You are the center of the story in Your Universe.
Lita Elisabeth Fridolin explores the importance of an individual’s surroundings, from their relationships, and their home to their workplace and where they choose to spend their free time.
She focuses on nine life areas, self-knowledge, relationships, cycles of time, and balancing feelings— examining what works and what you may need to adjust.
For your home, she urges you to discover whether you get support from your immediate surroundings— and she reveals steps that can make it a more nourishing place to live.
From there, she examines workspaces, analyzing four important areas and what influences you during your workday. This time is critical as influences at work can follow you home, including when you’re sleeping.
Lastly, she examines attitude and how it can impact your situation as a whole.
Get practical tips on taking responsibility for your life and navigating its ups and downs, happy and unhappy moments, and turns and changes along the way.
Cover Graphics/Art Credit: Irene Larsen
www.youruniverse-holisticlifeandhealth.comYou are the center of the story in Your Universe.
Lita Elisabeth Fridolin explores the importance of an individual’s surroundings, from their relationships, and their home to their workplace and where they choose to spend their free time.
She focuses on nine life areas, self-knowledge, relationships, cycles of time, and balancing feelings— examining what works and what you may need to adjust.
For your home, she urges you to discover whether you get support from your immediate surroundings— and she reveals steps that can make it a more nourishing place to live.
From there, she examines workspaces, analyzing four important areas and what influences you during your workday. This time is critical as influences at work can follow you home, including when you’re sleeping.
Lastly, she examines attitude and how it can impact your situation as a whole.
Get practical tips on taking responsibility for your life and navigating its ups and downs, happy and unhappy moments, and turns and changes along the way.
Cover Graphics/Art Credit: Irene Larsen
www.youruniverse-holisticlifeandhealth.com
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Overview
You are the center of the story in Your Universe.
Lita Elisabeth Fridolin explores the importance of an individual’s surroundings, from their relationships, and their home to their workplace and where they choose to spend their free time.
She focuses on nine life areas, self-knowledge, relationships, cycles of time, and balancing feelings— examining what works and what you may need to adjust.
For your home, she urges you to discover whether you get support from your immediate surroundings— and she reveals steps that can make it a more nourishing place to live.
From there, she examines workspaces, analyzing four important areas and what influences you during your workday. This time is critical as influences at work can follow you home, including when you’re sleeping.
Lastly, she examines attitude and how it can impact your situation as a whole.
Get practical tips on taking responsibility for your life and navigating its ups and downs, happy and unhappy moments, and turns and changes along the way.
Cover Graphics/Art Credit: Irene Larsen
www.youruniverse-holisticlifeandhealth.com
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781982220044 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Balboa Press |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Your Life Areas — What Needs Attention?
Take some time out to reflect. Give yourself a quick test where you focus on nine different areas of your life as explained below. This will give you clarity and an idea about how you may move on in the best direction possible.
First, I am going to introduce to you a system1 that I use myself to identify what can be improved in my life as it unfolds right now.
To help you fully understand what I am talking about, I have provided a short description of each of the nine life areas that should cover most aspects of your life.
Career and Life Journey
This area is about your occupation and what interests you — what you are burning for and what engages you, what you are working with, and how you make a living. It is connected to your career, both now and in the long run.
At the same time, it is related to your path in life, how your journey and life are shaped — not as a motorway but more like a meandering path with different experiences along the way.
If you are not aware of your direction in life or where your path is taking you, don't worry. I have felt so many times that I could only see a little farther ahead of me, like when we shine a flashlight in the dark. That is okay as long as we keep moving and don't get stuck where we are.
Are you living your own life and following your own inner voice, or are you perhaps obeying somebody else?
There is actually a lot we can do ourselves to create our futures.
Love and Close Relationships (Marriage)
This area is about your close relationships in life. It is related to marriage and involves a soul mate or someone you are in love with. It could be your boyfriend or girlfriend — a person you are engaged with.
You can work on getting a partner if you don't have one. If you have experienced a painful divorce, perhaps it will take time for you to heal and be prepared for a new relationship. And a new relationship may not work if the problems remain the same, like if you still are jealous, you do not listen, you are not forgiving, and you prefer being right instead of kind. Magnanimity often has a higher value than a victory, that can be dearly bought, and be heartless.
