How Stressed Are We?

Tags

Kebba Buckley Button, meditation, peace within, Sacred Meditation, stress, Stress Management, The life you want

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

© HaywireMedia-Fotolia

 

 

 

As a professional stress management speaker and coach, my passion is to share stress information, to help people develop better stress coping, in specific, and often easy, ways. And this month is National Stress Awareness Month! So please jot down any stress questions that come to mind as I share today. And then either email me or pop the questions into the comment section, below.

You probably know very well when you are stressed. There are lots of symptoms that tell us we are stressed: fatigue, irritability, forgetfulness, high blood pressure, high heart rate, digestive tightness, overreacting, headaches, back pain, insomnia, and even a weakened immune system. In Japan, there is even a word for death from overwork. That’s really bad stress! Short of killing yourself with commitments, what symptoms do you experience? What stress reactions would you like to be done with?

The American Psychological Association has been taking an annual survey of how stressed we are in the U.S. They call it “Stress In America: Paying With Our Health”. People were asked to rate their stress on a scale of 1 to 10. Since 2007, when the APA began the Stress In America survey, money has consistently been the top source of stress. For 2014, APA found:

• More women than men say that their stress has increased in the past year (32 percent vs. 25 percent).

• Far more women than men say they have lain awake at night in the past month due to stress (51 percent vs. 32 percent of men).

• Women are more likely than men to say they felt a sense of loneliness or isolation in the past month due to stress (29 percent vs. 19 percent of men).

• Millennials are more likely than other generations to say their stress has increased in the past year (36 percent vs. 24 percent of boomers and 19 percent of matures).

• Millennials are more likely than any other generation to say they have felt a sense of loneliness or isolation due to stress in the past month (34 percent vs. 24 percent of Gen Xers, 21 percent of boomers and 12 percent of matures).

• More parents than nonparents say they are not doing enough to manage their stress (31 percent vs. 20 percent).

• Parents are more likely than nonparents to report engaging in unhealthy stress management techniques, such as drinking alcohol (18 percent vs. 12 percent) and smoking (17 percent vs. 10 percent).

So on a scale of 1 to 10, how stressed would you say you are? Do you think you’re doing enough about it? Would you like to know more about stress and how to handle it differently?

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• If you enjoy 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! Due to a recent FB change, our “likes” look low. Thanks for your help!

Energy – Peace – Meditation

 

 

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

 

Stress Attack: How to Beat That!

Tags

Crisis Quickies, Dealing with stress, inner peace, peace within, stress, stress attack, Stress Management, sudden stress

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

What a beautiful day out. Life feels good, and you are so grateful for all your blessings! You just lost 5 pounds you didn’t want. Your car has 4 new tires and a full tank of gas. You got the bills paid online this morning and now you’re off to run errands. The first errand is depositing a big check from a new client. You feel at one with life, joyful without having to think about it. Your heart is light, and you are optimistic. You are In Joy Meant. You are in harmony with the Universe and in the flow with the traffic, on the road and on the Internet. You’re deep in your Peace Within. And then:

• An angry person blasts you with a vicious text or email, or
• A loved one calls, storming about a conflict at work, or
• When you’re almost home, a stressed driver rear-ends you.

Your serenity is shattered. Your heart is racing. Your mind has gone blank and you can’t concentrate. This is it: you’re about to catch major stress from someone else. What can you do to shed this stress trying to take possession of your body-mind system? Immediately apply these steps for stress first aid!

