“Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it.” ~Plato

The best part of my day is when I exercise, and the truest thing you can say about the mystery we call a body is that it is designed to work at its optimal level in motion. Even when I am painfully facing my physical limits in my early morning Pilates workout, I thank my lucky stars to be feeling the pain of strengthening my muscles as opposed to feeling my strength wane. It took me a series of long unfortunate back injuries to finally face up to the fact that the only choice I had was to learn how to get strong.

At close to fifty, I am as physically strong as I have ever been. I tell near strangers to feel the abs and oblique muscles that I have so proudly built over the last few years. I never have back pain anymore. I am strong enough at my core to hold my body up pain- free all day. These are triumphs that little else compares to in my life.

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“Every gain made by individuals or society is almost instantly taken for granted.” -Aldous Huxley

Cleaning out my office to make room for the new CEO was a great visual journey of progress. In one way or another, every action and decision we made in the past has brought us to this moment in time. Handling and letting go of the myriad old versions of the business plan and my old notes that held long equations looking for the cost of goods brought back the active learning process that consumed me for weeks at a time at regular annual intervals. The business plan success we enjoyed at the Willamette Angel Conference in May did its job and our plan is now being re-invented by qualified people who speak the business planning language as a native tongue. As I sifted through the pages and pages of this work, I felt like I was holding real building blocks to a success story that I imagined.

The feeling blossomed when I come across the old drafts of manuscripts and book proposals that were the beginning of my new book, Love that Works, which is in its first print edition this month. I don’t know how far the book will go in spreading the message that is at the core of all my work, but I am excited to have this seed to scatter. It is the best of my best thinking about how to love people, keep promises, learn to communicate and show up for the people who make life meaningful.

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“Tension is who you think you should be.  Relaxation is who you are.”  ~Chinese Proverb

I have been a tension chaser for most of my life, measuring my days by how much I got done. My four children and their myriad activities were the stuff of legendary multitasking and time management planning. I never counted my stress when I consented to another activity; I never even considered what it would take me to keep the promise, so immune from my own stress response.  I was in motion and the continuous business kept me in distant check with all the self-esteem issues I so actively skirted around.

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“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

A friend of mine gave me this quote framed more than twenty years ago when I was moving away to a new life. It has been hanging in my home ever since and has come to be one of the truths that I come back to over and over about learning to relate. As soon as we think we have a relationship figured out, we fall into the easy pattern of assuming we know someone. Then something happens that surprises us that wakes us up again to the truth that when it comes to the work of relationships, life is a spiral.

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“Prayer is not a way of making use of God; prayer is a way of offering ourselves to God in order that He should be able to make use of us. It may be that one of our great faults in prayer is that we talk too much and listen too little. When prayer is at its highest we wait in silence for God’s voice to us….” -William Barclay

I am trying to not just pray like this, but live like it, too. I want to come to my life even when I don’t like how it is going and offer what I have, feel full enough of myself to be of service, to let life lead me. I rarely think of my life or work as an offering, which really even if you aren’t religious is the most we can hope for ourselves. Is money, recognition and status bigger than the willingness to show up and offer yourself up to the people and work you care about.

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“More important than the quest for certainty is the quest for clarity” -Francois Gautier

Clarity is another act of grace. It is not at our beck and call, but rather an internal re-organizing and fresh perspective that comes through us when we are open and listening. Clarity is attracted to humility. It can fill us with an authentic and deep connection to our own truth when we give up the idea that we know. Clarity eases the anxious heart with it’s simplicity and focus. It has nothing to do with the situations out there, clarity is a gift that unfolds from the inside and marks our path distinctly and without doubt.

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“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.” -Buddha

I meditate almost every day now. I used to be able to judge the days by when I meditated, now I can judge them by when I don’t. My interpretation of life is clearer when I meditate. It is the only discipline I have ever practiced that actually has the power to change my mind. Don’t get me wrong here, changing my mind is a continuous journey, not a destination. Even after 200 days, the practice is the thing. We move closer to our true selves when we can be quiet enough to listen for what we deeply know.

The most challenging step towards that inner knowing is suspending all the noise and distraction that populates our working mind. The Buddha once said, “Meditation brings wisdom; lack of mediation leaves ignorance. Know well what leads you forward and what hold you back, and choose the path that leads to wisdom.” He believed that practicing mindfulness, which is the ability to be conscious and aware of what is going on in our world. By learning how to be more present to the moment we are in, we simultaneously detach from our perceptions of pain, suffering and anxiety.

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“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” -Martin Luther King Jr.

Over the years, and certainly throughout the positivity quest, there seems fewer and fewer things that are worth fighting about, both in my family, at work and in life. Even as the kids have moved into their teen years, one lesson from mothering that has held fast is the idea of choosing my battles. There are few things that deserve the consistency and vigilance that true discipline requires of both parent and child. Hygiene was never at question, but tidiness was open to interpretation. Disagreements were allowed but disrespect was not. Individuation was encouraged but not at the expense of maintaining relationships. Family needs and interrelating was always the trump card.

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“Whatever you are willing to put up with, is exactly what you will have.”-Anonymous

It is never too late to learn about your boundaries. I am coming to believe that it is perhaps one of the aspects of living that most defines our maturity and facility for accomplishing our goals. Boundary issues are common to most of us; in fact, our personal boundaries are the basic, yet often invisible rulebook that guides all of our relationships.   Our boundaries define how and what we communicate, what we give and receive, and even, in the most basic sense, provide the parameters for what we expect from others and life itself.

Boundaries reflect how we love ourselves and what we value most deeply. They impact our capacity at work, with authority, with our money and our sexuality. Knowing when we want to say yes, when we want to say no, what feels like self-respect and where our own needs start and end are the foundations that build the sense of boundaries that control our lives. Mine have long been porous, which is a generous way of admitting that my lines between myself and others, in family and even more so at work, have been fuzzy.

An old friend once told me that our boundaries are the truest measure of how we love ourselves. I thought I understood the meaning at the time. Raising four children should have bestowed on me a mastery of setting limits and protecting my personal space over the last two decades. It hasn’t. I am not alone in my struggle for healthy boundaries. Learning to define our boundaries is challenging for many people because they are fluid and change with our sense of ourselves.

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“Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories” -Polybius (Greek statesman, 200-118 BC)

For a long time I believed that winning and losing were opposites. In the past few months since the biggest win in my career, I have come to see how, like a yin yang symbol, they live not only side by side but within each other. Sometimes losing takes incredible courage and grace to go on and try again. Sometimes the distinction between winning and losing is incomprehensible; like in the recent tennis match that went for 10 hours and, in the final analysis, was a two game difference. Sometimes winning requires you to give up the game you knew before, because you have reached a new level.

I am suffering an odd sense of loss since winning a recent investment conference. In winning the investment, I also won a seasoned and talented CEO. In addition to him, or maybe because of him, there are more gifted and intelligent people than ever committed to the success of Good Clean Love and our collective success feels within reach. Still, ceding the responsibilities and roles that have gotten me to this point is more difficult than I imagined. Long a follower of identifying myself through what I do, it is requiring a new way to think.

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