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The Eclipse was one of the most comforting moments of my life thus far. If you didn't get to experience it in Totality I hope I can shed some light...or...I guess darkness on what the experience was like so we may all go into this next chapter feeling invigorated by it's occurance. We all know that feeling. When our whole body tingles with emotion. When we watch two people who deeply love one another commit their lives to each other. When a baby is born. When we hear that song. When we we're far away from city lights, laying under an epic amount of stars. When we re-count the beauty of someone's life after they've passed. When we feel truly seen and known by another. When we re-connect with our truest self. The Eclipse brought forth these feelings. The whole sun was blocked out, darkness descended quickly and the temperature dropped. A ring, brighter than anything I have ever seen in my life, pierced the daytime darkness. Our whole group reacted with strong emotions, speechlessness and tears. It reminded me that life is a journey of discoveries. Each year I am blown away by something new. So many of us close ourselves off from these experiences. We don't need an Eclipse to have them in abundance. It was just one of those moments that humbles and inspires us. In the moment of Totality, I returned to my roots. I allowed myself to be shocked, surprised, blown away. I allowed myself to cry (as if I could even hold it back) and feel that indescribable comfort. I felt as if I was transported to another world. One where all my fears and worries disappeared into that darkness. I was at full peace. Time no longer mattered, problems no longer lingered in my mind. I was wiped blank. I relinquished my control, realizing life is much more magical than our minds can comprehend. We always try to comprehend everything...and in that moment I just surrendered. We've made leaps and bounds as humans, but we still can't stop the moon from blocking out the sun. We still can't stop ourselves from dying. But if dying is anything like the eclipse felt, then it's all okay. That was the comfort I found in Totality. And that comfort is ours if we pause and watch nature, the stars and the universe swirl around us in it's epic beauty. Living with wonder replaces living with hate or despair. Living with wonder humbles our running lips and leaves us speechless when no words are needed. Living with wonder unites all people. ____________________________________________________________________ The Eclipse is also a sign of new beginnings. What are your intentions for the coming months and years? I want be out in nature more often, pause more frequently, practice gratitude and wonder, remembering that as long as I am pursing what I know to be true within me that everything will be okay. And ultimately, to approach life with more curiosity and less fear. ____________________________________________________________________ FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE: My groups reaction to the Eclipse FYI. There is cussing in this video...because...damn...nothing was held back.
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The importance of financial security was beat into my skull through the constant verbal concerns expressed during my upbringing. This was somewhat concerning given the fact that I had never been able to pull off good grades in school. I was stuck in an in between land, which I feel most of us inhabit, for a good portion of my life thus far. Fear drilled its way into my decision making and found a way to put up a wall. Thank God I am good at climbing because I’ve spent a lot of my time sitting on top of it and jumping from one side to the other. The first time I jumped over it was during my only year of college. Both my parents are in dental professions and I was lured into applying for Dental Assisting school in order to have some certainty and create a stable future. I was sitting in orientation, among a crowd of women as the presenter listed off the things we would need for school. One of the things on the list was Scrubs and where to find them online. As the presenter scrolled through the online store my mind only thought about one thing; what would be the most crazy and unique patterned scrubs I could buy? About 10 minutes later, and only 20 minutes into the 2 hour presentation, I stood up and walked out. The doors opened and flooded me with fresh air and light. I took a deep breath, the kind you take when you know you’re in the right place, the kind that contains a smile in it and sometimes joyful tears. I’ve always been braver than I give myself credit for. I left the possibility of a secure job behind and continued into the unknown. A lot of us forget to look back at ourselves as a young child, when we were most free, and see what was there. I was obsessed with dress up, wrestling, starting clubs with other kids where I was the leader, singing, dancing, posing, creating space with decorations, being creative in all ways, spending lots of time alone with my imagination, analyzing my emotions and other people (yes, I remember doing this from as early