Wisdom is one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit and is actually the highest of all the gifts which include understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord.

When God asked King Solomon (from the Old Testament from the bible) to ask him for anything and He would grant it, Solomon asked for Wisdom and God was so pleased He granted him way more than just that. It was wisdom that allowed Solomon to be a great ruler. When he was approached by two women fighting over custody of a baby, he suggested they cut the baby and half and share it. The real mother, who obviously cared about the baby more offered to give up the baby to protect it so Solomon knew who the real mother was and resolved the problem.

Sometimes in life we can make decisions based on faulty thinking. Perhaps we are tired or frustrated or just don’t really know enough about something to make a good decision, but we can ask the Holy Spirit to guide us. When I taught religious education to high schoolers, I told them to think of the Holy Spirit like a best friend who would help them with anything, they just had to ask. I made them repeat it multiple times to sink in.

I have a friend who also refers to a “White Light” when things are going bad or someone is giving her a hard time she sends the White Light to them, which she has alluded to as the Holy Spirit.

The help is there, we just need to take the time to seek it.

When I took painting lessons (art not house) the instructor warned us there would be an ugly phase when we would just hate our painting. He reminded us not to give up on it, but not keep going then and ruin it. So I would take a break, go for a walk, and come back to it later. Most of the time I ended up with something I was pleased with.

There was one painting I remember as “The Broccoli” that I threw out eventually. Maybe I kept going when I should have stopped. The assignment was to draw the silhouette of a shadow and paint it in contrasting colors. The green part of my image looked like a head of broccoli against a red background. I don’t even remember what the object was that I traced. For my next attempt, I traced the outline of a plant and painted it yellow and purple. It turned out to be one of my favorite paintings from the class.

I imagine this could be applied to life. Are you on the borderline of the ugly phase of something? In the middle of it? Can you step away?

Bear with me, I’m getting to it.

Occasionally on this blog I have shared some Buddhist ideas. I have been wanting to sprinkle in some of my own faith, Catholicism.

We may think of Catholicism as more about rules, formal rituals, and prayer which there is; but there is a meditative side to it that doesn’t get much publicity. One school of thought is based on the teachings of St. Ignatius. Ignatius was a Spanish soldier who lived during the 1500’s. He was injured and could no longer serve in the military. While he recuperated he read a lot and reflected on what he was learning.

He came to the conclusion that God was present in our everyday lives and by paying attention to what was going on we could learn to make good decisions.  There are retreats that you can attend to practice Ignatian Spirituality. They can be formal retreats at retreat sites or churches and you can even purchase books and do it on your own. There is also this website Ignatian Spirituality that you can visit for daily prompts.

They have a blog that I like to read and there was a recent post about Taoism (the T is pronounced like a D so it sounds more like “Dow-ism”). Taoism means “The Way” and is about living simply. I hope you will take a minute to read their post so to keep this short, I’m not going to expand on Taoism now.

If you would like to  know more about Taoism there is a great book called Tao of Pooh. The link will give a nice overview of how Pooh and his friends can show us how to enjoy our lives.

I think we need times for both silence and stillness.

I consider silence as quiet time when we’re not on the go.

Throughout the day we occupy ourselves with work, phones, TV, people, and whatever else. We don’t have time to just sit and think so when we try to go to bed we just start thinking and won’t allow ourselves to wind down and fall asleep. I used to do this all the time, but I’ve gotten a little better lately.

If we allow ourselves a little space to think we may come up with great ideas. Have you ever had what seems like a brilliant idea at night when you were trying to sleep?

Stillness, the way I am using it here, means doing nothing on purpose. In fact, if thoughts come into our head we need to not indulge in them…even great ideas. We just have to let them go if we are trying to be still. This is practically painful at first but if we do it for a few minutes every day, in time we will find it gets easier and we can be calmer throughout the day.

