Well, you can.

For several years I have been physically blowing out any feelings of negativity in a simple shift of energy I now call A Positive Puff.

I naturally learned this while fuming one day about a personal situation in Japan.

Living in the mountains, the first thing I do whenever I feel low is go outside.

Stepping out into the vista of hills and sky instantly expands my senses and perception.

I do so whatever the weather, as the wide eaves of this Japanese minka shelter me from rain, snow, hail, and even typhoon winds.

That day, fuming and spluttering, I was so upset I let out a hiss of noisy breath.

I also threw my fists downward in a gesture of anger and disgust.

At once I felt a dramatic and positive shift.

My body released its hostile tension.

My dark mood ebbed out of me.

I had physically released my negativity.

Refined since through practice, here is A Positive Puff for you to try:

• If possible, go outdoors to an attractive, safe area.
• Stand lightly without locking your knees.
• Relax by breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth.
• Mentally bring up what bothers or upsets you.
• Scoop your negative feelings up into your cupped hands.
• Raise your hands, full of these feelings, slowly in front of your face.
• Take a deep breath in through your nose and release it in one strong puff over your cupped hands, as if blowing away your feelings.
• Immediately drop your empty hands to the ground as if releasing your negative feelings into the earth.
• Shake off your hands.
• Breathe deeply in through your nose and out through your mouth.
• Repeat the same movements two or three times if you feel you need to.

You will most likely sense an immediate lightness, both physically and mentally, as if your tension had both blown and dropped away.

Which it has.

You are actually blowing out your negativity in a puff of positive intention to shift your energy.

Do you think this can work for you?

Why don’t you try for yourself and share your experience?

Red ribbons in the February snow.

Meantime, deep inside this 300-year-old minka in the mountains …

The stone hearth warms.

Fire and Snow Meditation in a Japanese Minka

Beneath the snow

A redness of rejoicing.

In the stone’s enfolding

An inner fire’s glow.

Catrien Ross, February 2, 2010

Stop doing, simply be.

Stop stifling, simply free.

Stop straining, simply flow.

Stop wavering, simply go.

Stop doubting, simply know.

Stop limiting, simply grow.

Stop withholding, simply please.

Stop constricting, simply breathe.

Stop taking, simply give.

Stop calculating, simply live.

Do you agree with my thoughts?

How else can you stop yourself into being more and better now?

What do you think of this Ice Age depiction?

Friends and family are experiencing one of the coldest winters ever and and my mother tells me the whole of Britain, unprepared and unaccustomed to such conditions, is at a standstill.

But my impulse to immediately share this weather image without having to write a regular blog post has motivated me to add a new blog category, Microblog.

Today, January 8, 2010, marks the start.

Under the Microblog category I will be posting snippets of observations and thoughts, as well as connections, inspiring quotations, poetry, photos, and passages.

Microblog is a wee jot on the map of my personal blogosphere here in Japan.

I invite you to visit often and your comments are always welcome.

Thanks to the Internet’s communication web, Barbara and I were reconnected after we lost touch.

Throughout all the years that “seas between us braid hae roared” she has kept a poem I wrote, in my original handwriting.

By posting it two years ago to a website that listed me, she tracked my whereabouts.

Now she plans to visit Japan.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

Never, for these two Scots.

And here is that girlhood poem, written to mark a monumental hike Barbara and I braved in the Scottish Highlands:

“That music is a song we sang on the road from Arrochar to Inverary. And this lamp, this table and this chair are nothing in the memory of wind and rain, the road that would be twisting round again before we reached the end. My friend, my lovely singing friend, we have thrown time into the wind like music, we may never catch it again.” by Catrien Ross, long ago