as 6 years old). But what do those things tell me about what I should do now? They tell me so many things. They tell me I wasn’t meant to be a Dental Assistant, that’s FOR SURE. They tell me that my concern has never been about money or even stability, they tell me that I enjoy leading, performing and connecting emotionally, that is my currency first and foremost, without that all the money in the world wouldn’t satisfy me. But hey, I am also realistic, and I do need money to survive. So what are legitimate jobs for me? Well, I went on a little journey after that fateful day in Dental Assisting Orientation. I started with the Floral Design Institute. An obvious choice for my creativity and visual mind. Once I started Forest & Field (now 7 years ago!) I also got this emotional fix. I was working with couples on their weddings and getting to hear a lot of their stories as well. Sometimes I felt like I was coaching them through certain aspects of planning in a very emotional way. Unfortunately, I was in an interesting time of life where I was incredibly concerned with how every action I took affected the world. It was stifling, but I was learning. This meant that I felt guilty about floral design because it didn’t “help” the world in the epic way I desired. (more on that later) The next road I took was toward health. For a few years I studied Herbal Medicine and Nutritional Therapy. As I’ve mentioned in my other posts, I came down with allergies for a whole year that debilitated me. Ultimately my road into health was because I wanted my life back. Although, after completing both courses I felt a little lost again. My mind has always been so creatively driven that even the thought of being a Nutritional Therapist and Herbalist triggered me back to the moment I walked out those doors at Orientation. Yet this time it was different. I was SO thankful for the knowledge because it saved me. It healed me. But I was scared to peg myself in an area that I didn’t fully feel fulfilled. The more people reached out to me for advice the more I pulled away. I haven’t shared this information with anyone but Johnny, but I feel it’s important to mention, and here’s why. Sometimes we think we have to do something just because we said we would or we spent a lot of time or money on it. This is no way to live life. Thankfully, I think I’ve found a way to re-define it for myself so I don’t fully have to let it go. This past year has been the most eye-opening for Johnny and I. We’ve opened ourselves up to a vulnerability and a truth that we ignored in the past. We’ve been blunt and honest about our life, our circumstances, our marriage and our direction. It’s been REALLY hard and REALLY good. We realized that some of his childhood coping mechanisms had put us into some hard places. And it’s like we both finally woke up. We spent so much time living for other people and trying to “save the world” that we lost ourselves. Sometimes it’s not about doing what is “right” or having a “servant's heart” it’s about being true to who you are and giving yourself grace and freedom. When I allowed myself that I became more healthy and able to love and give to others out of that well I dug within me. When we “try” to serve others and be compassionate it can actually steal the truth and love within us, making us resentful and ultimately thwart the vision that we were trying to accomplish in the first place. I learned that I need to be ME. That was the best person I could be for the world. This whole year has been re-defining that using my childhood self and journey to understand what it is that I desire. Honestly, it’s really easy when you’re just open and real. Ask someone who has had a few beers what it is that they truly want, they may say something completely different than if they were sober. How can we let down our guards and be real with ourselves sans intoxication? If you’ve been feeling unfulfilled then you’re probably not embodying your truest expression of self. In order to bring the story full circle, I’d like to share where I’m at right now. For so long I’ve dabbled in many things, it’s time I create a more direct vision. I am not tossing aside any of my training, I am just specializing. First off, I am allowing myself to love Floral Design and use it as a way to transform a space and create a feeling, like I’ve always desired. I think I got worn out on doing weddings that weren’t fulfilling me creatively and were repetitious, this year I have the opportunity to create installations and epic art while bringing the couples story and desires into their wedding. I also have found ways to meet my need to contribute through making medicine out of arrangements, donating to charities and doing flower graffiti around Portland with the leftovers. As far as the health aspect goes, I enjoy having nutrition and herb knowledge for my own life, family and friends across the board, but I really need to focus on something specific in practice. I started getting overwhelmed by it and knew that I wasn’t in the right place. This is where I’d like to officially announce my new direction (which is always subject to change). I will be focusing on mood