This is a guest post.

Have you ever been driving on a long trip and suddenly you realize that forty five minutes have passed and you have no recollection of the journey or how you ended up at that spot?

What happened? Is everyone safe?  Are there any other vehicles around and how did I not hit any?  How many exits have passed by?  It takes a minute to orient yourself and to re-establish where you are and what you’re doing…

I had been trucking along, on auto pilot really, heading down this familiar highway.  After being startled into consciousness and determining my bearings, something had changed, and the traffic had stopped.

Maybe I was tired of driving.  Maybe it was because I was moving past 40.  Or maybe, it was the gnawing in my belly for some satisfaction that wasn’t about money or my career.   I wanted more enjoyment, stronger family connections, spiritual development, and to see more of the world.

I needed to get out of this traffic jam right away – but I wasn’t sure what to do, or even how to get off the expressway.  Panic was setting in.  I didn’t have a GPS, night was coming, and I was running out of gas.  It was then that I noticed the road sign for the very first time… ‘Welcome! You’re on the ROAD TO SOMEWHERE.’

I don’t know how many accidents I caused as I got off this crazy road and pulled over.  People were whizzing by and I realized that everyone was going somewhere and I wondered, how many knew where that was?

Now parked, I was finally checking the map and asking myself: “ What makes me happy?”  It should have been the first thing I thought of BEFORE I started this trip.  I think my ego fueled by my ignorance on fire attitude had prevented me from thinking that way before.

The real truth is I didn’t know what “happy” meant to ME.  I define “happy” as the equilibrium you reach when all your pie pieces like: career, financial, personal life & family, and hobbies & interests are identified and cultivated.  It’s different for everyone. Your happy list should be YOUR list.  It’s really not a destination but an ongoing renewing process we have to make in each area of our lives or; we get lost in speeding to a destination that no longer exists or is somebody else’s idea of what “happy” is.  I think I would have figured things out faster, if I had read something cool about a life-changing, self-realization moment with a good highway metaphor, and these key lessons:

Lesson 1: YOU MUST ASK THE QUESTION…”What makes me happy?”

You may not like the answer you get.  I understand that.  We all have our insecurities.  However, if you don’t think about what makes you happy, and what you need to: (do / become / clear away) to BE happy, you will have a narrow chance of reaching your potential.   Seriously, I am not talking about some 2 week feel good thing here.   I’m also not suggesting some unrealistic notion of giving up all responsibility and becoming a wanderer.

I’m saying life isn’t supposed to suck 80% of the time so we can “live it up” the remaining 20%.  I’m talking about feeling good, regularly.   Is the 80% of your picture a good representation of how you want to feel about your life?  Sorry, not trying to be heavy, just honest.  Make a list.  Nothing fancy, just outline all of the things that make you happy even if you aren’t doing any of them right now.  It’s powerful.  You’ll thank yourself for remembering why you are supposed to get out of bed everyday.

Lesson 2: YOU MUST ASK SOME FOLLOW-UP QUESTIONS…

Pretend you have accomplished the task list you put together and you are doing everything you thought would make you happy.  Visualization is the key here.  How does it feel?  Is there anything missing?   Could you do that, feel that, every day?  For a week straight?  How about for a year without becoming tired of it?

Lesson 3: IF YOU ANSWERED YES ABOVE…

Get started.  You don’t have to figure out everything out at one time.  Do one thing on your list (big or small).  Then do another.  For you planners (I’m one too), loosen up.  Make a plan and be open when it needs to change, because it will.  Remember the goal here, it’s not about the plan you put together.  Always be open to better, faster channels to reach your personal nirvana.

If you answered “No.”

Your reasons are not strong enough.  In that moment when you knew it didn’t feel right is where you’ll find what’s missing in your plan.   Do your list again.  It takes a few times.  It’s a process.  You can’t do this kind of serious introspection in one night in your hotel because you’re pissed and want to quit your job and go home.  YES. START THEN and know that it will take some time to really create a strong vision of what you want.  Seriously, don’t rush to drive another bad route.  For pete’s sake, at least think about it some more on the plane ride home.

And so it’s out.

All my action to move myself forward, didn’t really. It took me miles to learn that the The Road To Somewhere doesn’t really go anywhere.  I’m not complaining because I changed direction.  I am just grateful that I saw the sign at the right time.  Keep an eye out.  Don’t be driving and texting and miss YOUR sign.  I found a lot of roads pour into The Road To Somewhere so make sure about the road you’re on, and know where it’s taking you.

