The Anne Report, Ad Lib Your Role in Life, reminds us that if we forget our lines, we can always ad lib our role in life. The Main article, Are you Alive to Death and Dead to Aliveness?, encourages us to stay present in each now moment of life. The Healthy Living article, The Place of Forgiveness, includes perspectives about forgiveness, from Pope Francis. The Anne Talk is Happy Lighten Up Day. Learn about Anne's newest book: The Living Book. The Featured Product this month is Offbeat Prayers for the Modern Mystic. Click to read What is EZosophy?

The EZ Mantra: "Everything can be EZ or at least EZier." -- Anne Sermons Gillis

Living EZosophy, October 17, 2017
Published Weekly on Tuesday Mornings

Phone: 281-419-1775
Email: anne@annegillis.com

Anne's Websites:

  The Anne Report

Ad Lib Your Role in Life

Dear ,

We have had a wonderful time seeing our grandchildren and visiting with my daughter and son-in-law. Looking after two three-year-olds is such a blessing. While they can be a handful, most often it's a handful of love and wonder. One of our favorite activities was walking around the outside of the house. There are so many wonders to behold. One of the twins, Thomas, looked up at me and squealed, "Grand Ma Ma, I'm so glad you are here." No words. I'm still awed by my first two grandchildren, and they will be my only grands. We're older than most grandparents, but we are also more enthusiastic than most!

Jim and I went to a play for my birthday. It was at the Black Fedora Comedy Mystery Theater. The play was The Church Street Daughters of the Late Unpleasantness Garden, Gun, and Gin Club. It is an interactive play. There are four professional actors and the rest of the cast comes from the audience. I played the part of Inspector Spector and had a rather large role. What fun and how creative it was to have the audience be a part of the play. That's what we need in life, plays that include everyone. We all play a part in the mystery of life, and if you've forgotten your part, just ad lib. It's the best way to live life – no rehearsal, just a live performance. That's it for the Anne Report.

Anne (back row, left of center),
audience, and cast at the Play

  Main Article

Are you Alive to Death and Dead to Aliveness?

We are alive to death and dead to aliveness. Both thoughts lead in the same direction. What a crazy thing to say, yet it's true. In my workshops, when I ask people to move, as in stretch or do an exercise, some fumble around, embarrassed, then participate, as if I'm their mom and they are three-year old's. I tell people they do not have to participate; who knows what they've been through? But I am still surprised when some people sit blank-faced, while others choose to move and become playful. Some people are alive to death. "Don't ask me to move, think deeply, change, or try something new."

What does "alive to death" mean? One has only to open a regular college textbook for the answer. When I was in graduate school, I read one textbook. It was the only one I found interesting. It was alive and open and filled with humanness and blessing. No, it was not religious, but it was heart-warming. I would open the other books, but they were so dull that I would skim them and pick out the facts I knew would be on quizzes and make an outline. I studied from my outlines. I made good grades, but what a salute to poor mental health and to the use of vision and imagination – the building blocks of aliveness. "Let's write textbooks that are so boring that our best minds will be dead by the time they finish reading them."

In the popular TV show, The Good Place, one of the characters was sent to hell because he was too academic and the text book he wrote was so boring. Not all college books are boring; they can be enlivening. The one book I read, The Theories of Counseling, was incredible. Hopefully things have changed since I was in school. It seems hospitals are now decorated more toward life than death, than they used to be, and walking into a bank no longer seems like a trip to the morgue. The somberness of society is dissolving. When I was young, the public library was a place of somberness. We all spoke in whispers. Now our libraries cater to children; there are special rooms where kids can be kids. Maybe we are waking up as a society.

Dead to aliveness – what does that mean? It means we are dead to our possibilities. We set limits to our aliveness and settle into them. We are adults playing in a sandbox of imagination and that sandbox sits on an infinite beach. The number one way we deaden ourselves? Busyness. We equate busyness with importance, and keep ourselves on a treadmill of doing. When we are busy, there are few choices to make, because our schedules dictate our activities. We had rather "run through a den of lions in a ham suit (Sorry, I got that from a comedian.)," than to feel irrelevant to life's conversation, so we stay busy.

My husband and I recently returned from a three-week vacation. We knew where we would go, six parks, but we had no agenda except to get up in the morning and hang out with nature. When we did travel, it was only 2 or three hours in one day. It was the most relaxed vacation I have ever taken. I came home alive with joy. I couldn't have taken this kind of vacation when I was younger. I was too addicted to being busy, to let go of activity. Some who know me still think I am still too busy, but I think I've hit a balance between being and doing. That's a balance we all need to have. We can't sit around and endlessly eat and watch TV, but we can't solve all the world's problems and constantly serve humanity, either.

