I have realized SO MANY amazing things with this experience!

Over the past 3 years I have learned to take exquisite care of my body. And yet, over the past year and especially the past 6 months I have not been feeling really fabulous – but I never gave up on my body. I treated it better and better – when in the past I would have given in to a pity party and decided that it wasn’t making a difference anyway. I probably saved myself serious complications from this undetected festering tooth because of it.

I truly have embodied the message of my own programs. I didn’t need to blame anyone. I feel like I am recovering from an accident that wasn’t my fault. I know what went wrong – but I don’t feel angry or the need for revenge. I immediately stepped into forgiveness with awareness that I could choose to be either angry or at peace, but either way I would still be without my tooth. Wow. That is epic for me, I could lose my beautiful tooth (I have good teeth) with peace.

Now that I am recovering from the physical challenge of this, I have woken up 2 mornings in row feeling fantastic. I feel that it is really time, and this tooth being removed… this tooth that has been festering from the inside out… is a metaphor for something so much bigger. NO more poison, no more pain, no more anger, no more blame.

I am at peace and I am so healthy – I looked after myself even when I didn’t feel fantastic or look fantastic because I truly, honestly with all of my heart, mind and soul LOVE ME. I feel complete. ♥

We look for ways and tools to help blunt the pain and frustration of life.  For many people, those frustrations might include screaming kids who are ready for school, traffic jams, bills to pay, and difficult managers, employees or clients.

For nurses, and those in other caregiving professions, they deal with many of the issues in the list above PLUS the risk of relating and feeling the real pain, and at times, frustration of their patients. Every shift brings someone that needs help and support and you see yourself, your mother, or your child in their eyes. You feel their fear, their pain and their vulnerability. You fear that every patient’s pain or vulnerability will mirror the same vulnerability that you work so hard to protect yourrself against.

The fear that your patient’s pain and frustration will permeate your shield, or armor you have created, is a daily struggle for many in the healthcare system. This struggle often drains the joy and beauty from this profession of angels, leading to nurse burnout.

While your armor provides a barricade against fear, pain and frustration, it also disconnects you from the joy, beauty and love that you could also be experiencing. Everything you experience has its own perspective, and I am going to invite you to change your perspective about the uniform of armor that you wear.

Pain and frustration are a part of daily living, and so are joy and beauty. The amount of each in your life will depend greatly on your perspective. Science is showing us that the “why” and the “how” we do anything is much more important than the “what,” “where” and “when” of everything.

Nurse burnout results from a lack of joy, beauty and love; the very feelings that you have been unintentionally shielding yourself from in your attempt to protect yourself. The irony is that it is the joy, beauty and love of working with others and supporting others that attract amazing men and women to the nursing profession. You know that the more you try to protect yourself, the more vulnerable you feel; you feel more vulnerable because you know that there are holes in your armor, threatening to expose your human-ness at any moment.

What if fighting against your vulnerability is the problem in the first place and the cause of your nurse burnout? You are YOU all of the time and you are safe to be you without protection.

Being a nurse is not who you are. Rather, it is an extension of who you are. Understanding that you are always enough and possess endless potential within your beautiful vulnerability is key to overcoming job burnout.

Vulnerability is life and it is empowering when it is embraced. I invite you to put on your uniform as a sign of your human-ness rather than as a shield against it. Your uniform is a sign of your understanding that the majority of human suffering is caused by isolation, and you are there to protect your patients from isolation. Isolation results from the protective armor – as we hide our vulnerability, we also block our connection to the world. Isolation is suffering in itself.

When we embrace our right to receive joy in every moment, and celebrate life in every breath, then the uniform we put on becomes a bright light of hope and love and beauty in this world. I am guessing that you have had glimpses of this lightness and try hard to find that inspiration again and try hard to experience the strength of that lightness again. The strength that you need to truly help and inspire people is inner strength, a strength that comes from the love and joy that IS in your life waiting for you to open your arms and your eyes to receive it.

