba Buckley Button is a stress management expert.  She is the author of the award-winning book, Discover The Secret Energized You (http://tinyurl.com/b44v3br), plus the 2013 book, Peace Within:  Your Peaceful Inner Core, Second Edition (http://tinyurl.com/mqg3uvc).  She also has a natural healing practice and is an ordained minister.

● Liked this article?  You can buy Kebba’s books:  just click the links!

• Discover The Secret Energized You (http://tinyurl.com/b44v3br). 
• Peace Within:  Your Peaceful Inner Core (Second Edition) (http://tinyurl.com/mqg3uvc)             

● Enjoyed this post?  Please click “like” in the FB widget in the right hand column!  You’ll have our undying gratitude plus a huge rise in your Good Karma.

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● Reach the writer at kebba@kebba.com .

 

 

UpBeat Living: Diana Nyad Realized Her Dream, and You Can Realize Yours

Tags

achieving goals, Diana Nyad, effort, passion, stress, Stress Management, success

© 2013 Kebba Buckley Button.  World Rights Reserved.

 

CBS News

Diana Nyad not only chased her dream, she caught it.  On Monday, September 2, 2013, Nyad, age 64, walked up on the beach of Key West, Florida, smiling and pumping her fists in the air, victoriously greeting a delighted crowd gathered there to welcome her.  For Nyad, the fifth time was the charm.  She had tried to swim from Cuba to Florida previously, but currents, jellyfish, and weather forced her to give up, four times.

This time, Nyad fulfilled her dream.  She swam for 53 hours, covering 110 miles, from Havana, Cuba, to Key West, Florida without a shark cage.  A shark cage would not only have kept away the sharks, but would also have created drag that would have made Nyad’s swim easier.  Now she holds the historic record of being the first to swim this route without a shark cage.

And how did this one woman, Diana Nyad, get to this culmination and this triumph?  There are 4 key elements to her success.

1.           Passion.  She got in touch with her passion for endurance swimming decades ago.
2.           Goals.  She set increasingly high goals and worked to meet each in turn.  For example, an intermediate goal to this week’s achievement was to swim around Manhattan Island, at age 26–and that’s 28 miles.  She worked for it, organized it, achieved it.
3.           Effort.  She kept identifying what it would take to get to each goal, pulled together the elements, stayed fit enough to excel in endurance swimming.  She put in the effort.
4.           Support.  She developed the right circle of support people and resources to help lift her to her goals.  This week, a team attended her departure from Havana.  A flotilla accompanied her along the swim, keeping her on the correct alignment, watching for sharks, assuring she took nourishment, and otherwise looking out for her safety.  PR people got the word out of her try for the historic record, resulting in media coverage and many non-swimmer supporters showing up in Key West, to cheer her victory.

Are you thinking about your own dreams, now?  And where you are on the timeline and achievement line?  How would you score yourself in passion, goals, effort, and support?  What would you need to shift to actually realize your dreams?

As she walked up on the beach at Key West, Nyad offered 2 key messages to all of us.  These are so timeless that we should all post them on our office walls:  “Never, ever give up!”  and “You’re never too old to chase your dreams!”  Now ask yourself:   where will you be with your dreams, when you are 64?

Start fresh in chasing yours.  Start again, today.

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• Peace Within:  Your Peaceful Inner Core (http://tinyurl.com/abd47jr)
• Discover The Secret Energized You (http://tinyurl.com/b44v3br). 

 

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