1. Drop your shoulders and exhale, to and through your toes. Do this three times. Notice your heart calming. Repeat as needed.
2. When both your hands are free, place your right hand over your heart and your left on your mid-back, if you can reach it. Between your shoulder blades, you’ll find a sore vertebra. Hold that one. Notice your body calming more deeply.
3. Think of how peaceful you felt right before this happened, and call that serenity back. Give this 30 seconds, at least.
4. Take 2 squirts of Bach Rescue Remedy spray (available at most health food stores- can be taken hourly). For future, keep Rescue Remedy in your home, desk, purse, and briefcase for rough days and sudden jolts.
5. If you don’t have Rescue Remedy, suck on a mint. Seriously! The mint itself is alkaline and will help your acid-base balance. No, the cinnamon flavor is not equally good. The fact that you are massaging the center of your tongue with that mint means you are connecting to some of your deepest energy lines and calming yourself. This connection is one reason for stress eating.

Now you should feel cool enough to carry on with the most reasonable strategy for the jolting situation. Do your best. Keep exhaling.

And remember:

1. This stress wasn’t yours before the jolt, and it doesn’t have to be yours now. You can move through this with calm and with a light heart, open to the stress dissolving quickly
2. Don’t move your consciousness into the center of the stress. Stay in your own mental space while considering it.
3. Whatever it is, this too shall pass.

Yes, stress can attack any of us suddenly! But you can move through it and not keep it. You can get back to your day and your Peace Within.

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• If you enjoy 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! Due to a recent FB change, our “likes” look low. Thanks for your help!

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

Stress is Contagious! Four Top Tips to Not Catch It!

Tags

breath, Kebba Buckley Button, peace within, stress, Stress can be contagious, Stress Management

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

 

Fotolia

Have you ever been cruising along, enjoying your day, at one with Life, and feeling, without trying, that all is right with the World? You’re deep in your Peace Within. And then:

• An angry person blasts you with a vicious email or memo
• A family member blows in, massively upset about a conflict at work
• A neighbor’s dog is suddenly barking loudly and insistently for at least a half hour now
• While you’re commuting and almost home, a driver rear-ends you

 

Your serenity is shattered. Your heart is racing. Your mind has gone blank and you can’t concentrate. This is it: you’re about to catch stress from someone else. What can you do to shed this stress? If you don’t have your own system, try these top tips:

 

1. Drop your shoulders and exhale. Do this three times. Notice your heart calming.
2. Place your right hand over your heart and your left on your mid-back, if you can reach it. Notice your body calming more deeply.
3. Think of how peaceful you felt right before this happened, and call that serenity back.
4. Take 2 squirts of Bach Rescue Remedy spray (available at most health food stores or from SwansonVitamins.com; keep Rescue Remedy in your home, desk, purse, and briefcase for rough days and sudden jolts).

Fotolia

Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.
~ Natalie Goldberg

Now you should feel cool enough to carry on with the most reasonable strategy for the jolting situation. Do your best. Keep exhaling.

And remember:

1. This stress wasn’t yours before the jolt, and it doesn’t have to be yours now.
2. Don’t move your consciousness into the center of the stress. Stay in your own mental space while considering it.
3. Whatever it is, this too shall pass.

 

Yes, stress can be contagious. You can catch it from others. But you can get over it, too, and get back to your Peace Within.

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• If you enjoy 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! Due to a recent FB change, our “likes” look low. Thanks for your help!

 

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 .

 

Stress Caused by Appearances That Can Be Fatally Deceiving

Tags

Boston Marathon, Inspire Magazine, Kebba Buckley Button, peace within, stress, Stress Management

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

 

Photo by Kebba Buckley Button

This column is always about how we can beat stress and  live the best possible life, having the most health and happiness. I definitely teach the use of beauty to uplift our moods, our homes, and our appearances. However, sometimes, when we believe an initial pleasant appearance that actually covers ugly substance, we can be deceived, ripped off, damaged, or even dead. We need to keep beauty in perspective and consider what may be underneath.

 

Recently, I looked out at the Feng Shui Garden, and the Mojito Mint had grown a white blossom almost as large as one of the mint leaves (see photo to the left)! For a minute, I was startled and thrilled! Then, my scientist-gardener brain took over and said, “[N]o no, that’s a blossom that fell from the flowering tree above; I recognize that blossom as something else.” For a moment, I believed the appearance. Then I recognized the truth. This was a pleasant example and gave me a good chuckle. Appearances can be deceiving. And sometimes it’s just silly. It doesn’t matter.