My mom is a retired emergency nurse. I saw her come home and take off her uniform/armor and just dissolve or shut down. She was disappointed that she was not stronger. She felt like a failure because she could not separate work from life. She felt guilty that she brought her pain home, and she felt fear that the terrible things she witnessed could become our reality. My mom was convinced that her armor had holes in it, and missed out in celebrating the beauty that she brought to the world as a nurse. She was tired of carrying around that armor, and tired of trying to plug the holes.

As her child, of course, I did not see her uniform as armor and I did not see her vulnerability as weakness. I was proud that my mom cared about people, loved people, and was saving people! My mom the nurse was my hero. If only she had realized and seen my vision of her in herself. It is only in retrospect, after suffering from the struggle of carrying around the weight of my own fears, that I now understand the two different perspectives, and the freedom and joy that is accessed when we let go of the armor.

The uniform is a symbol of caring and love. Empowered and beautiful, a nurse has an aura of light, a force field of love that with every bit of love, care and compassion that radiates outward magnifies the inward flow – and there is always enough and nothing is taken away.

Try consciously choosing to live your next shift with this new perspective, and let me know the results when you wear your uniform as a celebration of the depth of beauty and light in your own unique human-ness.

Before you put on your uniform again, try these 3 things to activate the love and beauty that you bring to this world to avoid nurse burnout:

1. Awaken to the beauty and love that is in your life already and breathe it in. Three deep breathes of love and light to fill you up. Whenever you feel the heaviness of fear, take 3 deep belly breaths and open yourself to experience lightness instead.

2. Be open to connect and listen to the people around you, without feeling threatened. You are not a nurse sometimes and a mom, wife, friend, colleague at other times. You are YOU all of the time and you are safe to be you without protection. Being a nurse is not who you are — it is an extension of who you are. Connecting with others and letting go of protection, guilt and resentment is empowering and surprisingly peaceful.

3. Commit to your own nutrition, sleep and fresh air. Don’t do this because you are supposed to be a role model of health or just because it is the right thing to do. Keep your nutrition, sleep and fresh air at an optimum because that beauty and light that you shine into your world is powered by your own health and flows back to you.

Don’t let your nursing career interfere with how you experience life. Prevent nurse burnout by proudly wearing your beautiful uniform of humanity and caring in the healthcare profession.

You’re welcome to use this article on your web site, blog or in your ezine if you include this blurb in its entirety, without modification:

Discover how to get back on the road to health and reduce your healthcare worker stress with free instant access to my First Response Remedy mp3 relaxation and visualization exercise. Visit http://www.FirstResponseRememdy.com to download your copy today!

Children look to adults to understand not only what to do, but also how to do it.  This is often lost on us adults, I know that I have been guilty of this.  Oh man, there is that word – already, and I have just begun writing!  GUILT!

When did every pleasure in my life get robbed by guilt?  Even… no…Especially raising my children.  Let me just tell you from the beginning, guilt and pleasure never co-exist, although, many of us have learned to equate the two in theory. IN fact, as soon as guilt is experienced, you begin the bouncing in the periphery between guilt and resentment and totally bypass any pleasure in any and every experience.

Somewhere along the way, I started to believe that pleasure meant obsession or passion and the only antidote was restriction.  I was either trying to be restrictive in my obsessions or obsessively restricted.  Food was my first pleasure to go, I think, and certainly my biggest challenge in trying to reconnect with true pleasure.  Relationships were next, followed by movement (re: exercise) and as a new parent, every decision and “mistake” felt painful.

For example, I love chocolate – at least I think I do since I tend to struggle with overindulgence. Well, truth be told, I feel physically great when I eat it and after I eat it, which brings on some weird feedback loop from my childhood and I dive right into the guilt and resentment.   This is really the killer of all joy (and a reason to eat more chocolate) and  I believe that many of us have this pleasure-equals-pain loop in our brains.

Were we punished for enjoying ourselves, or did we just perceive that we are supposed to punish ourselves by observing our role models? Do we punish our children when they are enjoying themselves, or do we model for our children that responsible pleasure is not only possible but the only road to fulfillment?