One way of creating your future is by using what I call a Treasure Map. I use one myself. A Treasure Map is a collage made as a vision board showing your favorite outcomes in the different areas of your life — how you would like to feel and live your life.
It becomes even more valuable and effective when you use a template called the "Magic Square," creating your vision board with intention.
By the way, a Magic Square in this context is a template consisting of nine areas related to your nine life areas. (In note 10 in the back of the book you can read about the Magic Square and in table 3 in chapter 9 you can see the full template and read much more about it with regard to the different life areas in your home.)
Using the template for your vision board means, for example, that your dream of a loving life partner should be placed in the top right corner of your Treasure Map.
Try to draw your dream of a partner and soul mate, or find pictures similar to the person you would like to meet and place one of them in the top right corner of your Treasure Map.
If you already have a partner, you can work on improving and nourishing your relationship by placing a picture of the two of you looking happy together in the top right corner of your Treasure Map.
In chapter 22 I explain more about creating a Treasure Map, and I show you an example of a special collage created that way in figure 9.
Elders, Family, and Your Past
This area relates to where you come from, your relatives, and where you belong. It is connected to your family background and culture, as well as to your personal past.
If you have any unresolved or unclarified problems in relation to your parents or others, this is the area to concentrate on. Unresolved problems from your past are also connected to this area. Sometimes we have issues that we are not even aware of.
Forgiveness can sometimes resolve issues in our past. Especially remember to forgive yourself. That is a good starting point. As Frank Sinatra put it in one of his songs,
Regrets, I had a few, but then again too few to mention.
Often it is easier to forgive when you analyze the circumstances and the reason behind own or others behaviour and comments. Most often life is more multifarious than perfect.
It is my experience that when I am sad or angry about something that happened in my past, I have to deal with that issue and solve it with forgiveness before I am ready to move on without obstacles. Later, in chapter 5, about balancing your feelings, I will give you an example of an exercise that I have tried myself and found useful for letting go of past issues.
Wealth, Abundance, and Good Fortune
This area relates to your personal feelings about good fortune and wealth.
Giving and receiving are equally important. Be a generous giver and an excellent receiver.
Say you want more money in your life. To create wealth and abundance, you have to be an excellent receiver and feel worthy to receive, hold, and grow your money. Otherwise it is like having one foot on the accelerator and the other foot on the brake at the same time. That will burn off the tires and not get you anywhere. If a big fortune were sent your way, you would probably spend the money and get back to a place where you felt worthy again — namely, without a fortune in the bank.
Think about what your real needs are. What is enough for you and makes you feel satisfied?
Some people seem never to get enough and constantly strive for more. Normally, raising your income means raising your expenses. If this is what makes you feel good, that's fine.
Perhaps you can spend 5 percent of your income on charity and helping others?
Prosperity is also about being able to manage your money, and perhaps include monthly charity. Giving is a learnable skill. When we share with others less fortunate and spend money on charity, we contribute to wealth circulation. Money needs to circulate to have worth.
Sometimes we have more money than at other times. Being grateful for what we have is another good focus. It does not matter how much money you have or what your net worth is if you are satisfied with what's in your life and if you feel good.
remember that you please the happy giver by receiving the present. Also think about how you as a guest often are the receiver of a gift during the visit. It could be a gift in form of an inspiration, a realization or something different.
Our inner world and our beliefs about money eventually shape our outer experience.
I will get back to how we can see how we reflect this — often unconsciously — in our homes. The good thing is that we have simple tools to change any negative influence.
We are, in fact, very powerful and can also improve our lives with easy methods in this important area. All other things being equal, money is freedom and makes life more enjoyable.
Health, Unity, and Well-Being
This area is about your health and overall well-being.
I am thinking about human beings as creatures with four bodies in one complete being, like a house with four rooms.
I like to visit each room in my complete being2 every day.
• The first is my spirit (soul).
• The second is my mind and mental side (thoughts).
• The third is my emotions (astral body).
• The fourth is the one you can touch with your hands and see with your eyes — namely, my physical body.
As I understand it, we consist of all four. I experience myself like that, and I am aware of my feelings guiding me or my mind interfering.
One way of visiting each room — your four bodies — is to sit or lie down in a comfortable position. Close your eyes and take some deep breaths to relax, quieting your mind and body.
