Narelle Hunter RURAL LIFESTYLE

Who is looking after you? Does anyone notice if you skip your breakfast, miss drinking water today or if you can’t find time to exercise? Are you flat out caring for everyone around you and cant remember the last time you dusted off your personal goals and felt a clear sense of direction? Well guess what, the best person to look out for you..is you! Have you noticed that the people out there achieving don’t let excuses get in their way, they find a way to make things happen and can work independently. They seem to have more time and more support. Its all right for them hey…they are not in our position? Well March is almost over now and if we are not careful each month will slip into the next and we will be saying the year is flying by.  There is no better day than today to start working on a personal goal, even if it has to squeeze into the tiny cracks in your routine. Some days I have to break my yoga practice into bite size pieces or its not going to happ

I find a place in the garden that is sunny and lay out the yoga mat on the green grass. It is glorious outside on this autumn day, much warmer than in the house. I take off my jumper and begin a yoga practice, reaching and holding, twisting and bending, soaking up the sounds, the sweet smells and the delightful breeze. As the tightness releases from my body I think of autumn, it is the season of letting go. We need to be able to let go to make room for new possibilities. Autumn is the perfect time for releasing old patterns, shifting unhelpful ways of thinking and knowing what is worth holding onto and nurturing. When we have the ability to let go, we can also be in a continual state of transformation, growing, exploring and reaching for our best self. The farm is constantly moving, growing, reaching and then returning to the earth. In the autumn the weeds are removed and the paddocks are prepared for sowing. You can’t plant a good crop in a paddock that’s a

This week I have had my farmer’s wife hat back on as Howard needed a hand to clean the oats before delivery Friday. It is an itchy job and the stormy heat didn’t help, but I didn’t complain. Howard could go ahead and feed the sheep, fix the wheel on the bin, load hay and pick up the chaff. Prior to being called to farming duty I was heading to Sydney to a ‘Blog to Book’ workshop with Kerri Sackville at the Sydney Writers Centre. You know what I would have preferred to be doing but in a strange way it felt like the content of the book was in motion. Me out there in the itchy dust instead of being in a lovely room full of writers. I guess that is what you call, 'walking the talk'. I was where I needed to be.  I could see Howard was feeling under pressure with so much to do, so I thought it would be a good week to get out of the office and off the yoga mat and get my hands dirty. You are so exposed to the elements out there and as the storm was buil

‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you’ describes a great life skill. This is a quote from Rudyard Kiplings poem ‘If’ and he explains the importance of staying calm under pressure. Even changing an old habit requires the ability handle the emotions and thoughts that are convincing you otherwise. Often it is in the difficult times that true growth begins. As Mastin Kip says so well ‘Even though life doesn’t turn out how we want it to, it turns out how we need it to.’ Today I want to look at what helps a challenging situation and how destructive negativity is. Negativity is like being on a sinking ship and releasing the life raft without getting in it, its just not helpful! I cannot imagine any situation that improves with negativity and criticism. When we get ourselves in a negative space we can feel drained, stuck and frustrated by our circumstances. We can become disappointed in the people connected t