 

In my youth, I somehow absorbed the principle that beautiful people have beautiful values and personalities. How I got that is another article. But in my professional life in the engineering world, I mistook beautiful people for nice people a few times, to my great loss. In a simple example, a beautiful, sparkling person, who I mistook for positive, said something vicious with a huge, sparkling smile, and then stole my only copy of a valuable document. It was never returned. Another beautiful, sparkling person routinely made up damaging stories about me, with a joyful smile, claiming he had known me well in grad school. This was all a total lie, but so well delivered that everyone believed him and believed I was secretly the person he claimed me to be—against their own powers of observation as to who I was. They were completely sucked in by his charm.  In neither case did anyone believe what these men had done, so I had no recourse. I wonder how many other good people these two had damaged? And they aren’t the only ones doing harm to others for fun. Beautiful people can be nasty sociopaths, often using their looks and charm to manipulate others. Sometimes we realize the truth too late. Sound familiar?

 

© vexworldwide – Fotolia

In some regions, we have garden snails. The snails move slowly and have beautiful, lyrically curved shells. The French make escargot dishes with garlic and butter, for which people pay a premium in restaurants. So snails are lovely, slow, harmless, and sometimes beneficial as a food, right? Yet now we hear, in the news, that there are Giant African Land Snails with one skill set: eating. These snails eat 500 species of plants and also houses. Yes, houses. In the first 6 months of life, they crave building materials like stucco, to build up calcium in their beautiful bodies. These snails get to be up to 9 inches long, live up to 9 years, and they have no natural predators. They are currently the most damaging pest in Southern Florida housing, and they are moving across Florida. Their appearance is deceiving, until you recognize the truth. They are beautiful but harmful.

 

Online, there is a professional and beautiful magazine called Inspire. The pages are filled with high-end commercial art. The images are stunning. But is this a spiritual journal? Actually, it is a jihadist magazine. It carries articles on how to make bombs in your Mom’s kitchen, and worse. The Boston bombers are said to have taken inspiration from this magazine. The beautiful magazine’s appearance is deceiving. It leads to death. Now you can recognize the truth. It’s beautiful but harmful.

 

To Katherine Russell, an artistic Christian from Rhode Island, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was handsome and compelling. In her college days in Boston, Katherine converted to Islam, married Tamerlan Tsarnaev. and began wearing a hajib. She had a daughter with Tsarnaev. He and his brother bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013. Now she is Katherine Tsarnaev, the widow of one of the most famous bombers of our time. Her husband’s appearance and compelling nature were deceiving. Fatally deceiving. Now Katherine has gone back to her maiden name and hides, with her daughter, in her parents’ home in Rhode Island. She talks with Federal investigators a lot. She dodges paparazzi and hopes to avoid Federal charges. Perhaps she now recognizes the truth about that charismatic man. He was gorgeous but deadly.

 

As humans, we are sometimes so compelled by beauty that we must touch it and sometimes tango with it. Ever since Eve spied a gorgeous apple in the Garden of Eden, we have had trouble with temptation around beauty. Think of the times you were fooled by glamour and charm. Perhaps we should all relax and take things slowly around too much beauty and shimmer. Staying deeply rooted in our Peace Within, let’s gradually try to get the true nature of someone or something before we get sucked in by appearances—and get really hurt.

 

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• If you enjoy 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! Due to a recent FB change, our “likes” look low. Thanks for your help!

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 .

Is Your Backstory Creating More Stress?

