The Anne Report, The Magic of a Beginner's Mind, spotlights the openness and innocence of a child's mind. The Main article, Growing Into Emotional Maturity, reminds us that as we mature, we need to change the emotional responses of childhood into appropriate adult responses. The Healthy Living article, Technology – Making Conscious Choices, talks about our ability to focus and how excessive "screen time" can distract our focus. The Anne Talk, EZosophy: More Machines - Momagenes, talks about times to do more and times to go more, or not. The Featured Product This Month highlights Anne's fifth book, The Living Book. Click to read What is EZosophy? Click to join Anne's Abundance Affirmations. Click for Shareables From Anne.

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

Living EZosophy, January 8, 2019
Published Weekly on Tuesday Mornings

Phone: 713.922.0242
Email: anne@annegillis.com

Anne's Websites:

  The Anne Report

The Magic of a Beginner's Mind

Dear ,

We leave today to return to Texas. As always, we have been mesmerized, entertained, and exercised by our wonderful grandchildren, Thomas and Reynolds. Saturday, I heard a loud yell. Thomas strolled into the room, smiling. I asked, "What's wrong?" "Nothing, Grand MaMa. I was just yelling." How wonderful. "Just yelling." I never yell for fun, but at age four, the adult way to live hasn't fully squelched his aliveness. When my daughter told his twin, Reynolds, to eat his apples, he replied, "No, Mama. The apples are tired of me." Thomas philosophized as only a four-year-old can do, as we passed leafless trees: "The trees are afraid without their leaves." It goes on that way every day.

They have the beginner's mind. It comes natural for children, but, as adults, we must retrain our minds and undo lethal indictments against ourselves and others, so that we can return to our natural state of emptiness and innocence.

As Suzuki said, "If your mind is empty, it's always ready for anything, open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few." The beginner's mind sees everything anew, with interest, enthusiasm, and engagement. It sounds trite to talk about the beginner's mind, as if it is something from a Hallmark card, but when we experience the revelation of anything, without interference from the past, we enter the sacred. And that's it for the Anne Report.

Anne

  Main Article

Growing Into Emotional Maturity

How do we deal with our emotions? Are intense emotions such as fear helpful? Yes. Fear is helpful when there's a bear coming toward us. It gives us the adrenaline rush we need to react. But what about psychological reactions? I realized at some point in my emotional maturation that most of my emotions were not content driven; they were chemical responses to a perceived threat. They were not reactions to a bear, a snake, or a fire, but I felt like there was a bear there. The threat was usually threaded to a past event or a basic life decision, but my reactions were not in the past. My reactions were and are a thing of the present. When someone shouts angrily at me or gives me a hateful look, my alligator brain (the fight or flight mechanism of the brain), hangs on for dear life. The primitive part of my brain tells me to run, put up a defense, or to wall off. My brain reacts as if the bear is coming after me. It is disconcerting to be directed by the alligator brain's commands, and it often leads to embarrassing, bazaar, or wimpy behavior.

The coping mechanisms we developed as children are useless when we become adults. As children, we protected ourselves from many threats, both imagined and real. There were angry or depressed parents to deal with, expectations of perfection, guilt producing remarks, or crazy making behaviors from the authorities in our lives. Our inner workings created psychological spaces that helped us navigate changing times, raging hormones, and inconsistent parenting. These coping mechanisms were designed to keep us safe and make us lovable; they were fabricated for a young child. As it says in first Corinthians 13, "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I grew up, I put the ways of childhood behind me." When we grow up, we can react from a different place, even when someone treats us with disrespect.

The Bible is an ancient self-help book that teaches us to grow with grace. It reminds us that love has the power to heal our childhood wounds and recreate our emotional reactions. Many focus on Biblical law, thus missing the beauty and comfort sacred teachings offer those who are bereft, confused, and depressed. All sacred texts offer such counsel. Poets and mystics alike point us toward the divine and away from the heart's hardest moments. They guide us safely through the pain or provide new eyes with which to see.

