By Lisa Cherry, on February 17th, 2012%
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG0V-9sxGbI”>Fame
So I’m 42 today! And for those of you who have been blessed enough to read the Douglas Adams books, you’ll know that this is indeed the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything. I think not.
But I can tell you a few things through my fringe with its ever so slightly greying hair:
- Being able to get through the night without needing the bathroom should have been more valued in my twenties.
- I thought I’d be dead by 30 so each year thereafter is a bonus, rendering me about 12 years old. This may account for the sensation I carry of actually feeling younger with each day that passes as I get older.
- I love leg warmers. I never fully appreciated them the first time round as I could never quite dance like Leroy in Fame….I have now come to terms with this….finally! Leg warmers and me with a hot cup of cocoa and it’s a good life.
- In the heady words of Bananarama, “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it”. I can now confirm that this is indeed wisdom. Who’d have thought it?
- Understanding the shortness of life, enables it to be lived with the urgency it requires.
- Chocolate does not give you spots. I know this to be true because my daughter informed me that it was said so on a science programme. Thank you god for daughters!
 Things I don’t understand and don’t need to:
- Thongs…I mean pulease! Bits of string up your bum?? Pass me the big knickers.
- Darts. I don’t even have any words to add.
- Cheese strings (there’s no cheese in them??)
- People who don’t kiss! What????
- Adults who say they are bored! Rude…
- Saving a dress for ‘best’. This is ‘best’. Today. Wear it today.
Things I don’t understand but will continue to try and fathom and change:
- World poverty
- Domestic violence
- Homelessness
- War
- Abuse
- Oppression in all its forms
- Children living in sewers without food
- People who hurt animals
I fully intend on living at least another 42 years and I intend on cramming a whole heap more into Part Two I can tell you!
Wishing you a beautiful day….
. . . → Read More: Darts and Big knickers….
By Lisa Cherry, on February 5th, 2012%
“Life begins just outside your comfort zone.”
Neale Donald Walsch
Your Comfort Zone is the place where you feel safe and secure. It’s the place where nothing and no-one really challenge you. In this place you are never ‘on the line’, exposing your vulnerabilities and your insecurities. You are not going to have to deal with the perception of failure in this place called Comfort Zone and you won’t have to worry yourself about change, unknowns and facing fear.
The flipside to all this of course, is that you won’t get it wrong or ‘fail’ so there are no learning opportunities. You are unlikely to meet interesting and new people that question and challenge and make you think about the world in a different way. You will be unable to gain the experience and knowledge of your own capabilities and strength because you will not have pushed yourself to try something different. Fear lives in Comfort Zone.
Luckily, leaving Comfort Zone, can be achieved by taking small steps.
- Try something new as many days a week as you can, whether it’s a new food, taking a different route to somewhere you go all the time (it doesn’t have to be major to start with).
- Understand the inevitability of change. Everything changes. All the time. That’s just the way it is. When you embrace this, the world becomes the adventure that it should be appreciated as.
- Say yes to doing something different/new.
- Do something spontaneously just because you can.
- Understand that there is no such thing as failing, only learning (or free training!).
- Release the need to believe that you absolutely must know the outcome to everything you do. Not knowing how something is going to pan out, is exciting!
Now you are on your way to be in Experience Life To The Full Zone. Where you can be the very best you can be, feel a sense of fulfilment and experience the love and joy and learning and pleasure that the world has to offer you…. See you there!
. . . → Read More: Are you in your Experience Life To The Full Zone?
By Lisa Cherry, on November 6th, 2011%
After spending an evening this week with yet another friend who is recovering from the awful experience of being in a ‘happy’ marriage that ends within half hour, always commencing with “It’s not you, it’s me” (The Mid Life Crisis) or “I think this is really it, she’s the ‘one’ for me” (The Affair and The Mid-Life Crisis) or “I never meant to hurt you but I need some space” (The Affair), I decided that a survival plan, laced with a little humour, was probably called for! For the male readers, this blog is entirely from a woman’s perspective, but please feel free to add your own recovery pointers onto the comments section….
