Archive for the ‘Prepared’ Category

On Being Prepared

March 1, 2011

Athens, Greece, site of the first earthquake I experienced, photo taken from the Akropolis

Living in an area of the world where the ground shakes and heaves occasionally, it makes it easy to both empathise and also breathe a sigh of relief when a bad quake hits somewhere else in the world. In my house we almost always ask each other: is our emergency box still stocked? And usually the answer is “no”. We ate the soup on those days that the fridge was empty and we didn’t feel like going out or shopping; the water was consumed slowly over the last however many months since the last earthquake that happened somewhere else in the world; the protein bars were consumed by the mountain bike rider in the family; and we lent the camp stove to a friend, and now can’t remember which friend.

After a big quake, the local news is full of words like Preparedness, and Safety. Words that breed a bit of fear, and the need to feel prepared. For anything. The Earthquake store downtown actually has a small line for the cash register, and they have been bustling since the quake in New Zealand last week. So, out to the garage to look at our emergency box. Sure enough there is one bottle of water, 2 cans of soup and one or two pouches of dried something or other. Oh, and there is a flashlight, with no batteries in it.

Being prepared. It sounds so Scout-worthy, so much like any one of the interchangeable mothers in a 1960s era sitcom, so steady and earnest, and sure. Being prepared for anything. In the larger picture of life, are we ever prepared for tragedy and destruction and mayhem, or do we improvise and do the best we can with what we have? I think it’s the latter.

I’ve lived in several places that are on fault lines (and still do live in one), and have experienced 2 semi-large earthquakes and any number of small ones, and in each, it was neighbors, and strangers and friends who were the truest emergency kits. We all say it, and it’s all true: people come together in community over a tragedy and then they come back apart after the work and the aid giving and the comfort is no longer needed. Everyone goes back to their lives as they were, the best they can.

So what does all this have to do with preparedness, or being a Gypsy Girl, or anything else that is important to your life? Life during an emergency is all about connection, and honesty of experience and being stripped down to the very essence of who you are when something incredibly scary or life threatening has happened. Would that we could live our lives that openly everyday—open and caring and willing to share and help— but we don’t and in some ways we can’t (our adrenals would probably completely dry up) but we can vow to remain open, and we can always do a better job of remaining connected.

So along with water, and soup and more pouches of dried stuff, some batteries for the flashlight, and some lighting cups for the camp stove we got back, I will be adding some other things: reminders that life is a constant attempt to balance what we are prepared for and what we must leave to chance; as well as what we are able to prepare for and what we never could have imagined.

Some Notes on Being Prepared for Life:

  • Give of yourself with honesty and joy.
  • Connect to who you truly are underneath the patina of worldliness and “I’ve got it all together” that we all wear on the outside of our skin.
  • Open up to people that you might not have first thought of as friends, but on second glance, recognise a “kindred spirit” under the skin.
  • Show everyone you love that they are loved.
  • Open to the real-ness and perhaps even the rawness of an experience. Feel it with honesty.
  • Open to the unexpected, no matter what it looks like—blessings and miracles are not always dressed in beautiful colours.
  • Open to rearranging what was planned in order to fit in something that was unexpected.
  • Tell everyone you love that they are loved.
  • Connect to the world in a meaningful and joyful way—whatever that is for you and you alone.
  • Reach out a hand to someone who looks like they might need a bit of help. Reach out before the hand is asked for.
  • Listen with your heart—sometimes we hear only what we expect to hear, and are surprised when out heart hears it differently.
  • Open yourself up to the ones you love.

Liz Kalloch is a regular contributor to Gypsy Girl’s Guide.

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Posted in Aware, Informed, Inspired, Prepared

Finding your solid ground

February 23, 2011

by Marianne Elliott

Many of you will have heard that a major earthquake hit New Zealand yesterday. My fellow New Zealander, Leonie Wise, will write more about the quake and what you can do to help later this week. For today I want to share a little about what I’ve learned about finding my solid ground, even when the earth beneath us proves to be unpredictable.

This week, indeed this past year, in New Zealand we’ve found ourselves wondering whether we can really trust the ground beneath our feet. You may not have lived on a fault line, or felt the foundations of your home and your city move underneath you, but as travellers we’ve almost certainly all found ourselves feeling ‘ungrounded’.

If you just read the word ‘ungrounded’ and thought to yourself “Oh jeez, why all this vague yoga language? What exactly does it mean to be ‘ungrounded’, presuming you haven’t actually defied the laws of gravity and floated up off the earth?” then:

a) I’m with you, babe. Honestly. Even though I’m a yoga teacher who falls into the trap of airy-fairy talk sometimes, I have a pretty well-tuned BS meter and I love people who call it when I slide in that direction; and

b) It turns out that we actually can lose contact with the ground, even without defying gravity.

