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What is it about these times we identify as ideal? Why do we love vacations? Because we don’t have to get up at a certain time? We have flexible time, flexible plans. Because we have memorable fun times with friends and family? Because we take the time to read the book we put off the rest of the year?

Are these things not all important to our health and happiness? So why do we marginalize these things, relegating them to 2 weeks a year (if we even take vacations)? Why do we spend only our vacations, and maybe a small part of our weekends actually living?

What if we could have more moments like these? What if we took the time to figure out what activities and states of being contribute to our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health? What if we began to actually live our lives now, instead of what Tim Ferriss calls the “deferred life plan”?

Our happiness with our lives depends on satisfaction in each of what Florence Shinn, in “The Game of Life,” calls the four pillars – health, wealth, love and self-expression. There is usually at least one which needs work.

Let’s take a little quiz, shall we? On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being horrible or non-existent, and 10 being awesome, perfect, ideal, could not be better. Five is “eh, whatever…”, okay, not what I want but marginally serviceable. Take a look at each segment of your life and rank it. When you are done you will clearly see where you need to do some fixin’, as well as giving you a general score of how well you are living according to what you want.

Pillar 1: Health

_________ Health (Do you feel healthy? Exercise enough? Healthy diet?)

_________ Spiritual (Are you happy? Do you feel at peace with your life, your choices? Do you feel balanced and centered? Have you developed your intuition? )

_________ Self-care (Do you actually make time to take care of your own needs?)

Pillar 2: Wealth

_________ Finances (Are your finances in good shape, or are you worried about them?)

_________ Career (Work: a passion or calling? Fulfilling?)

Pillar 3: Love

_________ Love relationship (Do you have one? Is it fulfilling?)

_________ Family (Communication? Close? Loving?)

_________ Social life (Friends – frequent enough quality time?)

Pillar 4: Self-expression

_________ Hobbies/free time (Do you make time? Is it satisfying?)

_________ Home/surroundings/location (Is your home (and office) comfortable, nice, functional, organized? Your home/workplace/community – are they places you want to spend time in?)

Total: ________ out of 100

Soooooo………. Are you living the life you want to live? Is your score as high as you hoped it would be? Were you surprised by your score? Did you notice which of the 4 pillars you may want to focus on first? Please tell us more about it in the comments below.

Blessings,

Keena

PS: The 4 pillars need to be built upon a strong foundation….!

PPS: If you scored less than 85 stay tuned for the revolutionary new intuitive lifestyle design program which will be released shortly!

PPPS: Coaching question for you to ask yourself: What inspires and nourishes me and what greater possibilities can I create with that?

How much unnecessary junk is accumulating in your attic? No, not the one in your house – I mean your mental attic. 

Since we are in the middle of what many of us call “spring cleaning” time, many of us sort out and discard possessions we no longer use and give them to charity or sell them at a garage sale. But have you ever thought about how valuable it could be if you took the time to perform the same kind of mental housecleaning? 

Removing the superfluous, the unnecessary, the destructive, or the outlived from our mental attics is a vital part of making room for new possibilities. I know one man who often says, with his jaw tightly clenched and a no-nonsense expression on his face, “I know who I am!” 

But we can’t possibly stay the same if we are living creatures. Each surprise, each unpredictable turn, each new venture, produces the potential for new insights, new responses, and new resilience. A willingness to change is a prerequisite for openness to life. And without that willingness, we become stuck in our need for stability and certainty. Eventually, if we stay stuck long enough, we stagnate. We exist, but we don’t really live. 

Is there any junk in your mental attic that you would be better off without – a grudge, a hurt, maybe an outgrown assumption? A job, an outworn “must” or “should,” or an old anger? Why not clean it out?

I had an interesting question posed to me, “How do you clean out all the hurts and go about this mental housekeeping?”  Fair questions that deserve answers.

Hurts are the most difficult things to get over, because of the emotional imprint we add to the experience, and then store that memory in our subconscious. Each time we remember the incident or situation, we also recall the pain and hurt, which just solidifies the memory. Some people spend their entire lives purposely remembering old hurts.

It takes a fair amount of work to put those emotional memories into a different perspective, and a lot of that work is self-reflection. Asking yourself the questions, “What else might have been going on, that I might have missed?” and “What was it, inside of me, that caused me to react in the way I did?”  Sometimes, those self-answers are more revealing than we expect.

The good news is that, while we are taking the time to answer these questions (and any others that come to mind during these times of self-reflection), we are cleaning out old mental cobwebs, dusting off even older memories that we may have buried away, under other memories, and illuminating our mental attics.

Self-reflection is like uncovering windows and throwing them open, to let sunlight and fresh air into closed spaces. The light allows us to “see” each memory in full with no shadows, and the fresh “breezes” give us a chance to change our perspective.

What we decide to keep or throw away is up to each of us. Sometimes, an altered perspective allows us to toss the hurt or the pain, and create a new memory of a new lesson learned.