Welcome

We all get busy, confused, lost, stuck. We all get sucked in by fear. We all get confused by the distracting chatter in our heads. But the people I know don’t want to live that way. We want:

• life to be as simple as possible, and as meaningful as possible
• to leave the world a little better than we found it
• to remember what really matters, and focus on that
• to live aligned with what we truly believe
• to realize the dreams we have for ourselves and for the world

Sophia’s House provides resources to help you do just that, with writing, classes, tools and inspiration to support you in living a more authentic, balanced, compassionate life.

Love,

Tara Sophia Mohr

Four Questions. Is It That Simple?

What would it look like to create your life around these four questions:

1. What do I love?
2. Who do I love?
3. What do I need to take care of myself?
4. What contribution do I want to make?

What if it’s a simple as this?

1. What do I love? What activities give me joy? What kinds of moments fill me up with meaning and rightness and good feelings? What do I love most in life? What does it look like to do those things?
2. Who do I love? Who are the most important people in my life? What does it look like to give those relationships the time and energy and quality attention and nurturing that I want to give them?
3. What do I need to take care of myself? Physically? Financially? Emotionally?
4. What contribution do I want to make? What do I want my legacy to be? What is required to make that a reality? What does it look like to get working on that project now?

What would it look like to build your life, your schedule, your commitments around your answers to these four questions?

What is currently cluttering your life –taking your time and energy though they have nothing to do with what really matters to you?

What if it’s as simple as this?

What do you think? Did I miss something important here? Let me know.

Love,

Tara

The Very Simple Way to Enrich Your Holidays

Over the next few days, most of us will be spending time in holiday mode – visiting family, maybe seeing old friends, and bringing in the New Year.

I want to share with you one, powerful, very simple practice that has dramatically transformed my holiday experiences: setting an intention.

What do you want for your holiday experience this year? Set that as your intention.

Ideas for Intention

Here are just a few examples of holiday intentions that have brought me delight, meaning, and a sense of peace over the past few years:

• Communicate honestly.
• Really share in conversations. Talk about the real stuff.
• Take time for myself and take care of myself.
• Keep it light. Bring humor into the room.
• Be surprised. See something new in each person.
• Express love.

Intentions are at the heart of our own power to create the lives we want. For me, holding an intention creates a much more alive, exciting experience. It gives me something interesting to be “up to” – no matter what else is going on. It puts me in meaningful relationship with myself, not just with those around me.

Holding an intention brings many other benefits as well. It gives me an anchor point to keep returning to. I’m not floating around, moving according to everyone else’s currents. If I’m open to it, I learn a lot about myself as I’m trying to put my intention into action: Where do I get stuck? What gets in my way? What makes it easy? Sometimes, my intention and the actions that flow from it truly begin to transform relationships. Not bad for an activity that takes less than five minutes.

Guidelines for Setting Holiday Intentions

1. Intentions are helpful only when they relate to areas in which you have power. They are not about what other people do. “Aunt Lulu and Mom will get along great” isn’t an intention. It’s a wish (or maybe a fantasy). “Aunt Lulu and I will get along great” isn’t going to be helpful either, as you aren’t in control of whether she’s getting along with you.

Something like, “My intention is to appreciate the things that are amazing about Aunt Lulu” could really open up and enrich your experience. “My intention is to not take Aunt Lulu’s comments personally” might also be a good one…depending on the situation.

2. An intention is touchstone, not a test. You might forget your intention entirely for a while. You might find yourself doing something in direct opposition to it. No big deal. This isn’t about being good or bad, doing it or not doing it. It is about having a support that serves you, especially in getting back on track in alignment with your values, your aspirations, who you really are.

3. It can be helpful to create a reminder of your intention. Write it down somewhere where you see it regularly, or send yourself and email about it and leave it in your inbox so you see it regularly. Or, let a physical object that you use regularly become a symbol of it. (This can be a piece of jewelry, a scarf, a small something you can carry in you pocket). You’ll be reminded of your intention whenever you see or touch it.

The big point here? Each of us has huge power in determining the quality of our holiday experience. In the midst of taxing travel, entrenched family dynamics, and long-standing traditions, that can be hard to remember. Our real power lies not in changing anything outside of us, but in how we live with ourselves, what we create from ourselves. It lies in what we do, through our own actions, in our own minds and hearts.

Love,

Tara

Are You Wasting Your Energy?

New Year’s is coming up, and with it, all that “resolution” stuff. Most of us start out the year excited about our goals and then, somewhere along the way, we lose steam. Our goals end up unfulfilled, and we feel flakey….un-disciplined…not powerful.

I don’t want you to go through that his year. This post is about one way to keep that from happening. Listen to the results of this recent study: When conference attendants were presented with meat as the default option for a meal, only ~15% of individuals opted for the alternative vegetarian option. When presented with the vegetarian meal as the default, only 17% opted for the meat alternative. Both times, most people did not choose their meal preference. They chose the default option.

We see ourselves as rational decisions makers – making choices based on logic or preference. The truth is, we often roll along with the “default option” in our lives.

Then we try to work against the default and form new habits. Let’s say your default is stopping for a quick and unhealthy lunch at the deli across from work. You try to re-orient around cooking healthy food at home in advance. But stopping for healthy food is more work and it’s unfamiliar. Pretty soon, you are likely to run out of steam. When life gets hectic, other priorities will certainly take precedence. And now you are beating yourself up: you’ve failed, you’ve flaked etc. You’ve wasted a lot of energy: the inspiration and effort you spent as you worked toward the goal, and the energy spent thinking not so nice thoughts about your track record.

Instead, here’s my request: use the default principle to your advantage. Structure you life so that your goals are as aligned as possible with the “default settings” in your life.

How? Do the work up front, in life planning and design, so that your most important actions and commitments occur like water flowing downhill –not like water trying to find a way uphill. This is particularly vital if you have a busy, demanding, often overfull life. You won’t always have time or energy to push against the current.

What does this look like in practical terms?

• If you want to exercise regularly, make a recurring appointment with a friend to do so. In fact if you want to do anything regularly, see how you can get social forces adding weight toward doing the new thing, not the old thing
• If you want to save money, get the auto-deduction going.
• If you want to eat more healthily, only keep the healthy stuff in your house.
• If you want to have more of anything in your life, put it in your calendar on an ongoing basis. This includes things you might not think to schedule like sleep, reflection time, quality time with loved ones, or doing nothing time.
• Wherever you can, look ways to have accountability with someone who is a powerful and loving champion for your goal.

For anything you want, ask yourself, how do I make this the default setting in my life? How do I make it like water flowing downhill?

Here’s how you know when something is the default: it’s more work/discomfort not to do it than to do it. It’s more work to cancel the exercise date than to just go.

But, you say, my goal is to become a professional sky-diver. How do I make that the default? In some cases you’ll need to identify the steps you need to take to make your goal happen and make doing those steps the default setting in your life.

We might call this approach “riding the wave of your own inertia” all the way to what you want. But at heart, I care about it not because it’s a cool “achieve your goals” kinda tip, but because it really is about being kind to yourself. I mean think about it: what if your primary responsibility with your aspirations was not to strive and throw time and effort at them but to carefully set yourself up for success without struggle?

Action: Pick one important goal and brainstorm: what is one way to make it (or the steps toward it) the “default setting” in my life? You can ask a buddy to help you think it through if you want. And leave it as a comment below if you’d like to share.

Love,

Tara