and emotions. This means digestion will still be a key focus due to its huge impact on emotional well being and function, but I’ll be diving into more mood specific food and herbs in order to support people while also supporting them emotionally through my Strategic Intervention Coaching. Feel free to continue asking me questions about health, but know that I am switching gears in that arena. On top of all that Johnny and I are heavily focusing on couples and marriage coaching. Healthy marriages are the backbone of a family and we are incredibly passionate about this life choice. I know this is the right direction because it feels deeply right. It feels in line with my true self, and there is no better place to be. Fore more on being yourself check out my most recent Vlog below! Be Wild. Be Well. Bailey   Building trust in a relationship is all about repeating and reinforcing. If you want to build trust with your partner you can follow these steps: 1. Commit and Declare The first thing is to just say, “I want to build trust with you and I’m committed to that because I love and care about you.” 2. Create Heartfelt Emotion Some couples have strayed from being emotionally vulnerable, so even the first step can be hard for them. After you say something with your words you need to create heartfelt emotion behind it. For a lot of people, especially women, PRESENCE is of utmost important, no one wants a partner who is constantly distracted and not focused on them. “PRESENCE is EMPATHY for what the other person is experiencing in this moment right now.” Exercise: Sit across from your partner and look into each others eyes. Practice this definition of Presence. Think about your partners Positive Intent instead of seeing the things they do that hurt you, see how they might be protecting themselves from vulnerability, see them as a child that maybe didn’t get the love or attention or freedom they needed. Marriage is a place where we can grow and be pushed beyond our boundaries, practicing true presence with our partner is seeing the positive intent inside them and also the hurt that they have gone through. It is empathy for the other person. While looking into their eyes flood yourself with thoughts of gratitude and dedication to the other person. Practice this everyday. POSITIVE INTENT. Examples: Your wife is nagging you all the time. Positive Intent: "she is scared that you don't care about her" You husband is unable to emotionally connect with you. Positive Intent: "he is protecting himself, making sure he is safe." In both these situations if the other partner understands the Positive Intent behind the actions they can better love their spouse and build trust. Our positive intents were formed as survival mechanisms. We learned that we would only get love from our parents when we cried and complained, or we were put down when we tried to be emotionally vulnerable and so we stopped in order to protect our self, A Positive Intent doesn't mean the person should go on acting like it, it means they should understand where there actions are stemming from and realize there is a positive intent behind them, something that they've used that is no longer helpful. After the realization it is time to make a change. 3. Share, Listen, Learn -Every time partners communicate it can be seen as either a comment or request. -Are they just commenting about something or are they asking something from you. -Practice listening and responding to your partner so you can learn new things about them and meet their need to connect and build trust with you. Allow them to speak truth, even when it’s painful for you to hear, that safe space is where trust is truly built. 4. Align Vision After completing steps 1-3 you should come to a place where you are aligned with your partner on what you spoke about. This is when you align your visions and confirm what you both desire. 5. Act of Love Seal the conversation with an act of love. This can be as simple as a hug and kiss or more extravagant, like a date night. If you can’t end the conversation with an act of love then more trust building needs to happen. You may go back in steps and keep working on 1-3 before moving to 4 & 5. FOR MORE TIPS CHECK OUT MY NEWEST VLOG BELOW. "HOW TO BEST LOVE YOUR PARTNER"   After perusing the cluttered newsfeed of Facebook, I often regret the time spent. I find a lot of news to be discouraging and just plain sad. I also find some personal news unnecessary, although it is my choice to follow people and scroll down through the endless posts that we put out into the world, memorialized for all time on a server in the middle of a desert, or who knows where. This is not an attempt at being cynical, I’ve lived that life already and it’s not rewarding. This is actually the opposite. The other day I came across a video that actually sparked something deep in me. Because of my past dance with negativity I have to be very careful about what I watch with my eyes and hear with my ears. I’d rather be FOR something than AGAINST something. Of course I am against things...but I’ve learned it’s better to focus on what I can do about an issue instead of wallowing in sadness or fear.