For many of us, hard work and suffering is hardwired to equal success, and there is no room for pleasure to distract us from our goals.  The only other alternative is to be lazy and selfish and the FEAR that bubbles inside of me at the thought of those two bad words is immense.

But wait a minute, success and pleasure are not polar opposites.  It is highly likely that success has been poorly understood by a whole generation.  I say that’s highly likely, considering the mess that we are hoping our children will be able to clean up (and I am very optimistic that they will).

So, now I realize, I have spent at least the past decade – probably two- confused that pleasure meant obsession and I chose the more mature, higher ground of restriction… until I couldn’t resist and then I was obsessed.  I even became obsessed about being restrictive, all in the name of being really good at whatever I do (aka successful).

Here is the real Fine Line.  Both restriction and obsession are painful in their attempts to avoid pain.  Pleasure is not avoiding pain.  Pleasure is connecting quality with awareness.  Pleasure is about permission to enjoy without hurting yourself.  Hurting or not enjoying, is just pain either way that you look at it.  The pain is your warning not our punishment.

If you are feeling numb or empty, despite the many opportunities for pleasure that surround you, I invite you to let pleasure back into your life.  Today I give myself permission to experience pleasure and stop punishing myself with obsession and restriction, masked as guilt and resentment. The boundary between pain and true pleasure is natural and doesn’t require restriction or protection, it is the fine line between love and fear.

Figure this out in yourself, and your children will not have to figure it out for themselves later.  You will know when you are parenting from love, because it is pleasurable. 

**And for the record, Grandparents, this applies to parents at every stage.

My university roommate, Erin, and I stumbled upon the book one lazy afternoon at the bookshop, 25 years ago.  We were not looking for anything profound.  We were drawn to the book because we knew the author, Shel Silverstein’s amazing other book The Giving Tree.  We quickly read through the book with its simple illustrations and simple text and then stood there staring at each other in awe.  This book was brilliant! We each bought a copy of The Missing Piece Meets the Big O (and a complimentary book called The Missing Piece) that day.

I have carried this book with me through multiple moves to different parts of Canada and through multiple relationships of every degree.  I have read it by the campfire, shared it with friends and read it to my three children.  Somehow, nobody seemed to be as thunderstruck by this book as Erin and I were (although most agreed it is clever).

There is not a client that has passed through my coaching program without at least one challenging relationship – partner, parent, sibling, girlfriend, co-worker, boss.  I personally have had several challenging (or perceived as challenging) relationships   I continue to believe that the meaning behind this simple, seemingly written-for- children’s book, is the best relationship advise that I have ever come across.

When we live life from the Periphery of Struggle™ the voice that motivates us is saying: “You are not enough! Find others to complete you, that you can in turn complete them.”   This may sound reasonable and since most of us are living from this ego perspective it is pretty easy to find someone else looking to be completed and simultaneously to complete you.  This works in the beginning, when there is an unspoken agreement to complete each other and life can seem pretty dreamy as you complete each other.  Enter FEAR.  The premise here is that you have a mutual relationship of 50:50 responsibility.  We are two incomplete pieces and together we can feel whole.  What if you find someone else that makes you feel even more whole than me??  What if one of us changes and grows?? Inevitable, by the way, since change and growth are fundamental characteristics of living. Yikes.

There is an interesting part of the book where the missing piece after much searching finds his complementary piece and they roll happily away faster than they ever could have without each other… but with this feeling of being whole, the missing piece begins to grow and then he doesn’t fit anymore Yikes again.

As you step into your Core of Truth™, the voice says: ” You are already enough, you can experience and enjoy life because you are already whole. ” Terrifying to think of what this means for the relationships that you are struggling to complete, right?!  If you are growing and finding yourself whole, you have two choices.  You can either put on the brakes and go back to feeling like a piece (along with certain resentment that you are being held back) or you can continue moving into your wholeness and therefore allowing / freeing your partner to also take the journey to become whole.  Either way you do risk ‘losing’ the relationship as you know it.  Growth and movement in life are constant and it is the stress of connecting with another person as anything less than 100% YOU that makes every relationship a challenge.

