INNER NUTRITION: UPDATING YOUR MENU, ROSLYN MCGRATH

What feeds you, on the inside?

What makes you feel balanced, strong, capable? Peaceful? Excited? Joyous?

What makes you want to get up in the morning? What makes your heart sing?

A relationship or favorite activity, sense of purpose, a little down time, the appropriate degree of challenge, simple pleasures, all these and more may provoke good feelings, may constitute your unique form of inner nourishment.

And yet, even these may seem to fall short at times, your pleasure in them withering like flowers past their season. This may signal a need to reassess what truly constitutes today’s internal nutrition, to explore new territory or refresh your approach to the old.

It may help to bring in your neutral side, to avoid jumping to conclusions about the topic at hand or yourself. Who says you could never try that acting class, or initiate a new friendship, or improve an old one, or travel somewhere you’ve never been before?

It’s a new day, and we are constantly re-growing ourselves, quite literally, from hair follicles to bones.

It’s only by thinking the same thoughts that we seem to have the same experiences, and even then, internally and/or externally, we’ll eventually be presented with palpable change.

Regular listening within is required to keep pace with the changes unfolding within, and to function at our best with changes without. And while these shifts may be imperceptible in their earliest stages, like a garden’s life force in winter, at the appointed time their tender green shoots will burst forth, calling out for nurturance.

Quiet time, stream-of-consciousness journaling and simple forms of meditation are some practices that can encourage the self-awareness required to keep up-to-date with our changing needs and desires.

Willingness to accept the newness in our selves and/or our situation is also required. Holding tightly to an old picture of our selves or our life circumstances and attempting to maintain it or retrieve it creates tension, decreasing the happiness we desire and shortchanging ourselves from the marvelous adventure beckoning.

Judging the past as better than what may await us, or our selves as unworthy or incapable will also block our new good. Willingness to suspend that judgment is necessary to discover what new ground may offer us.

Fear of the unknown may foster resistance to change.

Perhaps a sense of security in the unchanging, eternal nature of our core self, our underlying essence, can help us become more flexible with the many ways this core nature may express itself, and with how we might adapt to external changes that inevitably come our way.

Even something as seemingly trivial as taking a new route home from work, sitting in a different chair in your living room or conference area, loading the dishwasher in a different sequence than usual, can surreptitiously help shake you out of old habits of thinking by opening up new views, and prompting you to be more intentionally aware, less on autopilot.

What new perceptions and approaches might you bring to old situations? What new experience is just on your horizon? What new view of your self will facilitate your spring into your most life-engendering feast on the miraculous gift of this new day? Only you can allow yourself to dig in!

Roslyn Elena McGrath publishes Health & Happiness U.P. Magazine, shares healing arts for discovering and moving toward your highest vision of living at Empowering Lightworks, and is an ongoing student of life. Visit www.EmpoweringLightworks.com or contact (906) 228-9097, info@EmpoweringLightworks.com for more info.

Excerpted with permission from the Spring 2011 issue of Health & Happiness U.P. Magazine. Copyright 2011, Intuitive Learning Creation. All rights reserved.