The Grass isn't always Greener on the Other Side!

The grass isn’t always greener on the other side!

If the grass looks greener on the other side then start tending to your own grass until it is vibrant and filled with radiance!  Why are you looking at other people's grass anyway when your attention could be focused on making yours amazing!

This week has been quite a week for me. Two children’s books released and snapped up by audio producers, a return to work after being signed off with Deep Vein Thrombosis and being able to see the world with a new perspective. It is funny how when you are immersed in routine that you live on automatic pilot. How often do you stop to take in your surroundings? How often do you stop and say actually I am living the perfect life for me? I would guess that it isn’t that often. Don’t you find it amazing that all your choices and decisions in life have resulted in where you are now? Those decisions must have been made because you felt your situation would improve… Am I correct? So why do people look at other people’s lives and wish they were them? Or wish they had their life? Why do we assume that life is greener on the other side?

A good example of the grass being greener was when I was at a rowing championship. I was staying in a cottage with a group of mothers (who were there for their children). They said to me they wished they could live my life: a life of freedom, creativity and working in business. I had never considered that people would look at my lifestyle from the outside and consider my grass was greener. I pointed out that in my opinion they had it pretty good. They all had wonderful husbands who provided for them and they had a family, lovely homes and all they needed. They had not had to work up a corporate ladder or find ways to enable numerous incomes. Instead they had had the opportunity to focus on nurture, bringing life into the world and they had the opportunity to do that in comfort rather than struggle. I had struggled, seriously struggled and there were times where I would have gladly been saved by an opportune prince. Unfortunately there was no prince making that showy arrival, so instead I realised my life was my responsibility and rather than waste time admiring people’s grass and wishing it was mine, I thought well how do I make my grass the greenest it can be? Since each person’s life is their responsibility and their grass state is representational of their life, then tending to one’s own grass is the best thing a person can do.

At this point I would like you to ask how you make your grass as green as it can be?  The thing is it isn’t just about having more or earning more money, it can quite simply be a shift of mental perspective. Just think that there are people out there who aspire to have the life you have. I know… It is a strange thought. The way I see it is if you have access to the internet and have the opportunity to read this blog then you are rich. You have the capacity to purchase the technology to be able to access the world. You have the funds to buy the tools. You are not sitting in a hovel digging through shit.

Through doing this evaluation, I realised that my life was good and worked perfectly for me. As much as those images of people living in huge luxurious mansions bombard us, I realised that actually I would feel very lonely residing in such a huge space. I would be like a pea rattling around a warehouse. My little apartment is perfect for me. It is peaceful, cosy and filled with an air of femininity. In truth it is beautiful, has turrets and is minimalist. So you might wave a mansion at me and I would smile and know that in terms of where I live my grass is very green.

 

It was a few years ago now that I saw through the big illusion. That illusion is fascinating – we are fed images of ideals in films and adverts. They are not real. We are shown images of the ideal bodies, yet we are all different. So why not love the body you have and treat it well? Don’t starve it, treat it to great nutrition and it is worth shifting perspective to consider food as medicine and building blocks for the body.  Find an exercise you love so that your body radiates with health. Blood moving around the body stops it stagnating. Finally money – we all chase money to be rich because everyone else wants to be rich. Yes money is a decorated piece of paper to accumulate but what if all that effort to accumulate results in devaluation? It happened to Cyprus and Iceland. So with that in mind, you can realise that actually what you want is the feeling of being rich and that comes from appreciating what you have. It is so simple.

The moment I realised I was rich was quite out of the blue. I stood on my paddleboard on a beautiful expanse of water. It was close to sunset and the clouds were decorated with pink and the reflection made heaven and earth one. I stood there in that moment and thought I couldn’t pay for this. This endless chase for money is ridiculous because it is continuous. When will you ever have enough? You know the answer to that... For me - beauty and true wealth comes from being immersed in the experience.

That moment on the paddleboard was when I realised I had stopped to smell the roses and seen the beauty in life. That beauty had not cost a thing – it was nature working its daily miracles. What was it that made me rich? It was the recognition and the feeling of a great connection with the planet. A feeling of great wealth rose up inside me. I series of pictures connected, as if there was a thread throughout my life. I saw the sequence of great moments of inspiration. It was then that I realised that my grass was as green as I wished to make it. I just needed to focus on the feeling of being wealthy with what I have because I have access to that whenever I wish. I also realised that the grass is not necessarily greener on the other side. Instead it is far better to focus on my own grass, tend to my own grass and then take it with me in the form of radiant turf!

I hope this inspires

Ruby Allure BOOKS ON AMAZON.COM - https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_ebooks_1?ie=UTF8&text=Ruby+Allure&search-alias=digital-text&field-author=Ruby+Allure&sort=relevancerank

Ruby Allure BOOKS ON AUDIBLE.COM
http://www.audible.com/search/ref=a_mn_mt_ano_tseft__galileo?advsearchKeywords=Ruby+Allure&x=0&y=0 

NEW RELEASE: TINGLE DINGLE AND THE LITTLE MISCHIEFS

 https://www.amazon.com/Tingle-Dingle-Little-Mischiefs-Allure-ebook/dp/B01G9C0XC2?ie=UTF8&keywords=Ruby%20Allure&qid=1465049617&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1

NEW RELEASE: THE HAIRY-LEGGED MYSTERY

https://www.amazon.com/Hairy-Legged-Mystery-Ruby-Allure-ebook/dp/B01G2C0Y9Q?ie=UTF8&qid=1465049724&ref_=sr_1_2&s=digital-text&sr=1-2

It is TIME for YOU TIME!