- Get yourself a good Multi Vitamin. Oh yes….my all-time favourite from my very sturdy and practical friend, in or out of emotional pain! She is right of course, as your immune system will be low and your food intake will be bizarre so this will keep you vaguely balanced on a nutritional front.
- Read a self-help book, a good self-help book and preferably a funny one. My absolute favourite while sobbing all over the house during my own ‘the breakup’ was perfectly titled “It’s Called a Breakup Not A Breakdown.” In other words, you’ll get over it!
- Learn everything you can about who you are. Know who you are and what you like and don’t like, because you will be a different person from the person you were before you were together and different from the person that you became in the marriage/relationship. This is a great part of the journey, so try and enjoy it.
- You will either eat yourself stupid or you won’t be able to eat at all. In any circumstance, you’ll need ice cream, good quality expensive ice cream, that contains chocolate, cookie dough, nuts, etc. Essential for vague nutrition and comfort.
- Get your toe nails painted. One of my ‘favourite’ memories of the darkest days was sitting in the conservatory, eating chocolate and sobbing, while a friend painted my nails for me. Recovery, girlie stylie!
- I’ve heard it said that the best ways for a woman to get over a man is to get underneath another one. It isn’t. Really. It isn’t. Go back to number 4 and get the ice cream out of the freezer again!
- Understand the Story of Creation from Eve’s Perspective. This will help a lot.
- Don’t be on his Facebook page for a moment longer. You don’t want to know. Trust me on this one. You really don’t want to know.
- Go and buy lots of good quality wooden hangers and reorganise your clothing through the whole double wardrobe to replicate Jigsaw. You will now have space in between your clothes as they hang like ‘pieces’ from the rail as opposed to squashed together as if his clothes and yours were having their own private row as they fought for space in a wardrobe that just wasn’t big enough!
- On a more serious note, the pain will stop and if you allow yourself the much needed recovery time, you will learn to love your life as a single woman safe in the knowledge that one day, you will be annoyed again by the toilet seat being left up! So this time is your time. Now is the time to enjoy….
. . . → Read More: 10 Top Tips For Surviving ‘The Breakup!’
By Lisa Cherry, on October 5th, 2011%
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvxmypqMwFk”>In
How many times do you get asked to do things for charity? Whether it’s letters from the charities themselves pleading that there aren’t enough runners or friends who are jumping out of planes or swimming the channel with spaghetti on their head, it’s endless. There are always so many requests on my Facebook wall, my inbox gets a fair share and canvassing in the street has become a mission! (I have also been partial to the odd Skydive myself and the associated requests!)
So how do you choose? We all only have a limited amount of money to spend on charity and I always try and support as much as I can, but there is a limit. But this week has been one of those weeks where something becomes clear, ding dong moments of clarity that come flying from everywhere until you say “ok ok….I hear you”.
I had already decided to support Micheal, a business friend, as his passion came flying off the page. But it wasn’t until I went to The Just Giving Page and read his story, that the true emotion behind his passion became clear. He had lost his father to cancer and had never said goodbye or I love you or you are my hero. Youth plays tricks with us about the cycle of life and we all pay the price for that at different times of our lives and it seems to me that this is Michaels opportunity to say the things he never said with a passion and a voice so strong that the wisdom will be embedded not only for him, but for readers of the story who gain their own clarity in their own life lessons. Human beings love stories and we love nothing more than a story that resonates with our own fabric of life or a story that we can learn from.
My Gran was a seamstress, to fund life a single parent after her husband died after only 9 years of marriage. This was much to her disgust in many ways, as she had to kneel on the floor and sew hems of the ‘English peasant women’ (she was French and you’d never know that she lived here for nigh on 50 years). As I tried to make a skirt the other day, I wished I’d watched her. She could have taught me everything, but I cared not for such dull activities as sewing when getting on with my own life. I cried one Christmas after she died, into the washing up, for what seemed like an eternity as the radio provided the background music to my usual Christmas melancholy with the song In The Living Years.