I once was in the Amazon Jungle with a guide. He wanted the group to see a bird who only appeared at a certain time of day. As we ran through the jungle, so we wouldn't miss seeing this rare bird, I thought, "I am running through the Amazon Jungle. Even the natives have been influenced by western culture. This is crazy, when a trip through the jungle is high-pressure!"

Let's advocate for pleasure over pressure. EZosophy is about making our lives EZier and getting off the treadmill of life. We don't need to be dead to life and alive to death (life-deadening activities). We need to wake up, remove the pressure, and receive the treasure. Become a universal pleasurer. Appreciate life, and say no to endless, tireless activities to hide behind, because when you do, life will be EZier and EZier.

Anne

  Quotes

Anne Quotes

"For those who live life more from the inner realms and less from the domain of accomplishment and success, it is tempting to take stock of one's accomplishments through the lenses of the world's standards. They have some validity, but they are not the final record of accomplishment."

"Check into your life right now. Do you want to be in your life right now? In this very moment? If not, what is your resistance? The degree to which we resist being present in our lives, in this very moment, decides how much life force, presence, or light is available to us. When we step into each moment, demanding things to be different, we hold the moment hostage. We say to the moment, "If you don't behave like I want you to, then I'm out of here."

"If I conveyed my deepest thoughts, they would be a mixture of the pleasant, unpleasant, brilliant, inane, and nonsensical. Thoughts dart all over the place and, by some mystery, emerge in a symphony of conversation. Naturally, if we have a good social intelligence, we censor what comes out, and take into consideration our listening audience."

  The Living Book

The Living Book, by Anne Sermons Gillis

• Suppose someone told you that you could change your life radically, for the better, if you spent just three minutes a day doing inner work? Would you believe it? Maybe not, but wouldn't it be worth an investment of three minutes a day to try it?
• The Living Book offers just this. Devote three minutes a day to this process and your life will become a living testimony to the seed principle. A tiny seed can grow into a mighty tree, but it must be planted. Plant your daily seed for three short minutes and notice both subtle and miraculous changes in your life.
• In addition to the daily practice, one can use the process when they are stumped or afraid or angry. This process transforms anger into love. When we plant seeds of light into our thoughts and emotional bodies, we move into higher frequencies of well-being.

Learn more about The Living Book, by Anne Sermons Gillis.
Paperback $5.00. PDF Download $0.99. Kindle Book $2.99.

  Featured Product This Month

  Healthy Living

The Place of Forgiveness

We live in a new age of spiritual redemption. We are called on to fully participate in our lives, as servants of the good, but until we experience gratitude, and learn how to let go of our upsets, we remain lost souls. How do we let go of our upsets? Through forgiveness.

Forgiveness allows us give up the resentment we feel when someone does something unkind to us or to someone we care about. Forgiveness invites us to let go of our upsets when others do not act like we want them to. Pope Francis is possibly the most popular and the most controversial pope the world has seen. His statement on forgiveness summons us to spiritual maturity.

FAMILY, PLACE OF FORGIVENESS ...
by Pope Francis

There is no perfect family. We do not have perfect parents, we are not perfect, we do not marry a perfect person, or have perfect children. We have complaints from each other. We disappoint each other. So, there is no healthy marriage or healthy family without the exercise of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is vital to our emotional health and spiritual survival. Without forgiveness, the family becomes an arena of conflict and a stronghold of hurt.

Without forgiveness, the family becomes ill. Forgiveness is a sepsis of the soul, the cleansing of the mind, and the liberation of the heart. Whoever does not forgive does not have peace in the soul nor communion with God. Hurt is poison that intoxicates and kills. Keeping heartache in the heart is a self-destructive gesture. It's autophagy.

Those who do not forgive are physically, emotionally, and spiritually ill. That is why the family must be a place of life, not of death; Territory of cure and not of illness; Stage of forgiveness and not guilt. Forgiveness brings joy where sorrow has produced sadness; Healing, where sorrow has caused disease.

If you have any healthy living tips for the newsletter, send them to me at anne@annegillis.com.

  Anne Talks

Happy Lighten Up Day

Today's Anne Talk is the Happy Lighten Up Day. Time: 2:46

  Anne Art

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NOTICE: Here are two shareables from Anne. Feel free to pass them along.

The World's Best Weight Loss Secret

Thought Freedom

  Anne's Schedule

All times here are Central Time
unless otherwise specified.

Sunday October 22, 2017
10:30 AM Service
Rev. Anne Sermons Gillis speaks
Northwoods Unitarian Universalist Church
1370 Millbend Drive
The Woodlands, TX 77380
281-298-2780

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