Create a Balance

My intention for the month of June is to join some sort of local face-to-face community, but I still can’t resist the opportunity to take part of a salubrious online learning community. Have you ever heard of iVillage’s iLearn courses? They incorporate lessons, assignments, quizzes and interactive course message boards providing an engaging learning experience. Here are two of their latest free online life balance classes:

FREE - Achieving Work-Life Balance
Session: June 9 - July 11, 2008
Instructor: Abbi Perets
“Do you feel like you have too much to do and are somehow missing out on the important things in life? This course gives you a practical, actionable guide to help you get a grip on your time so you can get the most out of every aspect of your life and create a healthy work-life balance.”

FREE - Taking Time for Yourself
Session: June 9 - July 11, 2008
Instructor: Sarah Sawyer
“Do you find yourself scheduling everything except time for yourself? Do you consistently overbook to the point of feeling constantly on the verge of overwhelm? Whether you are single, partnered, or a mother of a big brood, finding time to fill your own cup can be tricky. This course will teach you how to intentionally take care of you so you can more joyfully and capably tend to all the rest.”

Some of our mentors appear when we least expect them.

Llamagraphics just launched an iTunes channel with free audio life balance podcasts. Although these free podcasts are part of their marketing strategy for their life balance software, the podcasts include good tips if you are a busy person who wants to focus your attention on the tasks, projects, and goals that are most important to you.

Although the podcasts include content related to using their software, they also discuss topics of personal productivity, time management and managing the demands of work, family and personal life.

If you are an “audio” person and can deal with the Life Balance software hype, click here to listen to some of the podcasts > Life Balance Podcasts

Note: This is not an endorsement for Llamagraphics software.

Since returning from the Kripalu Yoga and Health Center, I have been trying to incorporate meditation into my hectic life style. I have decided to take baby steps to meditate 3 minutes a day. It’s actually amazing what 3 minutes of meditation can do for someone who plays so many roles in one day (mommy, full-time employee, wife, chef, maid, butler, chauffeur, and more).

So I encourage you to take a deep breath and experience this 3 minute meditation.

Many famous Make Money Online blogs, such as JohnChow.com and BloggerExperiment.com, post monthly income reports on their blogs. Inspired by this idea, I have decided to post monthly life balance reports onto CreateaBalance.com. I have been trying to determine the best way to quantify my life balance success and decided, for now, that it will be more instinctual and less mathematical.

Here are May’s Results:

TOTAL SCORE: 7.8
(0 = completely lost focus, 10 = intentionally practiced life balance)

EMBRACING MY SELF - 10!

Travel: I took my annual vacation without any friends or family. I traveled to Lenox, MA, stayed at the Kripalu Yoga and Health Center, and visited a great friend in upstate New York. I also looked into travel dates for my annual February family vacation.

Blogging: I give myself a 10 in this category for two reasons. First, I now have 9 people subscribed to my RSS feed. That may not seem like a lot, but at the end of April I only had 2. So subscribers to CreateaBalance.com skyrocketed 450% in May. I think that deserves a 10! Second, I started sharing my blog with friends and family. Click here to subscribe to my RSS feed.

NURTURING RELATIONSHIPS - 10!

Children: I continue to spend quality time with my boys. The challenge is to balance my time between them and important adults in my life. Some highlights for May with my boys were playing tennis, swimming, flying kites, visiting the botanic gardens, reading, laughing, going to the zoo, biking, and celebrating birthdays.

Husband: I give myself a 10 in this subcategory because for the first time ever my husband and I found a babysitter for our two sons and went on a date. Finding the right babysitter has not been an easy task.

Creative Community: This has been something I have been lacking my life. Thanks for SARK’s Juicy Pens Thirsty Paper workshop at Kripalu, I was blessed to spend 4 days with SARK and an incredible creative community. I am staying in touch with my new creative community and intend to find a local creative community to join during the month of June. Click here for information on SARK workshops!

Friendships: I went to a concert with one of my oldest and dearest friends, I went to the zoo with friends, and I traveled across country to visit friends.

MONITORING WELL BEING - 7

Exercise: My intention is to exercise 6-7 days a week. In May, I have drastically increased my movement and have been walking around 10,000 steps a day since May 23. I also reactivated my gym membership and have been walking on the treadmill 2-3 days a week (I still hate the treadmill, but it gets the job done).

Yoga: I won a lot of brownie points since I spent my May vacation at a Yoga center. Let’s see how well I do in June.

Weight: I went to 3 Weight Watchers meetings and lost 0.6 pounds this month. My goal is to lose 4 pounds in June.

MANAGING MONEY - 7

In May I began learning more about investing charts to find the right mutual funds for my retirement portfolio. Things like SMA (3-line), RSI, Optimal Controls, and Moving Averages are a little less scary and foreign to me. I have been using Fidelity’s tools to learn and MarketWatch’s Virtual Stock Exchange to practice.

STAYING ORGANIZED - 5

I rearranged my living space to create more zones for my children. This has made a huge improvement in our quality of life and has also created a toy-free zone in my family room.

I gave myself a 5 in this category because with all of the excitement and momentum in my other categories…I neglected my laundry routine, had messy kitchen and bedrooms, and gave into T.V. this month instead of cleaning up toys and putting away dishes. I did give myself 5 solid points, however, for outsourcing housecleaning and grocery shopping throughout the month of May.

Since this is the first time I have shared a monthly life balance report, I’d love to hear your feedback on this post. Thanks!