Tags

Kebba Buckley Button, Letting go, peace within, stress, Stress Management, your backstory

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

 

Fotolia

 

These days, most of us have plenty of stress without looking around for more. Many of us are caring for kids and/or elders and trying to get everyone everywhere they need to be on time, with the right gear. Many of us work in organizations with personality and philosophy conflicts. The national and international news carry many stories of plane crashes, kidnappings, mass shootings, stock market drops and rises. So do we need to dig around to find more things to be concerned, uncertain, worried, sad, mad, or depressed about?

 

 

As a stress management expert, I say no! To live a joyful, satisfying, effective life, each of us needs to be as clear in mind and heart as we can be. We need to be as healthy in our bodies and brains as we can be. Spiritual people need to be as connected as they/we can be. Today has enough to concern us without borrowing from the future or past. Even Jesus said, “[T]oday has enough troubles of its own (Matt 6:34).”

 

So why do so many cling to their unhappy backstory? I understand celebrating memories of happy childhoods, great schools, fine friends, loving pets, thrilling cities we’ve lived in, and gorgeous countryside we’ve enjoyed. This will actually raise your DHEA and make your metabolism happier. But some have bad memories they keep recounting. Whenever you hold a negative thought for a few minutes, it depresses your parasympathetic nervous system and you literally become weaker. If you sustain negative thoughts, you become more likely to get sick. But some people cling to their horror, pain, and negative imaginings as though their life depends on it. And actually, their life depends on the opposite.

 

Leave the past in the past.  Tomorrow’s not promised.  Today’s a gift.  I guess that’s why it’s called The Present.

~ Joe Budden, Hip-Hop Artist

 

Years ago, I took a self-realization seminar that lasted 5 days. Each morning the 70 participants were invited to “tell their story”, and we heard amazing tales of fabulous and horrific formative experiences. One woman said she had had an incestuous relationship with her father for a number of years (shock number one) and she said actually it had been the most supportive relationship of her life (shock number two). Another woman said her father had been a fiend and that’s why she was heavy; she was in her 50’s. Later, I realized she was running her narrative about her childhood, in her heart and mind, every hour of every day. It was creating huge mental interference and general stress.

 

On the last day, it was time for those of us who had not told Our Story to share. On the way to the seminar, it washed over me: IT DOESN’T MATTER. Since I wanted to live life forward, and actually there is no other way to live it, no aspect of stress from the past was relevant to how I lived today. For the time, when Getting It All Out was a cultural value, I was taking a radical position. It changed my life. I now mainly live my life in the present moment with an eye to the future God and I are cocreating together.

 

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering.  Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

 

When someone asks you how you are, are you tempted to tell them you’re depressed or frustrated? Then you have some items to take care of.   A balanced person does not dump their stuff at the “Hello”. Write down what you’re feeling and what needs to be addressed.  Healthy people want to reach some degree of Peace Within, and peaceful people never reply to “how are you?” with negative statements.

 

Do you believe that some negative factor from your past is holding you back? If so, and if you say you want a happy and fulfilled life, it’s time to bust your backstory and get some professional help. Get some counseling, journal through the process, read any recommended books, and do any exercises the counselor recommends. If you suspect you need a prescription for anxiety or depression, start with your doctor.  When you have achieved a new balance, you may want to work on your life skills with a coach, read some books on relationships, and keep journaling. Get your eyes opened to some visions of your positive potentials and future!

 

It’s natural for people to want to improve: their health, their communications skills, their workplace talents, even their hair control. Don’t let stress from your backstory hold you back. Don’t let old stories keep you from having a satisfying day, career, and relationships. You are the only person who can put your right foot in front of your left and step forward. Create your great new life. Are you in?

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• If you enjoy 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! Due to a recent FB change, our “likes” look low. Thanks for your help!

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 .

