The Big Peace

Happy new year

It's the last day of the year and the last day of The Big Peace December.

Just waiting the arrival of my guests for a little party I'm holding at my house - where i hope to be sending Chinese Wishes up into the sky at 12pm. Think of me. I will be sending up a special wish for all of us for 2009 - one of peace, hope, love and just some massive fun for us all in 2009.

What is your greatest wish for 2009?

Here's for a peaceful, beautiful, lovely year for us all. 

Much love to you all.

I'm raising a glass to you all, with Oscar beside me who gives his best wuff too. 

Happy New Year!

Speak to you in 2009. 

Shackles off living

Big Peace December Day 30

Last night I wrote about napping more in 2009. But this morning I wondered what stops me napping more. And usually it's the drive to do more/more/more - answer emails, write more articles, drive myself, more driving myself. When I'm feeling highly creative and live and work from my Big Peace place, I feel exhilerated versus exhausted.

One tool I've come across that can really help me identify if I'm setting myself up for exhaustion or exhileration is from Martha Beck's (Oprah's favourite and mine too) book Steering by Starlight. She talks about making 'shackles on' or shackles off' decisions. Shackles off decisions taste of freedom, fun, love. Shackles on decisions make you feel trapped, gloomy, and wanting to chew off your own arm to escape.

Here's the interview I did with Martha earlier this year.

http://www.bigleaplife.com/audios/marthabeck0902_26un08.mp3

Today's exercise is to identify what daily decisions and actions make you feel 'shackles on' and what makes you feel 'shackles off.'

 

 

 

 

Napping time

Big Peace December Day 29

Today I have napped a lot. Two 90 minute sessions. "Just close my eyes for a few seconds," I said and then I was off. Not once but twice. It's been a full on year. It's good to rest. I'll defintely be napping more in 2009. Napping is definitely on my Big Peace Practice list. In fact, it's my only New Year's Resolution - to make napping my greatest skill for 2009.

Off to bed early now.

I'm having a day off, so you can too. No exercises today other than to simply close your eyes.

Night, night, sleep tight.

x

Somewhere over the rainbow

Big Peace December Day 28

Sorry for the late post today. I'm in Cornwall with my best mate. And we've been walking with the kids on the beach and getting cut off by the tide (always need that bit of adrenaline in my life, obviously!)

I've just read back on my last two posts and it brings up that push/pull dynamic that I feel that as I leap deeper into my Big Peace.

The push is the leap (the being brave piece, the leap into the unknown, the living from a different paradigm - for me this means living listening to my inner coach versus tuning into my inner pessimist radio) and then the pull is the 'growing slowly' piece. Which is the adjusting, the allowing for this new way of living to become just the way you live your life.

And accepting that the push and the pull are part of the journey. Leaping and 'growing slowly' are equally valid. I suppose it's that old yin and yang thing.

The 'growing slowly' piece for me is about making The Big Peace a daily practice. It' s the habit of meditating or dog walking or doing what gets us back to that place more quickly.

Over the last 2 years, I've put so much of my focus on 'finding' my Big Peace only to find that just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, all I've had to do is click my heels together and I'm 'home'. But the 'somewhere over the rainbow' living is very seductive and I still find myself in thrall of the Wizard of Oz or the Wicked Witch of the West (or so my ex says!) and want to believe there is someone or something external to me that will make me happy.

A somewhat beginner on the journey, I need to make The Big Peace a daily practice (or minute by minute sometimes) just so I can remember and remind myself that I've got my red shoes on and I'm a click away.

Oh but I do like a bit of variety!!! Hence all the tools I try and all the gurus I interview. I'm discovering there are lots of ways to leap back into your centre, your Big Peace, when you fall under the spell of the wicked witch ("I'll get you my pretty and your little dog too!!!") and I am so scared, I can scarcely breathe. Some have worked better than others for me. But we are all different.

So homework today....what practices have you experimented with over the past 30 days (life time) that really work for you? When the wicked witch in your head starts screaming at you, what gets Glinda by your side and those fabulous red shoes on your feet the quickest? 

 

What works for you and how can you practise this daily?

Leap into the Big Peace

I'm off to Cornwall today so spent time with my best girlfriend. She is brave, interesting and incredibly funny. And is constantly leaping in her life. She always encourages me NEVER to compromise and just leap.

She gave me this quote framed for my Christmas presssie:

"Sometimes you just have to take a leap and build your wings on the way down." Kobi Yamada.

Because she says that is what I have done all year. "And it has really worked. I have never seen you happier!"

If you were to leap into The Big Peace today - how would you do it?

Growing slowly

How was Christmas day? I had the ex and the inlaws round for Christmas dinner and it was all very amicable - if a bit sad for me, at times. But I definitely felt a sense of letting go, of time moving on, of healing happening. I have spent many a Christmas day being the people pleasing martyr but this Christmas day felt very different. I was a grown up, living life as it was versus how I wanted it to be.

Am now planning a little New Year's Eve dinner  - with a Chinese theme. I've just bought some Chinese wishes - chinese lanterns that you let go into the sky - which hopefully we'll let go at midnight. I've been looking for some Chinese proverbs to give to everyone. And I loved this one:

"Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid of standing still." 

The Big Peace practice is NOT about standing still but about growing slowly.

So just a quick question today. If you were to grow slowly today versus stand still - what would you do differently today?

Happy Christmas!

I can't work out who is more excited - charlie, me or oscar the dog.

It's Christmassssssssssssssssss! (sorry, three glasses down!)

I just would like to wish all you big peacers much love and happiness on Christmas day. I know it's been funny old year for me but you know, I'm beginning to realise that funny - be it ha ha or peculiar - can be good fun.

