Getting Older = Getting Wiser

One of my favorite phrases these days is: “One of the good things about getting older is experience.”   I’m still learning – just as I did when I was a child and a teenager – but backing me up now is my life experience.  Today I know in my DNA, nothing stays the same.  Life is in constant transformation and if sometimes we feel we are cornered we will soon be proven wrong.

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Video Blog – 7

Learning from others and creating a community.  Learning to embrace different experiences without judgement.

Video Blog – 3

Simply stated, we need to unplug. If we keep running around trying to complete as many tasks as we can in a day we miss the point of life which is to enjoy the small things, the surprises and to be ready for when opportunity appears.

Five Concepts To Know For Our Own Well Being

If You Can’t Change Others, Change Yourself

Okay, here is a hard one to learn; we can’t change others but we can change ourselves.  Why do I say it is hard?  Because we are so attached to proving either our truth, intent or fairness, that we keep coming up with different ways to make our point even if every attempt only brings us frustration and disappointments.

There is nothing wrong with trying to communicate our thoughts and feelings but what becomes a waste is when it is obvious that the recipient is not ready or doesn’t want to see things in a different way.  They are stuck in their position and methodology and they are not going to change no matter what we do.

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“Funeral” Looks at Relationships Through a Different Light

“Funeral” is a new TV commercial launched by the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS) in Singapore which looks at relationships in a different light, through a woman at her husband’s funeral. Yasmin Ahmad is the writer and this is her last and latest work.

Does Love Conquer All?

A friend of mine forwarded to me a couple of days ago, an email from her new girlfriend.  In this email her new friend listed ten things they had in common.  My friend wanted to share the email with me because had been pleasantly surprised by her new friend’s disposition to concentrate on the similarities rather than the differences.

I then thought about a friend of mine who is Muslim Turkish and came to the US to learn filmmaking.  While here she met a Jewish Turkish man and they fell in love and wanted to get married.  Her family threatened to disown her if she married him even though the two of them had so much in common.  My friend was forced to make a choice between the man she had fallen in love with and her family.  She chose her now husband but she still hurts for the loss of her family.  Her story is one of differences where families’ believes were so frail and non-inclusive that they couldn’t tolerate any differences. Read more

Might As Well Face It: You’re Addicted To Love

Saw the below article on CNN.com and thought it was worth sharing.

It talks about the highs we feel when we are in love and the craving when we are rejected.  The article actually states that physiologically being in love is the same as being high on cocaine and so when things end we miss it just like we would the drug.

The study was based on brain scans done of twenty year old men and women.  I believe if the study had been done on older people the results would have been somewhat different.

Think back to when you were twenty, if you are at that age this post will be something to remember when you get older, and the world was just opening up to you.  Most of us were sexually active and living on our own.  Everything was new and full of possibilities.  And love as “living happily ever after” and the house with the kids, was now a possibility in our lives.  Most of us also looked at our partners as the recipient and the giver of all the love we had and could experience.  Love at that age is exciting and full of fantasy.

As we get older and mature, love is still exciting but it also becomes profound and we no longer think someone else can be the end all for our emotional needs.

I believe if we suffer through the end of a relationship, as adults, we realize it is not the end of our lives or possibilities.  It is sad but surely we will survive because we now have life experience and we are a whole person on our own.

I remember years ago, when a boyfriend decided to end our relationship and my body actually ached as I dealt with not having him anymore.  My pain, I didn’t know at the time, was also a result of a very manipulative relationship.  I’m not saying it was consciously but he did enjoy seeing me dependent on him and have my feelings be all over the place.

Love is wonderful and energizing and we should all fully live it when we are in a relationship, and if we are connected to ourselves and keep a check on our expectations, we will be okay if and when it ends.

By Elizabeth Landau

(CNN) — Jim Dailakis still remembers how he stood below his then-girlfriend’s balcony, held up a tape player and blasted a George Michael song that the two of them loved.

But this romantic gesture, reminiscent of John Cusack serenading Ione Skye in “Say Anything” (but before that movie came out), didn’t make his first love stay with him forever. After a 2½-year relationship, he got a letter from her in 1988, saying “thanks for everything; we have to move on.”

“The first month was horrible, because when you break up with someone, it’s like a death, but it’s even worse because the corpse goes on living, just without you,” said Dailakis, 41, an Australian-born comedian in New York.

According to new research, the brutality of loving someone who has rejected you has a biological underpinning. A study published in this month’s issue of Journal of Neurophysiology finds that, for those who have been recently rejected, the brain may treat love as an addiction, craving it in the same way as cocaine…Continued

Dealing With Changes and The Past

I have always been a person who has had a talent for adapting to new circumstances.   I was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, lived in NYC and now live in Los Angeles.

I have left my family behind (when I moved to NYC), a bad relationship (when I left NY) and now in Los Angeles I live as a widow.

When I was growing up, I was an outstanding student and everyone thought I would get to do something that involved mathematics and physics but I ended up getting involved with the arts.

As I struggled through the years to make a living, I often heard how I had wasted my talents in a life that to outsiders seemed to be very hard and without the chances of bringing the success they were sure I would have had if I had followed the scientific path.

I must confess, I too, when life got really hard, thought I had made a mistake and wished I could have gone back in time and done things differently.

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How To Stop Being Self-Destructive

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Why are we so self-destructive?  Often the answer is fear. Somehow we are afraid of both succeeding and failing in the things we consider important and we turn to aggression and self-destruction as a way of keeping us from truly going after what we desire.

This life dynamics starts early in our development.  Think back to when we were kids and we liked the girl in pigtails or the boy with the banged up knees.  Most of us pulled the girls’ hair or ignored the boy instead of demonstrating how much we like them for fear of being exposed and rejected.

While that behavior can be cute when we are ten years-old it is destructive when we are adults.

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