Health Harmony & Happiness with Cathy

#87: Finding Harmony in Life's Unexpected Challenges

• Cathy Struecker • Season 3 • Episode 87

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In the midst of Libra season, I felt it fitting to dive into the concept of harmony in unexpected moments. Join me as I share a humorous story that involves a late-night trip to the bathroom and offer insights on finding balance even when life throws surprises your way. Discover how to maintain harmony in your life, no matter the challenges.

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Resources:
Daily Rhythms Tracker

More Episodes Like This One:
#84:  Harmony Within:  Exploring the Body-Mind Bridge
#68: How to Make Transitions Effortless, Part 1
#69 Three Essentials to Make Transitions Effortless, Part 2

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Speaker 1:

What does stepping or sitting in pee in the middle of the night on your sleepy bathroom trip have to do with harmony? Well, you'll find out in this episode. Welcome to help harmony and happiness with Kathy. I'm your host, kathy Stricker. I'm a state patrol wife, mama to three lively kiddos, a yoga teacher, certified NLP coach and an energetic rhythms expert. As an energetic rhythms coach, I help action-taking women use their body's rhythms and the moon's cycle to optimize productivity and avoid burnout, without letting their desire to remain in control alter their focus. And this podcast is all about doing just that, and Perhaps a bit more, so that you can create your own path to health, harmony and happiness. So come along with me, and may this episode serve as a nudge to discover tools that could help you on your path towards more intentional living. Enjoy the show.

Speaker 1:

Hey friends, welcome to episode 87. I am so grateful that you are here. I've got a little funny story that I'm going to share with you today, and then we're gonna bring it all together and talk about Harmony and what happens when harmony is disrupted in our lives. Yesterday, I dodged, sat in or cleaned up pee on or around the toilet three times within the span of 12 hours and One of those times was in the middle of the night. Not fun, my friends, I realized. For some of you this may be a regular thing and I just have to say, if this is your house on the regular, I am so sorry. It stinks because it is absolutely no fun and, oh my goodness, I am so grateful that my husband has played a major role in making sure that this is not a regular occurrence in our house. But for those of you who experience this regularly man, I empathize with you and I get it, and it stinks With three young kids. You would think this might be a normal occurrence in our house, but it's really not. My husband has done a wonderful job teaching and communicating the importance of being Considerate of others when using the bathroom in the middle of the night to our son. Praise God for that, and and typically this just hasn't been much of a problem with the girls, except for the occasional preschooler mishap. But that's to be expected. But yesterday was the exception. Keep in mind that everybody in our house at this point in time is fully potty trained. Even after spending a day at the soccer fields and using kybos all afternoon I didn't encounter the pee splashes or flat-out misses. That I did in our home yesterday and last night and there's nothing that breaks up the harmony of a pleasant Sunday afternoon or middle of the night eyes nearly closed, no lights on trip to the bathroom like sitting in or stepping in pee with bare feet or socks on Truly a nuisance. I'm gonna get back to that story and bring it back around in the end, but for now let's move on.

Speaker 1:

We're in Libra season, which is all about harmony, and that means that we might feel a pull to bring things into harmony in our lives or simply become aware of where things are out of harmony personally or around us. Either way, it's a time when balance is the center focus. I like to think of harmony as things working together in tandem to balance each other out and create flow. But when flow is disrupted, it has the potential to throw a whole day, month or year off. Imagine when you were a kid, or even when your own kids now build a dam with sticks or rocks in a stream of water on a rainy day. This happens quite a lot at our house because we have a great puddle and place that water likes to stream to and pool. So it happens pretty frequently that when it rains, kids are out digging in the mud or digging in the gravel, building dams and creating new streams. So grab this image in your mind of yourself when you were a kid or any kid building a dam with sticks or rocks in a stream of water. On a rainy day, the water's fastest path to wherever it's going is thrown off and it has to find a different way. It either gets stuck and fills a small pond or lake and, when the pressure builds enough, floods over the dam, creating destruction and chaos, or it simply goes around the sticks and rocks placed in front of it with ease and curiosity, winding and finding a new path. Either way, it's seeking harmony and flow, but has to get through the obstruction placed in front of it. First. It might be perfectly content in the pond or lake that's created behind the dam, but if the rain keeps coming and the pressure keeps building, eventually change has to happen. That pressure has to be released.