We’re all on the same journey. From birth to death. That journey can look completely different, but it’s something we all share. Some of us grip tighter to our lives than others. Some of us even get to the point where we will take our own life rather than living it out. So, back to the video I watched: it was about a girl, 19 years of age, who was terminal. Her life expectancy was mid-twenties and she spends her time living the short life she has been given with everything she has. Because she does not fear death she is living her life, albeit short, to the fullest. It’s weird, because some of us spend so much our time consumed with worry, working too much and zoned out, that we forget about our true life. “Live everyday like it’s your last.” I have heard this quote a hundred times over but never truly dissected it. For the terminal young girl this is more pertinent because she knows the amount of sand in her timer, for us, it gets a little more complicated to live like this. Some of us might have a shorter life expectancy than her but we wouldn’t know it. Some of us will live to be 100 years old. So how do you live everyday like it’s your last while still living in preparation for the future in case you get there. That is the true test. I believe it’s a balance of preparation and celebration. Preparation is key because we should have goals and dreams we are working toward, the key is creating a journey that is worth living too. Celebration is living in the moment. It reminds us to be thankful for the people and the moments in our life. This is my next goal. To celebrate daily and prepare daily. Looking ahead can be exciting, but if we only look ahead at the expense of our NOW then we may be disappointed when the future doesn’t turn out like we thought or we don’t make it there. On a similar note, if we always living in the past full of regret we will also lose out on our present moments. Let the past teach you things but don’t let it control you. A new tactic that Johnny and I have been trying out is weekly or monthly “resets”. Whenever we get stressed out or overwhelmed by our current situation we wake up the next morning and act as if this was the first day of our life. Our home, our bank account, our friendships, our hardships, everything is looked at as a new life that we are blessed and challenged by. We have the tendency to live in our past mistakes and our future goals all too often, this recenters us. It’s like taking the little Google Maps yellow man and dropping him down somewhere random. We wake up and say, “this is the life we have in front of us, today is the first day, how are we going to life it well given what we have in front of us?” We are not promised tomorrow. How can we live FOR things instead of always AGAINST? How can we create daily CELEBRATIONS? How can we continue to PREPARE for our future without being fully consumed by it? And how can we GROW from our past experiences and live NEW days? We are here to live, grow, connect, create and someday die. It’s the journey of life. How we walk that path is up to us. -Bailey Put two people together with different backgrounds, different childhoods and different sexes (for some) and see what happens. This sounds like a crazy experiment and yet so many of us embark on this journey. This is life partnership. My introduction in Part One describes it as a spiritual journey to wholeness. That sounds nice, doesn't it? But it isn't nice sometimes. It requires incredibly understanding, patience and fervor. This is why I began developing The Love Map. There are so many unspoken, subconscious dialogues taking place whenever we interact with our partner. There are influences from our childhood, our past experiences, our positive and negative reinforcements and on and on and on. We are a cluster of inputs which can create some confusing outputs for a person who didn't go through the same things we did. This is the reality of being different people. So how do we start practicing deep understanding in our relationship with all these unspoken rules and triggers? This is where the map comes in:  As I've studied psychology and intervention coaching there has been a common theme.
The Human Needs. This is where my map starts. Once you understand what needs the other is most trying to meet in their day to day life it unveils more about the person, their words and their actions. So the next part would be discovering how they already meet those needs. Ways They Meet Their Needs. Next we can discover how they receive and give love using their Love Language There is also the idea that you are attracted to a someone who has Strengths You Lack If we understand what needs they are trying to meet, how they are trying to meet them, how they desire to be loved and admire what strengths they have that we don't then we also should understand how they act when stressed and if they are a Fuser or Isolator On a really basic level we can add to our understanding of giving love and attention when we ask Are They: Auditory, Visual or Kinesthetic? An incredible, eye opening exercise would be to understand whose parental love did they crave the most, who did they have to be for that person, what kind of love was withheld. And what positive/negative attributes do you as a partner share with their parents. This is all about Childhood Wounds And finally you must discover their lost self, false self and disowned self. Their lost self would be the part that was discouraged by parents or societal demands. Their false self would be what they erected to fill the voids that their lost self would have taken up. Their disowned self are the behaviors that came out of erecting the false self, these could be seen as coping mechanisms or other negative reactions that have been bred in us. They are so offensive to us that we pretend like they aren't there. We disown them. This is the Repressed Self Once you understand these parts of yourself, and your partner, understanding begins to grow. You see your partner as a wounded child and you begin to understand why they do the things they do. Their little idiosyncrasies, habits, criticisms and actions begin to make more sense. Once you understand how to love them you can help them grow and visa versa. Putting this much effort into creating a Love Map is an incredibly way to have a thriving relationship. Don't get me wrong, bringing this stuff to the surface is hard. It's not, "here's who I am and how to love me." DONE! It can be painful and you might flounder around as you process and put into practice. More on that in Part Three.  “When we gather the courage to search for the truth of our being and the truth of our partners being, we begin a journey of psychological and spiritual healing.” -Harville Hendrix When we see marriage as a spiritual journey to wholeness it can change everything. When both partners enter their marriage this way or come to realize it later on it can have profound effects on their relationship.
