Having the Courage of Your Convictions
How are you managing your energy? Are you losing something of yourself?
When you are successful, some don’t like what you have to say. They want what you have. Continue and overcome the obstacles in your path.
Keep the conversation going and negotiate, negotiate, negotiate. You may be defending others as well as yourself when you become the spokesperson for the group.
Please just consider your self-awareness. Protection becomes important as you are asked to defend your accomplishments.
Turn to your integrity, positive energy, and your good intentions. You don’t have to accept criticism as truth. Instead, align yourself with your highest values.
This may mean that you have to draw the confidence within yourself to say “no”. If you find yourself at odds with your conscience, this is the time to set your boundaries.
Continue on and supplement this with your diet whenever you can. This is a time for introspection, self-care, wisdom, and a healing diet.
Set your sights on the future while you leave adversity behind.
Your job isn’t easy. But, remember, you have this job because of your prior success.
A STORY
“Don’t go away. I need to talk to you.” A man approached me in the basement hallway. As he spoke, the hair on my neck stood up.
The scene is etched in my memory. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the feeling or the toothy grin he showed that afternoon. I’m convinced he practiced for years turning himself into the big bad wolf he projected.
Stocking shelves in the food pantry, I prepared for the hungry people coming to shop in the food pantry soon. After filling the third shelf down from the top of a unit with canned green beans, I stepped into the hallway for a moment.
“Good afternoon, sir. What can I do for you?”
“For starters you can stop feeding all those people. Ever since you started working here, more and more people are standing in the halls waiting for food. You’re feeding too many people and I want it to stop. Right. Now.”
The man standing over me in the hall was fat, old, angry. His toes pointed outward, an indication he had painful back issues. “I want to see your files on the people who use the pantry.”
“I’m sorry sir. We don’t keep many files on our hoppers. We keep a journal where we record their names and number of people in each household. That’s all.”
“Well, you should. No one should be allowed in this pantry who isn’t on food stamps. You’re feeding people who shouldn’t be coming here.
“Just this last week you gave food to a man who you shouldn’t be feeding. He wrote a book and published it a couple of years ago and he shouldn’t even be here. He has a motorcycle. Writers make a lot of money.”
I didn’t believe this story about the writer and his book, but I didn’t answer him back.
“This man is definitely a threat to the pantry” went through my mind as he stood over me. “I’ll have to call the food bank about getting that kind of information.”
Not a secret, he didn’t like the way I managed the pantry. And, he had grounds. Before 2007, the pantry served about twenty-five of Woodstock’s most colorful characters on Thursday mornings and now with the economy tanking, new hungry people showed up weekly. Lines got longer on every pantry day.
The Hunger Prevention Nutrition Assistance Program (HPNAP) expanded pantry nutritional guidelines to include fresh produce, 1% milk, and whole-grain bread. Now, instead of shoppers getting a jar of peanut butter, a box of cereal, a can of tuna fish, they chose from shelves filled with fresh produce. Bread Alone sent bread weekly.
These changes brought not only hungry people but mountains of cardboard. According to him, the pantry was overrun with vermin. No amount of reasoning convinced them otherwise. It didn’t matter one whit that not even one bug or mouse could be found in the pantry.
Our boxed, canned, fresh, food arrived clean from the food bank with no insects or rodents. Food bank employees were proud of their clean food. The reason is simple. Rodents and insects prefer dark quiet conditions and immediately vacate a disturbed area.
Food pantry stock is in constant motion, the best pesticide.
Meanwhile, here was this angry man staring at me and demanding to see files I didn’t have and the State didn’t have and the State didn’t require. And, if I had them, he wouldn’t see them anyway.
“I can call the food bank and find out what files we need. However, an inspector was here only a few weeks ago, saw my paperwork, and pronounced everything excellent. We’ve never done anything like this before. After all, we’re not the police.”
“Well, check into it NOW!” he said as he turned away, his toes still looking outward. With that, he walked away.
He looked back at me then and grinned broadly, displaying a mouthful of large, yellow teeth.
As he walked down the hall and out the door, I felt a terrible pain in my gut. My solar plexus was on fire. My adrenals knotted. I realized I was afraid. Cold. Hard. Fear. He threatened the food pantry. I knew in my gut that I was the only person standing in the way of his threat. Others would mutter things about a job not being worth the aggravation and walk away.
