SpaceAgeSage

The self defense book for everyone I’ve been talking about is finally published and downloadable!

My first book is an e-book - Think Like a Black Belt - Take Charge of Your Own Safety.

And check out some reviews:

This one is from Betsy Wuebker, written on her blog Passing Thru:

“Think Like a Black Belt - Take Charge of Your Own Safety is a comprehensive guide to mental toughness and personal safety.  Written from the perspective of enabling parents to pass along personal safety and awareness tips to children and teens, Lori’s e-book goes beyond to a more universally valuable approach.  This e-book is for everyone - because everyone at one time or another finds themself in an unsafe situation.

“The Bonus Section is worth the price of the e-book alone. This is an activity set designed to fine tune your senses in your personal daily environment.  This D-I-Y workshop that will have you looking at your world in a fresh way while creating a strong anticipatory mode that will keep you more safe.

“Make no mistake - Lori doesn’t pull any punches.  She is not out to sugar-coat her message.  She is matter of fact, encouraging and ultimately, very convincing.  We can defend ourselves from the bad guys and we can teach our children how to recognize and deal with them, too.”

And this review of my blog and book is from Janice Hunter on her blog Sharing the Journey:

“Please check out Think Like a Black Belt for mental, physical and emotional self defense lessons, especially if you’re a woman or have children …

“Who can benefit? Anyone who walks in public, parks a car, has children, works with others, goes out in the evenings… in short, everyone! We’re talking some of the most practical life skills that can be applied to any situation where you need to be sharp, alert, aware and informed. I let my teenage kids read these posts. I’m anxious by nature, but the tips they’ll learn from the  Think Like a Black Belt e-book and blog will help me breathe a little easier. I bought the book the day it came out!  It covers many topics such as strengthening your inner radar and your psychological and physical defense mechanisms, and teaches us to layer all the skills for greater effect.”

For more information on the e-book click here. It’s over 100 beautiful pages and packed with information — no fluff anywhere!

I also wrote about the e-book on the companion blog, where I write on physical, mental, and emotional self defense. Some recent articles include:

• How intuition helps keep you safe in self defense  part one and two.
• Emotionally abusive predators and their ways: signs and traits and the blame game emotional predators play.
• Basic self defense moves: how to use keys for self defense and how to do a heel palm strike.

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It’s all fascinating and practical information that can keep you safer — and your children, too!

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Thank you for visiting,
Lori Hoeck

Tags: reviews of Think Like a Black Belt, self defense, self defense books

The wonderful and gracious Barbara Swafford of Blogging Without a Blog, helped kick start my new self defense website Think Like a Black Belt this week. You absolutely must go read this short and awesome review! It is called Kicking It.

The response to the site launch and Barbara’s review has been heartwarming and motivating! Already readers, including women and parents, have found the information useful and are taking action in their own lives to keep themselves safer.

I’ve posted five blog articles or post so far at Think Like a Black Belt. One is an overview of the blog and the rest cover either physical, mental or emotional self dense. Why don’t you drop by or read Barbara’s review? Here are the links to most current posts:

• How would you face danger or disaster?

• Self Defense with ‘Heel Palm Strike’

• Defense Against the Dark Hearts

• No one wants this kind of relationship!

• Think like a Black Belt? Yes you can!

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NOTE: I wholeheartedly believe the information at Think Like a Black Belt is so important, I may use SpaceAgeSage.com to direct readers there. I don’t plan any more posts as you will find in the archives here, but you may find what you are looking for in confidence, wisdom, and insight at Think Like a Black Belt. Thank you and hope to see you there!

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My last post at SpaceAgeSage was a few moons ago, but now I’m back in the saddle again ready to ride the blogging range. Many of my readers here knew of my martial arts background and desire to write books. That is all coming together!

The best news is I’ve started Think Like a Black Belt blog! Drop on by for a sneak peak before my official launch and full tweaking of the site to discover the how to defend yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally. I’ve just started with a few posts, but more will be added soon! Topics I’ll be writing at Think Like a Black Belt are:

• Basic Self Defense Moves
• Mental Toughness
• Unplugging from Emotional Predators
• Martial Arts Wisdom
• Frontline Stories
• Kids & Self Defense

Coming soon to the site will be my e-book Think Like a Black Belt — 15 Personal Safety Tips. I’m excited it’s almost here because the information is vital for keeping safe, but it’s also a tremendous help to parents. Over 100 discussion questions — at least seven on each of the 15 tips — will help parents and older children explore self defense topics. More information on that soon-to-be-unveiled gem of self defense knowledge is here.

