5 Reasons to Make Memorial Weekend Special

1. Memorial weekend unofficially launches the summer season. In Minnesota, this is a particular reason to celebrate! Feel the warm sun…kick off your shoes and walk in the grass! Take in the sights and smells of all the beautiful flowers in bloom! What will you do to specially celebrate the beginning of summer?

2.  Memorial Day commemorates men and women who died in military service for our country. When you see a flag, pause to thank God for the freedom we enjoy in our nation and honor the memory of those who gave their lives for this privilege.

3. Some of us spend some time remembering our own loved ones who have died. My dear father died three years ago, and I particularly think of him because it is his birthday at the end of May. While we miss him immensely, it brings joy to my heart as I reflect on all the times we “went to the cabin” when our kids were small. We loved going swimming and fishing and eating and playing games together. I almost always brought a pan of rhubarb bars for Dad because he loved them. I made some again this year, and I think of my Papa.

4.  Memorial weekend offers a variety of opportunities to connect with family and friends. Will you go to a lake or a park? Share a barbecue? Participate in a community event such as a parade? Be intentional about doing something fun with people you enjoy. Catch up on their lives. Share in some meaningful conversation.

5. Memorial weekend is a time to relax and rejuvenate. We are blessed to have a forecast of pleasant weather this weekend! Enjoy a walk. Ride your bike. Breathe in the fresh air. Relax in a lawn chair with a good book.  Stretch out on the grass and gaze at the blue sky! Whatever you find relaxing and different than your regular routine, make a point to do it!

Have a wonderful Memorial weekend!

Sherrie

The Flowers Of Your Mind

All the flowers of all the tomorrows are  in the seeds of today.    Indian Proverb

Even though most of us go to the florist or nursery to buy our flowers, we all know they start with a seed. SOMEONE  has had to plant a seed in order for those flowers to appear.

Our minds are like that as well. If you want positive truthful thoughts to automatically pop into your mind, you have to start planting positive truthful “seeds” in your mind  TODAY! Start your planting now and reap the benefits of a “beautiful flower garden” in your mind.

Sherrie and I are excited to share with you all the ideas that we have learned about how our mind works in our upcoming online workshop,” The Garden Of Your Mind”. We begin in June and will go through the summer so we hope you’ll join us! Tell your friends!

Give-Away Don’t forget to enter our Give-Away! Check back to the May 1 post for details!

Thanks for stopping by! sandy

Five On Friday

You’ll never have any MENTAL MUSCLE if you don’t have any heavy stuff to pick up.   Diane Lane

Working Our Muscles

Just as we have to exercise our legs to gain muscle in our legs, we have to exercise our minds and brains to gain mental muscle. So how do we exercise our mental muscle?   Here are five ways to do just that for our Five On Friday!

1) Teach a class Our mind gets exercise  when we do something where we have to think differently. Studies show that teaching helps to do just that. Instead of learning for ourselves, we have to think about how we’ll present  material to someone else. Whether it’s a Sunday School class,a Bible Study, or a Community Ed class teaching is the “heavy stuff” we need to “pick up” in order to exercise our minds.

2) Read, Read, Read Reading is another way to stretch and work our mental muscle.

3) Do crossword puzzles

4) Work on memory recall Practicing exercises that work on your memory are not only good for you in the long run, they also help you remember in the more immediate time frame

5) Be in the moment Yes, I said it again. It is SO IMPORTANT  it bears repeating. Keep working on this. It takes practice. We will tell you more about HOW to do this in our ” Garden Of The Mind” seminar.

GIVE-AWAY Don’t forget to sign up for our give-away!

Stretched By a New Idea

“The mind is like an elastic band; once stretched by a new idea, it never regains its original dimension.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes

This idea of a stretched elastic band does not refer to an old pair of pants in which the elastic has worn out! Instead, it is more like stretching on your tiptoes to see over that wall to new horizons that lie ahead! Stretching to learn and experience something you never before thought you would or could!

I find it encouraging that each new idea I learn actually stretches my mind. New neural pathways are formed with each new idea. I stretch my “thinking muscles” as I keep reading and listening and observing and learning something new every day. Learning whets my appetite to continue to learn and discover even more, and opens up a world of fresh possibilities.

