My Biggest Current Challenge

My biggest most recent challenge is learning to keep my mouth shut.

I've had opinions about everything ever since I started talking. I remember having answers for everyone's problems in school. In fact, if I didn't get asked my advice by at least one person a day, I felt crushed in high school. The same held true in junior college and nursing school. As a young married woman in Denver, our circle of friends were those who seemed to need my helpful hints. In Germany too! Why, I was always dishing out my thoughts on marriage, motherhood, and military life.

As a divorcee and working single mom, I dispensed even more words of wisdom and made it my business to offer my opinion to co-workers and etceteras.

I even built a personal practice on giving advice to my clients on wellness, particularly theirs . . . that is . . . until recently.

The last few years have seen me begin a shift to helping clients answer their own questions about what might make them happy and healthy. I've had an epiphany of sorts. I've been so busy minding everyone else's business that I realized I hadn't been paying attention to my own. Now much of my advice to the love lorn or those with other problems comes in the form of sensing when they've found an answer that resonates in their bodies. I can validate their feelings and dreams. I'm proud I've been able to make this change with my clients.

Then there are the current questions friends are asking. I'm trying not to tackle these decisions about job opportunities or choice of husbands. I'm allowing my ready answers to stutter into nothingness while I offer back only encouragement. It's also become imperative I stay out of my grown children's lives, whether my heart breaks because I would like them to consider options they refuse to see or I want to warn them about potential dangers or failures.

I'm trying to keep my mouth shut, but I'm not being as successful as I want to be. I need to find the place of balance where my mouth remains in a gentle smile, while prayers filter through the chambers of my mind and heart with hope that the consequences of their actions will be things they and I can handle.