Last night I stayed up late to watch one of my favourite all time movies. Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands still makes me cry. I wondered why this story is so powerful for me. And then I realized: it is a classic Western love story where pure, good, selfless love is squashed by social ignorance, where the truth of heart and feeling is overruled by the fear of the collective mind. And the really beautiful thing about this whole mess is: Although Edward Scissorhands and his true love Kim must release each other to their separate destiny, their gift of love is never lost or forgotten.

Sure, it’s just a movie, but it made me stop and consider the issue of letting go, especially letting go of those things that truly speak to our soul. How do we know when to let go? And how do we do it?

In recent years, many psychologists, philosophers and New Age spiritualists have turned their attention to the ‘living in the now’. Their call to be in the moment is supported by reams of research that demonstrate how holding on to attachments, feelings, memories, and desires increases anxiety, discontentment, and frustration. Ouch. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out. Staying angry or disappointed, or continuing to try to figure out what went wrong contaminates our present possibilities for growth and happiness with negative feelings or useless ruminations.

Letting go of the need to hold on to your past is the secret to living in the now. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? So how come letting go is such a challenge? Approximately 80% of our daily life is concerned with either thoughts of our past or our future. Perhaps we can blame the linear thinking processes emphasized in Western culture for this – we are trained to think in terms of cause and effect, and are asked to continually re-evaluate the role of particular causes so that we can maximize certain effects later.

To overcome this cultural focus, we must practice letting go of past and future-oriented thinking. Here are 5 tips to help you do that:

1. Angry or hurt by someone? Can’t stop thinking about how they have done you wrong. Try this. List their inappropriate behaviours. For example, they acted selfishly. Then remember a time when you behaved selfishly towards someone else. Oops – Recognizing the laws of karmic return sometimes make is easier to forgive and move on.
2. Does the past situation feel overpowering to you? It will lose its impact when you play the ‘what if’ game. Follow the situation to its most extreme conclusion. For example, “What if your child broke the TV?” A logical response might be that you would not be able to watch the news, and this makes you feel angry. Ask yourself: “What if you could not watch the news?” An extreme response might be: The apocalypse could occur and you would be the last to know – sounds ridiculous right? Kind of puts a broken TV in a bigger picture context where we can see that the broken TV issue is probably not the end of the world. Literally.
3. Ask yourself: who has control over how I interpret this situation? Guess what? You do. Recognizing your own power to let the energies of others affect you will automatically diminish the impact of their energies on you.
4. Trust your intuition. It is the voice of your spirit. Sometimes situations and feelings escalate because we have not honoured our intuition. We stayed too long, or did too much, or ignored our creep alert. Sometimes the person we are really annoyed with is ourselves. Honouring our intuitions will help us love ourselves more.
5. Watch how what you focus on in your life gets bigger. Feeling badly? Focus on that and watch how the bad feelings contaminate everything and everyone around you. Understand that whatever you focus on gets bigger. Focus on gratitude and watch how good feelings flood your world. Like attracts like.

Bring these tips to action by finding a quiet place to sit with yourself and your feelings. Even a few moments of reflection can help move you towards letting go and living in the moment.

Its spring! The sky is blue and the grass is green and the beer patios are calling you. But wait – you’re stuck at your computer. You have a serious deadline to meet. Or worse – perhaps you have to clean the windows, or put the kid’s hockey equipment in storage.

And as if it couldn’t get worse, what is really annoying is this: you could have done this last week, when it was cold and rainy BUT YOU PROCRASTINATED!! Sound familiar? Read on if you want to learn a few tricks to keep you ahead of the onslaught so you can get to that patio for some great spring fun.

Ditch the To-Do List. Sound scary? Is your to-do list the only thing keeping you from a core meltdown? If so, then you are probably not using your to-do list in the most effective way.

To-do lists are more frequently used for short term, immediate tasks that MUST be done. And you already know what these tasks are – feed the children, have a shower, buy your metropass. Sometimes your to-do list gets so full of tasks that it can not be used for what it is really good for – scheduling in unexpected or infrequent tasks like going to the dentist, for example. Here, having a to-do list helps to you look ahead to find a time when a trip to the dentist fits in.

Procrastination happens when your to-do list gets so full of daily, predictable tasks that you can not accommodate an unexpected or infrequent task. You put it off, or schedule very far forward. Or just decide you will deal with it later. And later never comes soon enough.

If this sounds familiar, don’t worry. You can use the ‘parking lot’ technique to help you deal with procrastination. Combine this with your to-do list, and you will have an effective method for taking care of short term tasks, while never losing site of those longer term issues.

Imagine a parking lot – cars move in, park, and then they move out. Less urgent tasks, that might be prime targets for procrastination, are just like cars. You want to move them into your parking lot, let them sit for a brief period of time, then move them out. Parking lots make more money when the cars keep moving in and out as quickly as possible.