I have a friend who didn’t realise, until she had been practicing yoga for a while, that she had made it through the first 35 years of her life without ever actually really feeling her feet on the ground. She might be an extreme example, but when was the last time you took off your shoes, stood on grass, soil or sand and really felt your ‘soft animal body’ release it’s weight into the support of the earth?

We travel in metal tubes that shoot through the sky at inhuman speeds. We live in landscapes of concrete and asphalt. Is it really surprising that we lose contact with the earth? We move at the speed of computer programmes and rest only when our bodies refuse to carry on any longer. Is it any wonder that we lose our sense of solid ground.

Here are some of the ways I find my own solid ground when the pace of life has outstripped my body’s ability to keep track or when the solid ground beneath me suddenly feels less solid:

  • Lying down on the earth, or on the floor – preferably on my belly.
  • Massaging my own feet.
  • Standing on those same feet, taking the time to feel the weight of my feet release into the earth.
  • Drumming.
  • Squatting, especially against a wall.
  • Yoga nidra.
  • Gardening.

What helps you find the solid ground within you when the world around you, or even the earth beneath you, is shifting?

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Posted in healthy, Nomad, Prepared

Truing Up Our Choosers

February 9, 2011

This is Rebecca’s second post in our 2011 journey toward fully claiming and expressing our Gypsy Girl natures. You can see the first post, “Getting Ready to Say, ‘Yes!’” here.

“Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.” – Brené Brown

Once you’re ready to say, “Yes!” it’s important to know what to say, “Yes!” to!

I’ve been reading Brené Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. For the first couple chapters I was sure I didn’t have anything going on about shame and that I was going to be the most Wholehearted liver who ever read that book. That’s her research topic and area of expertise: shame and Wholehearted living. I was convinced my Mom and Dad did such a good job with me early on that I’d developed an unshakeable sense of self. Certain I’d already lived through all my dramatic crap and was now entitled to enjoy my wholehearted life.

Then she got to the bit about Perfectionism.
And I started thinking about Choices.

I had a realization somewhere around page 70: I’ve kept using euphemisms for how 2010 went for me, “2010 really packed a wallop” or “2010 was a doozie of a year.” Reading Brown’s book I realized what I haven’t been able to say is, “For much of 2010 I was grieving. Sometimes it was loud, wailing grief, sometimes it was quiet, dark and curled into itself, but it was pure, un-numbed grief.”

Then one day I wasn’t grieving anymore. That’s sort-of how it goes, isn’t it?

One of the reasons I hadn’t claimed the grief is that nobody died. I brought this grief on myself by making certain choices over the last decade. In mid-2010 I found myself 40, childless and alone in a foreign country. (Many of you may think that’s cause for celebration. Today I see the genius in it. Last year? Last year I was grieving.)

I’d always thought the five stages of grieving only followed a death or a tragic accident or something like that.

The thing I’m really ready to look at and haven’t known how to until now is this: in certain areas of my life my Chooser has been broken. Until I read this book, I didn’t want you to know,  wasn’t sure how to fix it… or where to even begin.

“You’ve got to let go of who you were, to become who you will be.”  - Janet Fitch

Let me be clear: I blame June Cleaver for this. I’ve been trying to live her life, just updated for the ’90s, then the new millennium. And I am many things, but I’m not June Cleaver. And the men I find interesting? They’re most certainly not Ward.

Yet I’ve tried to stuff myself and them into some odd box that resembled the life June and Ward Cleaver might have… if they were alive today and not, you know, fictional television characters.

“To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there.” – Kofi Annan

Let’s go to work on our Choosers, shall we? The mechanism by which we make choices? Our goal is to live lives consistent with Who We Are. To be Authentic. To live Wholehearted. Each to live our own Adventures. In this day and age, there are no road maps. Every one of us charts her own course. We have myriad choices. It can be daunting.

Last month we had a worksheet. We don’t need a worksheet for this. Just do these 4 things:

1. Check out this **great** video. You’ll want to watch it more than once:

Here are a couple of my favorite quotes from it:

“Our lives don’t look like the women who came before us and they don’t look like the women next to us. We’re all on our own journey here.”

“If we are to move forward we will be taking enormous risks and we will be failing and we will be disappointing ourselves… We will fall on our faces, we will get up, we will brush off ourselves and we will continue.”

2. Pick up Brown’s book if you’re so inclined (it’s a great deal on the Kindle and saves paper, too!) and

3. Follow Tim Ferriss’ advice, “Do what excites you.” You may want to keep a log. Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, says at the end of the day write down three things that made you happy – after a while you’ll have a pretty clear picture of who you are and what fulfills you.

4. Please report back, won’t you?

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Posted in Fearless, Nomad, Prepared