What’s On YOUR Mind?

Pri­mar­ily, 2007 was the year of this BLOG.

Early in the year I began to cross post our old e-zine, Into the Cen­tre, to my Word­Press BLOG. In August, my posts shifted to the BLOG, and went to weekly post­ing from twice a month. I also hooked it up to Feed­Blitz, which is how the major­ity of you are read­ing this. It shows up pretty much every Mon­day, (occa­sion­ally Tues­day…) and you read it as e-mail. A few of you use an RSS news­reader, but that isn’t par­tic­u­larly nec­es­sary. News­read­ers are good for sites that pub­lish sev­eral times a week or day.

In the last year, the main access to our site has been to the Body­work sec­tion. Appar­ently, we are answer­ing a great need that peo­ple feel, to under­stand the Mind/Body/Spirit connection.

As to the BLOG, the top 5 arti­cles were:

Clear­ing the Body — a body mind spirit cleanse

10 Quick Exam­ples of Zen Liv­ing

10 Zen Prin­ci­ples to Help You Live Life Bet­ter

Zen for the Hol­i­days

9 Ways to Screw Up a Rela­tion­ship

So, what do I want to ask or say about this? Well, BLOGS are designed to fos­ter com­mu­nity and to encour­age dia­log. How­ever, send­ing each arti­cle out in its entirety, by e-mail, means that most of you never go to the web­site, and almost none of you post com­ments or ask questions.

I could change the for­mat of the e-mail and only give you an arti­cle excerpt, but I’ve decided against that. I will, how­ever, from now on, be adding this to each article:

I’m doing this because I want to hear from you!

I’d like to know

• what you are thinking,
• where you are com­ing from,
• what your stick­ing points are, and
• what you’d like me to write about.

I’m writ­ing this BLOG because I want to pro­vide you with tools and resources. To do THAT, I ask that you click over to the site, if not every arti­cle, at least on a reg­u­lar basis, and leave a com­ment!

Zen, Zen, Zen… it’s all about Zen

Well, no, not all about Zen, but as you’ve likely noticed, my focus has been mov­ing in a Zen-like direction.

I’m con­vinced that the issues we face are self-created, as we direct odd lit­tle pas­sion and per­se­cu­tion plays in our heads. We end­lessly scare our­selves, and then blame others.

Zen teaches a dis­ci­pline of watch­ing, with­out judge­ment, the games our minds play. I’m con­stru­ing my job as being a gong that wakes you from this game.

Wake Up!

Speak­ing of gongs, did you down­load my mag­i­cal Zen Timer pro­gram? I have it run­ning almost always on my com­puter, and I find the unpre­dictable reminder to stop and re-focus my atten­tion to be valuable.

Go Deeper!

Two weeks ago, I gave you a link to a new pdf, both an online and a down­load­able ver­sion, of some exer­cises you can try to deepen your rela­tion­ship with your part­ner. I’m going to include those exer­cises in my next book, which is near­ing com­ple­tion of the writ­ing phase. More on that next week.

Past Deci­sions, Future Directions

Dar and I con­tinue to waf­fle about the direc­tion our lives will take. As most of you know, Dar’s offi­cial retire­ment from teach­ing date is 2009. We kind of decided to go a year early — July 2008. You likely also know we own land in Costa Rica, and intend to set­tle there. Adding to this mix is our deci­sion to take a year teach­ing Eng­lish some­where. Presently, Korea is at the top of our list. We also think we’ll buy an older house in Costa Rica, once we get there, but that’s another story.

Any­way, we have com­mit­ted to tak­ing a few days away dur­ing March Break, to decide — will it be 2008, or 2009. Need­less to say, we’ll let you know what we decide.

This also means that if you have con­sid­ered work­ing with me directly, either in per­son or by phone, you’d bet­ter hop to it! Unless you want to visit in Korea or CR. If you’ve con­sid­ered show­ing up for some work, have a look at our Week­end Res­i­den­tial con­cept.

We look for­ward to keep­ing in con­tact through our BLOG post­ings, and encour­age you to keep in touch with us.