Sarah Wilson

sunday life: I test the whole “Law of Attraction” hoopla

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Are you seeing what you attract? (Before it smashes you in the face?)
Are you seeing what you attract? (Before it smashes you in the face?)

This week I gravitate to the “Law of Attraction”…to see if it makes life better.

I’m what you might call a Third-Way Cherry-Picker. People tend to say, particularly when it comes to the new-agey stuff I discuss in this column, there are two types of people. Sceptics. And Folk Who Buy Into the Whole Package – the books, lecture series and the gift-boxed destiny cards.

But some of us tread a third way. We take on board the message, but do so with a grain (or barrow-load) of salt, cherry-picking the bits that make intuitive sense. We have a foot in both camps, smart enough to know no one can really manifest a Ferrari. And find it kind of gross anyone would try to.

I issue this preface because I’m about to describe how I’ve just attended a Law of Attraction workshop with Esther and Jerry Hicks. Haven’t seen The Secret? Well, the Hicks appear in it prominently, demonstrating how to attract what you want by simply thinking it. Like attracts like; nice thoughts attract nice things. And (just to fire up the sceptics) they do it by channelling a spirit collective known as Abraham. Weird. But then so are gated communities. And sleeve tattoos.

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i like: Schkinny Maninny juice detox

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beautiful clean outsides.1So, you’ve all been emailing wanting to know the details of the 5-day juice detox I did, as written up in Sunday Life. OK, it’s called Schkinny Maninny, which is kind of a misleading name as it’s not really about losing weight…it’s about getting your system back to normal by consuming 6kg of fruit and veg each day…so you can lose weight in a sustained way. I found it great – the stuff is squeezed VERY early in the morning (from organic ingredients) and delivered to your door at about 6.30am (it can come to work or home). It runs Monday to Friday, so it doesn’t eat into your weekend.

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sunday life: the joy of outsourcing your eating issues

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So, this week, in my journey to find a better life, I outsource my eating.

masterclass_detox

Now, tell me if I have this right.  You’re feeling fat. No, it’s more than that. You feel stodged up and toxic and traffic has ground to a sluggish, cranky crawl down there. Grandma’s mince pies and sustained cheap champagne abuse has taken its fetid toll.  And now you’re obsessed with “getting back on track”, reforming your eating with a clean start. Accordingly, your head is swirling with a clusterf*ck of messages about food  – No more gluten? No eating after 6pm? Only carrot sticks for a week? You don’t know where to start or what you’re meant to eat any more. So you down a mince pie.

I’ve always found dieting depressing. I’ve never really been on one. Merely observing others wrestle with them gives me heart-sink. Ditto detoxing. Detoxing’s diet-lite, or dieting for those who fear dieting makes them look vain and affected. In principle, they’re useful. In practice, they do our heads in. I reckon (and I’ve mentioned this before) it’s because they’re limiting. They’re about saying no and holding back, which is antithetical to the spirit of human beingness.

But worse, they tend to leave us more obsessed about food than ever. Dieting and detoxing are all about finicky food rules and hyper-body consciousness and explaining to waiters you need the dressing on the side. You can’t fix a food fixation with more food. It’s like mending a wound by dragging the scab through gravel.

But all that said, this week I did a five-day detox, the details of which I post above. It was a juice/soup/almond milk program that ticked all the nutritional boxes (I had a nutritionist check it out). But – and here’s the rub – all the food was prepared for me, and then delivered to my door in a little esky, replete with daily nutritional updates, like “today your liver will be angry”. I didn’t have to do a thing.

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sunday life: lowering your New Year expectations will make you happier

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This week I resolve to have a crap-tastic New Year

2010 next exit XSmall sunday life: lowering your New Year expectations will make you happier

Stuck to my friend Katie W’s fridge is a list of New Year resolutions. From last year. At the top it reads, “Live life like you’re on holidays”. This concept – chipper-ly deluding yourself with a ”St Tropez at cocktail hour” vibe – has always appealed. Until Katie pointed out that the very fact she failed to keep this resolution has caused her untold self-flagellating angst each time she’s gone to grab milk for the past 12 months. That’s what resolutions do: they haunt. And make you feel deficient.

Now, as a relevant aside, this week marks six months of my seeking out a better life and writing about it in this column. One thing I’ve learnt along the way is that happiness is mostly about lowering expectations.

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declutterbug #2: suicide machine (social network annihilation via a little red button)

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Check out this new online gizmo. Web 2.0 Suicide Machine allows you to wipe yourself from social networking. Forever.

become as free as a REAL bird
become as free as a REAL bird

Web 2.0 Suicide Machine can strike you off Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. At the press of a button.

As the site says,  be as free as a real bird. A 2010 resolution, perhaps? To free yourself from the relentless tinkering with and preening of your social network sites?

I am very much hesitant about why I have a Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn presence. It all seems rather counter-intuitive to my search for simplicity and LESS in all aspects of my life.

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viral videos: why they make me emotional

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This one really got me:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5vRPKIS5UM&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

What is it about these videos? I think it’s the sense of Something Big and Human Happening. Of something simple that’s developed (often) innocently, but that grows exponentially through people’s desire to connect and share.

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do these images help/make your fashion head hurt?

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Check these images out: one model’s, well, model size (a US size 2). The other, Crystal Renn, is a size 16 (US size 12).
V mag

It’s a grand gesture that appears in the upcoming issue of V Magazine. To my knowledge, it’s never been done before. That is, putting women of different sizes side by side in the same spread. We can all see the point of it…to show us it can, in fact, be done. One fashion blogger describes it as “Renn taking on a typically slim model”, as though it’s a battle. He describes the onslaught as “revolutionary”.

Sure. But does it makes us feel any better? Salon.com’s Mary Elizabeth Williams’ 9-year-old daughter Lucy (have you followed that?), put it nicely: “That makes the fashion part of my mind hurt.”

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