photo credit Maggi Helga

There’s a part of you that always knew. People may have believed that you were a blank slate, innocent in the ways of the world and uneducated about yourself, but still — you knew. You always knew, even when you began to question if your perceptions were real, along with your tastes and preferences. You knew, deep down, who you were, even when you started to compare yourself to others and judge what was right and wrong and what was OK or unacceptable. You began to listen to the people around you and to doubt. But you knew. You always knew what made you strong and happy within yourself.

And you still know. Somewhere, inside of you, is the original blueprint — what you know you need in order to feel authentic. Find it again. Retrieve the essence of the soul that came into being with your birth and nurture it. Ask the questions that bring you back to you.

Most of us spend our lifetime unaware of who we really are and thus never get to enjoy that person. You can remember what you already know, and go there.

It’s never too late.

We just saw another excellent film through the Sedona Film Festival Series called The Music Never Stopped. It was adapted from Oliver Sacks’ case study, “The Last Hippie” and is the true story of a young man who, due to traumatic brain injury, is caught up in his memories of 1968. The movie explores the strained relationship between father and son, and the work of a music therapist who uses the man’s tie to the music of that time to enable him to move into the future. The film works on many levels and above all, you’ll walk away with the reminder to appreciate what you have because you never know just how long you’ll have it.

My ”oldest” friend (since we were three), Sue, came out west this week and we had fun visiting and scrapbooking. Our theme this year was elementary school in the 50′s.

Ah yes…those were the days…

My new class is ready to go! If you live in the Sedona, AZ area, register with OLLI for the April 11th start-date.

Written by Lu Stitt

Friday, 25 March 2011 00:00

+ Tom Hood/Larson Newspapers Preserving memories is something everyone wants to do — to keep those bits and pieces of a life well lived preserved for coming generations. If that is true, then why do most of us just toss the items in a box and stick it under the bed or in the back of the closet? “Oftentimes, people just don’t know how best to put those items together in some type of organization,” Sunny Schlenger said. “There are many ways to create your personal legacy.” Schlenger teaches a class through Yavapai College’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute to help people create and preserve their life story using the memorabilia, photographs and writings they’ve kept piled together in a box. The first step, she said, is organizing. “It doesn’t have to be done all at once. You can even start with one photograph and write a description about it and why it is important to you,” Schlenger said. Schlenger has written two books on organization. After her parents died, she inherited a large number of pictures and collected items from several years of saving. “Some [organizing skills] I knew and some I didn’t. I started scrapbooking about the same time and found I had to find things first, then organize them,” Schlenger said opening the book she made. “I decided I wouldn’t just pass along a box of unmarked ‘stuff’ to my kids.” From that decided statement, Schlenger came up with an idea of how to put her life into a book, then the idea for a class began to surface to help others do the same. “In my class you take one photograph and write about it, focusing on the positive. You ask questions of why and how this item is important. Include what memories and feelings are associated with the photograph and why. If we take it a step further, we can create pages from an era, like the 1960s or one year,” Schlenger said. Other ideas for organization are by people, family or events. It can be very basic, like a photograph and information about the people pictured. This is done most often with very old photographs of an ancestor. Creating a personal legacy is not just about remembering the past. It’s paying attention to the present and passing the stories along. “I want my kids to know what life was like for me on March 8, 2011. You can go from very general, like who is my family, to what I did yesterday,” Schlenger said. She starts by asking the question, “If you were gone tomorrow, what would you want others to know about you and the life you lived?” She said it is like an African proverb she likes to quote: “When an elder dies, it is as if an entire library burned down.” What Schlenger and the people in the class will do is keep it simple and specific to the individual. Every person’s life is different, even if the experiences are similar. Many people crossing the American plains and prairies in the 1800s to find a better life in the West bore some of the same hardships, but the journals they wrote were all different. “History books were written from people’s writings, how they saw what was happening. We all have a history that is worth telling. It helps us to see our purpose in life — why we are here,” Schlenger said. “It also helps us revisit those most treasured moments of our lives.” Creating a personal legacy can be like a treasure hunt to discover those bits and pieces, and why they have been kept as cherished possessions. “It helps connect us to ourselves and to each other. You can approach this from any angle,” Schlenger said as she opened several books on a table to demonstrate the different approaches she has used with her own legacy project. “It’s a lifelong process you can start at any age.” She said virtually everyone who comes to the class walks in the door with a tub full of photographs and collected items, and wants to organize them somehow. “Where should I put this item?” is a big question for most people, Schlenger said. “I want to help get people where they are and bring them into the perspective of their life as a story. I encourage people to write about their lives and having an item to write about helps,” she said. “I think this is part of my mission, to help people record their own lives.” The class is also designed to help people understand what is important in their life, what is worth keeping, and how, with a deep breath, to blow the rest away. “People need to record their lives, and not be just a name on a family tree or three paragraphs in a newspaper obituary. It’s a way to reclaim your life and have something to pass along,” Schlenger said. Schlenger is the author of “How to Be Organized in Spite of Yourself” and “Organizing for the Spirit.” She received a bachelor’s degree in social and behavioral sciences from Johns Hopkins University and a master’s in counseling from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Schlenger has lived in the Village of Oak Creek since 2007. Creating Your Personal Legacy will be taught for five weeks beginning Monday, April 11, from 10:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. in Room 39 of Yavapai College Sedona Campus, 4215 Arts Village Drive in West Sedona. For more information, call 649-4266.

