I am excited and proud to be a part of this Project Makeover Team

Please come celebrate with us and support Home for Our Troops

Project Makeover’s Reveal Party for Military Wife Amy Brady To Benefit Homes for Our Troops

Join The Project Makeover Team to Celebrate Amy Brady’s Makeover and Benefit Homes For Our Troops! Monday November 14, 2011 7:00-9:30 p.m. at Saffon Bistro, Nashua, NH Funds raised from this event will help Homes for Our Troops build a specially-adapted home for Sgt. Joshua Bouchard, who will live in the Granby, MA area. The Project Makeover Team proudly invites you to join us on Monday November 14th as military wife Amy Brady shows off her new look!  Proceeds from ticket sales will help build a specially adapted home for Sgt. Joshua Bouchard of Granby, MA, who lost his left leg, broke his back, and suffered traumatic brain injury after his vehicle drove over a pressure plated IED in Helmand Province, Afghanistan on July 8th, 2009 Please join us for a great evening and a chance to help a brave American in his time of need. All costs of the event have already been covered by our generous sponsor Saffron Bistro in Nashua, NH so the full value of every ticket brings Sgt. Bouchard one step closer to home. About Project Makeover Recipient Amy Brady   Project Makeover has selected Amy Brady of Lowell as their next makeover recipient, with the help of The Blue Stars Mother’s Group and Jay French, organizer of the Merrimack Valley Celebration of Freedom, a year-round series of events to support Homes For Our Troops. Amy’s husband Paul, who serves in the National Guard, has been stationed in Afghanistan since March.  Amy cares for their two young children and works at Mass General Hospital in Boston as a surgical nurse, and still finds time for significant volunteer work.  After reading a nomination letter written by Amy’s mother (unbeknownst to Amy!), the Project Makeover team knew they had found a great woman.   “….Amy is a compassionate, caring & an exceptional example of one who takes care of those in need.  Recently she was instrumental in finding help and providing comfort for a family of an injured soldier returning for medical care from Afghanistan. who was redirected to her unit. “Amy works as a military youth coordinator ensuring success of the Kid's Deployment Day & future events…” About Project Makeover:  Project Makeover is a team of stylists and service professionals from Massachusetts and Southern, NH who work to make a difference in the lives of deserving women. They believe in the power of gratitude and in giving back to the community. *Wardrobe stylist Susan Kanoff www.agreatnewlook.com *Make-up artist Grace Quintal www.gracemake-up.com *Photographer Heather Rogers  www.BeabeGallery.com *Nutrition & personal training Sylvia Sasso (Shaperella) www.shaperella.com *Holistic Therapist & Inspirational Life Coach Fran Spayne www.miraclework.org *Clothes from Thirty Petals Boutique/Belmont, MA www.thirtypetals.com, *Clothes Fresh of Nashua/Nashua, NH www.freshofnashua.com *Hair, Steven Michael/Andover Salon and Spa Andover, MA www.stevenmichaelcolorpro.com *Event planning, Monique Johnson www.monxdh.com *Interior design, Linda Holt New Light Redesign www.newlightredesign.com *Relationship Coach, Cheri Valentine www.cherivalentine.com *Business and Money Coaching from Maureen Campaiola www.breakthroughyourmoneybs.com *Merit Tukiainen, Project PR, merit@MeritEprises.com Special thank you to Saffron Bistro for their contribution to this event!  http://www.thesaffronbistro.com/ Ticket Information: Ticket price includes appetizers, non-alcoholic drinks and cash bar. Appetizers and cocktails at 7:00 p.m.—Program starts at 7:30 p.m.     Single Ticket : $25 Couple:  $50 Can’t Make The Event But Would Like to Help? Consider Becoming a Sponsor! Liberty Sponsor : $25.00 Freedom Sponsor : $50.00 Independence Sponsor : $75.00 Hero Sponsor : $100.00 Patriot Sponsor : $150.00 Victory Sponsor : $250.00 Click here to purchase tickets and sponsorships Find Project Makeover on Facebook at:  https://www.facebook.com/TheProjectMakeover?ref=ts We would be extremely grateful for your support of this very worthy cause. Hope you can join us!                      For more information contact Susan Kanoff, Project Makeover Lead susan@agreatnewlook.com   978.807.0577  Click here to purchase tickets and sponsorships  NOTE: PLEASE DO NOT USE THE "REGISTER" LINK BELOW, instead use the link above: "Click here to purchase tickets and sponsorships" to register for the event. Thanks! Bottom of Form