Forget Age Stress: 70 is the New 40

Tags

age stress, aging, Barbara Penn-Atklins, heatlh age, Kebba Buckley Button, lifestyle, peace within, stress

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

 

© stokkete – Fotolia

When I was in my twenties, for a while, I worked for a State agency. At that time, all Arizona State agencies offered employees a wellness screening. One of the big benefits of the health screening, done from a questionnaire, was that each person got a wellness score, their “health age”. I had never heard of “health age” before. As they defined it at the time, it was a measure of your actual age worked together with factors such as weight, exercise, length of commute, and whether you smoked. I was so pleased: my health age came in 5 years younger than my actual age.

 

I think of health age again every time I hear someone proclaim, “I’m old!” When I hear that, I wonder what rights or social rights they are claiming for themselves.  Also, some people talk about how old they feel at tired times, such as when they’re waking up.

 

Age is just a number, and mine is unlisted.

~ Unknown

We have many ideas about what age means. Age is a condition that supposedly moves in one direction and increases, independent of your choices. However, nothing can be further from the truth! I think youth is all about how you feel.  And we have many choices we can make to feel great.  If you feel young, energetic, flexible, and generally healthy, and you have peace within, then you are young. If you feel old, tired, stiff, achy, stressed, and generally unhealthy, then your health age is getting older–sorry! In an example from my own life, when I was 26 to 33, I had horrible, burning, crippling arthritis and felt very old. I moved stiffly, and other than my face, I probably looked old. But, I beat the condition in 8 years, and I began to feel very young and healthy. Read some of my adventure with that condition at http://wp.me/pw4HM-lB.

 

My husband recounts a story of an amazing woman he met while hiking the Grand Canyon one year. The Grand Canyon trails are long, and some are steep. If you go down into the Canyon, you also have to take one or another of the trails back out, no matter how much work it is. My husband used to go hike the Canyon yearly with some very fit middle-aged male friends. They would all work up to their Canyon trek, practicing on local Phoenix mountain trails, of which there are many. They would even wear loaded packs on these practice hikes, to be sure they were really fit for the Canyon.

 

Once on the Canyon trail, my husband’s group was puffing along, finding the hiking to be strenuous. A very petite, senior-looking woman with blunt-cut white hair came by, moving rapidly along the same trail, but coming out of the Canyon. My husband, who was then in his sixties, expressed his admiration to her, for her vitality and speed. She pulled her chin up and stood straight and tall at her possible five full feet of height. She gave my husband a stern look and said, “[Y]oung man, obviously you don’t know who I am! I lead walks like this [13 miles round trip] a few times a month for the Sierra Club!” Let’s say this woman’s health age was rather young, and she was very vital.

 

So are you ready now to challenge your age numbers? Consultant Bara Penn-Atkins (www.sunrisebeginnings.com) is an expert in leadership, retirement readiness, life options, and how to build a life of significance. Atkins has written a book, rightly called 70 is the New 40. In her chapter called Discover Your Power!, Atkins describes a transition all people go through:

Photo courtesy of Barbara Penn-Atkins

 

As a person celebrates age forty and beyond, something mystical and magical happens. How we feel life should be measured begins to take a different form. There is an awakening of the self, and our individual independence becomes profoundly important. …Internally, the psyche takes on a new maturity, and it only gets better and more positive with age.

~ Barbara Penn-Atkins

 

In Atkins’s book, she offers us exercises to write out our challenges, opportunities, and meanings. She shows us ways to transform the 3 D’s of aging– disease, disability, and depression—into 3 new D’s: discovery, discipline, and dedication. So how do you feel: fit, healthy, vivid, contributing? A person who is 70 now can feel the way a 40-year-old used to feel. Abraham Lincoln famously said,

 

In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.

~ Abraham Lincoln

 

I’m not saying our age numbers are entirely bogus.  However, age and aging do not have to stress us. Does your life fit you? How old do you feel? And what’s in your years? I would love to hear your thoughts.

 

 

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• If you enjoy 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! Due to a recent FB change, our “likes” look low. Thanks for your help!

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 .

