Category Archives: Spiritually Fab

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Follow Your Heart, Trust Your Gut & Use Your Brain

Life Doesn't Have to be an Either/Or Proposition

follow-your-heart-trust-your-gut-use-your-brainHow many times do you find yourself in situations when you feel like your heart is telling you one thing while your brain is telling you something completely different?

For me, this used to happen WAY more often than I liked and when it did, I hated the angst that came along with not knowing which direction to go.

Why does this happen? How can our internal guidance system get so out of sync with itself? How can our brain, gut and heart all be telling us different things and trying to send us off in totally different directions?

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30 Questions for 30 Days

November 2016

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If you’ve studied any philosophy in high school or college, you’ve no doubt heard of The Socratic Method. It is a form of inquiry (named after the classical Greek philosopher, Socrates) that is based upon asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to illuminate ideas.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been one to ask a lot of questions. I’m sure that this sometimes annoyed my parents and exasperated my teachers, but asking questions is how I learned to satisfy my curiosity about the many interesting things in the world around me. Once I was in college however; my academic advisor taught me the value of asking questions in order to gain understanding not just of the world around me, but also of the things that were going on inside of me.

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FEAR…Use it to Lose it!

Fab-YOU-lous Ways to Conquer Fear by Making it Work FOR You

fear-use-it-to-lose-itAh October–the month when ghosts and ghouls come out of hiding, spider webs are hung as decorations, witches cast their spooky spells and we visit haunted houses because we actually want to be scared. This is the one time of year when we enjoy and even celebrate feelings of fear.

What about the other eleven months of the year though? Isn’t fear a feeling that we normally try to avoid? Isn’t fear a feeling that we normally should try to avoid?

The answer to these questions is yes…and, no.

Yes, clearly we need to take the steps necessary to keep us out of certain kinds of scary situations. Don’t go walking alone at night down dark, scary alleys on the sketchy side of town. Don’t go skydiving from a plane without first making sure that your parachute is packed correctly and don’t poke a sleeping Grizzly Bear with a stick. These kinds of activities are bound to result in the kind of fear that should most definitely be avoided at all costs.

What about other kinds of fear though? What about the fear that many people have of public speaking or the suffocating fear of failure that most of us experience from time to time?

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31 Questions for 31 Days

October 2016

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If you’ve studied any philosophy in high school or college, you’ve no doubt heard of The Socratic Method. It is a form of inquiry (named after the classical Greek philosopher, Socrates) that is based upon asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to illuminate ideas.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been one to ask a lot of questions. I’m sure that this sometimes annoyed my parents and exasperated my teachers, but asking questions is how I learned to satisfy my curiosity about the many interesting things in the world around me. Once I was in college however; my academic advisor taught me the value of asking questions in order to gain understanding not just of the world around me, but also of the things that were going on inside of me.

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Lessons I Learned While Running (and Training for) my First Half-Marathon

A Little About Running--A Lot About Life...

half-marathon-lessonsI DID IT!!! I just finished my very first ever half-marathon! For those of you who don’t run, that is a distance of 13.1 miles…13.1 LONG miles!

I have plenty of runner friends who run marathons and half-marathons like they are no big deal, but that’s not me. To me, a half-marathon is a VERY big deal. Like, HUGE.

I have always been blessed to be naturally thin and in decent shape but I have NEVER considered myself a runner. I’ve led an active lifestyle of playing softball, hiking, bicycling etc. but for me, running always felt more like punishment than pleasure. Why then did I (at the age of 46) decide to train for and run a half-marathon?

The answer: temporary insanity, AND the desire to push myself to do something that I never thought was possible for me.

It wasn’t easy (not even close) but now that the race is behind me, I can definitely say that the sense of accomplishment of having crossed the finish line is well worth the effort that it took to achieve it.

In addition to the “bragging rights” that come along with finishing a half-marathon, I also learned some valuable lessons along the way–some about running, but mostly about life…