Author: Lori Deschene

“It’s not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?” ~Henry David Thoreau

Last week my younger brother visited me for five days. To ensure I could spend as much time with as possible, I worked extra hard during the weekend before he arrived.

It amazed me to realize how much I could accomplish when I had a strong motivation to be efficient.

During the week, I put in a couple of hours in the mornings to handle pressing issues, and then spent the afternoons and evenings going out with him. Once again, I was surprised to realize just how much free time could be available to me if I consciously chose to be more effective while working.

This made me think of Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

I realized then that I’d given myself more time than necessary for work, and as a result, I ended up spending a lot of time procrastinating and entertaining myself online.

How might things change for me, I wondered, if I chose to commit to more social and recreational activities, made them priorities, and then once again had a strong motivation to finish work more quickly?

I realize not everyone has flexibility in their work schedules, but I suspect we could all create more time for ourselves if we had a strong incentive to cut out the choices that don’t align with our strongest desires and intentions.

Maybe it’s blog hopping, or zoning out in front of the TV, or my personal favorite, searching the web for things you may want to do. If there’s one thing that’s consumed my time the most, it’s researching how I actually want to spend it.

I believe what John Lennon said is true: Time that you enjoyed wasting was not wasted. And I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with using technology if we’ve consciously chosen to do it.

However, we owe it to ourselves to get out in the world and explore different possibilities—to be playful, to be curious, to be engaged, to be.

Perhaps it would be much easier to do that if we asked ourselves: How can I be more effective? What am I currently doing that I can minimize? And how can I start using the time I’ve created in a way that will excite and inspire me?

Photo by h.koppdelaney

“The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world.” -Marianne Williamson

Did you ever feel like there was a conversation you really wanted to have with someone, and yet a part of you felt it was unwise?

This is a feeling I know all too well.

When I was younger, I spent years fighting for an apology. It wasn’t until my whole world crashed down on me that I realized I’d become a tornado of anger and bitterness, destroying everything in my wake.

I eventually realized I needed to let go of the victim story I’d been carrying around, whether I got the closure I sought or not. For a long time, I thought I had let go.

But recently I realized I’ve been carrying around subconscious resentment, because a part of me still wants to hear those words I chased long ago—that I’ve always deserved respect and love, and I’ve never deserved to feel pain and shame.

So I put this all in a letter that I don’t intend to send. Despite having spent many years in therapy, and even more collecting self-help books, I’ve never done this before.

The other day was the first day I got it all down. I titled this Word Doc “What I Need to Say,” and I ended it with the following words:

“I wrote this letter because I want to heal more fully. A part of me feels that would be so much easier for me if you could look me in the eye and say, ‘I’m sorry.’

Then I remember I chose to stop pursuing an apology. So instead of pushing for it, I will say this: for all the anger, resentment, bitterness, and cruelty I directed toward you many years ago, I’m sorry. That’s not the person I want to be. The person I want to be isn’t a victim. She’s loving, compassionate, and kind.

The person I want to be has forgiven you, and loves herself for making that choice.’”

Somehow just expressing these thoughts makes me feel empowered—and all the more confident that I deserve my own respect. I am not forgetting that I was hurt. I am choosing to heal. I am choosing to be the type of love I’d like to receive.

Little in this world is more powerful than that.

Photo by Frames-of-Mind

“Our way to practice is one step at a time, one breath at a time.” -Shunryu Suzuki

When I was younger I frequently had mini panic attacks and feared that I might suffocate. It literally felt difficult to catch my breath; it almost felt like I was being smothered.

When I felt this type of anxiety, people often told me, “Just breathe.” But that was the problem—it didn’t feel like I could. The missing piece of their advice was how.

When we’re feeling frustrated, or panicked, or stressed, or scared, we tend to breathe rapid, shallow breaths, allowing minimal air to our lungs.

This can actually lead to a number of physical problems, including dizziness, headaches, chronic fatigue, heart palpitations, headaches, high blood pressure, and numbness.

So on top of the difficult emotions we may experience, we then create short-term and long-term physical problems by reducing the amount of oxygen that gets to our brains.

The alternative: Take deep, slow, mindful breaths through the nose. Then hold the breath briefly before exhaling for twice as long as the inhalation.

Not only does this help us release tension and reduce anxiety; it also provides a solid internal focus to help ground us when we may feel overwhelmed by external circumstances.

That’s what it means to just breathe: to just breathe. To concentrate solely on the experience of nourishing our bodies with air and in doing so foster a deep sense of internal safety.

This reminds us that no matter how catastrophic things may seem, we’re alive. We’re okay. We’ll get through it. We are still here, still strong, still breathing.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, just breathe. Forget for a minute about everything that needs to be done, and take it all one slow step and deep breath at time.

