I’m in the Third Act of my life; it just feels that way.

What is my vision for my Third Act? To live as a grateful person.

Not just as a person who thinks grateful thoughts on a regular basis.

One who is infused with a grateful spirit.

It’s my modus operandi.

It’s my disposition.

It’s my way of being in the world.

It’s my natural habitat, my default.

It’s where I live and where I go, even when unwanted things happen.

Of course, that isn’t me right now. It’s my vision and aspiration and commitment.

Many of my friends would describe me as a grateful person, and gratitude does come easily to me, because it has always been important to me to be grateful; I am blessed in countless ways. But now, I am talking about a whole different level.

In truth, I’m at risk for becoming a crabby old lady, if I don’t stay conscious.

For many of us, if we are fortunate enough to reach the Third Act of our lives, there are more challenges than there were in Acts One and Two.

Life just gets a little (or sometimes a lot) harder than it used to be. It’s gradual and incremental, and for me, it would be easy to find myself living on the edge of irritation, rather than living as a grateful being.

How do I nurture and cultivate this way of being? I have some ideas (to come in later posts), but for now, it’s about committing to this aspiration.

Who’s with me?

This year, Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere is at 4:13 am 21 June, Central Daylight Time in the United States.

It’s the time that Summer officially begins.

The new Summer Alignment Kit 2022 invites you to restore, on all levels:

• Revitalize your body
• Refresh your mind, and
• Renew your connection to spirit

Click here for your free kit.

These Alignment Kits are designed to help you hear your deepest wisdom. Let this be an opportunity for you to sense and feel what will restore you. And, enjoy this summer conversation with your soul.

You may receive more than one notice of this Kit, if you are on more than one of my mailing lists. Apologies, and it just means that more love is coming your way from me.

With my love and many blessings for your well-being,

Lynne

I’ve arrived, virtually, at Santiago de Compostela. The cathedral is the traditional terminus for the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, unless you are going on to Finisterre, at the Atlantic Ocean.

That I’ve arrived is a celebration, but it’s not a Woooooo Hoooooo jump-up-and-down kind of a thing.

I expected it to be much more of a celebratory feeling of accomplishment, having walked 491 miles (790 kilometers).

That it isn’t a fist-pumping hurrah, I think, is because the process of walking and the practices of being present in the moment and of savoring joy have meant so much more to me than the accomplishment of reaching my destination.

This virtual pilgrimage was tremendously valuable for me.

It was the right thing, at the right time, even though I could not have pin-pointed why, at the beginning.

The “why” revealed itself along the way.

My Camino pilgrimage helped me get more in touch with the joys of my life.

But there are so many other gifts along the way also.

In the times where I felt a bit knocked off my feet by life events (for example, when I broke my knee), I remembered that I was a pilgrim, and I asked myself:

• What would a pilgrim do?
• How does thinking my life as a pilgrimage help me now?

Thinking of myself and any situation in this way helped me feel more grounded, balanced, and resourceful. It helped me remember that all is well, in spite of what conditions might look like in any moment. It helped me remember who I am at my core.

We are all pilgrims of life, any time that we intentionally choose how to be.

Our lives are a pilgrimage, when we think of our life journey as a walk with a purpose.

So I have completed my virtual Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, but I am still a pilgrim of life, and I can still think of my life as a pilgrimage, a walk with intention.

I hope I will always remember what it is to be a pilgrim. That will help me be the person I want to be, and to live in the way that I want to live.

How do you want to live?

This year, Spring Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere is at 10:33 am 20 March, Central Daylight Time in the United States.

It’s the time that Spring officially begins.

One of the strongest energies of Spring is Awakening.

This Kit invites you to Awaken Joy, right in the midst of personal and/or global challenges. It’s not about pasting a happy face on a challenge. It’s about opening yourself to the full depth and truth of your life experience.

These Alignment Kits come to me very intuitively, and they always turn out to be the Kit that I need too. This seems to be especially true of this one!

I hope you will enjoy this Spring conversation with your soul. The Kit is here.

You may receive more than one notice of this Kit, if you are on more than one of my mailing lists. Apologies, and it just means more love is coming your way from me.

With my love and blessings,

Lynne

I’m nearing the completion of my Camino de Santiago virtual pilgrimage, and I’m looking at the intentions that I set at the beginning of my walk in April 2021:

• strengthen my feeling of connection to spirit
• live with gratitude, especially for the ordinary and everyday
• be the person that I aspire to be
• live with grace and equanimity

I didn’t really keep those intentions top of mind during my pilgrimage, but I’m happy with the degree to which the intentions have been fulfilled.

I understand more fully (and in an experiential way) that we can feel joy amongst all the challenges of life. This has been life-changing for me, to give myself permission to savor joy even when I’m in the middle of challenges.

Through walking every day (or not, as when I broke my knee), showing up, and being fully present to my life, I have developed a habit of appreciating the most mundane or ordinary aspects of my life, in all areas of my life, and throughout the course of a day.

The practice of showing up and walking every day has helped me to feel more grounded and to live with more evenness of mind.

Once again, I have learned that setting intentions for how I want to be is a powerful practice, even if I don’t make a project out of meeting them.

That my pilgrimage turned out to be all about joy surprised me. This is a lesson that as long as I remain open in my heart, the right outcomes find me. I don’t have to go chasing after them.

What are your intentions, for how you want to be?

I’m within about a month of finishing my 480 mile (775 Km) Camino de Santiago virtual pilgrimage.

