Juli Schuster Art and Sanctuary

 Someone asked me recently what I considered to be the most impactful life lesson I learned through my many years of yoga. Hands down: attachment causes suffering. Attachment to stuff, attachment to people, attachment to ego, and emotional attachment of the way one thinks life should be or should have been. Attachment to stuff. Although many people think that stuff will make you happy, in reality, attachment to stuff leads to constantly comparing yourself with other people, always wanting the bigger and better 'whatever'. Attachment to stuff also leads to more work- more work maintaining the stuff, storing the stuff and sometimes, if it's big, expensive stuff- paying for it for many years before it is actually yours (and by then, it's not the newest, biggest and best, so you have to trade it in on the one that is and the whole cycle starts again.) The less you attach your worth to stuff, the less you will suffer.  Attachment to people. Relationships are, obviously, nece...

  3 Ways to Stop Your Overthinking Brain and Get Back to Sleep Are you prone to overthinking? Ruminating and replaying every word of a past conversation or situation just as your head hits your pillow? Me, too! Over the course of a few years, several books and months of counseling, though, I found ways to stop this kind of thinking in its tracks and get to sleep or get back to sleep.   Imagine your body and mind as your home. Imagine your soul as a specific being that lives within your home. Give it a name, imagine a clear vision of what it looks like, imagine where it resides within your home, etc. ( I imagine mine as a tiny seed that lives in my heart. Its name is Juli, because I know it is ME. My soul is me, not my thoughts.) After you’ve seen it in your mind's eye, named it, and imagine where it lives within you. Now imagine the ruminating thoughts as annoying roommates who want to get in to do their best to keep you awake by their annoying behavior and noise....

 Using what you have on hand, rather than immediately going to the store to buy more "stuff" that you "need", not only saves money and saves more junk from ending up in a landfill, it forces you to exercise the creative part of your brain and think outside of the box.  A recent example from my own experience: January is a "No Spend" month for me. I only allow myself to buy what I can consume. I resist temptation to buy more stuff-whether the stuff is more clothing, more gadgets, more furniture, etc. A few days ago, after cleaning up the Christmas mess and putting away all of the decorations, I realized we could really use a chair-side table in the living room, I immediately began thinking of what things I could re-purpose as a table. Options: a small ottoman, a wooden wine rack cube, a crate, a bar stool, etc. Then I remembered a vintage TV tray that I had painted and collaged a few years ago that was stored in the basement. I brought it up, wiped the dust...

Kinkeeping: the act of maintaining and strengthening familial ties. It is a form of emotional labor done both out of a sense of obligation and because of emotional attachment . [1] As I brainstorm reasons to start a new blog, what to name a new blog, what direction do I want to take a new blog, etc., I stumbled upon this term. It was an immediate light bulb moment. Keeping family stories and legacies alive has been on my mind a lot lately. What has also been on my mind is finding the best way to use my life experiences to help others. My hope is that a new blog will allow me to do both at the same time.  If you are new to my world, here is a little back story. I am the youngest of 3 kids, growing up in a tiny little suburb in Missouri. I had a pretty normal, uneventful childhood until age 11 or 12, which was the beginning of my rebellious period. This period ended when I got pregnant and subsequently married, at age 17. This was one of my first challenges in life. But, although...