The only relationship that is truly based in love and truth is a relationship that you bring yourself to 100%.  This requires growth and brings with it limitless, unrestricted potential for growth and change.  The idea that we can be anything less than 100% responsible for what we bring to a relationship is flawed.  You know the result.  Guilt for whoever is not perceived as holding up their 50% and resentment for the person perceived as holding up more than their 50%.  Guilt and resentment are relationship breakers, they are also where many of us waste a great deal of frustration and energy.

Focusing on what is missing is the illusion and it is a distraction from fully experiencing  your own life.  We perceive this incompleteness, these holes in our being, and try to fill it with relationships, food, money, sex, possessions and drama.  This illusion keeps us feeling vulnerable and stuck and unfulfilled.  Ironically, most of us are scared to admit to being enough for fear that it leads to loneliness.  NOPE, you guessed it!  Being enough is the starting point for amazing relationships, without dependence, resentment and guilt.  Being enough is the starting point for experiencing life with confidence and grace… there is nothing lonely or unfulfilling about that!

When we found this hidden treasure amongst the bookshelves, we knew that the message was profound despite feeling very incomplete at a vulnerable time in life.  Now as a mother of three, as a sister, wife, daughter, mentor, student and coach finding this book again today is a beautiful reminder why continuing to grow and step into my wholeness is not a threat to my relationships – it is a requirement.

Much love,

Lauri-Ann xxx

The Missing Piece Meets the Big O

The Missing Piece

Freedom by Zenos Frudakis / www.zenosfrudakis.com

Independence.  Do we truly understand what independence is?  Do we understand what independence feels like? Here is a hint:  it has nothing to do with dominance.

In more than 10 years of working with parents and professionals from all over the world,this is probably the word that I hear the most.  We want our children to learn independence, we reminisce about when we were independent, before marriage, before children, we hear constantly about financial and political independence.

Of course historically, there were wars fought for independence and it was a beautiful and noble goal.  The problem is that in the past two generations of convenience and greed and fear, the concept of independence has been totally recreated into glorified isolation.

Another common concern that I hear from many parents and professionals is that they have everything they thought they desired in life, but still feel remarkably unfulfilled.  There is so much fear and anxiety and isolation attached to their achievements that true mental and emotional independence remains elusive.

The Science of Serenity System™ (SoS), which I created, is a visual, tangible map guiding people out of the Periphery of Struggle™ and back into their own unique Core of Serenity™. I am convinced that it is truly Serenity and living our own unique truth which brings us the freedom of independence that eludes so many.  I believe, and have witnessed in my own journey, that it is the simultaneous desire for independence as a goal and the misunderstanding of what independence really feels like that is causing the major disconnection in modern Western society.   The disconnect has many symptoms (health crisis, economic crisis, environmental crisis, political crisis) which are all really the result of a major spiritual crisis.  Spiritual, not in terms of religion and dogma which are based on more fear, but spiritual as in accessing our true greatness and potential as living divine beings.

Humans are addicted to fear. 

When we set a goal of ‘independence’ are we really saying that we are afraid of ‘dependence’?

If we don’t understand something (independence for instance) we look at:  What it must not be = dependence; We then focus our energy on struggling against ‘dependence’.  The motivation here is to ‘not need anybody’… but this is incongruent with the result we are seeking – the unlimited confidence and freedom of true independence.

On the axis of TRUST on the SoS System™, we first open ourselves to our own vulnerability (as young children do so well) and trust LIFE through connection before we build the interdependent trust of SELF and confidence that we seek.  In seeking confidence first, without connection, or rejecting connection altogether (fear of dependence) independence is certainly not the result.  When we disconnect confidence from connection we are again in the Periphery of Struggle™ but on the opposite pole of Dependence, all the way over to Arrogance and the resulting isolation.  Are arrogance and isolation what our forefathers were fighting for? Arrogance and isolation are the reason that so many of us find ourselves in the middle of emptiness despite all of our effort to do the ‘right’ thing and pursue ‘success’.