Written by David Pitts {dp}

DP is an idea man, entrepreneur, and bottom liner. Check out his latest project at www.thedooverblog.com .

Photo by PeterJot

This is a guest post.

Although eating “well” can mean a variety of things, in the context of this post and in the context of my mind, eating well is eating to sustain and promote health in body and in mind. While eating can be, of course, full of pleasure and enjoyment, on a most basic level, its purpose is to fuel us with energy to survive. And, when you combine that purpose and goal with the added benefit of seeking to improve your mental strength and a positive mental attitude, you simply can’t go wrong.

I’ve dealt with many health issues over the years, most of them related to chronic fatigue and chronic pain. And, when you’re facing health issues or frustration or stress on a daily basis, it takes a huge toll on your mindset. Your mood falters, your outlook on life gets a little dimmer, and a bit of the joy you once thought was normal, can seem far off and unattainable. And, though I saw many a doctor and tried many vitamins, supplements and healing plans, one of the biggest ways I was able to help heal myself through my food. Here are some of the things that I learned to Eat Well.

1) Eat for Fuel, First & Foremost

When you are eating with the primary goal to fuel your body, it makes your eating choices and decisions much easier. While many of us are obsessed with dieting and trying to determine what’s the “healthiest” or lowest in calories, when you simply look at a food in terms of how much lasting energy it’s going to give you, the right choices suddenly become much easier to spot. Why do you hear whole grains so often? It’s because the carbs burn slowly over time, giving you sustained energy instead of a flash boost that causes you to drop and fall rapidly thereafter. (The crash after a donut? We’ve all been there.) Study and keep track of the foods you eat that power you through your day the best. This is different for everyone. While I may need more protein, you may need more whole grains and vegetables. Each body is different and needs to be fed accordingly.

2) Listen to Your Body and Respond Accordingly

You know how it feels to feel good. Make notes when you feel good and what you ate on those particular days. Similarly, what did you eat on the days you felt down? Sluggish, tired, moody, irritable? We all have those days, no one can argue it, but what we don’t often realize is that a lot of the time, our food plays a big part in that. Avoid the foods you ate on the off days and see if you notice an improvement. If so, make a conscious effort to listen to your body and make dietary changes accordingly. Energy and mood are tied closely together, which is why eating for fuel can go a long ways in improving your attitude. Likewise, eating the foods that can make you feel guilty or ashamed need to be cut instantly.

3) Cherish the Feeling of Feeling Good

The more you recognize and take note of when you do feel good after eating, the easier it becomes to eat well. You will find a new enjoyment in preparing your food and planning and crafting the ingredients and techniques that you know your body appreciates. Eating itself will also become more pleasant and enjoyable. While there may be a thrill in eating a piece of chocolate cake, it’s short lived and many times followed by guilt. There is another thrill that comes with preparing a well-balanced, colorful, nutritious meal that’s guaranteed to boost your mood and energy level all day long.

Eating well, above all, means taking care of your body. When you start researching the different foods that can promote memory and boost your endorphins or foods that reduce inflammation and help headaches, you’ll be amazed. Enjoy your food and don’t forget variety, simply eat well.

Written by Jocelyn Anne

Freelance writer Jocelyn Anne is passionate about healthy living, whether it’s related to living a more green eco-friendly lifestyle or simply the food we put into our bodies and the exercise we do. She is currently writing about the benefits of breathing cleaner, purer air with a portable air conditioner.

Photo by shenza

This is a guest post.

It’s that time of year when the transition from winter to spring becomes imminent and we find ourselves itching to ditch the heavy, bulky layers of clothing, escape the confines of the suddenly all-to-small-house, and stretch our legs during a late night walk while the sun sets.  But often, we come so caught up in the warmer weather, the extended hours in a day, and an over-ambition to do so much to make up for the more sedentary winter months that we miss the beauty of spring and we over-exert and wear ourselves down before we know what’s happened.

This year, I challenge you to start prepping now to build yourself up mentally and physically to  be prepared!  Here are some easy tips to get you started:

Start Exercising

One reason people often feel unprepared for spring and summer is the sluggish/out-of-shape attitude that we take on following months of a more sedentary lifestyle.  You don’t have to do anything drastic, maybe start taking quick walks after work.  Pop in an exercise video 2-3 times a week.  You’ll be amazed at the mood boost you’ll get from this, as well as the energy boost, both of which will help tide you over until spring is really here and start building up your energy level for longer days with more activity.