SARK asks women everywhere how we dare to be creatively fulfilled and successful? Her answer is “Because you have wonders inside that must be let loose, that is how you dare.”

This website is how I dare to live my creative dream each and every day. I accept that my dream and this blog will have days full of inspiration, insight, and laughter and I also accept that this blog will have days full of mistakes, detours, and the inability to impact anyone. I accept the entire package knowing I am living my dream and practicing the art of life balance.

A very wise woman introduced the following poem to me. I suggest printing it and reading it out loud as if you had written each and every word yourself.

Please comment on your emotional response to this exercise and poem.

So Much Happiness
by Naomi Shihab Nye

“It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…..

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.”

By now you may have picked up on the fact that I like almost any technology that saves me time. Amazon has another shameless (and lazy) pleasure called Amazon Unbox that I use all of the time to download movies directly to my computer and TV.

Key Benefits to Helping Me Create a Balance

• I don’t have to worry about losing the CD somewhere in my house.
• I don’t have to plan when I want to rent a movie.
• I don’t have to worry about the movie being sold out by the time I get to the store.
• I can be spontaneous (I don’t have to wait two days to receive a movie in the mail).
• I don’t have to worry about late fees.

I know other companies like Blockbusters and Netflix offer similar services, but I prefer Amazon Unbox because the movies I rent are digitally delivered directly to my TiVo inbox.

Here is my next drop-in post. It is from the blog KennyTheMonk.   This post reminds me that there are endless definitions and perceptions of life balance, that life is about making choices, that we can’t do everything during the short time we have on Earth, and that the ability to stop and be still on a regular basis is a treasured key to a conscious life. One of my favorite places to be still is in my husband’s authenic Brazilian hammock. Here is a clip of Kenny’s wise words. You’ll notice he states “Stop trying to achieve balance” which at first may seem like a contradiction to the essence of this blog. But I think you will quickly discover we are both encouraging the same truth but just from two different directions.

“We’re not going to be around forever, and we’re not able to have it all.  Acknowledging this will generate more than ample disappointment and regret. And we’ll pay a price for it: Guilt. But don’t be dismayed. Guilt doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve done something wrong. It’s more an indication that we have said “no” to some larger authority: parent, teacher, boss. Guilt’s an indication that we’ve chosen to live our own lives and not someone else’s. Stop trying to achieve balance and start learning to enjoy chaos. Discovering and relishing one’s imperfect life sooner rather than later is what’s available. Oliver Wendell Holmes said that most of us go to our graves with our music still inside. So, forget about work-life balance and let go of the need to please everybody. Rather, get out there and make some choices and let your music resonate.

The guilt won’t kill you and you’ll do just fine if some folks don’t like you. And you certainly don’t need to have it all. For as Steven Wright reminds us: even if you did, where would you put it…..” Read More

I am all about making life easier and gaining any extra free time I can find. Did you know that Amazon.com now offers more than 22,000 grocery items and they will ship these grocery items to you for free? FREE DELIVERY!

Amazon Groceries can provide you with great prices, favorite brands, and a personalized shopping list to make it easier to locate and keep track of items you purchase over time. They even have an extensive selection of NATURAL AND ORGANIC food.

I have been grocery shopping online for years and have to tell you the feeling of someone delivering my groceries directly to my kitchen door makes me feel like a Hollywood SUPER STAR (okay, it makes me feel like Jennifer Aniston). Plus, it frees up my time so I can focus on what matters most. I hate going to supersized grocery stores, so another plus is I am able to simply visit my local fruit market once a week, to pick up meat, fruits, and veges. I love that!

Happy Shopping!

During a time of economic instability, managing money can seem daunting. To add to the complex world of wanting to save for the future many people are struggling with their own financial values. In the video below, Suze Orman discusses the power of giving and how to determine just how much to give.

As I prepared for my son’s two year old birthday last week, I knew I wanted to bring cupcakes to his daycare Friday afternoon. As the days slipped by I realized I would have to settle for store bought cupcakes. By Friday morning, I was rathered dissappointed in myself that I still didn’t have cupcakes for the party. What kind of mom was I? 

Long story short, I stopped at serveral stores before going to daycare and the closest things I could find were Hostess donnettes (ugh, they weren’t even officially titled donuts). With 10 minutes until the party, I swallowed my pride and bought 3 bags of donnettes (yes, they were right next to the twinkies). This is a far cry from the organic Whole Foods cupcakes had imagined I would be bringing to the my son’s party.

In those moments at the drug store (did I mention I bought them at a drug store) I felt so much guilt of not being the perfect mommy. How could I be so irresponsible to not be able to pull off cupcakes for my own child’s birthday? I was so embarrassed to bring in 3 bags of proccessed donuts, that I also bought a yellow gift bag so I could at least walk into daycare thinking I looked put together. Bree Van de Kamp would have been appauled.

Everything changed, however, the moment I walked into daycare. My son had a huge smile on his face and thought I was mom-of-the-year just for being there. When he saw the donettes, he started chanting “Yeah! Cupcakes!”. He didn’t even notice they were drug store bought donettes.

I realized it wasn’t about the cupcakes, or the donettes, or how I packaged the celebration….it was about the celebration itself. Thank goodness I was able to release my unrealistic expectations and leave my silly pride at the door. When I was at the party, I was in the moment full of love and joy.

Creating a balance sometimes means letting go of useless expectations and focusing on what matters most.

Below is a video of the evolution of the birthday donette. Even without cupcakes, the party was fabulous!