It took a food pantry in a church basement in the most famous small town in America to teach me about fear in our country. Food shoppers and volunteers live with the peril of starvation daily. The subject is stark, deep, hidden, real.
Full-blown fear wasn’t in my personal vocabulary, so I rarely felt it.
At that moment I knew I wasn’t going to let panic get the best of me. People shopping at the food pantry were afraid of being hungry, being homeless, or being unemployed.
I was not going to let go of this pantry. I was not going to let go of this pantry. I was not going to let go. This anxiety stuck to me day and night. I felt unsafe every moment.
It seems a bit strange, maybe unbelievable. Looking back on the whole experience, it was a steppingstone on the path to the pantry. We all lost things along the way. I lost a lot of fluff and met up wiwth the stark reality of hunger in our nation.
I worked hard to avoid being overwhelmed by danger. First, I defined exactly what alarmed me. At that moment I knew exactly what that was. I was afraid to let pantry deniers close the pantry. I knew I had to negotiate my day-to-day work in the pantry to prevent that from happening. I had to find ways to make sure the people got what they were supposed to get. I had to balance things, so I didn’t go too fast but I had to implement the guidelines soon enough to satisfy the food banks.
“I’m walking a tight rope high above an abyss.” I thought. I needed to be at my peak performance.
I surrounded myself with people who lifted me up and who wanted me to lift them up. Volunteers and shoppers supported me even though they had no idea I needed it. People at the food bank inspired me and taught me to do my job better. People surrounding me made me successful because their support stopped anyone from holding me back.
I knew he wanted me to leave. I decided then that I would not let that happen – not on his terms anyway. I would not leave because of what he did did.
I stuck with my decision. I left on my own terms in 2013 when I took my experience and skills to Boiceville to open a new food pantry.
Pantry deniers finally evicted the pantry in Woodstock in a public outburst several years later which ended up with a story in the local paper.
I kept my mouth shut, much like a woman married to an alcoholic man who beat her. Whenever someone realized what was happening, I changed the subject and moved on to other topics.
Hunger in America is a hidden shame. Those coping with it have smaller and smaller voices. As time passes, they have none. More and more people with more and more are blind to those choosing between food and rent.
We know that the top 1% have more than the bottom 99%. From my tiny spot in the smalltown food pantry, I connected with it existentially.
Volunteers defend the food pantry for the hungry people using it. They feed hundreds of people weekly with as much dignity as can be mustered under the circumstances. They attach no strings.
Shoppers live the fear daily. There are no holidays. What are they afraid of? Hunger. Inadequate or no housing. No work. Healthcare costs. Clothing costs. Transportation costs.
FOCUS IN
Journal about what gives you resolution in your life. What do your purpose and your inner energy need now?
MEDITATION
`This meditation helps you find solutions to life challenges arising once you achieve your goals. Use it to creatively solve your problems and generate new ideas.
Find a private and safe place for this meditation. Sit in a comfortable position. If you want, turn on some healing music, light a candle.
Take in and out breaths. Breathe slowly and deeply The inbreaths encourage invigorating energy. The outbreaths release tired, worn out, toxic air.
As you continue with your meditational breathing, focus on this problem while you inhale and exhale.
After several grounding in and out breaths, you find yourself in a parklike setting. You notice the trees, the plants, the path nearby, and the bench you are sitting on.
You think about your problem. Focus on ways you can resolve it.
With each in-and-out breath, think about the different aspects of your problem and how protecting yourself fits into the overall picture.
Think about how to protect yourself in your situation.
As you do this, you get to know it intimately. How does it smell? Taste? Feel? Sound?
Can you see your challenge as an opportunity? Can you see it as a solution?
See the challenge now as a way to grow – to move forward on your path.
Feel a sense of freedom as you see your problem’s new place on your path.
You know it is time to return to the present.
Focus now on the room where you began your meditation.
It is time to join the world of now.
You know you can return to this park and this resolution any time you want.
Enjoy!
Thank you for reading this article. Please share it with your friends and family. Forward it to your favorite social media network! It is my hope that it will support you in your healing journey.
Have you read my book: “Healer’s Tarot Memoir”?
Books are available at www.thurmangreco.com
Learning as Self-Care With 3 Stories Featuring Maria Talamantez and Sister Athenasius
As we grow up and experience adolescence, or adulthood, many of us leave our religious beliefs behind. Or maybe we never had a childhood religion to leave behind. This can create the experience of having no beliefs at all.