There is a great book called Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn to help achieve stillness. It has short mediations to help you learn to slow down. My favorite one is the following:

Breathing in: “I calm my mind”

Breathing out: “I am smiling”

Breathing in: “Present moment”

Breathing out: “Wonderful moment”

Practice this for 5, 10, 20 minutes daily and you will get there.

Did you ever read or see the movie Eat, Pray, Love and Ketut, the medicine man, tells Julia Robert’s character, Liz, to smile as her meditation? I always wondered how you just practice smiling, but I found this meditation helps with that.

When you realize your mind has wondered start thinking about your breath again and focus. I’ve found even when I’ve had sessions when my mind wondered the whole time I still feel calmer and focused throughout the day. I recommend this book highly.

To reveal is to share or expose something. Often times we hold back on revealing things for various reasons.

Maybe we really don’t want anyone to know.

Maybe we think no one will care.

Maybe we don’t think it’s significant in the grand scheme of things.

Maybe we just don’t want to argue or have to explain because sometimes explaining can take a lot of time and energy.

Maybe we think it won’t change things even if we share it.

But when we reveal things we may find others who feel the same, or they care because they care about you which makes it significant to them.

Or we find they care because they care about you, which makes it significant to them.

They may provide information you didn’t think of before that is helpful, or perhaps you’ll end up changing their mind.

Sometimes we find we were right to keep things to ourselves, but maybe there is something to learn about ourselves even in our frustration. By revealing things a little bit at a time we figure out who we can trust and we build relationships.

I like to do those quizzes that pop up on the Facebook feed. I always wonder how they come up with the results because they often seem to describe me accurately. My favorite was one about which Disney characters I was most similar too and I was 60% Merida and 40% Mulan and the description was so right that my cousin started laughing when she saw my results. I still came up with the same results even when I did the quiz again and changed my answer for the questions where I was trying to decide between two answers.

Why do we like these quizzes? Why do we get such pleasure in seeing ourselves described? Is it because we want to feel like someone gets us, even if it’s an anonymous quiz creator?

It is important to phrase our thoughts positively because our brain does not pick up on negatives. For example, we shouldn’t say, “I will not get sick.” The brain will not register the “not” and it will hear “I will get sick,” so it’s better to say, “I will be healthy.”

There is a Deepak Chopra meditation from his CD “Blissful Sleep with Deepak Chopra” called Anapanasati Mindful Breathing where you repeat positive phrases while breathing slowly in and out. These are some of the phrases:

-I focus my mind

-I calm my mind

-I make my mind happy

There are many more phrases but you get the picture, it doesn’t say, “My mind is not stressed,” right?

I found this to be true in real life when I rode a mechanical bull for the first time. This was before I knew much about this idea regarding positive thoughts. I stayed on the bull much longer than I expected. I focused on my balance and staying on but there was a point when I started to lose my confidence because it had been so long (in my mind) and I just kept thinking, “I’m going to fall off,” which I did soon after.

I imagine gratitude journals work on this same premise causing us to think about the positive rather than the negative. So as for achieving all of your goals, I suggest focusing on what is working rather than what is not working.

I woke up today, not really wanting to get out of bed. It’s been a struggle to do everything I normally do. I’ve been getting things done, but I’m working at a much, much slower pace. Which is okay. Tomorrow I will probably wake up and be back to normal.

So I’m not beating myself up that I’m a little off today.

This blog post is part of the April 2016 A-Z  Challenge which involves writing a blog post every day (except for Sunday) with a theme based on the letters of the alphabet (April 1-A, April 2-B, etc.). I will be focusing on wellness. 

Navigate means to find a way to get to a place.

We may be ambitious and want to do something new (or have to do something new) but since it’s new, we don’t really know what we’re doing. Sometimes it seems like everyone else knows what they’re doing and it can be frustrating or even embarrassing to NOT know, right?

But if we just kept doing the same thing all the time life would get boring. It can be good to not know for a while. Not knowing allows for unexpected things to happen- they can be good things, they can be bad things although we never know if a good thing can come from a seemingly bad thing. Not knowing allows us to discover new things.

