Martian Child

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“Sometimes we forget that children have just arrived on this earth.
 They are like little aliens,
coming into being as bundles of energy and pure potential, 
here on some kind of exploratory mission
and they are just trying to learn what it means to be human.”

                                                  from the movie ‘Martian Child’
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What’s with this movie thing I’m doing????  Curious.   But here’s the commentary on this quote.  Isn’t it amazing?  And I find it rather interesting that I saw this movie, fell so in love with this quote that I replayed that section of the movie over and over again to get it written down correctly… AND that I happened to see this movie just as I was completing the workbook I wrote called:

 “Did you love aliens?~ a first-step view into your world of passions and gifts.” 

And yes, it starts with a story of a child, (me, in fact), who played with aliens.

By the way, this workbook is currently available free at my site www.musingsandmud.com. Enjoy!

Shift Happens

Shift Happens.  oh my.. I’m going to do a most intriguing workshop on this!  Note to self or to Nicole:  I must add this to my list!

Reality bites

I’ll write this one before anyone has a chance to know I exist in this blogland.  Because this is sooo unlike me.  First I must laugh at myself at the title.  Typed it in as a result of feeling that way…  then, thought.. oh how odd of me to be doing this movie thing!  So what the hel–, this is now categorized in movies.  I’m humouring me with this one.

Today I discovered water in my basement.  Moved things and discovered a cement wall crumbling. Could hear water running.  A friend came over to discover that an old pipe had broken beneath my bathroom.  Not sure yet how much of an ordeal this problem is… besides a difficult to replace pipe, a crumbling wall, it’s also possible that my bathroom is sinking.

It’s a fabulous little home, my home.  A fabulous little home built in 1954.. a habadashery of additions and changes and oddities.  Well this one is one of the oddities.  So, I sit waterless,  while a friend sits pondering the logistics of the problem, and I wonder if this is an insurance claim.   BUT here’s the life coaching portion of this blog, and the amazing part of this event.

I was babysitting the wee precious grandbaby Evalee this morning.  My dear friend Nicole came over to get her ‘baby fix’.  As it happens, Nicole had a free day, and I asked her to coach me after Evalee went home with her parents.   Nicole is not a life coach… but she has spent many many years passionate about self development…and has been a buddy through all my life coaching development,  and so she does a nice job coaching me.   My problem?  SOOOO many things to do, coaching and artwork inspirations to develop, business things to take care, promotional ideas…. I really really needed to actually make the list and priorize.  And add in some time ‘away’ from all these things – I love what I do, but it’s important to take pauses  and I haven’t been lately.

And so after a great coaching session, I came to realize that first I must get the basement organized… long story to why it became so chaotic… but for now, the basement needed to be organized to help my creativity classes function better.

Nicole said she could stay and help me do it today.  (She’s amazing!) We entirely cleaned one room, and started working on the next when she discovered the water.   We cleaned the water, baffled at how it got there, and realized it wasn’t going to stop.  No minor seepage happening here!   So the point of the story.. if I had not been life coached today, we would not have been in the basement, and by now, this evening, my entire basement would have been flooded.

So, yay to life coaching.. who knew the benefits could extend this far?  hee hee.  Yay to ‘inspiration’ that guides us to be so inspired as to work in a basement today.  

Well. Isn’t this interesting? I started this blog post to whine. I really wanted to whine about the pain in the butt that this event is.  And it is.  I wanted to whine about the car breaking down, too.  I am so not a whiner.  But I was definately having a moment of ‘reality bites.’  But look what happened?  I got that shift in perspective that I needed instead!  (I swear, sometimes I’m so positive, it’s crazy.) 

And this all reminds me of something I wrote not so long ago, on the topic of reality vs imagination.   

We sit in a reality that we believe to be true, until we allow our imaginations to visualize something different.  Our perspective is our reality.  If it is not serving us well, a coach can encourage exploring other perspectives…..

Nice work on the shift from ‘reality bites’ syndrome.. to ‘wow, nice of the universe to line us up to be working in the basement!’   I wouldn’t say this one took a lot of imagination to get there, maybe a bit of creativity, but the main thing is ‘shift happens’, thank goodness.  Okay, I feel better now.

The Bucket List – a life coach’s perspective

I’m a life coach… how could I not love a movie that is built on the concept of a list called “The things I want to do before I kick the bucket.” Brilliant! 

Some of you know that, when being coached, I might say:
 “Imagine you’re sitting in a rocking chair at age 95 or 104, looking back on your life.
  You’re feeling fabulous because you are so grateful that you ____  & ____  etc..  
  Tell me, what do you want those blanks to say?”

I went to the movie intentionally watching for its ability to inspire people to create a Bucket List.  Without revealing the whole story, I wasn’t all that far into the movie when I thought, “OH NO!” I probably even spoke that thought out loud.. since we were at “Stars and Strollers” with a few mom’s, a dad, a grand pair of grandparents, and babies who are welcome to cry or interrupt. So I may have actually exclaimed “Oh no!”  quite comfortably in that setting.

Why the “OH NO”?  In the movie, the list is created, and then, lo and behold, one person has endless amounts of money. I could see immediately that audience members who could have been inspired to do the list, might at that point think, “Ya, as if we all have billions of dollars.”  That wee little thought has the potential to stop a person from seeing the possibilities in creating a Bucket List.  They might not even notice that some of the things on the list didn’t require money.  AND, people may even miss the magic! –  simply by creating the list and meaning it…. well, ‘things’ just start to align themselves, even in the strangest ways, to make the dream come true.  

Okay, I admit, it’s not so simple to create a clear and effective Bucket List that magically brings these things to you, when you aren’t knowlingly living the last year of your life.  Edward and Carter, the characters in the movie, would be way past worrying about all the things that once ‘mattered’ once they knew they were dying. Most certainly the things they once thought significant, would have become ‘ mind clutter not worthy of attention.’  But still, the concept of writing a Bucket List is brilliant, clarifying, thought provoking and empowering.  Go ahead, give it a shot. And to get rid of one barrier, tell yourself, “if money were not a factor, I would____ & _______& ______, etc.”