February is showing itself to be a tumultuous month around the world this year — I’ve been swept up in the fervor of everyday people taking back their power. This energy is both contagious and healthy. This year’s journey is all about taking back one’s power from supposed authorities and choosing instead to create the life you deserve. This article gets us caught up on our year’s journey with the Heal the Money 2011 Colors Calendar.
Save 20% on your purchase through Feb 21! Lulu is having a sale … use coupon code HAPPY305 … so here’s a great opportunity to get one of these calendars to brighten your world.
Here are my thoughts on the exercises suggested for first two weeks of February. As I’ve mentioned before, all of this year’s exercises point you toward healing and can be done anytime throughout the year. They build on each other whatever order you do them.
February’s thought: “Gently choose to know oneself through beauty”
Pain, you have to admit, is a very useful tool. How many of us have not learned a valuable lesson through pain? Pain forces us to pay attention. To focus. To reevaluate. It gets our undivided attention. It often builds compassion and sympathy, insists we care for ourselves, directs us away from a rotten experience, prompts us to choose differently.
Useful as it may be, pain, especially when learned at an early age or through the example of our parents, can become a habit, a reflex. Ever noticed that you have a pattern of having the same painful experience again and again? It might be heartbreaks, conflicts with family, a recurring injury — or, yes, struggles with money. Patterns like this indicate your body and subconscious have come to the conclusion to expect this experience of pain in certain circumstances. It seems as if you have no say in the matter. You’re attracted to the person who will break your heart, you walk right back into the same arguments with family, you step too gingerly and slip once more on the same ankle — or somehow you don’t have enough to cover the bills, again.
Human beings, you might say, are masters at pain. We’ve come to know ourselves very well through this tool. Here’s the epiphany: pain is not the only tool available to us! We can choose to know ourselves through, say, joy, or ease, or beauty. As frustrating as those pain patterns may be, to become aware of them is a grand step forward. The next time you are faced with the approaching circumstances — say the month is beginning and bills are due — first simply acknowledge this is where you have a habit of choosing pain. Accept that it happened, and allow it all to be a habit of the past. This time, declare your intention that you choose from now on to know yourself through beauty.
February exercise week 1: Take a photo of a flower
Flowers are everywhere in California — I am exceptionally fortunate. They crowd almost every fence — an unfolding of hues and astonishing shapes in every pocket of earth, every month of the year. One of my joys has been pausing on my walks to enjoy and take photos of the beauty around me every day here.
I’m not the only one fascinated by flowers. Eckhart Tolle, in the opening paragraphs of his book A New Earth, has these remarkable observations:
Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being, their true nature. The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness. The feelings of joy and love are intrinsically connected to that recognition. Without fully realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that which is most high, most sacred, and ultimately formless within ourselves. Flowers, more fleeting, more ethereal, and more delicate than the plants out of which they emerged, would become like messengers from another realm, like a bridge between the world of physical forms and the formless. They not only had a scent that was delicate and pleasing to humans, but also brought a fragrance from the realm of spirit. Using the word ‘enlightenment’ in a wider sense than the conventionally accepted one, we could look upon flowers as the enlightenment of plants.
Flowers as the enlightenment of plants — that notion delights me! What a gift indeed they are. Take time this week to observe a flower. Take a photo to honor the moment. As February is a cold month in much of the country, perhaps linger by the flower stand at your local grocery, or look longer than usual at an arrangement in your office, or treat yourself to an early gift of spring at a florist. Take a moment to connect to beauty and ponder the mirror of it. Send me your pics (to suzanne at healthemoneybook.com), if you’d like to share! Here’s my photo 
:
February exercise week 2: Draw with colored pens or pencils
Play is an expression of joyfulness. So often we can be so concerned with what we need to get done — the tasks at hand, the deadlines to meet — that we dismiss any activities that don’t “make sense” — that don’t have a clear purpose. Though such focus has its usefulness, when we’re in this mode all the time we restrict ourselves and limit our own joy, without even realizing it.
This week, find several large pieces of paper and a bunch of brightly colored pens, pencils or markers — and scribble. Don’t try and draw anything in particular. Don’t have a goal. Just play with the colors and the feel of the pen crossing the paper and your hand moving in unplanned directions. Draw with your non-dominant hand. Trade pens from one hand to the other. Let go of any judgment of what happens. Just connect with what your hands want to do and see how you feel while you’re doing it.
When you open this door to your playfulness, it’s as if a confined horse has suddenly been let out to pasture — it can lope around doing what it was meant to do. Play can return the flow that you’ve been missing. You can open new energies that invigorate and expand possibilities in other areas of your life. The experience honors the creative spirit within you and welcomes it back into your life.
Just beautiful!