Sometimes we have to be patient with not knowing, and stumbling, and dealing with difficulty as we figure things out. Inventors deal with this all of the time. While working on the light bulb Thomas Edison said, “I did not fail, I just found 1,000 ways it didn’t work.”

As we’re navigating we are finding our way, and that is the interesting part.

Today I would like to sing the praises of the free App  MyFitnessPal  by Under Armour.  I like it because it trains you to be conscious of what you’re eating and make better choices. It also shows you – with numbers- how beneficial exercise is. I admit it took a few tries before I started using it regularly but now I believe it is beneficial for helping establish good habits.

KEEP AT IT

A friend told me about the app last year (you can also use it on the computer but I find that more tedious). At first I was horrified logging what I ate and only used it for a few days. It didn’t help that I started it while on a road trip when I was eating all kinds of junk anyway.

I tried it for the second time in the Fall of 2015 when a co-worker was using it and had lost weight. This was really helpful because he would check on me periodically to see if I logged my meals and at lunch time he would say, “It’s time to enter our lunch.” He pointed out the idea that you can enter your meals ahead of time and plan your calories. This is helpful, for example, if you know you’re going to eat out for dinner. You can be conservative with your breakfast and lunch. I lost about four pounds using MyFitnessPal for about two months. It may not sound like much, but weight is like GPA. It goes in the wrong direction very easily and the right direction painfully slowly.

After I left my job and  had no routine for a while, I couldn’t be bothered with logging in my food throughout the day. However, another friend was using it which put it back on my radar and my recent Fitbit research motivated me to start it the third time and I believe this time I’ll stick with it. I realize it’s not just a diet but a way to live healthy. We are surrounded by tempting foods and drinks and we’re always going to have to be conscious of what we consume.

KEEPING TRACK OF CALORIES

The way MyFitnessPal  works is you log your meals and snacks and it keeps track how many calories you consume. After a few weeks, you will find that you eat the same food for the most part so it gets easier to select it from your list. You also log your exercise. If your phone has a pedometer it will automatically deduct calories for your movement, but if you go on actual walks I suggest you log specifically. It seems to deduct more calories that way. MyFitnessPal can also be synced with other apps like Fitbit.

What is helpful about seeing your calories is you can begin to make better choices by substituting lower calories foods. Also, when looking at the calorie content of food you start to question if it’s really worth consuming. You can decide that it’s not worth having a high calorie slice of cake when  a 90 calorie Fiber One Brownie tastes really good anyway. And you can see how your exercise has an impact on your daily calories allowance. On days I am when very active I can eat a little more (have something fun) and still be under my goal.

NOTICING PATTERNS

You also begin to see patterns in your weight loss. For example, I lose a few pounds (and get very happy) then it comes back the next week (ruining all my plans for thinking if I lost this much weight every week I’ll be where I want to be in a month or two) but then the following week it goes down again. After you see your pattern you don’t get devastated when you gain some weight because you know you are establishing good habits and it will eventually go down.

HOW MYFITNESSPAL IS MOTIVATING

What motivates me the most about it is when you click on the button to “complete the day” it tells you if every day were like today you would weigh X in five weeks. This is an estimate, but you get the idea if you stay in your calorie count, your weight will decrease. You also realize one bad day here and there isn’t horrible if overall you’re establishing healthy habits. I suspect there is a psychological motivational benefit to seeing a weight ten pounds lower associated with YOU on those days when you are below your daily calories.

Wisdom I have gathered from using MyFitnessPal

1. Stick with it. It takes time to build up the habit of logging your stuff. It’s upsetting at first facing what you eat but you have to face it in order to change. It will get better if you give it some time.
2. If you give up give it another chance in the future. As with many things in life it may take multiple tries before it sticks.
3. If this app doesn’t work for you try a different one.

Have had success with MyFitnessPal or another app?