I’m beginning to think that my whole pilgrimage has been a quest for joy. This is ironic because joy is already here, for all of us. The ability to feel joy is innate in us. You can see it, naturally occurring, in babies.

There are so many challenges in all of our lives these days, and in the lives of people we love, that it seems as though we deserve to feel all of the joy that’s available to us also.

As I’ve written in prior blog posts, I tend to breeze past a lot of the joys in my life without really taking them in.

I want to soak in all of the joy. I want to fill up with it.

This morning, before I arose, I laid in bed and savored all of the joys of the day-to-be.

I thought about my husband and our dogs, and how much I appreciate and enjoy them.

I thought about each friend that I would connect with that day, and how much I was looking forward to their presence.

I thought about each client whom I would spend time with that day, and how much I love them and am inspired by them.

I thought about the walks I would take and the bits of nature that I would love seeing and feeling.

I thought about the art that I would get to do.

And I just cherished the rhythm of my days.

There is joy everywhere, just as there is love to take in, in our lives, often right in the middle of all of the challenging stuff.

There are joys in gratitude, in anticipation, in memories, in things that we share with others. There is Right Now joy, that I often miss, depending on where my focus of attention is, in any moment.

Where is your joy? Write me and tell me about it.

On February 14, we think of all the people we love. The day is a wonderful invitation to send them love from our hearts.

What if you found lots of ways to love yourself on Valentine’s Day, too?

I invite you to download my free Valentine for My True Self for some ideas.

Much love to you on Valentine’s Day,

Lynne

When I was sitting quietly, letting whatever wanted to be expressed this week on the blog to arise from within, a curious phrase rose to the top of my mind. Over a lifetime, I’ve learned to respect what comes up, and to be curious about it, because there are often wise nuggets in there for me, as crazy as it all might seem initially.

The phrase was: “The joy was hidden behind the nest of responsibility.”

The image of a bird’s nest came immediately into my mind, with all the joy hidden behind it, shouting “Look at us! We’re behind you!”

Sometimes, on a pilgrimage, it’s just a plod. But that doesn’t mean that the joy has gone away. It’s still there. It just isn’t in our field of vision in the moment.

This week the joys were out of my field of vision, but that was due to my faulty, black or white thinking.

This week, like a mother bird, I have been singularly focused. I’ve been plodding along, getting my 2021 business accounting finished so that I can submit all of information for my taxes to my accountant.

My black or white thinking about doing taxes was this: doing taxes = no joy.

In my thinking, I could either meet my responsibility to do tax work, or experience joy, but not both at the same time. (I know, I could easily experience joy when I get the taxes behind me, but I’m not there yet.)

Then a friend shared her experience of the joy she had in doing her taxes, and she challenged me to find the joy in doing my taxes.

I love a good challenge, so I looked behind that nest of responsibility to discover all the joys that were there.

And, miracle of miracles, I started to feel joy in the tax work. Ever since I was a math minor in college, I have loved numbers and purely rational things, for which there are answers.

So much of my work is intangible, intuitive, and in the realm of exploring the unknown (I love all those things too!), that to have a pile of tasks in front of me that are clear and tangible and measurable, that is a joy.

If you have a nest of responsibility, where are the joys in it, for you?

My last two blog posts have been about joy, and being conscious of all the joy that’s in our lives, every day.

It’s my intention to notice more of the abundance of joy in my life. Even with all the challenges of life, there are joys in our days too, but my attention isn’t always tuned to them.

I have been thinking about joy and being on a pilgrimage, and how it might be easier to be conscious of the joys in our days on a pilgrimage, because we’d be in a new environment, and we would be away from the cares and concerns of our everyday lives.

But, maybe not….I have friends who have been on real Camino pilgrimages, and they say some days are a struggle, and on those days, they say, noticing joy is not necessarily top-of-mind.

Then I had a couple of conversations about noticing joy with friends. I was curious about how much they felt they are conscious of the joys in their lives, throughout the moments of their days.

Like me, my friends looked back into their lives and easily identified many things that they are grateful for. However, they say that they aren’t as aware of the joys as they move through their days.

So, I’m wondering: do we need to train ourselves to notice joy, until it becomes habitual?

Babies spontaneously gurgle with joy (but not all day, of course). So the capacity for noticing and feeling joy does seem like it is something that we humans are born with.

However, as we mature and take on more responsibilities and challenges, the full awareness of joy seems to slip below the surface of our minds.

Having my Joy Stuff journal by my side during the day is a positive trigger that prompts me to stop, breathe, and notice joy during my day. Perhaps with practice, I will train my brain to see joys in the moment.

What do you think: do we need to train ourselves to notice joy?

I mentioned in last week’s blog that I was noticing joy this year.

I made a journal to draw and letter the joys I notice. (Credit to Lynn Whipple for the idea and name of Joy Stuff.)

I keep my journal by my side during the day so that I can make entries as I notice joys during the day.

They are all simple, everyday things.

A cute dog pose.

A cute dog.

A simple appreciation.

I’m noticing that sometimes I hesitate to sketch something in my journal because I haven’t developed my skill to the level I’d like. Then I remember that isn’t the point. The point is to capture a moment when I feel joy, and then, having savored it, to move on to the next one.

Then, at the end of the year, I’ll have a book of touchstones of the joys in my life.

I’m also noticing that often I pass the joys right by, because my attention is on the thing I am doing or the next thing I will be doing. This makes me sad, missing the joy moments.

But I’m confident that having my journal by my side this year will help me notice and remember that I am flooded with joys all day long.

How do you notice your joys?