I’m also blogging at LoriHoeck.com, where I “Write just for the Hoeck of it”  — poems and prose, old stuff and new stuff, a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

Thank you for stopping by and hope to see you in my new blogs soon:

Think Like a Black Belt

LoriHoeck.com

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Oh yes, feel free to browse here at SpaceAgeSage, too, but I’m officially retiring it as I move on to more exciting writing!

Hello one and all,

I’ve been writing this SpaceAgeSage blog for just short of a year now.

Time for a change. 

I guess studying Ecclesiastes has made me realize this blog’s cycle is over.

Time to plant roots in a new blog (or two) and finish my novel.

Why the change?

1. Months of writing Morning Pages kept revealing one thing I need to do: Let go and let God.
2. Ancient wisdom or self help books have great information, but the only thing that keeps me truly growing and changing is a relationship with God and his Word.
3. My sense of the upcoming year for the U.S. is not rainbows, butterflies, and singing happy songs.
4. I’ve put a lot of myself into this blog as part of a cathartic need, but I’ve not designed it for large readership or monetization.
5. Posting to SpaceAgeSage has not improved my writing.  I’ve enjoyed writing more for self expression rather than for the art of writing. It’s time for me to delve more into the artistry of words.

Thanks to those who have stuck by my SpaceAgeSage blog. I’ve learned a lot about myself from the process:

1. Weaknesses and strengths may take longer to show up online, but they eventually do.
2. Writing is more about yourself, your ego, and your heart than you may realize.
3. When a certain passion fades, it’s time to reassess the roots of that passion.

To my fellow bloggers, I’ve learned a lot from you all:

1. Distances don’t mean hearts and minds need to be so far apart.
2. Even if they are one sentence long, words of encouragement help lift and heal.
3. Sharing knowledge builds community because people don’t listen until they know you care.

I’m not sure what’s next. I plan to publish and promote an e-book, finish and publish a techno-thriller, and start another blog or two that are in the mental works. I want to ramp up my writing so that I post higher quality prose — perhaps even poetry. Caregiving for my mom has taken a rough turn and her denial of certain limitations has created a lot of stress for me that has affected my health so I need to focus on my own well-being for awhile, too.

When something concrete happens, I’ll let you know with another post here.

Thanks to you all and be seeing you in comments here and there.

And to all bloggers, here’s a quote I think most of you can appreciate:

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A reporter interviewing A.J. Muste, who during the Vietnam War stood in front of the White House night after night with a candle, one rainy night asked,”Mr. Muste, do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night with a candle?” Muste replied, “Oh, I don’t do it to change the country, I do it so the country won’t change me.”
~ Andrea Ayvazian ~

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Photo credit: speech path girl

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Tags: endings

As I’ve noted in my last posts, I’m studying the ancient and timeless wisdom found in the book of Ecclesiastes from the Bible, starting with the passage I wrote about here.

Each line of this passage describes life’s unchanging and changing natures by showing opposites that aren’t in contradiction, but rather part of a spiral or cycle. The first lines are:

A time to be born and a time to die;
A time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted.

Having grown up on a farm where we had a small herd of cattle, these words make sense to me on a deep level. Animals, for the most part, have shorter life spans than we do. Watching their life cycles in miniature to ours helped me realize early on that all life begins and ends within a bubble of time.

In other areas of our lives, many things are born and die: ideas are born and die, emotions are born and die, friendships are born and die.

Once we understand the cyclical nature of life, we plant where we hope the most healthy growth will develop. It takes a while to learn this, so sometimes we have to uproot what is planted. For example an alcoholic may plant friendships with a bunch of hard-drinking buddies, but then realize she must uproot from those friendships for awhile to get sober. The same applies to drug addicts, gang members, or those whose “friends” use them more than love them.

The planting and uprooting concept also applies to work. Some of us are being uprooted because of recent economic downturns and some of us are choosing to make changes for the better. In the later case, Sean of the blog Writer Dad has moved from running a pre-school with his wife to working online as a writer and entrepreneur. He writes of his sink or swim life changes:

Drive to work, finish the week, cash your paycheck, purchase the essentials (alongside the frivolities), buy some more, refinance, drench yourself in sweat the second the economy buckles…I’d rather sink or swim.  The old way just isn’t enough …If life isn’t working, change your behavior.  Do without.  Go hungry.  A diet doesn’t have to be about food.  Find what you want from life, then figure out a way to work toward it.  I knew what I wanted, and I gave myself a year. Half the pages have fallen from that calendar and right now I’m surrounded by nothing but blue.

(Feel free to drop by and encourage him and his family!)

The comedian George Carlin had a completely different take on life and cycles which I have to include here as a bit of levity on such a heavy subject:

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating    …   and you finish off as an orgasm.

How do you see life cycling around you?

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Photo credit: speech path girl

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Tags: change, cycles of life, death, Ecclesiastes, George Carlin, Life