MORE LIVING RICH AND WEALTHY

I want to begin by acknowledging what today is.  My feelings about today are probably the same as my parents' feelings about December 7.  It's a stunned, eerie, and very quiet and somber feeling.  It almost seems that we should just stop on a day like this and not do anything, not even post a blog!  Days like this should be like the Sabaath!  So here I am, posting a blog!

Perhaps this hub is a rehash of the first hub, but with a slightly different slant, and perhaps somethings can bear being repeated and reslanted!

As a licensed marriage family therapist, I do the traditional therapy "thing" with a couch for you and a chair for me. But that’s about as traditional as it gets. I also have a magic wand, I rarely sit still, and when I’m working with an entire family (yes, I mercilessly squeeze them all onto that teeny tiny couch) I’m all over the place.

And besides "working" with you wonder-filled clients, some of you are quite young and some of you are ELDERS, I also enjoy public speaking engagements and presenting workshops and seminars. I get very excited about staff development and inservice trainings, in addition to teaching a few hours a week at a local community college. I really ENJOY my "work."

I have "run" a successful business since 1982, but there are times, especially in the last two years, that the bottom line screams out like the accountant in the Sit ‘n Sleep commercial, "You’re killing me, Vern!" And sometimes my own anxiety about the bottom line leaves a path of destruction in my body much like that of a tornado or hurricane. I overeat, I chew my fingernails, I drink too much, my face is furrowed with frown lines, my relationships become distant and snappy, and I forget to return phone calls as well as where I set down a slew of important items: keys, notes, checks, my lunch, my shoes!! I need to see a therapist! And I do! And by the time he hears my woeful story, we both consider jumping!

The bottom line often turns on very loud voices, both inside my head and out. The voices sound like the Wizard’s voice in Oz. The voices shout and taunt, "Give it up....Cut bate....Who do you think you are, Donald Trump?.... It’s getting worse, not better....You’re going to end up in jail....Nothing is going to save you, short of the San Andreas Fault letting lose!"

So what keeps me going? Well, the voices are pretty funny actually, and at some point, I begin to laugh hysterically at them! But I also reread the chapters in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron on Money and Abundance. I reread the chapter on Generosity in Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat-zinn. I listen to my CD’s of Wayne Dyer’s Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, and T. Harv Eker’s Secrets of A Millionaire Mind. I look at one of a zillion copies posted throughout my office and bedroom of Jabeth’s prayer from Chronicles, and I meditate on the Beatitudes. I even go so far as to demand that God get my phone ringing with business. I also listen to my wonder-filled son, a dynamite salesman, review for me all that I have accomplished and how proud he is of me. I then take a deep breath, open the office door, and begin another day of being in business for myself. I FEEL very rich and wealthy. And I YAM. And by the way, the office is really COOL in every sense of that word! You gotta come and see it!

Thanks for Reading.

Vern