Sherrie

For more information on keeping your brain healthy and strong, check out this link to Dr. Daniel Amen, reknown physician, psychiatrist, and brain imaging specialist and the article, 6 ways to keep your brain young.

http://www.amenclinics.com/newsletter/article/?articleID=254

Your Potential

Within each of us, just waiting to blossom, is the wonderful promise of all we can be. Anonymous

Five Ways To Awaken Your Creative Spirit

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. Henri Bergson

Every Friday we’re listing 5 tips ( Five On Friday ) that will help your life BLOOM. One of the things that helps us grow and bloom is keeping our creative spirit alive. So I’ve listed 5 things you can do to WAKE UP your creativity!

1) Listen to Mozart .   Mozart’s music is said to uplift our mood and spirit. It’s lively and melodic and fun to listen to. Don’t do anything else  but LISTEN and ENJOY! Well, enjoying a cup of tea or coffee  as you listen would be OK. You can get a Mozart CD at the library.

2) Draw.     Find a pencil drawing, turn it upside down, and just COPY the lines and squiggles that you SEE. Don’t worry about making your picture look like the drawing. FOCUS on following the lines only. You can start with a cartoon.

3) Drive a different way home from the grocery store occasionally.   Just taking a different route than normal helps your mind get out of the “rut” of doing the same old thing and “awakens” your mind to new things

4) Spend a morning being AWARE  of everything around you .           Keep your thoughts in the present moment. This takes practice!

5)  Lighten Up and Laugh.   Find something humorous to laugh about. Don’t be afraid to be silly.  Lightening up helps you be more creative. Sandy

HAVE FUN! I’ve posted a creative flower arrangement by Phil at 1-800 flowers. Julie Mulligan has a floral lifestyle blog about flowers and has this photo on her site. The dog is made out of flowers and sits in a “purse” Check out this blog here: Julie’s Floral Lifestyle Blog

Also see the CREATIVE flower arrangements from Flickr on the right sidebar!  Live Creatively!  sandy

The Joy of Gardening

The photo shown here is a print of the painting that I have hanging in our living room. It was painted by a woman named June Dudley and is called “The Secret Garden”.  I love it because it shows a lush and beautiful flower garden. I have loved gardens for as long as I can remember.

What is it about a garden that is so appealing? For me, it is a number of things.

First, I love to plan and dream. Gardening allows a little of both. Who isn’t tempted to peruse the colorful catalogs that come in the mail, touting beautiful, healthy flowers, vegetables, or even trees laden with fruit? It’s fun to dream about those plants growing in MY garden! All I have to do is buy those special seeds and young plants. Then the real fun begins.

My husband willingly tills the soil as I decide what will go where. I read the seed packets diligently, noting how much sun and spacing will be required. Then I note how BIG each plant is expected to grow. After considering all these factors, we both get busy and actually plant the seeds and young plants.

Then we watch and wait. That’s another thing I love about a garden – the joyful expectation of what lies ahead! Something fresh and new.  Of course, during the wait, we pull weeds and water and fertilize and spray stinky stuff to keep the deer away. But how satisfying it is to watch the garden gradually begin to turn into a thing of beauty!

The analogies of a garden to life are many. We plan and dream and prepare. Then we work diligently at something we are passionate about to produce something that is satisfying and new and beautiful. June Dudley says about her work, “I am very passionate about my art. I love painting!”

It is why Sandy and I are passionate about the concepts of “The Garden of Your Mind”. We look forward to sharing them with you.

Sherrie

By the way, check out more of the beautiful art by June Dudley at her website: http://www.junedudley.com/

MOTIVATING YOURSELF TO GROW

What MOTIVATES you? What INSPIRES you? What EXCITES you? What makes you EAGER to get out of bed every morning? What are you CURIOUS about? What makes you want to KNOW more? What makes you WONDER?

If you can answer even ONE of these questions, that is where you need to plant the seed of learning.  It seems that my learning always begins when I see a need. Whether that need is one that I encounter  personally or one I see in the world in general. I recognize the need and I ask myself, ” How can this need be met?” Then my mind goes into action trying to figure out some answers. It is at this point that I WONDER what will work. I become CURIOUS  about what will help and I want to KNOW more! I become MOTIVATED to find the answer! I get INSPIRED by what I’ve learned so far!  I’m even more EXCITED now about finding solutions! I feel EAGER to get out of bed to learn more!

