Self Healing With a Little Self Love

While away on holiday recently I had an interesting healing experience.

I was bitten the first night by a mosquito. I react badly to bites and the next morning my right hand was starting to swell up as was my face, chin and forehead. The last time this had happened on both ankles it was 10 days before I could walk again. By the second morning the pain of the swelling over my knuckles was excruciating and hadn’t responded to anti-histamines at all and I went down to breakfast looking like Quasimodo and was feeling quite miserable and angry with myself.

My partner was holed up in our room with food poisoning which didn’t help the mood of things either. I stood in front of the large shiny coffee pot unable to grasp it with my right hand and proceeded to throw scalding coffee down my front trying to pour with my left. More misery. So I grabbed some ice from the champagne bucket, wrapped it in a serviette and sat down with the makeshift icepack and alternated holding it on my hand, face and my newly burnt stomach.

I was angry, firstly at not having thought of mosquitoes in Southern Spain in January then just general anger at being so pathetic, which turned into loathing for my hand that had reacted so extremely and prevented me from getting my caffeine fix (and why hadn’t a staff member noticed and offered to help, useless hotel…)

Oh dear oh dear I thought, stop this right now, it is up to you how you are feeling, you have the power to change this immediately.

So I laughed a bit at the preposterous state I had got myself into, rose to the challenge and started to do something about it.

So I started doing a little Beauty T on it, a technique a colleague had created to overcome poor body image. I looked at my hand and forgave it for being like that and said sorry for feeling so hostile towards it. I stroked it gently and said, I love you and I’m so sorry I let this happen. I then forgave myself for not anticipating mozzies and bringing along repellant. I forgave myself for being angry with my body for always reacting like this to bites.

I thanked my hand for all the good things it does for me and apologized for how much I took it for granted. It really did look ugly, the skin stretched tight, all the knuckles with extra swollen rolls over them and the skin close to my wrist all wrinkled with the distortion yet I managed to focus on its beauty and the extraordinary underlying engineering that lets it do what it normally does.

The upshot is within 2 hours all the swelling on my hand was gone. My face still looked gross but I hadn’t focused on it because there was a lot less pain involved. I’d done nothing differently for any of the bite sites except give my hand some focused love. They had all had equal ice time and I had barely been able to touch my hand because of the pain so the couple of gentle strokes couldn’t possibly have made a difference in dispersing the fluid. And yes, the other bite sites took a full 10 days to return to their normal state.

So next time something hurts, for whatever reason, whether through an accident or general illness, give that part some love, really let it know you don’t blame your knee, leg, shoulder or whatever it is, and forgive yourself for the suffering you’ve caused it.

It can’t make things any worse, and you never know you may just have as interesting an experience as I did.

Let me know.


More information about Beauty T and how it has become an awesome alternative to plastic surgery :)

Getting Things Done

Ok so it’s now 2009 and thoughts turn to getting organized, once again.

I’ve just been reading a thread on Friendfeed about this and all the different ways other people organize their to do lists.

Text file
Whiteboard
http://rememberthemilk.com
Emailing self
Notepad (real paper not the app!)

And I’m nodding my head down the whole list because I USE THEM ALL, in addition to iGTD, and that surely is where I am going wrong!!! No wonder my mind is so fragmented most of the time, wondering not only what I need to do but where it might be written. Duh.

David Allen in Getting Things Done says it’s important to write everything down, get it off your mind so you then have space there to actually DO stuff. I got that bit right at least though now I understand why I still wasn’t actually getting much done. It was all out there just not in an organized form so I could act on it.

Years back when I was running a huge family business, pre-computer/internet days, with nearly 30 employees and hundreds of accounts and suppliers to keep an eye on I used just one A4 sheet of paper every day with all my to dos on, split into four.

Top left - business ‘to dos’
Top right - business ‘to buys’
Bottom left - home ‘to dos’
Bottom right - home ‘to buys’

And that was it.

I would do or delegate each task and next morning simply transfer undone jobs/buys to today’s list.

Hmm, and now I’m wondering with the huge variety of projects and tasks I currently have on if this will work as well but there’s only one way to find out, so here goes and will report back after a week, or maybe two.

How do you organize your life, what works best for you?