So often we work hard on our career or other endeavors in life, why is it that we don’t view marriage as something to challenge us, help us grow and become whole? Why do we give up? We need to look into our past, our childhood, and discover how we were denied adequate nurturing and how we repressed essential parts of our self. It’s as if our parents pass us off to our spouse so they can finish the work that was started. The more dysfunctional the family of origin, the more intentional the communication and action must be in the marriage. We can do this searching through self-reflection, journaling, therapy or whatever avenue makes sense to you. As we discover new things about ourselves we can share them with our partner to start building a new way of interacting. Every single day Johnny and I share new things with one another and calibrate accordingly. Some people might say, “My partner doesn’t listen to me" or you don’t feel comfortable sharing with them. In this case trust must be built first. Marriage remains stagnant without trust, openness and vulnerability. We can start by “going first”. When our partner reveals anything about themselves, no matter how small, we must respond with understanding and compassion in order to start building the trust from our end. As we build our Love Map (a concept I will describe in Part Two) we will inevitably find ways to love our partner in the way they desire so deeply. Even the most stubborn, elusive partner will soften when their needs are being met on the deepest level. We’ll actually start to see them as “wounded children” whom we can heal with our unconditional love. Stay Tuned for Part Two.  What is the most common phrase you speak to yourself? For me it's probably: I want to live with authenticity and passion. We can also have negative common phrases, or incantations we tell ourselves. One of mine is: I will never be successful. I am not good at being truly affectionate and vulnerable. The problem, or the benefit, with incantations is that we actually hypnotize ourselves. Positive or negative incantations have real life implications. It changes how we act, how we view ourselves, how we view other people, etc. The biggest impact you can have on your life is to change your incantations to encouraging, positive words and phrases. It's been proven that people are more likely to succeed in life if their self-talk is encouraging. If you are suffering from self-confidence issues remind yourself of how strong you are. Make a list of the things you've done in your life that required great inner strength. If you are suffering from feeling inferior in relationships with others remind yourself of the ways you care about others. Make a list of the things you have given to friendships in the past and present. Add in things that you desire to give in relationships and that you know have within but haven't given out yet. If you are suffering from feeling critical and angry remind yourself of how compassionate and caring you really are. Sometimes the hyper-critical people are the most compassionate of all, they just don't know how to let go and be themselves. Write your true compassionate and caring desires down. Get specific with it as it applies to your life and relationships. This one is really true for me because I have suffered from a very critical world view and yet I feel like at my core I am exceptionally compassionate. We're taking the things we want to change, or the things we think we're bad and we're looking at the positives. If we think we can't do anything right then we're going to start speaking that incantation to ourself and then it will come true in our life. Instead we need to focus on our positive qualities, the things we have accomplished, the people we've given our love to and so on. This reframes how we view ourselves. If we want to help and contribute to others then we need to see the positives in ourselves. This is what creates good interpersonal relationships. We all want other people to feel good about themselves but then we don't practice the same kindness for ourselves? What kind of double standard is that?  I'll go ahead and practice what I am preaching. Here is my list. These are my CORE STRENGTHS. Get a piece of paper out and do this now! We're so uncomfortable with saying what we're good at. I think we can sometimes see it as arrogant. This is unfortunate because self-confidence in a healthy way is so beneficial to us and everyone we love. Lift yourself up. I am compassionate I am a deep thinker I am always trying to improve and grow I try new things I have a strong spirit I desire to be encouraging and giving in my friendships I am open to others point of view I care about people I love giving people gifts I am a great poet who can communicate my deep thoughts with written words I am intuitive and can sense people's feelings and emotions You can keep writing as long as you think of things. I would re-read this or add to it at the beginning of every new day. Speak these things out loud, write them on a poster, put it where you can see it. Whatever works for you! Live Epic, Bailey  The Sadness Facade is a tricky one. I have used it for a lot of my life. Weirdly, my sadness came from my desire to connect with others. As you get older you realize how many people have been abused or gone through trauma as a child. As a female, you are surrounded by eating disorders, lack of self esteem and so on. I didn’t have to endure these things. Weirdly, this made me feel a lack of connection with others. One of the biggest human needs is for love and connection. It’s all I wanted.