Then pay loving attention to your inner world, starting with your heart, where your soul resides. For me my heart represents my master spirit filled with wisdom and love. I listen to my heart to see if any messages come up for me — perhaps ideas or inspirations for the day.
I continue to pay loving and gentle attention to my physical body. I register if I have any pains or problems anywhere in my physical body.
Thirdly I pay attention to my mind in the same kind way. I observe my thoughts. Do I have lots of thoughts? What are they about? Are my thoughts positive or negative? Is there anything I can change for the better? Write it down and perhaps work with the "elephant" in little bites, one at a time.
At last I sense and register my feelings. What are they like? Do I feel good and happy or perhaps unhappy? Is there something bothering me and affecting my mood? I observe my emotions. If I feel sadness or anything like that, I try to figure out where in my physical body the feeling is concentrated — for example, in my stomach — and what the feeling is telling me. If the feeling is in my stomach, it may be something going on in my life — some challenges or other experiences at the moment that are hard for me to digest.
A pain in my stomach could of course come from something I had for breakfast, a disease, or the like. But it could also be a feeling manifesting a pain in my stomach as a message to me.
Depending on what I find when I visit each of my four rooms, I take action, for example, by using a blessing to get balanced and feel better. For me that is a feeling of peacefulness and well-being. In part IV of Your Universe I introduce some practical tools that you may use too.
Exercise
I take care of myself by doing some exercise (for me, it is yoga) and going for a walk every day.
Food
Also I make sure to enjoy three meals regularly over the day — morning, afternoon, and evening. I don't skip any meals, and I eat a lot of vegetables — preferably ecological food, but I am practical and not fanatic; I make many exceptions. I don't prepare all the food I eat myself. For lunch I eat at work in a canteen together with my colleagues. In the evening I typically eat with my husband at home, and we share the cooking.
Sleep
I go to bed not too late in the evening in order to get enough sleep during the night. For me, that is around seven to eight hours every night.
Analyze Why
When I feel ill, I try to understand why I am out of balance and then seek the real cause.
In our homes, we can work on improving our living areas, one at a time, and eventually feel healthier and improve our overall wellbeing. I will get back to how I do that later.
Appreciation
One last thing is that I frequently remember to appreciate myself and give myself due praise for all improvements.
For instance, many years ago, when I stopped smoking, I saved around the same amount of money monthly for myself that I would normally have spent on cigarettes. At the end of the month, I went out shopping to buy something nice for myself — a new dress or whatever I felt I wanted. So every time a month went by without smoking any cigarettes, I gave myself due praise and felt good anchoring that feeling. After one year, I stopped doing this and used the money elsewhere in my budget. I have not smoked since that time.
Helpful People
This area is about helpful people in your life.
Sometimes a person shows up who is exactly who we need to get a job done, to be inspired, or to take new steps, or for some other reason.
That happened to me last year, when all of a sudden I had a new boss at work. In fact, she played a big part in encouraging me to write Your Universe. It feels as if she somehow had been sent to help me start writing. I am deeply grateful to have met her and that we have gotten to know each other.
I am sure you know what I mean. Perhaps the same thing has happened in your life, someone showing up exactly when you needed them to or when the time was right to move on with something. Sometimes speaking with another person is enough. You get the idea yourself while you explain your problem.
I hope you allow other people to help you. Don't think that you should do everything yourself. If that is the case, you can consider working on this life area. Remember that many people like to help. They are delighted at offering their help and enjoy to get involved.
By the way, this life area is also connected to the spiritual side, like deceased helpful people in your life who are no longer there. You may still have some sort of communication with them and get some help from above. Maybe you think of them in situations that remind you about how they would have handled things.
Normally when we help others, we will feel good and useful. At the same time we improve the possibilities for getting help ourselves when needed. It can be as simple as listening to others.
Children, Creativity, Projects, and Our Future
This area is about how we use our creativity. It is also connected to our relationships with children (our own and others'), so any stepchildren are included. Furthermore, any projects and our future are related to this area.
By creativity I'm not speaking of artists but the creativity that every person has, whether in work or spare time. We all have this wonderful side of getting new ideas, making new combinations, etc., no matter what our workday looks like.
Allow your imagination to inspire you. When my children were living at home, I loved to listen to their stories and what they imagined. Asking them what their best experience of the day was before they fell asleep in the evening was a good topic.
