This is a first in a series that I am doing about 4 Questions to Ask to Facilitate Change.

Introduction

I had a fair amount of time over the last few days to think since I wasn’t feeling well and unable to go on my trip to Chicago. I started thinking about retreats I started taking back in the summer of 1985 on Friendship Island in Maine. The retreats were “empowerment workshops” for women led by one or two people from the therapeutic community and other holistic practitioners like massage therapists and healers. For several years I would spend one summer weekend on that island with no phones and no interruptions. They are memorable times.

Each workshop would start on a Friday night with a guided meditation that centered around 4 questions. The wording of the questions changed year to year depending upon the area in our lives being explored but in general they go like so.

1. Where am I in my life right now?
2. Where do I most want to be in my life?
3. What within me is in the way of getting to where I most want to be?
4. What do I need to get to where I want to be?

The beauty of these questions is that they can be worded to deal with a specific area in our lives or all encompassing when we feel that we are off the beam. They can be answered quickly to see what comes right to mind or meditated on to find that voice inside ourselves.

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One of the hardest things I’ve had to deal with living with a chronic illness is taking care of myself and making sure I get what I need.  Like some other people I’ve met I tend to put the needs of others before myself.  Unfortunately when I do that I end up with a flare-up with my fibromyalgia resulting in the inability to take care of myself or do for others.

It’s a reality I deal with and this week I tried to take care of business before going off to SOBCon, a conference featuring bloggers from all over the U.S.  I thought I was taking care of myself but the truth was I wasn’t listening to my body when it started aching more, I just pushed harder.  The result was a flare-up of the fibromyalgia that I was unprepared for and I had to cancel going to Chicago for the event. 

It was a hard decision to make and while I feel a bit better today, flying to Chicago would have been difficult at best and my worry was that I would have spent Saturday in bed rather than down at the conference listening to all the wonderful speakers (although I could have done like Ellen DeGeneres did last week and have my bed down in the conference room ).    It wasn’t easy to accept not going to Chicago.  I hate when I can’t do something I had planned.  The reality in life is that we don’t always get to do what we had planned, chronic illness or not.

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One of my reasons for starting ellen Living was to have a place to discuss more personal issues and topics and keep my Confessions of an Infomaniac centered more on technology and Internet topics. Well, here I am…what to talk about…oh, there is this post over at Monk at Work asking, What Would Make You a Better Person?  Thank you Adam for giving me a jumping off point.

Who am I?

The past few years I have retreated more and more into my own world and not socializing as much as I would like.  Some of my retreat is due to health issues, some of it due to settling into a rut of “comfortability” in my own small world.  I feel safe in my little world.  The problem is that I am not growing, changing and evolving.

Since 1990 I have lived with a chronic illness called fibromyalgia.  In 1993 I left my career of being Administration & Circulation Manager for a group of newspapers and tried to work part-time for a couple of people.  It didn’t work out very well back then.  What I really needed was to get my illness under control.  It took time.  I went back to school for a while and then started working again about 10 to 12 hours a week for a couple who understand my limitations. 

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