So I became sad. I found reasons, I marinated in them and manipulated myself to feel sad. Then I used that sadness to connect with other people. This started in my teens. I was a poet and a “closet emotional” and my sadness facade came about because of negative reinforcement. I noticed that if I was happy, confident, liked myself, etc. that people would become angry or put off by me. Because my ultimate goal was for love, connection and caring for others I felt that my happiness and contentment would make people feel worse about themselves so in order to protect them from my happiness I became sad. Sometimes sadness is real in me. I have gone through hard things. This is not the sadness I am speaking of. Situational sadness and grieving are necessary. It’s when sadness becomes a lifestyle that holds us back from true joy and love for ourselves that it is a problem. It’s when we actually go to the point of changing our physiology to become sad when we’re either bored or desire to connect with others. The equation goes: I get sad=I get attention from others I get sad=People feel sorry for me and connect with me I get sad=I feel a deep sense of meaning I get sad=I connect with myself in a deep way I get sad=Bad things are happening everywhere and so I have to be sad I get sad=People will see me as heartless if I don’t Sometimes we aren’t actually sad, we just feel like we have to be for some reason and so we trick ourselves into it. We are “doing” sad. We hold ourselves in that place for so many reasons. A few of mine were: -Connecting with myself -Connecting with others -Fear of succeeding -Fear of making other people feel bad about themselves -Feeling like I would be judged if I didn’t mourn the bad things happening in the world -Getting reinforced when others would share their sadness with me My power does not last long when I’m sad. I may have written a few great poems that way (which was another reason I liked being sad) but ultimately it keeps me from growing. Sadness as a lifestyle is not helpful. Our culture tells us to be happy, love yourself, live without fear...but then if you actually do it people say, “You can’t be THAT happy.” “You’re conceited/arrogant.” The feedback comes from other people's insecurities. All my life I’ve been trying to protect those people by not showing up fully in my life. I’ve been trying to protect people with insecurities by staying in sadness and discontent. I learned these things a few years ago and constantly have to work on understanding my state of being. If we understand how we create our sadness facade then we can change. It’s time to get sad. Answer these questions and outline how to get sad: What do I do with my body when I get sad? What is my posture? Where do I go? What is my internal dialogue? What am I saying to myself in this moment? What could snap you out of this feeling? If your friend was feeling this way what would you say to them? Understanding what we do with our body and mind when we “get sad” is key to changing the pattern. You start to realize that you actually willingly change your physiology to create and environment for sadness. But we can only be sad for so long...what happens when we get tired of feeling sad? When I get tired of being sad for so long where do I go from there? Do you snap out of sadness with anger? How does this anger make you feel? Does it make you feel in control again? How does your posture and body change when you go from sadness to anger? In Psychology this is coined as “The Crazy 8”. Not only do humans have the need for love and connection, they also need variety and certainty. Going back and forth from sadness to anger creates this variety. Getting angry makes us feel in control again after being sad for too long. Unfortunately this pattern keeps us stagnant. We feel like we’re doing something by getting angry but soon we’ll slump back into sadness and lose that momentum. It keeps us stuck. In order to get out of this pattern let’s do a little exercise. Think of a time you felt accepted and understood by someone. Think of a time you felt victorious. Remember a time you felt excited about something. How did the moments leading up to this feel? Think of a time you felt peace. Where were you? What made you feel that way? In what moments have you felt the most free? Who are the people you love? How do you show them your love for them? How do they show you love? Think about those moments with them. These are SPARKS. The places, emotions, relationships and activities where we lose our holdbacks. Where we feel that warmth in our gut and that excitement. Staying in sadness, anger, anxiety, or whatever emotion you struggle with, will ultimately hold you back from what you’re meant to do. We are manipulating ourselves into those emotions so when we change our posture, our thoughts, our self-talk, we can snap out of them and accomplish what we are meant for. We can find our strengths if we stop holding ourselves back. The exercise above is meant to get you excited. It’s meant to transport you into the moments and memories in your life where you felt the most alive. Meditate on those memories, draw them into yourself and transport them into the future. We’ve all overcome things, experience adventure, recklessness, excitement, happiness, love, acceptance and so on. We can cultivate THESE emotions instead of emotions like sadness. The first step is realizing that we hold ourselves in those emotions because we are meeting our needs. We have to learn to meet our needs for love, connection, significance, certainty, variety and contribution in other/healthy ways. Are you getting off on sadness or some other detrimental emotion? Why? What if I approached life like a video game? Something like World of Warcraft comes to mind, though I know next to nothing about it. I am my character. Every problem or difficulty I encounter is a challenge that, should I prevail, allows me to advance to the next level. Through training, learning, and practice, I can level up my character. Thus I can add weapons to my arsenal and skills to my repertoire.