So what is independence if it is not the opposite of dependence? 

Independence is not something that we do relative to everyone else, it is living our life in your own truth and accessing the love and beauty and strength that connects all life.   I call this living from the stability of your Core of Serenity™, or Core of Truth™.  When you access your own greatness, then Connection and Confidence are interdependent and fear is no longer your motivation.  You cannot be afraid of dependence if you are connected with confidence.  You cannot be afraid of isolation when you are confident with connection.

Independence, then, is the ability to live without fear.  Independence is freedom from the voice in your head telling you that you ‘are NOT enough’.  Simultaneously trust LIFE and SELF rather than separating life into two extremes of ‘me vs. them’.  Serenity allows you to respond and experience life with your arms and eyes wide open – rather than reacting from within the constant imaginary struggle created by your fears – this is true independence.

If we truly desire to gift our children and ourselves this elusive ‘independence’, then I invite you to step out of the ‘fear of dependence vs. fear of isolation’ mentality.  I invite you to consider the possibility that investing into, and being motivated by, the unconditional love will anchor you to both connection and confidence at your very core.  There has been considerable energy wasted in seeing the world only in its extremes (right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, selfish vs. selfless, dependence vs. isolation, bully vs. victim, etc.). If we reconcile these extremes,  and stop magnifying imaginary differences, we will achieve universal connection that allows us to finally live in freedom.

Not being held hostage by our ego and our fear in isolation but in unity; while truly expressing our uniqueness and beauty to energize the world and finally experience INDEPENDENCE.

Change can mean a lot of things, but for me change highlights my fear of failure, fear of losing control and fear that beginning something new means ending something else.  So how do I move past fear and step into change, so that I can enjoy every new beginning that life brings to me?  Honestly, there are many examples in my life where I just closed my eyes and jumped and other times that I just stopped frozen and didn’t step into an opportunity (ouch!).

1) I can jump compulsively into every opportunity that arises, not wanting to miss anything but missing everything with my eyes tightly closed.

or

2) I can remain frozen (re. stagnant) with fear and miss out on living to my potential.

These are both reactions and neither allow me to really feel into any experience with awareness and confidence.  The real choice is never between two extremes, the choice is always about living anchored and awake in the Core of Truth™ or living in the instability of fear, Periphery of Struggle™.  When I step into change with different energy and intention, I have a totally different outcome.

There was a moment when I realized that the diagrams and ideas that I had been fiddling with, to understand what my own philosophy of living and coaching are, were developing into an intricate and clear explanation of why so many of us feel stuck in life despite our best efforts and desires for wellness and happiness.  When Science of Serenity was revealing itself to me, I would have been completely distracted by the two obvious choices – to blindly jump in and share it with the world as an obligation to help people while exposing myself as vulnerable OR to turn my back on it and walk away.  But both of these reactions were around fear; fear of being irresponsible, fear of failure, fear of arrogance, fear of criticism, fear, fear and more fear.

What I am doing instead is releasing this information to the world, from a totally different space which is neither of these two choices!  I slowed down and sat with this system, worked through this system, gave myself time to enjoy the truth in this system.  I listened to my own truth and slowing down allowed me to access a clarity and confidence in the value of the Science of Serenity System™.  The opportunity became about my own experience in developing the system and releasing it to the world with trust that people that are drawn to the program are meant to receive it, nothing more and nothing less.

When we face an issue with the very large fear of doing the wrong thing, we miss the opportunity to experience the new beginning in awareness and clarity.  Fear creates expectations for results and stepping into something new with expectations is just as paralyzing as not stepping into it.  When we trust life there is no failure and that opens up infinite opportunities to truly experience life.

With a deep sigh of appreciation and fulfillment… I am ready to step into this new beginning with open eyes and open arms.  Welcome to Science of Serenity!

Much love,

Lauri-Ann

xxx