There’s Healing and There’s Curing

Tags

arthritis, curing, healing, HIV/AIDS, Kebba Buckley Button, Oriental energy healing, oriental energy therapy, peace within, stress, Stress Management, UpBeat Living

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

 

From a photo by Nikki Zalewski, Fotolia

 

Is there something in your body or your life that you wish were healed? Today I went to a meeting of the Healing Ministry at my church. It’s a large Episcopal Church in Scottsdale, Arizona. The lay Healing Ministers shared stories of healings they had experienced, and we discussed dimensions of healing.

 

I like to focus on the positive, the Upbeat Living, the joy… all the Highest and Best. Not the past or the pain. However, today I was moved to share with this loving group my most dramatic healing story: mine. Here it is.

 

When I was 26, one evening, I began to feel cranky. I thought “[H]ow odd! What’s going on?” My body replied that the large joints of my hands were burning. I thought, “[N]o problem. Mom has had mild arthritis since my age. I’ll take aspirin, like she does.” Oh no! Within a year, I was burning from head to toe. And there was a terrible stiffness with the pain. Over a few months, my joints began to enlarge and I could hardly use my hands. I would be needing a wheelchair by my mid-thirties, and there would be no marriage or children. As an engineering manager, I went at potential solutions like a freight train. I learned nutrition, controlled my diet, and took up oriental energy healing, primarily Jin Shin Jyutsu.

I learned there are many approaches other than medication, to beat a painful condition.

 ~Kebba Buckley Button

When I was 33, I was at a party, and someone was talking about her arthritis as though she had married it. She was obsessed with it, in love with it. But that’s another column. I heard myself saying to her, “[W]ell, when I had horrible crippling arthritis, I found several things really helped…” From there, I have no memory of what I shared with her, because I was so shocked to hear myself speak of my hellish condition in the past tense. It had finished leaving sometime over the previous few months! I learned that just because you have a condition doesn’t mean it has to be progressive. Just because you have a diagnosis doesn’t mean you have to keep it. Later, as my joints actually healed and shrank, I learned that just because you have organic body damage, it doesn’t mean it can’t reverse. These were huge revelations to me. Now, at 62, most days, I have no pain of any kind whatsoever. People take me for 45.

 

The opportunity to experience that crippling condition was a transformative gift in my life. I became so fascinated with natural pain solutions that I left engineering and morphed into an energy- and spiritual healer. I became an ordained minister, a spiritual teacher, a stress management trainer, and an award-winning author.

 

In the 1980’s, the AIDS epidemic hit Phoenix. I volunteered at the Malta Center, a community healing organization funded by an arm of the Catholic Church. We served HIV/AIDS patients and their loved ones, without regard to their income. We comforted and listened. We helped the clients organize the practical help they needed. We had Red Cross classes on understanding HIV/AIDS. We had funeral planning workshops. We had a lot of funerals. I had extraordinary conversations with many people experiencing the embrace of AIDS, and with their families.

 

I learned that I had friends who had been HIV-positive for 10 years, with no symptoms at all, even fatigue. I learned that some AIDS patients got very close to the Divine in their last weeks. I learned that some seemed to go into a state of Grace in their last weeks, in complete harmony with Life, the Universe, and God. Some said their lives were healed, and then they passed on. They weren’t cured, but they were healed.

 

Today, the Clinton Initiative and other organizations stream pharmaceutical protocols to many countries, and HIV is not the frightening specter it once was. Do you want healing? Let’s remember:

• There are many approaches other than medication, to beat horrible pain and other health conditions.
• Just because you have a diagnosis doesn’t mean it gets to rule your life.
• Just because you have a condition doesn’t mean it has to be progressive.
• Just because there was never a medical protocol before doesn’t mean there won’t be one soon, if you like medical protocols.
• Just because you’re not cured doesn’t mean you can’t be healed.

Live your life.  Don’t fear health labels.  Maintain your miraculous body the best you can.  It’s your life:  be there.