Energy is constantly flowig and moving.

Think of a car for a moment.  A car takes energy to go in any direction.  The law of attraction is the same way.  When you feel about something or think about something, you begin the movement of that energy and your life in that direction. 

Believe

"Whatever the mind of man can conceive, it can achieve."  W. Clement Stone

Attracting From Feeling Happy

When we are feeling happy on the inside, law of attraction is matching up the inside of us, and brining unlimited happiness to us.  Law of attraction says, “like attractions like”.  We have to be the exact state on the inside of what we want to bring on the outside.  You can’t complain and be miserable and expect your life to change.  In that state you are attracting more misery to yourself.  You have to be the ‘like’ that you want to attract. 

Seek the Goodness In People

As you smile at life, life smiles back to you.

"But how can I smile?" one of my clients asked.  "When I look around and all I see is craziness in the world.  It makes me sick to my stomach to hear about all the violence that is happening."

"Exactly," I said, "it makes you sick.  However, if you deliberately
look for what you can appreciate about your life and the world, your life will begin to brighten."

When you seek the goodness in the world and the people in it, you will find goodness.  You will discover things to appreciate and admire.  You may even bring out the best in others which will in turn make you more gracious.  The potential for grace exists in all human beings.

Not only will your life brighten as you see the good in people, you also create
positive energies and make your world a better place.  And that's what you are here
for, right?

Creating Ourselves Rather Than Discovering Ourselves

In the absence of knowing who we are, self-definition or self-creation will always be attempted to some degree.  After having spent a good portion of our lives attempting to create ourselves, can we now see that it cannot be done.  It will always lead to failure and disappointment.  We cannot create ourselves because we have already been created.  However, the attempt to do so is the basis of much commercial activity and spawns commercial enterprises costing billions of dollars.  Much more money is spent  on creating ourselves than on discovering ourselves.

We attempt to create ourselves according to the standards given to us by whomever we learn to respect or on whom we have been taught to depend.  In other words, what is good and worthwhile to us will be determined most immediately by our family and peers and then by our culture generally.  We learn that if we are a certain way we will be “somebody”. 

Botox for the Brain

Culture Culture & Society September-October 2009 Views Reviews and Interviews August 26, 2009

A Harvard psychologist argues that our mindless acceptance of stereotypes leads to premature aging.

By Tom Jacobs

 

In a landmark experiment, Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer had seniors live in a secluded monastery as though it were 1959. The results were surprising.

 

 

Here’s an innovative way to lower health care costs: Set everyone’s biological clock back 20 years. Senior citizens of 75 will enjoy the strength and stamina they had at 55, meaning they will need far less medical attention. The energetic elderly will remain productive members of their community later into life, which could also ease the strain on Social Security.

Granted, this sounds like an unusually wonky episode of The Twilight Zone. But three decades ago, Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer conducted a landmark experiment that suggested reverse aging needn’t be relegated to the realm of science fiction. Her revealing study, the many follow-ups it spawned and the implications of their findings are the subject of her fascinating new book Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility.

It’s a brightly written work — Langer has a knack for metaphors — that deftly challenges an array of assumptions we hold about health. She reminds readers that many definitive-sounding diagnoses are in fact best guesses, and that no study, however elegant and persuasive, can truly tell us the best course of treatment for any particular patient. Physicians, she counsels, should be thought of as “consultants.” Ultimately, we know our own bodies best.