If you’re feeling worried, just breathe. Forget for a minute about everything that might go wrong and create what can go right, one slow step and deep breath at a time.

If you’re feeling scared, just breathe. Forget for a minute about everything that might hurt you and take care of yourself, one slow step and deep breath at a time.

Oftentimes the world inside our heads is far more chaotic than the world outside it. We have immense power to calm it by remembering to just breathe.

Photo by brewbooks

“Judgments prevent us from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances.” -Wayne Dyer

The other day I was writing at a community table at Starbucks when an older man asked if he could sit next to me. Since our chairs were backed up against a wall, I had to get up to facilitate this.

I thought he was looking at me in a slightly strange way, but I put this out of my mind. We were sitting side by side in a confined space, not walking down a dark alley together—there was no reason to be alarmed.

Several hours after he’d left, he came back in to use the bathroom. When he saw me, he said, “Wow, you’re still here.”

I responded, “Yup, I pretty much live here. It’s my unofficial office.” And we both laughed a little. Again, he was looking at me in a way that made me feel uncomfortable.

Then he asked me what I do.

After I told him a little about Tiny Buddha, he told me that his passion is music—and then he offered to show me this trailer for a documentary he’d made.

If it were online, I would have posted it, because it moved me, and reminded me how music can inspire, connect, and heal. I could see he was proud and excited to share this, and I felt grateful for having seen it.

After it ended, he told me music means so much to him partly because he was born 80% deaf. After many operations, his sense of hearing has improved dramatically, but still, it isn’t perfect.

That’s why he’d been looking at me in a way that seemed odd; he was trying to read my lips.

I almost completely judged him by appearances and assumptions—and if I had, I would have missed the fleeting opportunity to see inside his heart and find a piece of myself.

I write and publish a lot of posts about opening up and reserving judgment, and yet sometimes it’s still instinctive to shut down and close people out.

It’s even more tempting when we suspect there’s something to fear. Of course it’s always best to follow our instincts when we genuinely feel we’re in harm’s way.

But the truth is we rarely are. Most often, we’re sitting side-by-side with someone just like us, who has something amazing to share if only we’re open to receiving it.

Photo by Akuppa

“Nurture your mind with great thoughts; to believe in the heroic makes heroes.” -Benjamin Disraeli

The other day I read about an insightful Native American myth. A tribal elder tells his grandson that inside each of us, there is a black dog and a white dog doing battle.

The black dog possesses qualities typically understood as negative, including envy, greed, sorrow, anger, resentment, and arrogance. The white dog possesses qualities understood as positive, including love, joy, kindness, empathy, compassion, humility, and peace.

The grandson asks, “Which dog will win the fight?” And the elder responds, “Whichever one we feed.”

What an empowering call to action. We can reap tremendous benefits from asking ourselves: What am I nurturing in myself today?

We can choose to dwell on everything we think is wrong, complain about it to everyone who’ll listen, focus on everything we think we lack, and generally go through our days feeding negativity.

Or we can choose to engage with the world in ways that feel right, talk about the things that excite us, focus on everything that makes us feel fortunate, and generally go through our days feeding positivity.

Of course, there is a third, likely more realistic option: We can do our best to recognize when we’re doing the former, and then make the conscious choice to do the latter.

We may never completely eliminate negative thoughts, but we can learn to catch them and dispute them with increasing regularity.

We may not always feel loving and kind, but we can choose to meditate, practice yoga, or do whatever helps us create inner calm, so as to cultivate those feelings more often.

We may never feel permanently peaceful, but we can choose to question our envy, resentment, and discontent to develop self-awareness and act on what we learn.

It also serves us to recognize that we all come from different places, and despite our similarities, we each have our own unique blend of challenges. Contrary to the myth, very little is black and white.

This means it’s our job to recognize how we’re out of balance, without judging why it’s so or comparing ourselves to other people, so we can focus on doing our best to nurture good thoughts and feelings.

We don’t live in a purely positive world, and we can’t control everything that happens to us—but we can make the world a better place by first striving to know and nourish ourselves.

Buddha image via Shutterstock

“It’s not who you are that holds you back; it’s who you think you’re not.” -Unknown

I know this may seem obvious, but I recently realized I have the most confidence in the things that I do most frequently.

For example, I write every day—and I have a lot of confidence in my ability to help people through my words. I identify myself as a writer, which goes a long way in motivating me to do this consistently and passionately.

I feel less confident when it comes to the business side of things—negotiating the contract for my next book, for example. I frequently reinforce to myself that I’m not a businesswoman; and as a result, I rarely think or act like one.

