A TASTE OF ENCHANTMENT - Accessing Wonderful MemoriesWritten by Dr. Barbara Becker Holstein
THE ENCHANTED SELF is about focusing on your memories, talents, and capacities for joy and happiness. You may not realize that one of your most precious gifts, in terms of accessing joy, is your capacity to utilize your memory in positive ways. All of us seem to know how to use our memories in negative ways. How easy it is to conjure up bad feelings surrounding a disappointment. How easy it is to remember unpleasant times. However, it is much more useful and leads to more happiness, if we can reminisce about good times (we have all had at least some) and also sift through our memories for our talents, strengths, and potential. I focus on teaching you how to value your own history with all its ups and downs. Seeing your past, even with its disappointments at times, as a G-d given opportunity to experience life, is a major step in validating your uniqueness and your specific purpose in life. This is your story and nobody else's. Your life is a marvelous adventure that could not and will not happen to anyone else. I teach you how to scan your history to recognize and emphasize your abilities rather than you disabilities ... your strengths rather than your weaknesses. Learning to view yourself in a positive way puts you in an advantageous position to reinvent yourself. For example, haven't you know someone who was a very successful businessman, and sure enough in his past was a grandparent or a parent who took him to factory or office all of time, making him feel special? Or perhaps you know a mother who later in life started a successful catering business, and sure enough there was a love of cooking and nutrition that went back for many years? Successful people always pull from earlier talents and refurbish themselves as necessary.
| | Ah, Sweet Memories - Part TwoWritten by Dr. Barbara Becker Holstein
Thank you for staying with me. Last week I shared some colorful autumn stories of my childhood that were truly enchanted moments. This week I hope you will enjoy part two as Emily shares her beautiful story about color and enchantment with us. Enjoy!Featuring story Prism by guest writer, Emily Doherty "Right brain ... left brain ..." droned speaker. I doodled idly in my already embellished notebook margins and mumbled "No brain!" under my breath. Surely a crayon or two might still lurk in a forgotten corner of this escapee mother's pocketbook. I nudged my friend for assistance, but all she could find was an old lipstick stub, too neutral for my purposes. Not even a smudgy red pen or a faded highlighter. I grinned conspiratorially in her direction as we recalled yesterday's 'there-goes-another-flower-child" glances of other tourists when they spied bunches of scarlet poppies waving comfortably from a free corner of my backpack. "Right brain...left brain..." One for words, one for images, and I, ever easily aroused and enraptured by both. Which brain was mine, I mused? Yet another hole too round for my perennially square peg. Images. Color. Why choose? I cannot remember a time when I was not seduced by color. Was it petunias, perhaps, firm grip of my father's aging hand as we climbed short hill beside our house to browse briefly in palette of fuschias and magentas, violets and lavenders blue? Was it haphazard piles of velvet upholstery samples tossed invitingly on play yard floor of my grandmother's linen closet, beckoning me to cavort with kings and queens? Or bright balls of wool stored in shiny brass potato chip can awaiting her dedicated fingers to transform them into rainbow squares for afghans? Perhaps it was color words themselves, tantalizing tongue twirls of fairy tales and Crayola wrappers: heliotrope, delphinium, vermilion, celadon, burnt sienna, Endless as imagination, they lured me to delight. I am drawn to mesmer of color as musician is to melody. Song colors my ears; image colors my soul. I cannot choose a favorite, like chocolate or vanilla ice cream; life remains incomplete without all 64 in one box. From earliest remembrances of childhood, my favorite few possessions were books with "colored plates", a rare find among my mother's vintage novels, and crayons. I amassed color everywhere: postage stamps, ribbons, fabric switches, buttons, flower petals, butterflies, marbles, in endless and varied collections. While my mother shopped, I crawled invisibly under tables in millinery department, risking spots on my shopping-white gloves and hoping that an elegant bloom or two, a feather or a bright sequin, had somehow hidden in pale, plush carpeting. I traced paisleys in oriental rugs, and retraced them as I rubbed my eyes and journeyed through my very own Arabian Nights to sleep.
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