There are some who live in sustained peace, but most of us are not immune to deep-seated, debilitating emotions. Fortunately, as we mature, if we mature, we learn how to move through emotional intensities without injuring ourselves and others in the process. We learn to move with grace to a better space.

You may want to check out my teleseminar talk about emotions, Dealing With Emotions and Going Beyond. The ideas contained in the audio may vary from those in this article, reminding us that the information we need to heal and transform ourselves, comes in many forms. Which one do we follow? The one that works for us at the time. There is not one medicine that works for every problem. Imagine going to the doctor with a severe infection and she gives you an antibiotic that works well. The next time you go in with a heart attack and she prescribes an antibiotic, and when you go in with a broken arm, she gives you an antibiotic. That would be silly, when what you needed was an antibiotic for one problem, a stint or a heart healthy diet for another, and a splint for your arm. Contaminated or doctrinaire thinking keeps us locked in endless loops of ineffectiveness. The predictability of familiar flawed thinking brings a strange kind of comfort, but the outcome makes the pain worse.

When we heal our pain, we gain the ability to handle our emotions. Fortuitously, life brings experiences that assist us in healing emotional trauma. Life calls us to itself and leads us to green pastures.

The following experiences help restore our faith in ourselves and give us the ability to more easily cope with life.

• The deep, abiding love of a friend or partner. When people love and respect us, we begin to believe in ourselves. As we strengthen our self-esteem, our old defenses crumble, and we build a life free from severe emotional reactivity.
• A transformative spiritual experience. We hear stories of people who have a deep spiritual experience. Their entire world changes immediately. We have had those experiences. They imbue us with deep compassion and insight. Something much bigger than our personality and our personal pain carries us away from our limits. We cannot make this happen. The transformation occurs through grace and by grace.
• A good therapist. Therapists can be the change agents which help one undo the limiting messages from the past that haunt the present. Therapists offer a safe space for change, they give their clients powerful new messages to replace the ones from the past, and they give their clients permission to change.
• A strong, emotionally healthy community. Studies show that people who have strong communities live longer than people who live more isolated lives. These communities can become the supportive family we never had. These can be spiritual communities, 12 step programs, clubs, special interest groups, and even neighbors.

Dealing with emotions in a safe and sane way, is critical to having a good life. We cannot skip this step in our maturation. Whenever we find ourselves pulled over to the sidelines of life because someone said something inappropriate or harsh, we must heed that warning. An emotionally mature person does not meet cruel words with revenge. They may feel bad, but they don't act out just because someone else acts out. When we are deeply hurt, we must take time to process our emotions, not collapse into them.

Here are some ways to do that:

• We can call a friend and talk with him or her.
• We can journal.
• We can experience the physical sensations that come with the upset.
• We can see a professional.
• We can attend a 12-step meeting.

If we react and respond like a child, that is a signal that we need to seek help, advice, or insight into the situation, because when we do, everything will be EZier and EZier.

Anne

  Quotes

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  Abundance Affirmations

Click to Join Anne's Facebook Group

This group is a place to post uplifting affirmations and thoughts about prosperity and abundant living. Let's create a right relationship with money so that we feel comfortable about money. Let's use money as it's meant to be used, and not as a way to accumulate power or to fill a void. We don't need money to buy more stuff. We need it to create a world that works for everyone. We want to cast off old beliefs of lack and reclaim our natural state of abundance.

  Featured Product This Month

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.

The Living Book, by Anne Sermons Gillis. Paperback $4.95 plus $3.00 shipping. PDF Download $0.99. Kindle Book $2.99.

  What is EZosophy?

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  Healthy Living

Technology – Making Conscious Choices

My husband and I do a yoga/Pilates workout in the mornings. It is a 20-minute workout and our gyrations leave us ready for the day. There's a part in the sun salutation where you bring your leg forward from the plank position. I've always found that move tough. It is harder to do it on my left leg. One morning, as I watched the video, I aligned with the instructor's energy and found myself easily moving the left leg into position. I was amazed. I had previously struggled and strained to do the move. When I focused in a non-efforting way, the move came easily.

