Choose your Life

I am grateful because I have a small family My friend is grateful because she has a large family I am grateful because I have a small house my friend is grateful because she has a large house I am grateful because my two children are doing very well. My friend is grateful because 4 of her 9 children are doing very well. I am grateful because usual Sunday I meet a friend for lunch. My friend is grateful because on a usual Sunday there are at least 10 for lunch. I am grateful because I don’t own a car. My friend is grateful because her car sits 8. I am grateful because I have found joy in my life. My friend is grateful because she always had joy in her life. I am grateful because I have a simple life. My friend is grateful because her life is full. Choose your life. But be grateful for it .

Let All the Negative dissolve

A wonderful article on the benefits of yoga to make your life happier.

Science tells us to be happy

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/19/opinion/happiness-success-achor/index.html

Granny glASSES IS LEAVING THIS PAGE BECAUSE i CANNOT GET COMMENTS HERE . pLEASE LOOK FOR US changingthegrannyglasses.wordpress.com

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame.html a very powerful talk and a true prespective on how we need to change the way we look at ourselves.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/just-a-spoonful-of-cinnamon-makes-the-internet-rounds.html Ok so during grannys time toast and cinnamon was medicine for when you felt bad. The warm bread, butter, sugar and cinnamon and then a good sleep... next day everything was good again... The good old times. Sometimes granny s world is just so appealing.

Back again

Sorry to my readers and followers. For some unknown reason, at least to me, my blog was blocked for some days and I have not been able to post. But everything is back to normal and I will post again as often as possible. Please send me your comments. If not here to my email mercedescue@gmail. Would love to hear from you.

The power of a creative mind

No water in my house today due to construction problems in the area. OH oh how inconvenient. Not so, a few days ago ago I learned how to make Mexican tortillas the traditional way. This requires water. Today, i tweeked the recipe.. And I discovered a new mexican tortilla... hahahahhaha a happy moment.

THERE IS NO TREE THAT HAS NOT BEEN SHAKEN BY THE WIND (Hindu proverb)

changing the granny glasses: Join us

changing the granny glasses: Join us: Changing the granny glasses is a multicultural, multilingual site hoping to connect people who see a change in the way we look at the world....

Join us

Changing the granny glasses is a multicultural, multilingual site hoping to connect people who see a change in the way we look at the world. Comments, likes, dislikes are welcomed . As are all types of discussions. The world is interconnected and we want to be a part of it. Old, young, married, single. of all races and cultures. We want to know what is on your mind. This medium has Power and we want to use it. We can help old people be more connected, young people help the older generations effectively. This is the moment to share your ideas because if you don’t everyone will be in tough bind. Thanks for joining us.

Face the Fear

Some of us are people pleasers. I have devised a way to help turn this characteristic into a motivational strength. When I am faced with something I need to do, but fear paralyzes me, I make it into a challenge by writing down what I need to do and when I am going to accomplish it. Then, the motivational trick is to share it with someone I trust will encourage me to go for it. It's important to choose that person carefully. It doesn’t have to be your best friend, your significant other, or your mother, although it could be. I have found it most effective when it is someone who shares the problem of paralyzing fear with you simply because they will understand how difficult is has been to make this commitment. Choose someone you don’t want to let down and don't take it lightly. In other words you want to see that they are pleased that you did this. Don't expect any reward from them at all. The reward comes from having done it, faced the fear and shared it with someone, who upon having seen you do it, will have the force to do it themselves. It is a win-win situation which promotes happy habits. Eventually , with practice the fear will subside.

Heightened Awareness

Yesterday I was walking down a busy street in the center of Barcelona where I live. It was after my yoga class and I was feeling the heightened awareness that comes from practicing yoga. The day was sunny and spring like and the street bustling with the usual cars and motorcycles,bicycle riders,shoppers, tourists, and people rushing to a destination to which they must arrive at a predetermined time . Presumably, this latter group was going to work. Then in the midst of this group , I saw her. I believe this is the first time I have ever seen this. I stared at her. Yes I did. I stood there and stared at her, but not to worry, believe me when I tell you that she did not notice me. How could she? In her face and body language I could sense that her attention dispersed in her incredible multitasking could not handle any more . I didn’t stare at her out of contempt or disapproval but out of astonishment and disbelief. Have we really come to this? Are moments in our life not important enough with one single activity? Do we always have to multitask? Is this how we have come to believe that we are leading productive and fulfilling lives? The woman was breastfeeding her baby while walking very quickly to her destination. Luckily I suppose for her , no one else on the street seem to take much notice of her. They were all rushing about also involved in their individual multitasking, I assume. For me, she became an image of self revelation. I believe in slowing down and noticing the moments of life which stand out by their very nature to bring peace and heartfelt sincerity. To me , it is a matter of bringing value to life itself, not just overbooking.