The past and the future are connected. So if you have problems with your past, you may experience challenges with moving forward in your life with new partners, new projects, etc. If you have taken on bad habits from your own parents, these will follow you until you decide to change your way of thinking and living.
Unresolved or unclarified problems in your past can hold you back — including the ones that you may not be aware of. In that case, working with the third life area concerning elders, family, and your past can be useful.
Quiet Contemplation, Self-Development, and Knowledge
This area relates to education, learning, wisdom, understanding, self-development, and personal growth.
We all need a break and silence every day to balance ourselves. Especially for those of us with busy lives and lots of activity during the day, finding time for quiet contemplation is a must. Taking a fifteen-minute walk in the fresh air or having a mindfulness session and listening to a guided meditation could be the balancing element needed.
Take several short breaks during the day without your mobile phone in your hand or nearby. The busier you are, the more quiet breaks you need.
I write in more detail about quiet contemplation in chapter 24 and give some practical tips that I use myself in part IV of Your Universe.
Success, Acknowledgment, and Illumination
This area relates to our inner fulfilment and our feeling of happiness, inner, peace and satisfaction. Furthermore, this life area is connected with our outer success, like rewards, medals, and achieving goals.
When we love and acknowledge ourselves, that is a good start. People around us notice that we are smiling and positive. In my experience it is much easier to feel good, smile, and acknowledge others when we love and appreciate ourselves.
Actually in my view we only need our own acknowledgment in the sense that most of us are our own worst judges anyway. Many of us blame ourselves for this and that. We forget to appreciate who we are, and we think of pleasing others more than taking care of ourselves. Don't compare yourself to others, but compare yourself to yourself instead — and notice any improvements.
To me the object is to become more aware of who we are and create the life that we truly want to live in alignment with our dreams and desires.
As a rule of thumb, it takes six weeks to create a new habit, so whatever you may wish to work on or change, remember to be patient. Also be kind to yourself and forgive yourself. Not everything needs to be perfect.
Errare humanum est — it is human to make mistakes.
My husband says that my patience is limited. That is how he experiences me. I believe it depends on what I am working with. I grew up learning never to give up, and my experience in life is that patience somehow always is rewarded.
Test Yourself — What Needs Attention?
From time to time I evaluate my life and my overall well-being, going through all the nine life areas to see if I need to adjust something, for example, in my home, as our homes reflect our lives. I have done that over and over again for the last fifteen years, and I still find it of great value and quite interesting also.
The thing is that the universe does not stand still. Changes occur, sometimes unwanted, and these have an effect on my life.
I start with finding the life area that I may want to prioritize.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Your Universe"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Lita Fridolin.
Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword, ix,
Acknowledgments, xi,
Introduction, xiii,
PART I: YOUR LIFE,
Chapter 1 Your Life Areas — What Needs Attention?, 1,
Chapter 2 Know Yourself — Nine-Star Ki Analysis, 20,
Chapter 3 relationships — Nourishing and Maybe Harmful, 31,
Chapter 4 Cycles of Time — Your Phases in Life, 44,
Chapter 5 Balance Your Feelings, 50,
PART II: YOUR HOME AND SURROUNDINGS,
Chapter 6 Nourishing Surroundings, 59,
Chapter 7 Flow of Life, 65,
Chapter 8 Clutter Clearing, 71,
Chapter 9 The Nine Life Areas in Your Home, 79,
Chapter 10 Symbolism, 85,
Chapter 11 Use of Color, 91,
Chapter 12 Yin and Yang, 101,
Chapter 13 Space Clearing, 108,
Chapter 14 Sacred Space, 118,
Chapter 15 Space for Creativity, 122,
Chapter 16 Mirrors, 124,
Chapter 17 The Bedroom, 126,
PART III: YOUR WORK SPACE,
Chapter 18 The Art of Placement, 135,
Chapter 19 Use of Light, 144,
Chapter 20 Green Is Good for Your Health, 146,
Chapter 21 Architecture, 149,
PART IV: PRACTICAL TIPS,
Chapter 22 Creating a Treasure Map, 157,
Chapter 23 Our Attitudes, 161,
Chapter 24 Quiet Contemplation, 166,
Chapter 25 Energy Placement, 172,
I Ching—Book of Changes, 177,
Universal Laws or Laws of Nature, 181,
Notes, 183,