Focus was the key to my success. Focusing doesn't take a tremendous amount of energy. Focus is an aspect of awareness that frees us to be radically present without effort. Unfortunately, our culture sanctifies technology, and while technology simplifies many things and gives us better access to our families (think video chatting), technology wreaks havoc with our ability to focus. We get notifications that grab our attention, we receive phone calls in the middle of the forest, and we get lost in the proverbial rabbit hole. We get Wi-Fi on airplanes, cruise ships, and in the grocery store. Unplugging from technology is increasingly difficult.

People are waking up to the addiction. There's a new movement called "Time Well Spent." It recognizes that technology is hijacking our minds. Tristan Harris says "Time Well Spent is a consumer movement to shift what we want from the companies who make our technology. Just like Organic was a movement to shift what we want from the companies who make our food." Time well spent is a movement away from distractions and disruptions in our screen time.

The Center for Humane Technology clarifies the problem. "Technology that tears apart our common reality and truth, constantly shreds our attention, or causes us to feel isolated, makes it impossible to solve the world's other pressing problems, like climate change, poverty, and polarization.

No one wants technology like that. Which means we're all actually on the same team: Team Humanity, to realign technology with humanity's best interests."

The Center for Humane Technology recommends taking these steps to minimize the way we use our technology.

The following is a short list, but for a more comprehensive list of suggestions, click the above link.

Turn off all notifications except from people.

Notifications appear in RED dots because red is a trigger color that instantly draws our attention. But most notifications are generated by machines, not actual people. They keep our phones vibrating to lure us back into apps we don't really need to be in.

Visit Settings > Notifications and turn off all notifications, banners, and badges except from apps where real people want your attention; e.g., messaging apps like WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Signal, Telegram, WeChat, etc.

Go Grayscale

Colorful icons give our brains shiny rewards every time we unlock. Set your phone to grayscale to remove those positive reinforcements. It helps many people check their phone less.

Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut (bottom) > Color Filters. This allows you to quickly triple-tap the home button to toggle grayscale on and off, so you keep color when you need it. (The settings to do this on your device may be different.)

Charge your device outside the bedroom.

Get a separate alarm clock in your bedroom, and charge your phone in another room (or on the other side of the room). This way, you can wake up without getting sucked into your phone before you even get out of bed.

Technology is here to stay. We are learning how to consciously deal with it. Companies are vying for our attention and, according to some sources, "We haven't seen anything yet." We want the benefits of technology without succumbing to the hypnotic lure of a synthetic reality.

It's important to take time to see how technology can serve us, rather than allowing it to use us, and when we do, everything is EZier and EZier.

Anne

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

  Anne Talk

EZosophy: More Machines - Momagenes

Anne's video, EZosophy: More Machines - Momagenes, Anne talks about times to do more and times to go more, or not. Time: 2:12

  Anne Art

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Special Announcement

Miracles in the Mountains Presents: Miracles, Scribes, and Mystics, a conference based on A Course in Miracles, Oct. 11-14, 2019. Join Miracles Productions at the beautiful Art of Living Retreat Center, Boone, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, during the peak of the glorious "Autumn Leaf" season! Early bird special through March, 2019.

  Shareables From Anne

The World's Best Weight Loss Secret

Thought Freedom

40 Days to Abundance

Anne's Conscious Carols

  Anne's Schedule

All times here are Central Time
unless otherwise specified.

Saturday, February 16, 2019
10 AM-12 Noon
"Evolution of the Higher Consciousness: An In-Depth Study of H. P. Blavatsky's Teachings," chapter one review, by Anne.
Houston Lodge, Theosophical Society
1525 Heights Blvd. Houston, TX
Donation basis

  Schedule Anne

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Contact Anne to book your event:
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  Anne's Services

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Interested in getting ongoing support? Try life coaching with Anne. Anne offers both short-term and long-term coaching. Contact her for details. Click here to contact Anne by email or Click here to view information on Anne's One Year Seminar and other training too.

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