Eat Spring Appropriate Foods

One should really only eat so much soup in a year!  Regardless of whether or not you’re still seeing snow out your window or there actually are sprigs of grass peaking through the earth, start changing up your meals now.  Try to cut back on the carb-heavy, higher-fat foods that so often accompany winter months and winter moods.  Start lightening up the dinner plan with more fresh fruits and vegetables. Make Wednesday night Salad Night. Consider doing a cleanse and really gearing up your body to feel refreshed and renewed.

Finish Goals & Set New Ones

Whatever tasks you had planned for the winter months, wrap them up!  Then, start making goals for what you want to happen ahead of you in the spring and summer months. This will not only carry you through any winter blues, it will give you a sense of satisfaction for work completed and inspire you to plan and prepare for new tasks, new achievements.  It will also give you a time frame so that spring doesn’t hit and make you suddenly feel overwhelmed with the necessity to go everywhere and do everything.

Find a Volunteer Outlet

Helping someone else out is actually also one of the easiest ways to help yourself out.  Not only do you get to inspire another person or help them to overcome obstacles or needs, the rewards, the confidence and the happiness that such an activity produces in you is immeasurable.  If time is limited in your life, you don’t need to find something with a regular time commitment, or even something that requires a huge chunk of your time on any one day.  Go volunteer at the nursing home to play games for a few hours on a Saturday.  Check to see if there is a house being built for a family in need that you could pitch in and help with.  Spring is the perfect opportunity to delve into new places to get involved and to make a difference in your community.  You’ll see, the rewards to you will probably far outweigh what you’ll possibly give to someone else.

Be prepared, be pro-active, and gear up to be happier and healthier this spring.  There’s nothing like the signs of new life all around and the invigoration that accompanies that to set a trend for an extremely positive new year.

Written by Tara Alley

Tara is a freelance writer who enjoys writing about ways to live healthier, more fulfilled lives.  She also writes frequently about eco-friendly and sustainable lifestyles and is currently working alongside Coffee Home Direct, helping them research fair-trade green coffee.  You can follow her on Twitter @hopesiempre.

Photo by dominiqs

This is a guest post.

Serious mental illness is scary and off-putting even for the healthiest among us, but for those afflicted it’s a thousand times worse.  They’re often isolated, misunderstood and adrift from lives that once felt purposeful.  Sometimes they even hear voices and suffer terrifying delusions.  And it isn’t just the sick person who suffers – mental illness can and often does devastate whole families.  Part of what hurts, of course, is the illness itself, and, for families, the loss of a fully functioning loved one.  But when you add to that the suffering caused by stigma and shame, and the resulting secrecy that keeps whole families from asking for help, you have a truly vicious cycle.

The good news is that much of the stigma and shame around mental illness result from beliefs that are completely untrue.  When these myths are exposed and replaced with knowledge, kindness and common sense, hope and progress are possible. Following are five common myths about mental illness – and the truths that can set its sufferers free:

Myth #1. Mentally ill people are a lost cause.

Truth: Mentally ill people can and do get better.

For a long time people thought the best way to treat the mentally ill was to just warehouse them – lock them up in an institution or hide them away at home – but it turns out that much more is possible.  Kindness, respect and inclusion go a long way toward helping anyone, no matter how sick they are. By treating mentally ill people with the same respect you’d pay anyone else, you can begin to make not only their lives better but the lives of their families and caregivers too.

Each case is unique, of course, but compassionate care, the right drugs and a network of tenacious helpers can lead even severely mentally ill people back to their own lives.  Sometimes they may get sick again, but they can get better again, too.  Life is like that.

Myth #2. Mentally ill people are scary and sad.  Associating with them is dangerous and depressing.

Truth: Suffering is scary and sad, but people can be helped.

Mentally ill people who are helped to find their way back to their real selves actually tend to be grateful, hopeful and happy, and that makes the people who help them hopeful and happy too.

Myth #3. The mentally ill are just too strange so don’t even try to talk to them.

Truth: Not only can you talk to mentally ill people, you might find them rather interesting.

People with mental illness might not hold the same beliefs or observe the same conventions that you do, but for just that reason they can sometimes be startlingly insightful and funny.  Besides, after you get to know someone with mental illness you’ll see he’s just a human being like you except one who happens to be living with an isolating brain disease.  You have the power to break through a little of that isolation just by making contact.

Myth #4: Mentally ill people are too out of it to notice how you treat them.

Truth: If anything, mentally ill people tend to be hyper-aware and watchful.

Just be yourself around people with mental illness and be as polite as you would be to anyone else. If sometimes they do or say things that are out of the ordinary and make you laugh, that’s OK, but include them in the joke.  Like anyone else, they’ll appreciate it.