Mother sent me as a young child to local Vacation Bible Schools every summer. That meant I spent a week each with Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Baptists, and the Church of Christers when I was quite young. The Catholics didn’t have Vacation Bible School and I never quite understood why.
I absorbed different things taught by different Christian Sunday School teachers in an unsophisticated format intended for preschool and elementary school children.
Elementary school influenced my religious beliefs, but not how you might think. This was the American Bible Belt in the early 1950’s. In the classroom each morning, right after reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, a student recited a prayer.
For some of my classmates, this experience may not have been so bad. For others, it was excruciating.
Standing in front of the class is hard on a lot of little kids. Standing in front of the class and reciting a prayer can be excruciating, especially if they don’t really know a prayer. It was hardest on the Catholics because they began and ended each session with the sign of the cross.
My memory always brings up Maria Talamantez when I recall the morning prayer. Standing at the head of the class, Maria appeared embarrassed, flustered, frightened. And, while she struggled with the Sign of the Cross and the Our Father, I was over at my desk praying quietly and fervently to God and Jesus and anyone else I could think of just thanking them that my name hadn’t been called that morning.
Meanwhile, Maria prayed as fast as she could and so quietly that she couldn’t be heard by most of us in the room. I don’t think the teacher cared, really. She was simply filling a slot required every morning and looked forward to escaping into a math exercise or reading a story.
For me, this was a time of pure torture. And I was so grateful that I was an Episcopalian because I didn’t use the Sign of the Cross. And the Episcopalian Lord’s Prayer seemed shorter and faster than Maria’s Roman Catholic version.
This is part of my journey into adulthood.
Both adolescents and adults spend time thinking and rethinking things they read, heard, and believed as children.
To dismiss these experiences as part of the move into adulthood is a gross oversimplification.
Abandoning our childhood beliefs can be difficult. It’s challenging to move beyond the childhood religious stories we either grew up with or didn’t experience at all.
As a pre-adolescent, I attended a Catholic School in my middle-school years. (The Sisters didn’t call it middle school.) Sister Athanasius had a whole list of books we weren’t supposed to read. And, since I wasn’t from a Catholic family, Sister suspected every book she saw me carry.
Several years later, as a student at St. Mary’s University, I found all of those books she was looking for in my book bag. They were in the university library, sitting on those shelves for the students. Amazing! Forbidden fruit in middle school became the main course in college.
Later in life, my best Reiki therapy and Reflexology students admitted to me that they were struggling with their meaning-of-life path.
Now, as an octogenarian, I find myself smitten with Mother Mary and the birth of Jesus Christ.
If you find yourself at a moment in time where you are taking a look at your life, now can be a good opportunity to explore your childhood teachings. They may be holding you back from focusing on things you otherwise might be interested in.
This place in time opens an opportunity for self-care.
As an adult, you can slow down, seek the solitude, and listen to the silence. Allow your intuition and life experiences to guide you along your path.
The answers you seek may not come immediately but they are there. As you journey on your path, you may encounter changes to your lifestyle which help you connect with your own truth.
You can develop an understanding of your own experience.
Thanks for reading this article. Please share it with your friends and family and forward it to your preferred social media network.
You can find out more at www.thurmangreco.com.
Want more information on self-care? Check out some older articles on this blog.
You may also enjoy my YOUTUBE shows: “Let’s Live with Thurman Greco”
Thanks again!
Thurman Greco
www.thurmangreco.com
Subscribe today!
Visit the website and see what books might interest you. The first edition of “But for Gabriel” is available as an eBook.
Finally, include a Reiki therapy or reflexology session this week.
10 Easy Wellness Tips for Your Self Care
Self care is all about realizing that we need to take care of ourselves to function optimally in our lives. For many, self care is being selfish. This is simply not so. Eating properly, resting, getting proper exercise, smelling the flowers…these things are not selfish.
Lower back pain? Try not to overdo the bed rest. One or two days seem to be the best amount of time. to be off your feet. Lower back pain is a spiritual situation. Try to get up and about asap. Self care is needed when your lower back hurts.
Are your cholesterol numbers less than ideal? Try to exercise regularly. Can you lose weight? That will help, too. Eating fish helps. And, finally, omega-3 fatty acids really help.