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If you enjoy 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! Due to a recent FB change, our “likes” look low. Thanks for your help!

 

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 .

What To Do When There’s Nothing You Can Do About That

Tags

Depression, Go(o)d Thoughts, peace within, Pray, stress, Stress Management

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

 

Photo by Dreamstime–abdone

From time to time, we are stuck in, or we see, a situation that is ridiculous, absurd, and not right. We feel stress and anxiety, even depression. After writing our Congressperson, we may still feel frustrated or reviled, even to the point of having a tight stomach, a headache, or knots in our back, because there is nothing we can do. Here are several examples.

 

A TV show tells the story of a house that disappeared overnight. The husband came home and found his house missing– a site-built home, not a mobile home. It evolved that there was an inheritance dispute. Do you feel stressed, hearing about this? Yet there is nothing the observer can do about it.

 

In a famous story, a family hired architect Frank Lloyd Wright to build a country home for them adjacent to their favorite wooded picnic spot, a flat rock at the edge of a stream. The family wanted to easily access their beautiful spot and its view, and eat there more often. The architect decided he wanted to build the rock into the home, and the family lost their favorite outdoor picnic spot, its view, and their family tradition.  In addition, according to their son, “you can’t really live in such a house”. So they lost their picnic spot, spent massive funds, were unable to live in the house, and made an architect famous for “The House at Fallingwater”. The house became a museum. Do you feel frustrated or angry when you think about this? Yet there is nothing the observer can do about it.

 

In Wisconsin, a video bubbled up that portrays several men trapping a deer, wrestling with it to put a yellow t-shirt on it, and laughing. The deer escaped and has been seen since, still wearing a portion of the yellow t-shirt. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources advises that the deer looks healthy and should be left alone. Watching the video, a friend was reminded of human sexual assault, and she imagined how the three men treat the women in their lives, then laugh. My friend feels very disturbed by this story and the behavior of the three men. Do you? And yet, there is nothing the observer can do about it.

 

The stock market is acting squirrelly, the US border with Mexico is not secure, North Korea is threatening SONY and the USA in general, another abused child has disappeared. Boko Haram has murdered another 2000 Nigerian villagers and eradicated their villages, in one week . Yet there is nothing the observer can do about it.

 

But wait! Yes, the observer/you can do three things:

1. Pray or hold Go(o)d Thoughts, even if the event seems to be over.
2. Detach, exhale, drop your shoulders, and turn your attention to peaceful thoughts. Relax physically, and don’t allow yourself to go over and over the sequence. No obsessing. If the bad thoughts come back again, exhale each time.
3. Focus on what is good, uplifting, and meaningful to you. This will cause the lower thoughts to be displaced, and your energy level and health will begin to rise immediately.

 

For the spiritual reader, Phillipians 4:8 advises us:

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things.

 

What to do when there’s nothing you can do? Pray, hold Go(o)d Thoughts, and set it aside. And get on with generating Good in and around your life.

 

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• If you enjoy 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! Due to a recent FB change, our “likes” look low. Thanks for your help!

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 .

Caution: Assumptions Can Kill Relationships

Tags

assuming, Assumptions, peace within, personal peace, Relationships, stress

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

© Ad van Brunschot – Fotolia

 

Have you ever caught yourself assuming something you have no way of knowing? A lot of gossip comes from, well, nothing. It’s human nature to fill in the blanks when curious about something. But we need to take care we are neither consumed by our natural curiosity nor creating problems for someone with our assumptions.

 

Here’s a relatively harmless example from a business networking meeting. To get the dynamics, you need to know that I only ever eat small meals. This particular group always has a buffet, so it’s interesting to see what people choose to put on their plates. However, normally members never comment on what others are eating. This one day, an unusually fine-boned, thin (as in, no one is thinner) and athletic member took a massive interest in my lunch plate.

