Give Yourself Permission to Claim Your Life

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The First Way

In January, I wrote these words.

I want to have
the time of my life.

I wrote ten ways to live your life. The first way was to claim it.

Give Yourself Permission to Claim Your Life

You know you can do this. What is a few minutes in the context of the hundreds of thousands you spend in a life?

Stop what you’re doing.

Sit and breathe in the air a bit.

Notice the feeling that begins to become you.

Keep noticing that feeling until you forget about the breathing, until you are comfortable just being.

Name that being feeling “living.” Don’t try to make it into anything.

When you feel like a human, get up and do something to claim this life you’re living.

Go Out to Claim It

Here are a few ways you might do that, in case this notion is new to you.

See the sun rise. See a beautiful sky. See a smile you put on someone’s face.

Eat something delicious. Share a marvelous meal with a friend.

Send yourself fresh flowers and give one away.

Listen to the sounds of nature that you don’t usually hear.

Take the longest shower or bubble bath in your experience.

Kiss someone you love. Follow that with a hug.

Most folks don’t need ideas to fill our life moments. But we might need an occasional reminder to fill our moments with life.

How will you live the time of your life?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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The In Between

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about how we mark time.

Yesterday way my son’s birthday.

Two weeks ago he started his first job after college.

In May, he graduated.

We mark such big events. Weddings, birthdays, graduations. Births. Deaths.

But we live our lives in the time in between.

This weekend as travel to work a project,
I’m going to remember . . .

that it’s the in between I value most,

that’s it’s the in-btween I find myself wishing back.

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Great Find: Five Things I Learned from Blog Comics

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It’s More than Reading the Funnies

Doing research for another post, I came across this one.

Great Find: 5 Things I learned From These Hilarious Blog Comics by Siziopedia

Permalink: http://www.sizlopedia.com/2007/06/24/5-things-i-learned-from-these-hilarious-blog-comics/#more-453

Target Audience: anyone who knows a blogs

Content: This article describes blogging made using blog comics as the talking points. The commentary is right on the experience of blogging. Click the comic below to read the article.

It’s short, sweet, and funny.

What more could you want for a Sunday afternoon?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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How to Be Alive and 10 Ways to Celebrate It!

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Give It a Try

silhouette of girl splashing water at sunset

Oh yeah, science has defined and described life — no disputing that. It’s that time that occurs between birth and death that we fill up with breathing, eating, sometimes sleeping, preserving the species, and whatever thoughtful and mindless else we might devise.

To get beyond the state of being to having meaning is an art and a craft. The trick is finding the space between the literal and the figurative.

If you want to give it a try . . .

How to Be Alive

In some ways, being alive is a mystical balancing act. It takes thinking and feeling about ideas, things, and people. Actually being alive is deliberate and spontaneous. It’s getting all systems go while being totally still. It can be done. I’ve actually met people who are alive!

Here’s a way to give it a go.

Check your life signs. Even though working lungs and a beating heart are clear necessities of living, most of us hold our breath and lose our hearts when we’re overwhelmed. We crawl up into our heads and forget who we are.

Know that you can’t get a life — you’ve already got one. If you don’t have one, you’re not reading this.

Bring things to life. Be there and show up with all that you are. We get back what we invest.

Hold onto your wonderful memories, but let go of the rest. Keeping too much makes us less, holding onto less makes us more.

Work hard to reach for your potential, but be easy on yourself. We all need love — our own most of all.

Be true to life. Listen to what you knew when you were born. We start out wise, authentic, and letting the world know we’re here. That’s the part we call spirit. We know. We did then. We always will. It’s who we are.

Be who you want to become.

The best part of being alive is that other people find a living soul fascinating and attractive. They come to see what makes a person so energetic and calm. Any life expands with each person who takes part.

10 Ways to Celebrate that You Have One

When we walk back into our own life again, it’s a wonder — we wonder at what took us so long, wonder at things we hadn’t been seeing, doing, being, sharing with folks we care about. The realization can be quite stunning and profound.

It’s breathtaking to be living.

Definitely worth celebrating. Here are some ways to do that.

