Posts Tagged "God"

Appetite For Distraction?

Posted by LisaYoung in Big Ideas | 0 comments

The title of today’s post comes from something I heard in an audio book by Father Richard Rohr (@RichardRohrOFM) called “The Art of Letting Go“. In it, Richard talked about how we, as a collective society have fared more along the lines of Huxley’s “Brave New World” than we have Orwell’s “1984″. His thoughts circle around how we’ve done ourselves in by our chasing of pleasure, versus being controlled by Orwellian “pain”. Granted, Rohr is a Franciscan, so I expected him to speak to our materialist natures, but this particular part of the audio book hit me hard.

An “appetite for distraction” implies that the more we chase these pleasurable distractions, the less we focus on what really matters – on being our true selves and being able to be present to what life is about in the here and now.

The other morning I was immersed in part of a 40 day & night transformational process I’m developing.  In response to a writing prompt about what I believe about my business, I wrote down the following:

Before You Can Play…

Posted by LisaYoung in Big Ideas | 0 comments

When I was a child, the world looked a lot less complicated than it does today. The “rules” were a lot easier to navigate.

Share with others. Say “please” and “thank you”. Take turns.

I was having an interesting spiritual conversation the other day. The discussion leader, a good fiend of mine, made the point that we need a common language if we are going to understand each other. There was a lot of talk around the nature of establishing “rules” for a society, and at one point, we came to a playground analogy.

We were discussing how, on the playground, children don’t jockey for position, and most aren’t bullies. In fact the ones that bully at a young age were either raised to be bullies, or they just haven’t learned how to interact with others yet. At which point my friend made the following statement.

Unpacking An Old Dream

Posted by LisaYoung in Big Ideas, Faith | 17 comments

When I was a kid, I used to dream about being “a rock staaaar”, as I used to call it.

You know, writing and singing songs on a stage in front of thousands of screaming fans. That kind of thing.

Well, I got older, and older, and “life” seemed to get in the way. I all but abandoned that dream for the last fifteen years.

See, I’ve been doing some concentrated living since I graduated high school. I had a kid, got married, had another kid, started a couple of businesses, lost a couple of businesses, and bascially set about living a normal life, instead of chasing after some “hare-brained, childish dream” from a time when my hips were a lot slimmer, and my hair wasn’t even starting to grey.

Then, a friend of mine, who holds a weekly meeting for spiritually minded folks at her shoppe, suggested we all put together vision boards.

Who will mourn your death?

Posted by LisaYoung in Faith, videos | 9 comments

So I was watching the Kevin Costner eulogy for Whitney Houston last night.

Say what you will about Whitney, Costner’s eulogy rocked it.

And I got to thinking about a tweet I saw a few months back when Steve Jobs died. Something about “will we cry when you die?” or something like that.

It really got me thinking.

Recently, my friend, Ted, turned 50, and his wife put together a “celebrity roast” to commemorate it. As part of the entertainment, I got to channel my inner Judy Garland and sing him “Over The Rainbow” until he cried (he’s a huge fan of Judy).

So it’s no wonder I started wondering about my own death. And who would really miss me when I’m gone.

To be clear, I’m not planning a funeral here, nor am I demonstrating any suicidal tendencies. This is not a “poor me” pitch to get a few people to tell me they think I’m awesome and they’ll be first in line at my funeral (wha?).

Actually, this is more spiritual than any of that.

Loving My Inner Critic

Posted by LisaYoung in Faith, Family | 5 comments

It began at the convergence of three events:

A while back Andrea Patten asked me to proof her “Inner Critic to Inner Ally” program and offer my feedback. I proofed it and offered some suggestions, and left it at that. A couple of weeks ago, she was talking to me about some of the great results her clients were getting, so I asked if I could review the entire program and see if it might be something useful to my subscribers.

I had started working through it, and got stuck on an emotional block for me. It stemmed around describing my Inner Critic, and quite frankly, I had spent many years trying to shut it up. The last thing I wanted to do was spend time putting energy into describing what I believed was the very thing holding me back in life.

Then, my coach posed a question last week that vexed me. “Really, Lisa. What if it REALLY didn’t matter what other people thought?”