While a part of me enjoys not focusing on money, I also realize we all need money to live, and there’s a lot of good we can do with our earnings, for ourselves and other people.

Just recently, my friend Emmanuel wrote a blog post about receiving a generous financial gift from a client, and then passing it on to a friend in need.

When I read something like, I’m reminded that my restrictive thinking not only limits my own financial stability; it also impacts my ability to give to others, whether I do that directly, or through my capacity to continually invest in this site.

Right then I realized:

Confidence doesn’t only come from knowing who we think we are, and what we can do well; it also comes from believing in who we can become and what we can do better.

We’re best able to do this if we consciously choose to see ourselves differently, and then act on that vision a little every day.

For me, this means recognizing when I’m limiting possibilities by thinking, “I’m a writer—this isn’t for me,” and instead proactively choosing to create new opportunities, guided by the belief, “I’m a visionary, and there’s no limit to what I can create.”

It’s a tiny shift in thinking that can make a profound difference. It’s amazing how simply adjusting our self-perception can dramatically impact our confidence and potential.

We get to decide what we do, create, and become in this life. But that means we need to be willing to ask ourselves: What’s the impact I’d like to make, how do I need to evolve to do that, and what steps can I take to enable that, today and every day?

Photo by Andrew Girdwood

“Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand-and melting like a snowflake.” –Francis Bacon, Sr.

The other day I planned to work out in my apartment community’s fitness center after I finished writing. But when I left the coffee shop, and walked straight into a bright, sunny day, I felt the last thing I wanted to do was stare at a magazine on an elliptical machine.

What I really wanted to do was pull out my bike from where it had been resting for months and do a little exploring.

Immediately, I began making excuses in my head as to why I shouldn’t do this.

I’d get a better work out on the elliptical. That’s what I’d planned to do—and it’s good to stick with plans (a weak argument, I know). It would be hard to get my bike out of the closet under my stairs, where it was wedged in with other stored items.

Suddenly I realized I was talking myself out of doing something I really wanted to do.

This may seem like a little thing, but I believe the little things are the big things.

It’s the tiny choices we make about how we spend our hours that dictate how we spend our lives—whether we get out and enjoy what’s in front of us, or make excuses to do what we always do, or what we planned to do.

And this type of thinking can obviously impact the things we traditionally consider big—the choices we make and the risks we take in our personal and professional lives.

If we’re not self-aware, we can end up making all kinds of excuses to not do what we want. We can tell ourselves it’s unwise, or impractical, or unrealistic, or pointless, or laughable, or risky, or inadequate.

We can tell ourselves we’re unsure, or unprepared, or uncommitted, or untalented, or incompetent, or too busy, or too distracted.

We can rationalize that it’s too late, or we’re too old, or it’s too soon, or we’re too young. And we can convince ourselves it doesn’t really matter.

Except it does. Whether it’s a tiny choice or a big decision, if it’s something we want to do, it matters.

Happiness is when we recognize that, dispute our own defeatist excuses, and then get out there and enjoy instead of holding ourselves back.

Photo by Shadowgate

“The whole life of a man is but a point in time; let us enjoy it.” -Plutarch

There are certain motivational quotes that I find to be a double-edged sword, in that they can both motivate us and lead to guilt and pressure, depending on how we interpret them.

One such quote reads, “Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”

To me, this quote implies using our time well means doing something huge for humanity. It also fails to acknowledge that creating time sometimes takes…well, time.

It’s true: each one of us has exactly 24 hours to fill every day—and ultimately, we have the ability to create our lives as we visualize them. However, we’re all starting from different situations, with different responsibilities.

An unemployed person who does not yet have a family, who is living rent-free with friends, can much more easily find time for their passions than someone who has a mortgage to pay, three children to support, and aging parents depending on them for care.

This is not to say the second person should consider themselves a victim of their circumstances, or make excuses to forget about their goals.

It’s merely a neutral evaluation of the facts. Sometimes we simply have more free hours in our schedule.

Why is it important to acknowledge this? Because it allows us to form a realistic plan based on our unique situations—one that allows us to identify windows of time and maximize them to the best of our ability, instead of worrying we’re not doing enough and then feeling paralyzed.

It’s a matter of being kind to ourselves in assessing our current reality and making a plan to transform it. As far as I’m concerned, being kind to ourselves is always the best use of our time.

So often in life we push ourselves to do and be more than we are, sometimes sacrificing our self-care and other priorities in order to get where we think we need to be.

It always benefits us to make time for the things that really matter to us, but if the goal is meaning and joy, it serves us well to ensure we’re not overwhelming ourselves, sacrificing meaning and joy now, hoping we’ll find them later.

Photo by h.koppdelaney