Just come back from the pub with my friends from the village who are funny ha, ha and I have laughed a lot.

I do love my friends and the happiness scientists are right - hanging out with our mates does make us happy. And be it the mums from the village who feed me wine and good conversation or enlightened Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now - life can offer you exactly what you need at exactly the right moment.

For Christmas day, I thought I'd share the wisdom of Eckhart Tolle:

• Consider the thought:  “nothing exists outside this present moment’ and the idea that the past and the future are illusions. After all, they only exist to the degree we focus our attention on them right now.  We create the past and the future by imagining them in the present. But we don’t even exist outside the Now.”
• Consider the thought: “To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfilment.”
• Consider the thought: “The psychological condition of fear is often divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now.”

Give yourself the present of the present today. Have a liberated, enjoyable and very merry Christmas.

Much love,

Suzy x

What are you most proud of in 2008?

Big Peace December Day 24

Oooo, it's nearly Christmas, never ever fail to get excited!
As I mentioned, I spent last night with my girlfriends, drinking far too much champagne, eating mountains of food and planning 2009. We went round the room and answered these questions and then created a vision board (lots of magazines/pictures/drawings) to create a 'vision' for what we want 2009 to feel like.

I suggest you grab yourself a glass of wine/tea/get your friends round (or do it on your own) and today answer the following:

1.    What are you MOST proud of this year?

2.    What is the most powerful thing you have learnt in 2008?

3.    Complete this sentence: I will remember 2008 as the year of……..

4.    What was your big leap in 2008?

5.    Complete this sentence: For me, 2009 will be the year of…….?

6.    Set an intention: What are your big leaps for 2009?

7.    By January 1st 2010, what do you want to have created/achieved and how do you want to feel?

8.    What three baby steps do you need to take to be who want to be 2009?

9.    If you had to create a daily Big Peace practice to keep you focussed and inspired, what would it look like?

10.   If you were brave, what would you most like to do in 2009?

Have a wonderful, wonderful Xmas eve, everyone.

Much love!

Suzy xxx

Just say f**k it.

Big Peace December Day 23

Normally, every year, just after the bonfire night fireworks have fizzled out, I start to plan Christmas. I invite the relatives, rip out ideas from magazines for unusual, thoughtful gifts, order in some logs to roast the chestnuts on and get really excited about the perfect, fantasy Christmas I’m going to have.

Fast forward to Boxing Day, and there I am, back in reality, tense, snarling, martyred, always bitterly disappointed. It’s the same every Christmas, but by the time the fireworks go up ten months later, I’ve forgotten the pain, only to repeat the same old pattern all over again.

Last year, my brother announced on Christmas morning that he’d ‘forgotten to do his Christmas shopping’ and my husband got man-flu and refused to get off the sofa for days. He somehow managed to stagger to the pub on Christmas Day with my brother and didn’t get back ‘til the turkey was as dry and pinched as my face. That was when something finally snapped. ‘F**k this and F**k Christmas,’ I was heard to slur over the turkey brandishing a rather big carving knife.

What I didn’t know at the time, was that I was having a spiritual epiphany. The wonderful John C Parkin (who has agreed to come and talk at the Big Peace Day....happening late April...watch this space) says that ”F*** it” is the perfect Western expression of the Eastern spiritual philosophy of letting go, giving up and finding real freedom by realising that things don't matter so much (if at all).

John has developed a philosophy that’s about getting what you really want by rejecting what you ‘should’ do and doing what you want to. ‘And Christmas, with those months of self-imposed angst and self sacrifice, is a perfect time to start,’ he says.

I will talk more about John and his book F**t It, the Ultimate Spiritual Way in the coming months.

But for now, here are John's brilliant rules for the perfect F**t It Xmas (try all, one or none for today's exercise)

How to have the Christmas you never knew you wanted

1. Stop being a martyr. ‘Be selfish. Being selfless is a lose-win situation,’ says Parkin. ‘You end up getting pissed off and that’s no good in the end for the person who seems to be winning either.’
2. Stop clinging to how you want things to be. Make a list of your ideas, beliefs and expectations of Christmas. Ask yourself – would Christmas be so terrible if none of this happened?
3. Accept Christmas for how it is. Stop moaning and accept Christmas in all its wonderful, stressful, lonely, awful, delightful ways. The truth is there’s not a lot you can do about most of it.
4. Know that you can’t keep everyone happy. No matter how much you bend over backwards for people, you’ll always disappoint people and upset people sometimes.
5. Do something you didn’t think you could.Tell your brother what you really think of him, eat all the Christmas cake, go on strike, just do what you really want versus what you think you should.

Transformation

Big Peace December Day 22

Recently, on my journey to do more of what I really want to do
(following my own flow) I've started to be more creative and am
attempting to write a little bit of fiction.

I was inspired by a screenwriting course I attended in Cornwall led
by Hollywood Guru Blake Snyder, author of Save the Cat!: The Only
Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need: 

I just wanted to share this post on Blake's blog: It's about
transformation:

 "All stories are about transformation," writes Blake.

 All stories are the caterpillar turning into a butterfly in some
 sense. All stories require a death and rebirth to make that painful
 and glorious process happen.

 And it occurs in movies... and in life.

 We transform every day, re-awaken to new concepts about the world
 around us, overcome conflict, and triumph over death... only to start
 again each morning.

 It's why stories that follow this pattern resonate.
 Because each day is a transformation machine and so are our lives."

Here's an exercise to get your creative juices flowing today;

Write the story you want to create today. What new concepts do you want to re-awaken?

What conflict will you overcome (and how?)

How will you triumph over 'death' - (I'd prefer it if you did that
metaphorically....! death of an idea???? death of a belief system?)

How will you choose to transform your life today?