7 Easy Steps to Turn Your Detour Around in Any Weather

“Why feel blue when there's sooooo many other colors you can feel.”
― Karen Salmansohn

 What do you do when your plans get derailed by…a stomach bug/head ache/sickness/insert here?

Well on a practical note, these are some of my hacks for dealing with head aches:

·       Eat hot, spicy foods. …

·       Try spinach. …

·       Drink a cup of a caffeine-containing beverage.

·       Eat almonds. Almonds contain magnesium, which may help relax blood vessels and relieve headache pain!

But what about a stomach ache?

·       Brew some Chamomile Tea. …

·       Use a “Hot” Pack. …

·       Rice Water. 

·       Use mint!

·       Warm Lemon Water

·       Ginger Root Tea. …

·       Chew Fennel Seeds (really.)

·       Drink Club Soda and Lime (or seltzer!)

Okay…but what about when you have that kind of pain…and you don’t have a stomach?

(Amy raises her hand meekly here…)

Sometimes, a stomach pain could really be signaling to us that something deeper needs to be listened to. Even a child’s stomach ache can be a clear sign of how the body and mind are intricately related.

What’s the best way to recover from anything?  Start with a positive mindset:  fake it till ya make it.

Fake It Till Ya Make It and Hope For the Best

Sometimes it just takes a forward-thinking mindset to literally move through things. If you act healthy, you’ll feel healthy, right?

Detour or Not, it’s Still a Journey

Its not always easy, but even in the most painful, frustrating, and uncertain times, I really do try to remember what I’m grateful for, and what I can learn from.

For example, breaking my leg about a year ago.

Breaking a leg is not the kind of “learning experience” I like to have all the time, but when something like this does happen – and we all know that there are certain things in life that we don’t expect…

So let’s use that time as a way to break through the surface and learn something about ourselves that we never would have found out without that detour, glitch, or broken leg in our lives.

A 28th surgery was definitely not in my “schedule” for 2017. But it did give me a time to ask myself:

 
Seven Questions to Ask When Your Detour Derails You:

1.     – Is there a message for me in this experience?

2.     – What’s the gift in this situation?

3.     – What can I learn from this?

4.     – What’s the most loving thing I could do now?

5.     – What’s the most important thing for me to focus on now?

6.     – What would I do if I knew I could not fail?

7.     – What would I do if there were nothing to fear?

It helped me to ask myself those questions every few days. Eventually I went from a walker…to a cane…to limping (and falling on my face more than a few times!) to walking…to …tap-dancing again!

You might not be able to answer all of these questions for every “wrong turn” or setback in your life, but remember, nobody expects a detour to happen in life. It’s what happens when we think we’ve got our set-out path all figured out.

And then life takes a detour…

So what is your detour telling you today?

If you’re not sure yet…

Keep traveling.

And even if you can’t “travel…”

breathe. You’re going somewhere.

What is your detour telling you today?

Oh and more importantly…how do YOU cure what hurts?

You can read about a few more detours…and ways to travel them in my book, which you can check out here.