Whenever you stretch your mind, stretch your body too. The difference is exponential and incredibly cool.

Do something that’s not electronic. Better yet make it something you’ve never done that you do with someone who sees you as you are.

Go somewhere you can’t see anything made by people. Then before you look, close your eyes to listen for the longest while.

Eat something delicious. Go for that “last cookie” feeling with every bite.

Run your hand along a fence or a wall. Sit on a floor. Walk the curb like a tightrope walker would. You know how. I bet you’ve done them all before.

Listen to music filled with images of your history. Seek out and savor the smells and tastes of comfort times in the past. Send a thought to the people who experienced them with you wherever they are. They’re not gone, if you remember.

Test drive your body like a two year old who just got brand-new shoes.

Run in the grass and fall down on purpose. I bet you did that once too.

Touch wet paint to see how wet it is. Wipe your hand on your pants without a thought. Then send a wish to a guy who did that same thing once, while his mom was watching. Know that his mom didn’t get mad.

Say “I love you” and mean it to someone who least expects it. Then do it again and again. Every time that you do, tell yourself the same thing.

I’m guessing you have the hang of it by now. Being alive really comes down to one sentence.

Live your experiences and experience your life.

We have a whole life of time to do nothing but that. It makes sense, simple and elegant. It’s not hard to be alive . . . once we remember how.

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The Top 10 Ways to Start Living Your Life

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Everyone Gets the Same 24 Hours

Life — it’s what we do between the time we get here and when we go. We only get one, and despite what other folks might suppose, it’s ours to determine what to do with it.

We don’t measure life in hours and minutes. We measure life in memories and moments.

What do you think of when you read this sentence?

It was the time of my life.

We don’t say that often enough.

The Top 10 Ways to Start Living Your Life

Life either happens to us, or we take hold of life and live it. Here are 10 Ways to get a life and start living it.

Give yourself permission to claim your life. That’s right — permission. You’re the only one who can decide you are in charge of your life. Even though it feels like you’re not supposed to do so, turn off the internal editors, the old tape recordings, the “shoulds, have tos, and musts”, and the rules that didn’t come from you.

Define what living means to you. It’s not as hard as it sounds. Just picture yourself at the end of your life looking back. What words would you want to describe how you lived your life and who you are as a person?

Stop living in the future. Every time you think “someday” or “when I have time I will,” stop. Ask yourself, “Why not now?” Think about this sentence, “I always wanted to, but never did.” Start doing the things you always planned to do. Choose your life every morning. Plan one thing you will do that day to feel alive.

Surround yourself with people who enjoy living. They’ve obviously discovered how to have a life and live it. Why not hang with the pros?

Lay down your pain and your anger. Carrying them around makes living harder and less fun. It doesn’t bring anything, and it steals a lot.

Let the losers win. Don’t argue about things that you don’t care about. Unless there’s some real threat, let the folks who have something to prove, prove what they need to. Why waste your living time trying to fix what’s wrong with them?

Create energy. Jump to forgiveness and love, then figure things out. Most conclusions we jump to are not only wrong, they’re negative. Negative conclusions lead us to prepare a defense. Being on the defensive isn’t living. It’s hiding from life.

Learn the physical symptoms of when your head and heart become disconnected. We know when we’re having a knee jerk reaction, when we’re feeling sorry for ourselves, and when we’re being blind to people’s feelings. We can remember how it felt physically while we were behaving badly. Get to know those symptoms, and you can stop the behavior. Living life will feel a whole lot safer because you won’t be in danger of shooting yourself in the foot.

Take small risks that push your boundaries in every way. The joy of life is packed in learning that matches our skill set. When we stretch just a bit intellectually, physically, emotionally, we grow. Living is growing. Even your cells know that.

Value and protect the people and the places you care about. A job isn’t a life. It’s just a part of one. Let the people you care about come first, and let everyone know that you do. Re-read numbers 1 and 2.

We come into life with whatever we’ve got. It’s ours to do with. It took me a while to figure that out — that my life isn’t just what happens to me, that I could take hold of it.