 

“I came across some awful characters when I got some kind of status and came to Hollywood. Then you have directors trying to sleep with you, assuming that you will do things because of the way you dress.”

~ Stacey Dash

 

She asked me loudly, “[I]s that all you’re going to eat?” I hate becoming the center of attention for something so trivial, but I replied pleasantly, “[O]h, I never eat much.” At the same moment, this woman finished taking the food she wanted, and turning out of the buffet line, saying even more loudly, to the room,“[O]h! She’s on a diet!!” To make that statement, she had to be assuming that I felt overweight and wanted to lose pounds, and further that I was choosing food reduction as a means of losing pounds. I did not enjoy the flash realization that my “friend” thought I was overweight. Nor did I enjoy her telling the entire group that I was overweight and had decided to diet, to lose weight.

 

“I’m just trying to get rid of all the mystery surrounding me and let people see what I’m thinking. So they can understand me and stop assuming things about me.”

~ Juliana Hatfield

 

In part, at first, I felt humiliated. I also saw this could escalate into a group discussion, as others started peering at my plate and considering what the ultrathin woman was saying. It was horrible being put in this position by someone else’s broadcasted assumptions. Taking a deep breath and a huge risk, I matched the ultrathin woman’s volume and said calmly to the room, “I’m not on a diet. I never eat much. Don’t make stuff up!” Interestingly, the woman went silent and kept moving, without even looking at me again (ever, so far), let alone apologizing. I no longer seek her out or regard her as a friend.

 

What do you believe about people and situations? How much of your belief system about each friend or colleague is based on fact, and how much on imagination? If you are disturbed by someone’s behavior, is your discomfort based on actual conversation with them? Or is it based on your ideas about why they said and did what they said and did? When you are frustrated by a situation, try writing down what you actually know, what you guess, and what came from rumors. Eliminate the conjecture for a clearer picture, and try starting fresh. You’ll have much less stress and much more peace within.  Will you let assuming consume you? It’s a burden you don’t need, and it’s up to you.

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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: Gratitude, Power, Peace

Tags

David Steindl-Rast, Gratitude, Kebba Buckley Button, Melody Beattie, peace, peace within, Peacemaking, personal peace, stress, UpBeat Living

© 2014  Kebba Buckley Button, MS, OM.  World Rights Reserved.

Fotolia

This morning I woke up realizing my mind was chanting “thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.”  I had a perfect day yesterday, with meaningful paying work, good food, satisfying writing and editing, a client meeting, and a professional meeting full of loving colleagues and friends.  After the meeting, I drove home in my cute PT Cruiser with the great air conditioning and hung out with my amazing, delightful husband.  I was (am) so grateful!  It would be hard for life to be sweeter.  My consciousness was so filled with peace within, so permeated with my gratitude, that my brain was chanting it when I woke up today.

 In daily life we must see, that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy.

~ Brother David Steindl-Rast

So: what if everyone on the Planet were this grateful and happy for the Good?  Wouldn’t there be less stress and more Upbeat Living?  Would we not all be quicker with appreciation and slower to anger (Prov 14:29)?  Could we end up with peace among peoples and nations?

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more.  It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity.  It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.  Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. 

~ Melody Beattie

Do you dream of world peace?  A basic practice of peacemaking is to BE the peace we want to see. Then our inner peace multiplies all around us into a force of and for peacefulness.  One of the negative human traits that generates the most conflicted thinking and conflicted interacting is resentment.  And the most effective antidote for resentment is gratitude.  When we are unhappy or frustrated with someone else’s choices, we feel resentment.  And resentment can turn into anger, conflict, and violence.  Resentment is the basis of racism and of religious hatred.

But if we focus on how grateful we are for our good and for the good of others, we cannot simultaneously be in resentment.  Focusing on the good, and our gratitude for every positive thing and every positive happening, is the basis for joy.  And joyful people emanate peacefulness.  They BE the peace they want to see.  Are you in?

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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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