Myth  #5: It’s all the parents’ fault.

Truth: It’s probably not the parents’ fault.

Nobody knows exactly what causes the most serious forms of mental illness but most scientists agree that schizophrenia probably results from a combination of genetic and other biologic or environmental factors that are then triggered by stress or trauma.  All parents make mistakes, but serious mental illness is rarely the exclusive result of bad parenting.

Blaming parents for their children’s mental illness is not only unfair but it makes life worse for their ill offspring too.  Since parents are usually the ones left trying to figure out what to do, early on at least, they need all the support and sympathy they can get.

Myths, fears and old wives’ tales about mental illness stigmatize sick people and their families while kindness and common sense help. Maybe what it comes down to is the golden rule. Just ask yourself this: how would you like to be treated if your world suddenly started to shrink, darken and change in uncontrollable ways?

Written by Margaret Hawkins

Margaret is the author of “How We Got Barb Back: The Story of My Sister’s Reawakening After 30 Years of Schizophrenia” (Conari).  She also teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been an art critic for the Chicago Sun-Times for more than two decades. She is the Chicago correspondent for ARTnews. Her essays have appeared in a variety of national publications. Her debut novel, A Year of Cats and Dogs, published last year to strong reviews and her new novel, How to Survive a Natural Disaster, publishes this fall.

To learn more about her books, please visit her Amazon page here.

Flower photo by tallpomlin

This is a guest post.

Akin to the great soldier of civil rights in the USA, Martin Luther King
Jr., most of us have some sort of dream in life. Some people are living
their dreams, others dreams are still hidden in the depths of their human
fibre. Yet others are locked in frustration as their dream wrestles for its
revelation to the world.

Like Dr. King, others have marched in the same battle of justice for a human
cause. Amongst these braves who have shaped the course of our lives, are the
likes of Ghandi, Mandela and arguably one of the most controversial of men
in history, Jesus. The amazing common lyric in the war cry of these mortals,
is their willingness, to die. I suppose that’s what sets a soldier apart
from the rest – he or she is usually at the frontier while the rest debate
over media reports. Ironically the soldier’s first act in winning the battle
is actually surrender to the cause.

Biko, (an African martyr for the cause of humanity), describes this
willingness to surrender one’s life as a “highly irrational thing” (Biko,
2004). Irrational, perhaps meaning that it is not just a matter of the
mental faculties. Rather it may be a matter of the “heart”? A kind of that
crazy behaviour a teenage girl (forgive the blinkered generalisation)
displays when she finds some rugged looking, seemingly aimless, testosterone
driven boy, that she thinks is the man of her dreams. Ah! Of her dreams….“Highly
irrational”, I suppose, meaning something beyond the boundaries of
intellectual or empirical debate. It’s a matter of the gut, something that
stirs from the inside of one’s being. Almost like, a self-existing life
force, craving desperately to emancipate itself from this limitation of a
mere mortal body. An irrational fervour that is willing to die for what it
believes.

Could this be the morning wakeup call from the drill sergeants of our human
chronicles? A call to those of us who long for that place of freedom, that
place of realising our dreams. Saying to us, “When you have found that
something you are willing to die for, something that will serve others -
even more than it may serve you – you have found your purpose for life.”

So what does this all practically boil down to? Well, in viewing the
footprints of these freedom fighters I am led to consider that when one has
found this dream to die for, one has found a reason to live. My point of
course is not that one has to die in order to fulfill a greater service to
humankind. The point is more that every human spirit yearns for freedom and
I humbly submit that the true means for this liberation is through our
willingness to give our everything for the betterment not just of our own
lives but for the lives of others – our families, friends, strangers,
communities or nations. A willingness that dares to live a dream. Above all,
the consequence of our action must result in service for the betterment of
our fellows, by no means can we claim our actions to serve others if it
leads to their ruin. Gandhi says it best in these words, “I am prepared to
die but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.” “For to be free
is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects
and enhances the freedom of others.” Mandela.

Thoughts worth considering:

“If you die trying for something important, then you have both honor and
courage, and that’s pretty good.” The character Michael in the movie Blind
Side.

“It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it
is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” Mandela

“…he humbled himself and became obedient unto death…” written of Jesus.

Written by Renal Mannikam

Renal Mannikam is a Husband, Father, Student and Speaker. His passion is to help people think, feel and do better for themselves. He also works in a family business and in his spare time enjoys blogging and reading. He lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.

One of his favourite quotes: “The most potent weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Steve Biko.

Contact: emailrenal@hotmail.com






Cloud image by geoffeg