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EVERGREEN Professional
Hypnotherapy
Stockton’s Small Business of the Year 2003-2004
6820
Pacific Ave., Ste. 2-B Stockton,
CA 95207 (209)472-0722
1111
J Street, Ste. G101, Modesto, CA 95354 (209)622-3837
www.egreen.net
Click
on: www.DocGinDigsIn.blogspot.com
Welcome
to EVERGREEN
OUTREACH!
It’s a changing world.
I can remember when a house with a phone on the wall was upper class.
A family with a private line was, well, really upper class.
Then phones came off the wall and sat on a table or desk, but even that
was improved upon by use of an extension cord.
Heck, you could move that phone as far away from its installation point
as the length of the cord would allow! Next
thing, by golly, there were extension phones… in the bedroom and/or
kitchen; so every household had two, three or even more instruments!
I know a businessman who had a private bathroom off his office… with a
phone in it! Can you imagine?
Be that as it may, when the cordless phone appeared on the scene
we thought we’d died and gone to phone Heaven.
We could even take the gadget outdoors, if we didn’t stray too far. But wait!
Remember car phones? And yes, there’s more!
Or… less… because the phones became smaller and, holy moly,
even more mobile! Now, needless to
say, there are four or more cordless phones in most homes and every
family member has a cell phone to carry everywhere with them. I’ve seen
six-year-olds who own them.
Needless to say (but I’ll say
it anyway), phones are no longer simply for talking… you can text, e-mail,
play games, listen to music, watch a movie, catch up on the news, access
zillions of “apps” and goodness only knows what all else there is that I
can’t mention because… it’s a changing world and I’m changing too, but
we’re going in opposite directions. The world is racing ahead of me and I am
falling behind. Such is the nature of the aging process.
My then 80-year-old father refused to own a “new fangled” answering
machine (remember when they weren’t built in?), let alone a cell phone.
The Yin & Yang symbol
represents Taoism, which teaches (among other things) that in
all good there is bad, and in all bad there is good.
In telephone terms this means that -- along with the evolution of worthwhile
telecommunication -- came: hang
ups, wrong numbers, prank calls, obscene calls, marketing calls, and even
recorded calls. Adjunct electronic capabilities include various advertisements.
And on and on and on it goes… this changing world.
Proving that in all bad there is
good, I’ll bet you can recall a mistake (bad) you made that turned out in your
favor (good). This happened to me
recently when I tried to reach my daughter via the list I keep on my cell.
Her name is Jennifer, but I know two other Jennifers, and when she
answered, it didn’t sound like her.
That’s because it wasn’t. It
was Jennifer Lind, whose CD
Cowboy State of
Mind I
listen to obsessively. When we both figured out who we were talking to, we
caught each other up. Jennifer’s
band (Hired Guns) is performing soon in our area, so I calendared June 19th
at Abundance Vineyards, and July 17th at Micke Grove (where she’ll
be joined by Randy Sparks plus three other New Christy Minstrels!) Yippee! I am
dusting off my cowboy hat!
In challenging times it’s easy
to forget about fun. Most people tend to work harder, which is different from
smarter. They push themselves too far ahead of the… current…
to be carried by it toward the goals they pursue.
Their stress actually interferes with the… flow…
of communication between the conscious (smart) part of the mind, the
subconscious (strong) part, and what
Carl Jung calls collective conscious (the empowering part). Working hard-er
might get us where we want to go eventually, but it gets us there the
hard way -- and often the price in the long run is too high -- our
health.
One of my favorite books is Flow
-- The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
(Just trying to spell his name is fun!) When (1) we are involved in a
worthwhile activity (work or play) that (2) transports us in time and space to
what might be called an altered state, and (3) we don’t even realize we’ve
been gone until we’ve come back -- feeling better for the experience -- this
is called flow (during which our body/brain chemistry changes
beneficially). If your
work does that for you, you’re doing it right. If it drains you, drags you
down, or drives you nuts you’re doing it wrong.
What drives me nuts is
when we hear some famous person say, “Live your passion!
Follow your bliss!” It
worked for them, sure, but trust me; they are the exception, not the rule.
They’re like the dynamic movie star we see and hear everywhere, expounding
upon… whatever. But for every star
who has made it big by living their passion or following their bliss, there are
thousands more who didn’t. We just
don’t see or hear from them. If it works for you, more power to you.
Count yourself among the fortunate.
On Larry King’s show recently Clint Eastwood, when asked how he became
so successful, said -- “Luck.”
So if you’re not one of the
“lucky” ones whose dream is coming true, do the best you can at whatever
earns you a pay check, and feel grateful. In
this day and age a pay check is luck in itself. Use your money honorably (to
feed your family and stay out of debt, for example), and find a way to
experience flow apart from your job.
Read a good book, for example, that makes you laugh, and think (but not
too hard). Anything you find on www.balona.com
will temporarily carry you away, and bring you back better for the journey.
Good music does that for us too.
Whether you’re kicked back by the fireplace gazing into a snifter of brandy or
sittin’ on a bale of hay, stompin’ your foot with a beer in yer hand -- good
music is good for you! When we want to be cute about a mistake we’ve
made we sometimes say, “My bad.” When
I reached Jennifer Lind by accident though, my bad turned out to be good
because it reminded me of how important it is in life to take time to have fun!
Further proof of this changing world?
Time was we would have said, “For a good time call Jennifer” but now
it’s: for more information click
on www.jenniferlind.net
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