In a sense, this is a book about the limits of empirical knowledge. But as Langer sees it, the ambiguity that inevitably accompanies medical research can be profoundly liberating. If we can’t be sure that a diagnosis — or a widely accepted truism such as “memory loss is inevitable with age” — truly applies in our case, we’re less likely to stick ourselves with a self-limiting label. “While many of our experienced disabilities may be a natural part of aging,” she writes, “many are instead a function of our mindsets about old age.”

The ingenious counterclockwise experiment was conducted in 1979. Langer and her students recruited two small groups of elderly men to spend a week living in a secluded New Hampshire monastery. Those in the control group spent the seven days reminiscing about the past, while those in the experimental group effectively re-entered the past. Their environment was designed to convey the impression they were living in 1959. They watched movies, listened to songs and read magazines from that era and discussed “current events” such as the first U.S. satellite launches.

“Both groups came out of the experience with their hearing and memory improved,” Langer reports. (It appears our bodies respond to being intellectually and emotionally engaged.) But members of the experimental group experienced more dramatic benefits. They were more likely to improve their scores on an intelligence test; more likely to show improvement in joint flexibility and dexterity; and more likely to look younger, as judged by a group of outside observers who compared before-and-after photos. Also, their fingers were longer. Since their arthritis declined in severity, they were able to extend their digits past the point they could a week earlier.

A fluke, perhaps? Well, Langer offers plenty of other data suggesting a strong link between self-perception and health. My favorite involves a group of hotel maids who reported their long hours and family responsibilities didn’t give them time to exercise. They were then told that their work, with all its bending and scrubbing, in fact involves quite a bit of exercise. So informed, they lost an average of 2 pounds over the next four weeks. Langer, who has spent several decades studying the effects of mindfulness, notes the women were paying renewed attention to activities that long ago became routine and mechanical. That, she suggests, is the key: If you’re noticing the precise condition of the carpet rather than daydreaming as you vacuum, chances are you’ll push the machine a little bit harder.

Langer defines mindfulness not in the sense of meditation and detachment popularly associated with Buddhism, but rather as being aware enough to notice subtle changes in ourselves and in our environment. The health implications of such alertness are obvious: If we notice small shifts in how we feel, we can address problems before they become acute. She argues we will also begin to realize that the distinction we make between being “sick” and “well” is often arbitrary and usually unhelpful, in that it prompts us to bounce back and forth between willful ignorance of our body’s workings and helpless dependence on a medical professional.

Langer wrote a best-selling book on mindfulness in 1990, and this latest volume may also climb the charts: A Hollywood movie focusing on the counterclockwise experiment, starring Jennifer Aniston as the research psychologist, is scheduled for release next year. No doubt the renewed interest in Langer’s research reflects a widespread fear of aging among baby boomers, many of whom will resonate to her ideas. How many have the discipline to follow through on her recommendations is another question. Living a fully engaged life in which we constantly question not only society’s assumptions about aging but also our own ingrained beliefs is a bit more involved than getting a Botox injection.

Nevertheless, policymakers and health educators need to be exposed to these concepts. (Her chapter about the consequences of language used by doctors should be taught in medical schools. Does anyone really feel better when told their cancer is “in remission”?) Langer persuasively suggests it is no coincidence that a society that worships youth and considers the elderly somewhat embarrassing is bankrupting itself with health care costs. If pop culture and the mass media equate being old with being weak, helpless and irrelevant, why wouldn’t the elderly feel feeble?

So the fountain of youth may in fact be the flood of chemicals in our brain that processes both internal and external messages about old age and dutifully passes them on to our joints, blood vessels and vital organs. Perhaps it’s time to start noticing these cerebral downloads and disregard the disempowering ones. Personally, I’m planning to pop in a tape of When Harry Met Sally into the VCR and celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. It turns out 1989 was quite a year.