Haruki Murakami

I started to read some of excerpts of his books today. Next step is to Amazon Uk.

Change your thoughts, change your mood

Today I am offering you an interesting exercise for you to try. Everyday, write one sentence of the top of your head about how you feel about someone, something or a circumstance. Then look at the words carefully. If there are any negative words, change them to positives. If there is any "should", challenge it. Should you really? Rewrite the sentence (just one) in a different way and see what happens to your mood. By doing this everyday we can actually form a new habit of how we look at our life events.

When the trunk of the tree is crooked the branches cannot grow correctly.

In the last few days I have been taking Iyangar yoga classes. This branch of yoga was recommended to me by a dear friend,a psychoanalyst by training and a practitioner of Iyangar yoga for over 30 years..What always amazed me about him, is his calmness, good humor and spiritual deepness. He makes everyone feel comfortable and calm, initially. Once you get to know him, you realize the depth of this man but without the emotional turbulence that often accompanies this openness to delve into the unconscious.

I am determined to get to the root of my problems, my suffering and unhappiness. Many times, I have asked myself why is it so hard for me. I have felt guilty, in many ways realizing that in the grand scope of things, I have no reason to be unhappy. Mostly, I have looked for a way out of that unhappiness.... and in my case, the guilt associated with it.

Through Iyangar yoga, I think I found the root of the problem. I ve tried other yogas before which were great but nothing like this. The wikipidia defines iIyangar yoga like this,” [It} is characterized by precise attention to detail and precise focus on body alignment. Iyengar pioneered the use of "props" such as cushions, benches, blocks, straps and sand bags, which function as aids allowing beginners to experience asanas more easily and fully than might not otherwise be possible without years of practice.” “ It is a slow, intense yoga, by the way, recommended for everyone including grannies. My experience is anything but slow. After just a few classes, my body changed. The tension I have been carrying all these years in my body is beginning to release. I am in tune with my own mind body connection. I have stopped working on the mind and body as separate from each other, and the result is more than I had imagined.

I am sure you are thinking, yes well we all know this. You are right. I thought I knew it too and I was doing everything possible to make myself, better, happier, more fulfilled. Thanks, my friend, you have shown me a new path and I am loving it .

Love and Happiness

Here is a excerpt from the Scientific American that a friend of mine posted on facebook.

“What of happiness? Can a relationship lead to happiness? Certainly, it can. Yet the survey suggests that taking care of your own happiness may also be important. Personal happiness was associated with intensity of love, especially for women. In other words, one may think that tending to one’s own well-being through a night out with friends or time at the gym is selfish, but taking responsibility for one’s own happiness has the potential to drastically improve the quality of our relationship. Of course, being intensely in love may also be contributing to the happiness observed. “


I seem to be caught up in a personal dichotomy, which I am I'm sure I share with many others. In my granny glasses, what I expected was that when I found somebody to love, loved happened After the initial hunt and chase to get your loved one, you took care of someone. You met a boy, you got married, and you had children. You took care of them by giving of yourself every day to them. This was not an issue for me. I liked to do that.

What the boys expected was different. They got a job, worked hard, made money became successful and by taking care of themselves, they took care of the wife and family they also had.

Everyone had a clearly defined role. Everyone knew what to expect. But then something happened. Girls didn’t learn to cook and sew, they ventured into what the men were doing. They studied law and economics, got MBA' s and PhD's. They started to go out into the world to work and slowly through the following generations showed everyone that they were just as good as the boys in making money and becoming successful. Hurray, I like this idea too.

Many boys liked this idea too. But I think it was harder for them, and I think with good reason. So no, I am not going to trash men. On the one hand, their girlfriends, wives, mothers became “interesting people.” At the risk of not being politically correct one more time, I am not going to go into all that. What I do want to say and I offer it as something to think about is this: How, when, where do couples manage the expectations they have of each other? How, when, where do the children fit into all of this?

I am all for women working.... and I am also for men working. What I think right now, is that children are getting the short end of the stick, and that really bothers me. I would love to get comments on how to resolve this situation. Most of the time, I hear one of two things: either that children are not as disciplined, hard working and polite as they used to be, or that children today are their parents trophy.

The quest, should you accept it, is to figure out how to bring a balance to your childs life. The power plays don’t exist only in the boardroom right now, it is in the childrens room too. Somehow, I would prefer if was taken out of the childrens room.

Cosmectics

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjwgLEPUIVQ&feature=share

Maybe this is one of those times that we want granny's glasses back.

I Will Always Love You

I am deeply saddened by the death of Whitney Houston. Her song “I Will Always Love You” has been my favorite since it came out. So many of my deepest memories are attached to this song it is probably the key soundtrack of my life. No one can sing it like she did. With her incredibly gifted voice she expressed beauty, elegance, spirituality, and in the lyrics, something I have always treasured, the memory of a great love for someone or something . How appropriate that this amazing woman who wowed us when she was just 19, died between Happy day and Valentines day. It is not really the timing of her death that confounds me, but that so many people who seem to have it all, really have so little. Let's wait and see why she died, although I think we all have an inkling. No ones life should be this tormented. One can only become more and more convinced that fame, success and money is not the key to a fulfilled life. Let's keep changing the granny glasses.. we have to find a better way.