You Time…

 

Is it really that indulgent to have time by yourself? To spend time alone and allow yourself the time to process your life and your experiences?  The thing is life gains momentum and becomes busier and busier. There is more to experience, more to distract yourself with, more social media than you can shake a stick at and more on the to do list than can be ticked. No matter how tick-tastic you are there is always more ticks to be added to the list. This seems to be how life has become and amongst the endless treadmill of experience and things to do – when do you allow yourself to be bored or to simply dream.

 

 

It was over the last few months that I realised that I was running on the fastest speed of the mental treadmill. I worked full time, in the evenings I listened and edited my audio books whilst writing my next book, socialising, promoting and marketing. All of this gradually became overwhelming to the point where I was becoming moody. There were endless appointments coming in and I found myself booked up for three months. The prospect of that made me feel like crying. I had stopped enjoying being out with people, instead I just wanted to get it over and done with. In my moments between blogging, writing, promoting and doing spreadsheets I would manage to fit in a bit of nutrition. It then occurred to me that I was not the only person who was living a life like this. Most of my friends were. In addition, some had weddings to organise and children to juggle. They were all running at full speed through life.

 

 

Last week I went to a baby blessing, a lovely event out in the forest with my best friend. Towards the end of the picnic she turned to me with an expression that revealed she was ecstatic but worn out. She stared me in the eyes and said ‘I NEED A TWILIGHT SPA!’ she didn’t care how much it cost, but she simply needed five hours out of the endless race that she felt she was competing against herself in. Her desperate need for time out triggered something in me because by the end of that weekend I had listened to 30 hours of my audio books and by Monday I was just ‘done’. Even though I had achieved a monumental feat I was moody and grizzly. It was then that I realised that I had had enough. I needed quiet time and I needed to schedule it in. So where was there space? I looked at my diary and realised that evenings were filled. Work had to be produced and the only time I could make me time was from 6 in the morning until 7.30. It was then that I decided that me time involved doing something I loved. I needed to start the day with something that inspired me and took me out of my mind back into body.

 

 

After a bit of thinking I came to a conclusion and I began stand up paddle boarding before work. Sitting watching sunrise on the sea from a stand up paddleboard really puts everything in perspective. There you are in a vast natural open space bobbing about like a small cork. The act of stand up paddle boarding takes you out of your head and back into body. For the first time in ages I felt connected and not in a mental and physical churn. Admittedly many people consider getting up so early madness, yet it is what I needed. My state of mind has shifted from churn to calm and the generated anxiety has stopped turning up. Now, from a calm and removed perspective, I can see how many people need the space for them but never quite find the space. When you don’t have that space to process your thoughts and experience you find that you are on a slippery road to burn out. I could see that I was heading in that fiery direction. So today I wanted to write about the fact that finding space to come out of the mind and be in a physical space through yoga, meditation, paddle boarding or simply journaling has to be one of the best things for you. Otherwise one builds resentment and time, the new wealth, feels as though it flies by. So my question is why do so many think it is indulgent to have time for yourself…  Time to be with you because then you will have more to give others.

 

 

LINK TO MONEY FARM:

 http://www.audible.com.au/pd/Fiction/Money-Farm-Audiobook/B010BKZK5I

"Smartly Written, Thought Provoking Read!"

Narration - Helen Lloyd - Kick A$$!
Really Great Narration - Brits and Aussies and Germans and more. Lovely voice to listen to and she even captured the rather robotic nature of the cult-like members of the Money Farm.

This is a really terrific book - and is it bad that for the majority of the book I was thinking "sign me up!" (or at least sign up one of my grand-kids and let me move into one of the retirement neighborhoods).

The Money's are all 'their best selves' due to the nutrition and fitness requirements along with a few other treatments along the way which are tailored to each individual and allow them to reach their full potential. All their needs are met, they have no debts, no worries, they are appreciated and they all live in really nice digs. (like I said...sign me up!)

It's a smartly written and thought provoking book of a Dystopian/Eutopian society where our heroine Jyllian finds her-self jobless with her savings running out. She ends up being selected to join the M.O.N.E.Y.'s as a "breaker" because of her intelligent & rebellious way of thinking. She is to challenge their systems and find ways to break them, all in the name of making them better.

The story follows her and a few other select characters through their introduction to Money, their training, their indoctrination and ultimately through their discovery of what Money's goals really are.

I can't really say much more without giving away too much, but I thought it was a really terrific book. It was hard for me to 'get into it' in the beginning, but I plan to listen to the start again.

It's smartly written and filled with intricate details about these two "worlds". Really an interesting book about the state of the worlds finances! Loved it! I'm actually stunned that I'm only the second review of this book on Goodreads. READ or LISTEN to it! It's a keeper!

I received a copy of this audiobook free of charge from Audiobookblast in exchange for an unbiased review.