This one was especially fun! I joined in with Jamie Ridler’s Dreamboard group and really benefited from the telecircle and questions she had us ask ourselves about our board. It seems that I have an abundance of  “flight” images this month (birds, feathers, eggs, nests, wings); I even have a winged donkey.  These feel like very positive images for me now, as I’m launching some new product ideas (although I’m not too sure about the donkey .

courtesy of stashabella

I’ve been away from the blog for awhile, but there have been a lot of good things happening! It’s time to catch up.

In honor of my late mother-in-law’s birthday today, and the 7th anniversary of my dad’s passing, I’d like to share this short final chapter from Organizing for The Spirit:

A man of ritual, routine, and regularity, my father opened my biweekly email newsletters at precisely 11:00 on Saturday mornings. It didn’t matter that he had been up since 5:00 or that I usually sent them before 10:00; his time to check his mail was 11:00. Period.

My dad passed away suddenly on May 7, 2003. Fortunately, I was with him, in town to help my folks out after my mother’s mild stroke three weeks previous. Even though he had survived a massive heart attack twenty-two years before and four subsequent cardiac arrests, it came as a shock that it was finally his time to go.

As I contemplated writing my next newsletter, I didn’t know how to deal with the fact that my father wouldn’t be sitting at his computer, ready to read it, ever again. But a wise friend told me to write it anyway,  because my dad would still receive it – he would simply be at another address.

My dad was a complex and stubborn man, and that’s probably what kept him alive for so many extra years. He insisted on things being done his way, and only his way, but after his attack he left an impressive legacy of public service through his twenty-two years of volunteer work for many organizations.

The night before the funeral, I lay awake, wondering what exactly I could contribute for my part of the eulogy. My husband told me not to worry, that somehow my dad would “tell” me what to say. The next morning, my mother came to me with an envelope that she had taken from the back of her desk drawer. It read, “To Be Opened Upon My Demise” and was signed by my father. “I knew this was there,” she told me, “but I have no idea when he wrote it.” We opened the envelope, which contained one sheet of paper, with but a single sentence written on it, summing up what he believed to be the purpose of his life.

As my father demonstrated to me, “Organizing for the Spirit” means to become who you really are – to discover what makes you unique and personally powerful so that you can experience the joy of living and sharing your gifts with others. Organizing for the Spirit is a lifelong process of discovery and self-development, and the ultimate personal adventure. As my dad wrote in his final message: “To leave the world a bit better – to know that a life has been changed because you were there – this is to have succeeded.”

It is never too late to become who you are meant to be.

Very interesting weather we’re having but it seems that all’s well that ends well.

And that’s enough winter for me.

If you’re looking for some new, life-affirming DVDs to help raise your spirits during the grey days, I’d like to recommend Infinity and The Shift. They’ll make you think, and feel good.

My friend Nancy Whitney-Reiter has written another information-packed book (Do What You Love) on the art and science of achieving success — the kind of success that’s “not of a summit you reach after a lifetime of climbing, but a feeling you experience daily when you’re doing what you love.” Utilizing interviews compiled during a seven-year study on successful career change, along with her own experiences, Nancy has demonstrated that change is something to be embraced, not feared, and that the journey toward your dream job is the road you’re truly supposed to be traveling.

This is an excellent book on the subject, and one that I was pleased to have been asked to contribute to.