From Chaos to Peace with Conny

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Just Swing

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      Two years ago I started jogging.   To beat the stress, I added walking and jogging, thinking that exercising more would give me a benefit of losing five extra pounds  that I gained in spite of my strict daily regimen.       I downloaded  "lose it" app on my iPhone and began calculating each gram of food that was going into my mouth. My goal was to restore my sleep to be able to look and perform even better.      Thinking that 10 thousand steps and 900 calories a day will do the job, I decided to keep my yoga and pilates practice to maintain flexibility. In an instance, I got addicted to uploading my daily pedometer reading into a fitness software to get digital praises and bonuses from my health insurance company each night. In sixteen weeks,  10 thousand steps a day took me on a virtual journey around the world. I was thrilled. Instead of being fatigued, I felt energized, ecstatic,...
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Overcoming the fear of getting out of line

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 I knew from personal experience the painful and humiliating consequences of stepping out of line, even though it ended up being only a kind of flick on the nose. One November, when my daughter was a baby, my husband, Sergei, and I decided to participate in the annual celebration of the Great October Revolution. We joined the parade that marched through the streets of Sverdlovsk, to end up in the main city square, taking Julia in her stroller with us. But we soon fell out of step. It was unbearably cold, and not only was our little daughter getting cold, but we had overestimated our own endurance. We decided to find a shorter route to the central square, where loud music was playing and a voice kept shouting out cheerful words of greeting and salutation to all the marching columns with flags and banners. When we reached the central square, we tried to join another column that was marching toward the Lenin’s monument. But our attempt to re-join ...
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Lacking Self-esteem? Have a Happy Period!

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When I hear that some American girls and women lack self-esteem , I can’t help but wonder. How can a young American girl have low self-esteem or lack confidence in this country of abundance ? I never liked when my parents used phrases like “When I was your age, I walked to school five miles, under the snow.” I rarely tell my story because it starts very similarly, “When I was your age, I had no Tampax during my periods!” This is when I get the sympathy that my father was looking for but never received from me. It is easier to imagine walking on snow than a period without pads or Tampax.   “That can’t be true! Everybody has Tampax!” “We did have pads, but we had to make them out of cotton ourselves.” “Were you poor?” One girl finally began using her brains. It didn’t matter how wealthy or poor we were - our drug stores were empty. It was a lucky day when you could get one or two rolls of pressed cotton or bandages to make those pads at home. Very seldom could we ...
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