How Ballooning is Amping It Up

nobody@vox.com(Amp It Up!) — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 15:41:26 -0700

March 28th is my birthday (national holiday, everybody take the day off). My boyfriend Michael wanted to give me an experience for my birthday rather than a thing, because he knows that I'm creating the rich life of my dreams, and outrageous experiences are really fundamental to that. But I'm even more fortunate because Michael is a maximizer. He tries to get the most out of every experience, and I've seen him accomplish it over and over because he's willing to ask for more. Here's how he maximized this experience for me.

After donning gloves and helping to hold the balloon open as it filled with air, we jumped into the basket and took off at sunset. We rose 4,000 feet into the air and gently drifted over the Savannah River. After some conversation about the sights below, Michael reached into a gym bag he'd brought along with him, and pulled out an excellent bottle of pinot noir we'd been saving for a special occasion. He popped the cork and poured me a glass, and we sipped and sailed silently over the forested lands below. It was magical.

As it came closer to the time to land, our balloon pilot slowly let us drift toward the ground. As you may know, balloonist cannot control the forward motion of their balloons, so the landing location is usually a surprise. Our pilot's balloon chasers were ready, though, and they followed us as we drifted closer and closer to the tops of the trees. At first we thought we might make the golf course, but that didn't work out. And then it was a cul-de-sac in the neighborhood next door, but there was a tall pole there that might have damaged the balloon. Finally, with our basket brushing through the trees, we landed safely and exactly in someone's back yard.

Because we'd been so low for so long, children were waving at us from the ground, and when we landed, whole families drove up and piled out of their cars, having followed us to our landing spot. When Michael saw the crowd, he informed them all that it was my birthday, and asked them to sing Happy Birthday to me. Which they did.

Now, that's getting the most out of a situation. That's amping it up! I'm learning this trick from Michael: don't accept the ordinary, when the extraordinary could just be a question away.

Wishing you every possibility!

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Choosing the Right Cold Meditation

nobody@vox.com(Amp It Up!) — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 07:30:51 -0800

Yes, you read that right. The title of this post was a headline in my local community newspaper recently. The article itself was about cold medications, but the head of the person doing the page layout was somewhere else.

Or maybe not. Because a lot of the advice in the column, which was indeed about medication, still applies to meditating. Meditation is a powerful tool in amplifying possibility into reality. If you're stuck on your way to your goals, feeling like you've got a virus in your belief system, you might try some of the following suggestions from the column (with a dose of my editing):

• Treat individual symptoms with single-ingredient meditations. Narrow, focused meditations are often better than the "one-med-fits-all" approach. The doses in a combo meditation may be too potent for mild symptoms, or not strong enough for severe symptoms. With focus, you can better control the dosage.

• Choose the right meditation for the right symptom. Are you trying to energize yourself, or shift gears? Do you need healing, or calming? Are you afraid, or pissed off? Understanding the root cause of your symptoms will help you to better focus your meditation.

• Go ahead and use more than one meditation if you're experiencing more than one symptom. Luckily for us, there aren't a lot of side effects to doing multiple meditations. Just be sure that your meditation doses don't get so large that they begin to interfere with your ability to act.

• Check with an expert if you have questions. It's okay to not know what ails you. Seek the advice of someone you trust if you need help sorting out your thinking.

And remember, some meditations may cause drowsiness, but a little nap might be just the thing your brain needs to make sense of it all.

Wishing you every possibility!

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