A male business colleague who writes poetry (rather secretly I understand) wrote a line that captured this sense of life’s cruel trickery so beautifully. It reads “And nature’s paradigm laughs at wisdom”.
I take from that line the understanding that this cruelty is how we gain wisdom which is precisely why wisdom can only come with age. These lessons are often un-noticed through life until we have the ability to really learn what we need to learn from them. This is the journey that we all take reagardless of who we are. All of us share this path and all of us will have to watch our children start the journey from the very beginning….as we desperately try and teach them what we know from our wisdom to somehow protect them from the pain (pain which they themselves need to grow and develop their own wisdom); that which they cannot learn until they reach that point where they understand the cycle of life and it’s lessons.
. . . → Read More: In the living years….
By Lisa Cherry, on June 21st, 2011%
When that time in your life comes hurtling towards you, screaming at you that life cannot go on like this, the pain so great that it takes you to your knees forcing you to plead in your aloneness for help because you cannot take anymore, it won’t feel like it but it is indeed a wonderful thing.
This juncture, this fantastic turning point, comes in many different guises. A breakdown, a divorce, a bereavement, constant battling with food drugs and/or alcohol, living with depression, these are all clear messages that something has to change, that your life isn’t working for you, that your choices are causing you harm and you haven’t been listening to the endless messages you’ve been receiving.
However it comes at you, it hits hard but there is another way, a path that is about personal responsibility, self-love, self-investment and consciousness.
I have had to surrender many times but my first and most powerful surrender came at 20 years old through the glass of a whiskey bottle. The beginning of the life I was meant to lead rather than the life self-hatred had shown me was about to begin.
I have learnt that there are a few things that will help us when we start on a path of recovery or when we are going through pain and change.
- Be kind to yourself. Forgive yourself. Sleep well and eat fresh food, regularly through the day.
- Nurture yourself. By this I mean, walks in the countryside, visits to the seaside, reading a nourishing book, spending time with people you love and who love you.
- Start living in a state of self-awareness. Along with what my previous points, this is the time to start taking responsibility for your life, health and wellbeing. Personal growth and self-acceptance have amazing impacts on yourself and those around you.
- Make your health your business. If you’ve been suffering from depression and taking endless pills and then more pills to quell the side effects of those pills and you still feel the same, then maybe it’s time to approach life in another way. I am absolutely not advocating stopping doing anything without consultation with your GP, but there are lots of people who manage a host of issues holistically through diet, complementary therapies and preventative strategies rather than reactive ones.
- Stress management is so important. Again, think preventatively and ensure that you have time allocated to yourself whether it’s for long lunches with friends and family, walks that put you in touch with nature and your spiritual self, meditation, massage, reading. Whatever it is, book an appointment in the diary with you!
This is just the beginning, and living responsibly, lovingly and pro-actively will eventually become a way of life. Not looking after you will no longer be an option. Not having your healing time will feel wrong. Surrounding yourself with people you love and who love you, eating lots of fresh wholefood and taking responsibility for your health will define you, not the label that brought you to a place of surrender and change. This point is the beginning, the beginning of a journey that will take you beyond your wildest dreams…
. . . → Read More: There is another way…
By Lisa Cherry, on June 9th, 2011%
Holidays mean so many different things for people giving much needed opportunities for either doing nothing, doing everything, sightseeing, scuba diving, spending time with the family, catching up with friends, reading books, resting. Whatever it may be, it’s a time we all look forward to. I booked a holiday for me to have some time alone. I am writing and I wanted some space to write without any distractions and that is exactly what I got and it was bliss. So while it was hard to leave the children behind, I knew that I couldn’t write at home, the way that I could write were I absolutely away from everything; my kids, my dog, my Blackberry, my daily life.
I arrived to a basic little room right on the beach in a virtually tourist free town called Nikiana in Lefkada, a Greek Island just off the Mainland. Travelling alone but with a Solo Travellers company, I knew that there would be other people around but I could dip in and out of socialising. Being constantly surrounded by people and distractions, I actually found the first couple days of incredibly difficult and coupled with writing about things that were difficult emotionally, I cried a lot. But with the silence, came healing beyond anything I have dealt with in a long time. The combination of writing, of articulating long forgotten feelings and the sound of silence which came in the form of the sea and the birds singing, brought more recovery than I could have imagined.