So here is how you do it:

Pick 1 task that you are procrastinating on right now in your life. What 5 SMALL actions could you do that would bring you 1 step closer to completing that task? For example, if you need to go to the dentist, you could do the following: look up your dentist’s phone number, find 3 possible appointment times, make an appointment, get your insurance information written down, and find childcare for your appointment time. Each of these small tasks represents a car in your parking lot.

Now back to your to-do list! Each day on your to-do list, schedule in 5 – 30 minutes of time dedicated to moving a car out of your parking lot. Within a week, 5 items will be taken care of and moved out of your parking lot. You will be set up to visit the dentist when your appointment time comes. If something remains in your parking lot for longer than a week, consider that car abandoned, and tow it to the dump.

Clearly, it wasn’t significant enough to warrant attention, so you probably don’t need to do it anyway. The trick to keeping your parking lot moving is this: keep your tasks as small as possible. If a daily task is too big, you probably won’t do it anyway. You can think of this as preferring economy cars over an SUV.

Ever wondered why good things just happen to some people, again and again? They don’t really even seem to be trying, or be overly impressed with themselves when they get that new job, win the lottery, or find their soul-mate. And meanwhile you are slaving away at your job, trying to make ends meet with never enough time or money to do the things you love?
Let’s look more closely at one increasingly popular explanation for how this happens. So, if you have been wondering what the heck Oprah’s ‘Big Secret’ is really about, here is your chance to learn a bit more.

In our world, we usually measure our successes and failures by looking at the things we did to make something happen. We focus on our actions, and how they created a result. That’s great – actions are important. But they are only a piece of the story. Our thoughts are the real key to bringing about change. Thoughts become things, as Mike Dooley puts it.

There are a number of equally compelling and seemingly bizarre explanations for how our thoughts become things however, what is most important here is to understand that our thoughts are steeped in our emotions. Want a new job? Try getting excited about the opportunity to find a new job – to meet new people, make new connections, and explore
other career possibilities. Be genuinely enthusiastic about the process. Forget about the outcome. Wondering if you will get the job, whether they like you, or if you will fit in, just brings negative feelings into the mix, and this will create a more negative experience.

Sounds a bit Pollyanna? Just be happy and everything will go your way? Not really. You have to continue to do what you need to do to make the outcome happen. You can’t feel your way to happiness without actually taking the physical steps to enable happiness to manifest. So update that resume. Keep researching who is hiring. Keep going to job interviews. But do it with a sense of adventure, and you might be surprised how quickly your dream job becomes your reality.

Spring is coming! When I think about the tiny crocuses buried beneath the last inch of snow and ice, pointing their new, green tips towards the warmth of the sun, I am reminded of the cyclical nature of ‘new beginnings’. And I remember that sometimes there is so much growth around me that I just can’t see.

Perhaps this is what a miracle is – the birth of something so amazing and whole, that when it materializes out of nothingness we realize deep within our hearts that it must have been there all along.

Are you tolerating a cluttered kitchen, boring career, tumultuous love life? Or perhaps you are caught in that post holidays, downward financial spiral that rectifies itself next October, just 2 months before you start holiday shopping again? Let’s face it. These tolerances are crazy-making! They create blocks that hold us back. They rob us of joy, security, and ‘everything-is-right-in-my-worldness’. Life is a collection of moments – some great, some challenging. Getting rid of today’s tolerations will set you up for a lifetime of burden-free moments, and ramp up your overall happiness quotient. Here are some tips for getting rid of tolerances, and creating a lifetime of happiness – one moment at a time.

1. Stop needing to be right. Of course, we know that you ARE right – but being right is not the same as being happy. And being happy is not predicated on being right. If this were the case then idiots would be miserable, and ignorance would not be bliss.
2. Create a list of small things that are driving you crazy in your life today. Tackle 1 thing each week. Clean the closet, sort those socks, get your car serviced so you at least know why the engine light has been on for 3 months. You will experience an immediate feeling of lightness even doing just 1 a week.
3. Hire someone to do the things you hate the most. Students are always looking for short term jobs that can be completed in a few hours. Try calling a college or university employment centre near you and get someone fast. No money for help? Find a friend who will help in exchange for helping them with ridding their lives of something they tolerate.
4. Scale down your life. Having, doing, or being too much creates annoyances that must then be tolerated. Purge, purge, purge and learn to say ‘no thanks’.
5. Decide to drop the baggage and move on. This can be tricky because sometimes we really like our baggage. Like it or not, you can move faster and farther without the crap. And if you find you need it later, well you can always go back and get it.
6. Make your life a toleration-free zone by being honest about what is important to you. Put your values at the centre of your life. If something feels like a compromise, it is! Consider what you must give up when you are caught in the midst of constant compromise. Is it worth it?

I hope your spring feels miraculous.