We’ve been talking about continuing to keep our minds active and continuing to learn and the best place to begin is to find  ONE THING that inspires you, or motivates you,  or causes you to be curious, or causes you to wonder, etc. If you don’t know what it is yet, start looking for  it NOW. It does not have to be some great or grand thing. But when you put that little “seed” in your mind, something begins to happen. And when you “nurture  that little seed”, a sprout of an idea comes up and begins to grow. And before long a beautiful flower of  inspiration blossoms and soon you have a mind blooming with excitement!

But I’m getting a head of myself here! We’ll be  talking about these things in “The Garden of Your Mind” in our upcoming seminar starting in June. We hope to inspire you ahead of time to be thinking about the possibilities that nurturing your mind can bring! So begin thinking of something that might answer at least one of the questions above. And prepare to grow a beautiful garden in your mind like the beautiful blossoms shown here.

PREPARE TO BLOOM!  SANDY

And don’t forget to sign up for our Give-Away! Check out the May 1st post to see prizes and rules!

To get a closer look at our Flickr photos seen on the right, double click on them and you’ll see a bigger photo.

5 Reasons You Should Never Stop Learning

Don’t go through life,

GROW through life.  Eric Butterworth

Well, here we go with our first, FIVE ON FRIDAY! Each Friday we will share 5 tips about some aspect of being a blooming boomer.

Now, one thing I have to say first ,and we may have mentioned this before, but I’ll mention it again here while we’re talking about learning: We are not claiming to be experts! But we HAVE experienced some things in life that have helped US in understanding more about “blooming” and we love  sharing those things! We get excited about them  and  we’re both excited about  continuing to learn NEW things and we hope that desire continues for the rest of our lives! At least that is one of the goals we each have. So we are trying to encourage YOU to have this same goal for YOUR lives because while your BODY DOES grow old, your MIND and SPIRIT don’t have to!

So what are the reasons you should never stop learning? Here are 5 but I’m sure there are many more:

1) Decreases your chances of getting Alzheimers. Studies are showing that if you keep your mind active  there is  less likelihood of getting this horrible disease. It’s the” use it or lose it” phenomenon. This is really the ONLY reason you need, but I’ll give you 4 more.

2) You will be a happier, and more contented person. People who are  actively engaged in life and stretching and growing are happier than those who are not.

3) It makes you a more interesting, creative, and well- rounded person.

4) It’s just plain FUN! And who doesn’t want more fun in their lives?

5) You have a CHOICE about it. As we grow older, we often have less choice in our lives such as… well… growing older!  Choosing to use our minds and spirits to learn and grow in wisdom and knowledge is something we can do even as our bodies slow down. As long as you have the ability, CHOOSE to learn and grow!

One of the things that has interested ME to learn about for some time now is the subject of how the mind works. So I’ve continued to read, take workshops, talk to people and learn as much as I can about the mind and I’ll never learn all there is to know about it so that in itself will keep me on the learning path. In fact this very topic is what brought Sherrie and I together to start blogging, writing articles, and hopefully in the future to write a book. And in the meantime we keep learning and passing on information to each other  that we’ve found. We’re having a great time! We hope you’ll join in the fun!  Keep Growing!      Sandy

Thought is the Blossom

“Thought is the blossom;
Language the bud;
Action the fruit behind it.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

I really like this quote! Sandy and I are learning so much about the importance of our thoughts. What we think is just the beginning of a creative process – like a blossom.

Blossoms are all around us in this beautiful season of spring! Many of these blossoms lead ultimately to fruit, like the yummy home-grown strawberries shown here.

For each of us, our thoughts lead to language – or words – whether spoken or on the printed page. The more we think, speak, and write about something, the more likely it is that we will indeed take ACTION on it – or produce fruit!

Such a simple concept, it seems, yet so intricate and profound. It is why Sandy and I are excited to share “The Garden of Your Mind” during the weeks ahead. We hope you will join us as we learn together.

Sherrie