Running a course on meditation was a lovely woman called Anne Simpson who led Meditations and discussions on topics such as detachment, responsibility and desire. I hadn’t booked onto the course but joined in on a couple of sessions and they were brilliant. The discussions would bring up a variety of emotions which would then be meditated on. Fortunately, the meditations were only around five minutes as stilling my busy mind while sitting still, takes a mammoth amount of effort! A contradiction if ever I heard one!!
Anne shared something with us that I absolutely loved. She said that Earth is a feelings planet. It is an education. Some people sail through with few difficulties, few problems. “Like people who seem to have an instruction booklet for living?” I said as this is how I felt so profoundly when I was growing up. Everyone else had the leaflet on How To Live and I hadn’t received one. These people she said, are in the Nursery part of their education. For people who have suffered a lot, they have probably been here several times before and are now doing a PHD. I considered briefly where I may be on this spectrum …
What I absolutely love about this view of the world, is that we live in such a warped society, whereby people are constantly being quantified by what car they have, the size of their house, the amount of consumer items they possess etc etc. This viewpoint turns all that judgement towards other people upside down. So when you next look at the homeless guy on his last drunk, he’s probably off to a higher spiritual plain having finshed his PHD in life. I like the idea that souls more troubled than me are just more highly advanced than I am in their education. And you can have as many ‘things’ as you like dear shoppers, but you can’t actually take them anywhere with you. It is people who matter, the people we love and who love us and the ones we can’t cope with because they’re further along the education system.
I still have so much more writing to do but my holiday this year was about giving myself time to focus, to breathe, to write and to heal and for the opportunity, I am truly grateful.
. . . → Read More: Being Still…
By Lisa Cherry, on May 20th, 2011%
I was recently asked to take part in a BBC Radio 4 discussion regarding women’s relationships with men and whether it is vital that we are in intellectually compatible relationships and the impact of being or not being in such a relationship. So questions asked will also be around “Does it cause problems in a relationship when the woman is more “intellectual” than the man” and “Is a shared intellect important?” When I found out that I would taking part on this, I put the status on Facebook and waited for the obligatory, contemporary way that we can collect views and have an immediate debate on the matter – Social Media is a wonderful City! 58 comments later showed that Radio 4 had indeed picked a good subject matter for it’s morning listeners.
Firstly, establishing by what is meant by “intellect” will be a good starting point. If we think of intellect as using the power of thought, or mind, to explore, reflect and speculate on a variety of ideas then that is probably a useful shared understanding of the concept.
And secondly, I think that a key points that will come out of this type of discussion is what sort of relationship are we talking about here? Once out of child bearing interest and single, relationships tend to have a different context and there are more types of relationship that can and will be chosen. Finding a provider, a father for your children may (or may not) be on the agenda in your 20′s and 30′s but unlikely to be your priority when you’re in your 40′s. So the types of relationships open to us have changed. For example, the needs required from a short term fling, a love interest, a companion or a part time lover are going to be very different than the needs a woman would have from a relationship that was long term, with someone who has involvement with your children or living together. So when we think about what types of relationships we’re looking for, what is at the top of that list in terms of a priority of what is needed?
Is sitting up into the early hours of the morning discussing the state of the world and existentialism part of what makes a satisfying relationship (excuse my flippancy for the purposes of making a point)? What are women’s support networks like in terms of getting those kinds of needs met? I personally have a very extensive circle of people around me who I can ‘intellectualise’ with. I also co-run a successful women’s Business Network called Networking Women so am surrounded by inspiring, intelligent, achieving women with whom I can pontificate with about just about anything!
So what do we need from our relationships with men, post 40, financially independent and in the year 2011? What do I think? You’ll have to wait for the programme….
The recording is on Monday, the airing date will follow….I’ll let you know!
. . . → Read More: Intellect, Men and Relationships…
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