Today is World Happy Day

Now this is a day worth celebrating. What I love about this day is that it is meant to be all inclusive. It is for people who are young, people who are old, people who are alone but strive to not be lonely, people whose birthday is today, people who are remembering the passing away of a loved one. Do you see the picture? It is a great day for changing those glasses!
For a few years I have been obsessed on studying happiness. One fine day, I made a decision. Enough of all the doom and gloom in my life. I realized that there are people out there, that seem to get through every circumstance in their life without the pain and suffering that can drown other people for years, including me. The operative word here is “seem”. Can this be true, I thought? Are these super “dooper” (granny word, sorry younger ones) human beings? If they are, I want to be one too.
Luckily for me, I found that there are a lot of people studying happiness now and there is excellent scientific evidence coming from these studies. The great news is that we CAN all be happier. It takes a little more work for some of us, but how lucky we are that science is showing us that we don’t have to settle into our unhappiness.
In The Happy Movie , http://www.worldhappyday.com which aired world wide to celebrate World Happy Day, one professor makes a statement I just loved! “Psychologists have spent so much time trying to measure depression, why can't we measure happiness?” Psychologists and neuroscientists are doing it, great people made a film about it . And it is a cross cultural film, which makes sense since as I said, World Happy Day includes everyone. Screenings are being arranged all over the world. It has happened in some places already, but I encourage everyone to go see it. At least see the trailer on their web page. If it hasn’t been screened in your university or community, try to arrange a screening. The happy people involved in this are very helpful. Just go to their web page.

working on the mission

Some of my biggest supporters are asking me to post everyday. However, I am still working out the kinks on all of this. I don't know how to add a place for your comments to inspire my daily blog to be able to make it what it aspires to be... a place for thought, reflection and sharing. Obviously, that can't be done without comments from people who are interested enough in reading it. I am also working on adding links to other web pages, to keep the flow going. Changing the Granny Glasses is meant to be that.. a place to encourage us to change what is old and no longer works for us, to that which makes our life happier and more fulfilled. Each stage of our life comes with challenges, sometimes it is best to lend granny your glasses. Sometimes it is great for you to wear hers. Here, here at Changing Granny Glasses(or for the granny's hear hear) to granny's willing to change and to the younger generation willing to consider learning from... well... the older folk.

Acceptance

So,blogs today are a way of connecting and sharing thoughts and experiences.. And this is good. But I know thanks to Facebook ( although I always knew it) and I humbly accept that I will never be as good in math as my friend Sally, or as beautiful as my friend Brooke, or as rich as my friend Lisa or as traveled as my friend Martin,or as elegant as my friend Nancy or as spiritual as my friend Octavio, or unfortunately as in love as too many of my friends... but today I am more than ever thankful that I am me and that through thick and thin I have been true to my fundamental values. And that has been a challenge. I am not good in math, I am not beautiful, and I am not rich. But slowly I am becoming more spiritual, more connected with the world , happier and more at peace. I thank my children for that.. for they have taught me what it is to go through each step of life, one day a a time.
So be careful with what you say to your children because from my experience they provide an excellent opportunity for you to change the prescription of the old granny glasses you have. You are not too old , you need new glasses.

Birth of a blog

09/02/2012

I am American living in Spain. That, in itself is not so unusual. But what people here marvel about me, is that I usually wake up at around 5 AM Spanish time, the time most people are coming back from partying on the weekends in this country. But what intrigues them most is “what do you do at that hour?” Well, I say, I get on the internet, I talk to my friends and son in the United States, I read the world wide press, especially that of the countries that I am most attached to for one reason or the other, and I write. Wait a minute, I thought the other day..... people don't write anymore.... they blog. Those words “anymore” kindled an idea, and so the blog “Changing the Granny Glasses” was born.

I am not a granny yet. And honestly, I don't expect to be one in the near future. But I am a mother, and I wanted to be a mother since I was five. I know that may not seem overly ambitious to many liberated, highly productive and extraordinarily remunerated men and women of my generation but I think motherhood, in fact parenthood, these days gets a very undeserved bad rap.

I have done other things besides being a mother. But motherhood is as fascinating to me today as it was when I was five, and I have now been working on this motherhood career for 22 years. Let me just add that I doubled up on the work every single day of my career as I not only had twins, I had boy / girl twins. Whatever the politically correct stance is on this.. boys and girls are different from the word go. What happens as they grow depends on many things, but at least in my mind, boys will be boys and girls will be girls. I am very grateful for that.