Get your annual flu shot. Every year, I encounter people who come down with the flu. Most of the time, these people neglected to get their shot. And, getting a flu shot does not immunize a person for life. A flu shot must be repeated annually. This can be a bore. However, I’ve gotten a flu shot annually for the last 20 years or so and, somehow, don’t seem to get the flu.
Worried about toenail fungus? Keep your feet clean and dry. Wear well fitting shoes and socks. Snug, poorly ventilated shoes and damp, sweaty socks are a breeding ground for athlete’s foot. Go barefoot if you can. If you do have toenail or foot fungus, and if it is painful, it’s time to see a dermatologist.
To keep your teeth and gums clean and healthy, brush your teeth often. Brush your teeth after you eat with a soft bristled brush. Tooth brushing is essential for good self care.
Do you have hay fever? Cut back on alcoholic beverages during pollen season.
Do you chew gum? Chew sugarless gum to fight tooth decay.
Concerned about carpel tunnel syndrome? Keep your wrists straight when working with your hands. When you work on a keyboard, make sure your fingers are lower than your wrists. Carpel tunnel doesn’t always require surgery. A good body worker or physical therapist can often help you.
Buy your shoes in the afternoon when you’ve been on your feet for a few hours, and always have your feet measured. Know which foot is larger and fit your shoes to that foot. That way, you’ll have a more accurate shoe size and fit.
Pinkeye and other eye infections can be extremely infectious. Use care.
Always first on your list for self care is regular reflexology.
Thank you for reading this article.
Please refer this blog article to your preferred social media network.
Thanks again.
Thurman Greco
Self-Care for you, Reflexologist – 2
Working a full day is challenging. Only another body worker or healer knows what a day full of appointments means to you, the reflexologist – physically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally.
There are things you can do to minimize the fatigue encountered on just such a day.
One thing you can do that will help immensely is release the appointment when your client partner’s session comes to an end.
What you want is to release the person, the issues, the intention, the time spent to the universe.
When you do this, do not forget to “cut the cords” between you and the person to emphasize that the session is over.
You have done what you can for this person in the time allotted during the session. It’s time now for him/her to accept your healing efforts and return to the world.
Once you release the person, both the your client partner’s body and issues are gone from you until the next appointment.
The whole release may not take but a few moments. A suggestion is that you write a script for release and mentally repeat it as each client partner leaves your table.
If you are a ceremony person, you may write a ceremony of release to practice in your space at the end of each shift. This ceremony may include essential oils, smudging, prayer, Reiki therapy.
This releasing gesture seems easy enough but many people don’t do it. This release makes a difference in your health, your energy, your career.
Whatever you do, it’s important to release each and every client partner who comes to your table.
Thank you for reading this blog.
Please refer this article to your favorite social media network.
Jennette Nearhood provided the artwork for this blog.
Thurman Greco
Self-Care for You, Reflexologist
When you look at your calendar for the coming week…where are YOU on the schedule? If you are not on the schedule, you are not doing the basic self-care things things to protect your career. Self-care is the difference between a two-year career as a healer and a twenty-year career as a healer.
You are the healer. You join the professional organizations. You pay your taxes. You make sure your office is “just right”. You take continuing education classes. In short, you do the things necessary to protect your business.
But, what about you: your body, your spirit, your emotional strength, your thoughts? Where are they lined up here with the bills and the available appointments, and the marketing activities?
For many healers, body workers this is the most difficult thing to do on the entire list. As reflexologists, we’re accustomed to give, give, give. And, we enjoy giving. Obviously we enjoy giving or we would never have taken even the first class.
The bottom line here is that you commit to your own private, inner, personal wellness when you receive a weekly session. You also set an example for your client partners.
Things you can do!:
Begin by filling your spiritual tank. Schedule a session for yourself each week. Every week. Do something. Get a massage. Get a Reiki session. Schedule a session with a shamanic healer. Try out that new chiropractor who just moved into your neighborhood.
Do something! The important thing is to get on someone else’s table at least once a week.
Personally, I receive an hour-long Reiki therapy session every week…no matter what. I also receive a reflexology session every week. The work I do the rest of the week is much better for this hour which I invest in myself.
Thank you for reading this blog.
Please refer this article to your preferred social media network. Share this article with a fellow healer.
Thurman Greco
