Blessed Interruptions

Did you ever forget how awesome life is?  Of course you have.  We all have.  I've done a pretty good job myself lately.  In fact, a problem has been distracting me so much it was all I could think of pretty much all of yesterday.  And last night. And this morning.

When that happens, we need to interrupt our thought patterns.  We can let life do it for us, but that's not always the best.  I found that out this morning when I was so consumed by how the problem made me feel (stressed & angry) that in my distraction I let another, preventable problem occur - the kind that makes you say "hash mark-exclamation point-question mark-star-exclamation point".

At least I was distracted enough to come up with a solution after that.  I did find myself dwelling on the problem-feelings occasionally during the day, but came up with a phrase to interrupt myself with when I started thinking about it again.  The next step probably would have been standing on a chair and doing something silly just to reinforce NOT thinking about it.

Another key is to make sure you hang out with people who reinforce how you WANT to think, enough to counteract the woe-is-me trends we can get into.   And making sure we start choosing to act in ways that minimise stress.  For me, it's learning to set deadlines, agreements, and goals, and making sure I start them sooner than I think I need to.  If the weight of finishing a huge task makes me feel that much better, chances are I've left it too long and let it become a problem when instead it can be something that moves me closer to a goal.

And don't forget to look around and see how awesome life is.  Turn off the news, it's rarely going to tell you anything you don't already know, and will simply fill your  thinking with rubbish and hyper-negative thinking.  If it's important enough, you'll hear about it.

Look for what you love.  Today I was reminded how much I love the fact that in Australia I can drive down the road in suburban Melbourne and there are a bunch of horses doing something somewhere.

This holiday season is going to be vibrant, refreshing and amazing.  Because I choose to live it that way.  Have blessed Christmas and an stunning New Year!

Are You Ready For This?

I can't believe it's been a year since I blogged anything.  That's not to say I haven't been sharing my thoughts, just not KLogging...

This morning I was listening to Craig Hill's "God's Principles of Finance."  He talked about how most people spend 40 years doing what they hate, so they can retire and do what they love.  I love his question:  why not skip the forty year bit and get straight to what you love?  God wants us to be passionate about what we do, and love doing it.  It doesn't mean it will be easy and always fun - especially when people think you're nuts.

It really set up my day for the next bit - attending Melbourne's Dynamic Growth Experience at RMIT - a conference of chiropractors, their teams and chiropractic students getting together and discussing the concept of health and healthy living.  Discussing the research and evidence around the fact that conditions and health problems (eg, diabeties, high blood pressure, obesity, low blood pressure, you name it) have to do with the fact that what happens in the body is due to cause & effect - such as the cause of lifestyle factors, hidden or overt traumas, etc and their effect in the body.  No disease is ever caused by a lack of medication.  The key is to find the cause and address it, not silence the functions God created in the body to initially correct and certainly warn of the problem.   Certainly there is a time and place for pharmaceuticals and surgery.  They are gifts in emergency care.  But the fact that I'm fat isn't an emergency that requires a pill or injection of dangerous substances into my body.  It requires me to make better decisions about what I eat and how I exercise.

Chiropractors remove interference on the nerves in a way that no other practioner does, being trained to work with the spine specificially.  This allows the nerves to work at their best ability at that time.  If those nerves go to the heart, or the kidneys, or the eyes, or the bladder, then those organs will work even better as a result.   Working with the muscles is a gift that relieves pain, strengthens the body and helps correct particular issues, but the fact is that if the interference is still happening in the spine, doing stretches or muscle work so you feel ok doesn't make that problem go away.  And it will have effects later.  The problem is that we don't think about "later" until we get there, and then the problem has been there for years.

It's not a matter of "believing in chiropractic."  That's like saying, "I don't believe in dentistry" or "I don't believe in physiotherapy."  As one speaker mentioned, you don't get a choice. Like any other doctor, chiropractors are highly trained, they are accredited, they are regulated, they exist.  The facts are out there, just like Galileo discovered.  And as Galileo also discovered, facts can be unpopular.

Am I passionate about getting the message out there to allow your God-given nervous system to work as well as it can, so you can heal as best you can, your mind and emotions can work as well as they can, and you can be as healthy as you can?  YOU BET!  Because I've witnessed so much amazing change in people, including myself.  Will many of you think I am a fanatic, or nuts?  Quite likely.  But as one of our student speakers put it:  the forest is full of mightly trees that were once nuts who stood their ground.