Speaker 1:

Disrupted harmony is kind of like being stuck. You've likely experienced this stuck feeling in life I know I have and usually it happens when one element or quality is out of balance, out of harmony. We talked a bit about harmony in the last episode. Check that one out when this one's over, if you haven't already. I want to expand a bit more on harmony here today, because when harmony is disrupted in your life, it can be hard to find it again unless you can identify what is out of balance. What are the sticks and rocks that are creating the dam in your stream of flow and causing water pressure to build up and stay stuck. Once you identify those things, you have to have the courage to take the steps to make the changes so that it can come back into balance. And for some that might be the hardest part, because this is the part that often requires a habit change, and changing habits can be tough. Transitions can be tough there's a few episodes about that in the podcast as well but it comes down to mindset and a bit of motivation.

Speaker 1:

Harmony can be a bit of a paradox, like we talked about last week, with two seemingly opposite things working together at the same time, but it can also be thought of as the whole process of flowing. We see this harmony modeled to us in God's love for us. His power and compassion communicates that we need these two seemingly different, yet really not so different qualities in our interactions with others and with ourselves. The journey is in finding the balance in them. It's what you do, or maybe don't do. In order to create that harmony, power and compassion, work and rest, giving and receiving, inhaling and exhaling. Masculine and feminine, solar and lunar. We need both parts of all of these dichotomies to flow.

Speaker 1:

Too much of only one and our rhythms will be off and harmony disrupted. You might even say it feels like chaos ensues, kinda like when the water spills over the dam. The first step is awareness, right, so identify what is out of balance and it will lead you to what is causing the dam or the stuck feeling. This can often be done by observing the messages from your body, even noticing which side left or right feels more dominant, or where the rhythm of your body feels off, with aches, pains, tension or even your breath. Often these can be identified in the regular practices that you do that maybe feel off or just don't happen like they have in the past. Perhaps it's your yoga practice, perhaps it's your workouts, perhaps it's just the sluggish feeling that you can't get off the couch to do something that you want to do. Those are the messages from your body. Then you have to notice the thoughts around these messages and choose to take captive the thoughts that aren't serving you or that are keeping you stuck. Find your situation and ask what positive thing is trying to come from this, or maybe what else could this mean, or what mindset would serve me better?

Speaker 1:

But then comes the hard part of actually doing the work to align with how you want to feel, to align with the harmony you want to create or have in your life, and that takes courage, motivation and change. For this sort of thing, I invite God to the party because, well, I believe the energetic power of the Great Spirit is the positive source of all creation and it is the desire or goal of this energy working through and in us to be living in harmony, as we were in the beginning when creation came about. So how does this relate to me having to clean up P and sitting in P in the middle of the night? Well, it's the little things like that that we can get hung up on. Well, it's the little things like that that we can get hung up on if we're not mindful and don't take the right actions to keep us moving forward. They instead have the potential to keep us stuck brooding over the past and living with a sour attitude. Is it gross and annoying to have to clean my leg off in the middle of the night? Was it gross and annoying to have to clean my leg off in the middle of the night? Yep, but why let that ruin the flow or harmony I'm seeking in life by dwelling on it?

Speaker 1:

Harmony is about not forcing, instead finding the rhythm of life and steering through a round or over the rocks that show up.

Speaker 1:

It's remembering the past but not holding too tight to it, while also looking forward at our potential and moving in the direction you want to go.

Speaker 1:

It's surrender and action, forgiveness and ownership, empowerment and restraint and the understanding that we can indeed find balance in all of them, seeking harmony even when the chaos of life tries to slow us down. So here's my invitation to you this week Notice where things feel a bit out of harmony with your life this week, whether it's in your physical body, your thoughts or your emotions. Just notice them. Then dive deeper into what's underneath that imbalance, and an excellent tool to use to help you with this is the Daily Rhythms Tracker. I'm going to drop a link in the description and in the show notes of this episode so you can easily grab that if you haven't already. If you have used the Daily Rhythms Tracker in the past, maybe this is a time to revisit it, to get back into a rhythm of using it so that you can find what's out of balance and begin to move towards harmony and come back into flow and into balance. Until next time, I'm Kathy Stricker, helping you find and use the rhythms in and around you to cultivate greater health, harmony and happiness. Cheers.