Like any well-designed game, life is inherently challenging. Often our model of the world is that life should be easy, or at least difficult only when we want it to be; when we are feeling bored. What if a person’s favorite game was easy? It probably wouldn’t be much fun. I don’t play Scrabble with Bailey because I win every time. I crave the challenge. When I face a problem in life, I can default to getting angry or depressed. Or, I can stare down the problem like a high level player in the game of life. I can take a stance of enthusiastic curiosity. I can look for the unique quality of this individual problem; the opportunity it affords to push beyond my present understanding of my limits and what is possible. I can allow the desire to know what’s on the other side, on the next level, be my motivation as I craft an elegant, creative solution. Once on the other side, there are a couple things I can know for sure: the problems of my past have brought me here to this level, and another challenge is on its way. I wonder what this one will be like? -Johnny I'm proud to officially announce my next certification journey has begun! It's common for people to ask me if I went/go to college. I tried this avenue for about a year and a half but only thrived in three classes: Psychology, Public Speaking and Writing. This should have been enough information to lead me where I needed to go. Unfortunately it's difficult to see when you're freshly out of high school and carrying the weight of pursuing a career for security instead of passion. Not only that, but I've always had a hard time in school. So instead I decided to "create my own major" Well, I didn't actually decide this at one moment in time…it just sort of happened. From the age of 21-27 I've completed (or am completing) these certifications: Floral Design Institute Beginner + Advanced Herbalism Nutritional Therapy Practitioner Strategic Intervention Coach The last three certifications will go beautifully together. Although Floral Design seems unrelated it has actually been the job I needed to accomplish the other three. Normally I'd have to work at least 4 days a week to make the money I do as a floral designer in the summer months and other weekends throughout the year. Because I was given the gift of time I decided to use it to pursue the "job" I actually wanted. I created this job. It's me, it's my desires. You could call it a Wellness Coach…I haven't decided on the best term. It comes out of my deep desire to THRIVE. My life question has been, "what makes some people thrive or experience happiness and what makes others get stuck and feel depressed?" I noticed there was no relation to life circumstances and how someone reacted to them. Some people have a very hard life yet they thrive. Some people have a relatively easy life and they don't. And vice versa. "Pain is a damn good thing if you use it." -Tony Robbins I understood that happiness is not one thing. It's a lifestyle. Health is not one thing. It's a lifestyle. I wanted to thrive in mind and body and see other people do the same. This final certification (probably not the last!) is honestly the one I am most excited about. Psychology, emotions and the way we use them is the subject I am most obsessed with, always have been. I am so thankful to have the knowledge of food and herbs as they are equally important in this equation.  So here is where you come in.
Over the next few months I will need volunteers to practice my skills in this next certification. So if you are someone who has felt bogged down, stuck, depressed, anxious and angry in life this is for you. Or if you have a problem in life you are trying to solve, this is for you. Or if you want to discover your passion and learn how to pursue it, this is for you. This will basically be a few months of FREE life coaching/nutritional therapy/herbs. At the end of my certification I will be hosting an overnight workshop for a discounted price so let me know who is interested in being a part of that as well! Send me an email if you're interested: [email protected] |
Bailey Patrice & Jonathan David
Categories
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Date
December 2017
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