Just a short note about a timely reminder I received about abundance. Abundance is everywhere. Abundance is the inflow of life and the laughter and the togetherness and the love we share. It is the creation of life as well as the experience of it. For years I looked at abundance as a financial thing. A means to create more means and have the things that make us comfortable. But I am ever grateful for the understanding that abundance doesn’t mean the ability to buy things—it means the abundance of life we allow in and the experiences we are graced to have.
I was raised to do it on my own. It was partially a trauma response from an inability to effectively communicate my needs to people and to communicate my goals. It was also a response to being left alone early in life—not that I was abandoned or anything, just that my siblings left when I was young and I experienced a lot of life on my own or with my parents. I tried to keep up and create an image I thought would be accepted by others instead of learning how to accept myself. I thought I had an image to uphold and that everyone behaved that way.
I see how stifled life was for me based on an unclear understanding of what life was. I sometimes fear my child will have the same experience because he is an only child and my misinterpretation of life happened because I was almost raised alone. Well, I was mainly alone through the really hard parts. I learned to self-soothe and to grow up faster than needed instead of being a kid and having fun. As I am learning more about life as it really is, I think the candid view of what allowing life in makes all the difference. Life is everywhere. Life is meant to be lived and loved and relished. That is an abundant life. Our goal becomes how much life we can fit in our days rather than how many ways can we spend money. It’s a lovely transition. All you have to do is let real life in. Allow.
Today I am grateful for projects. We’ve been doing small things around the house and I think I’m more grateful for nesting than I am for the projects themselves. I mean, I absolutely need something to keep me moving and I love doing things that are productive. But there is also this underlying warmth from building something we both want and bringing a vision to life. That part is awesome as well: the working together. My husband and I definitely have things we don’t see eye to eye on, but I will say any time we take on a project around the house together, we are 100% in sync. There’s an ease to tasks that drive most people crazy. Then again, who knows. Maybe we were both decorators in a previous life 😊.
Today I am grateful for trust. I live a lot of my life waiting for the other shoe to drop. I won’t buy certain things because I’m afraid I need to keep a nest egg, or I deprive myself of what I really need because I think I can make things do. Lately, I’ve been looking at it differently. I’m not talking about being reckless and making bad choices. I’m talking about putting it in perspective. Is that $15 book really going to impact my bottom line? Not if I do it responsibly. Is my kid messing up the house really a bad thing? No, he’s learning to express himself. Yeah, we have to work on the listening and cleaning thing, but him getting to be himself is key. I can trust that things happen as they are meant to–I can follow what I am meant to, even if that means randomly buying wood canvases so I can paint…something. I am safe to indulge every now and then. It is safe to allow.
Today I am grateful for life. There have been a tons of ups and downs the last few years. I’ve dealt with mental health issues for as long as I can remember. But these last few months have been revelatory for me. Saying yes when I want to, saying no when I want to, learning the things that make me tick—that is life. All of the things I’ve preached about over the last few years finally getting put into practice. Well, not that I didn’t practice before, but it was more like putting my toes in the pool. Now I want to feel the entirety of life as I dive in and feel it surround me. There is so much to be grateful for. It’s not really living if we don’t embrace the chances we have while we have them. So I’m grateful to dive in.
Today I am grateful for my family. Things have bene tense between my husband and son this past weekend. They are both stubborn and my son especially takes after my husband in that department. My husband struggles with it because he wants our son to do what he is told. Well, five year olds are learning all they can about who they are and my son has a healthy dose of me in there as well—he wants to express himself and he feels like he can handle it. I am grateful for the love we all share in spite of our differences. We spent some time baking this weekend, learning how to make healthy treats together. It’s an experience…and a lesson in letting go for me as well. I’m grateful to have the lesson.
Today I am grateful for growth. Literally and figuratively. I’ve been putting in a ton of personal development work in order to make decisions about who I am and where I want to be—and so I can share that process with all of you. It’s so helpful to know we aren’t alone and I want to always share how messy it is. Growth is painful but it is progress. There is nothing more painful that holding yourself back and missing those opportunities. So I’ve invested the time in myself and in my home. I’m taking the time to plant seeds and watch that growth as well—and those seeds are blooming! It’s a privilege to experience that and my time needs to be focused on that now. I’m not throwing that away.
Today I am grateful for learning. Through all of the growth, I mentioned I’m dealing with literal growth as well. Those seeds I mentioned are in the form of my garden and they are absolutely blooming. That is a form of self-care unlike anything I’ve done before. I also never expected it to be so much like raising a child—waiting for them to do what they need to do to grow while figuring out what these silent creatures need to survive. Then I went ahead and looked up how to germinate my own cherry seeds. It is fascinating! This is a new facet of my life and I love it. There is a slowing down and a learning what really matters working with the Earth and seeing the results. It is life.
Confession time: I have a lot to learn when it comes to technology, even the basics on some stuff like adding filters to the camera when I take a picture. It actually started as a “moral” thing where I didn’t want to project a false image. I genuinely hate when we feel like we need to put out something that isn’t who we really are. When we were younger, we honestly didn’t give a damn about making those candid snapshots look perfect because we didn’t have the phones/digital images/filters we do now. We lived in the moment and had fun. That isn’t to say that we haven’t ALWAYS altered images in media or created false ideals about what we should look like. I didn’t want to contribute to that. Not that I was comfortable in my skin, but I was less comfortable with what felt like a lie.
We went to a small birthday party the other night and I took a picture with the birthday girl/host and she was using a filter on her phone. I instantly felt so old because I was fascinated by it. I had done my makeup so I initially didn’t realize that’s what it was until I really looked at the picture. It was one of the first pictures I’ve taken where I felt pretty immediately. I share a lot of photos of myself post-workout so I’m sweaty and completely raw/unedited and the goal isn’t to be pretty—so seeing that was different. And then I saw my smile. I’ve always been self-conscious about my smile and in that photo, I knew it wasn’t my smile. That was what gave away the filter for me. It wasn’t me. At the same time, I could instantly see the addiction to making ourselves look perfect, but that voice stayed loud: that wasn’t me.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it didn’t detract ANYTHING from the night. We had an amazing time. I just really started thinking about my reaction and how easy it is to get addicted to making ourselves look perfect. My friend is gorgeous but she feels like she needs this filter on every picture she takes, like she can’t let the world see HER beauty. She is one of the most unique people I have met and she has an amazing heart and a million other things that come before how she physically looks, but this is what we still base our standards on. THAT is the stigma I never wanted to contribute to. Yeah, it’s embarrassing to post or share an unflattering picture. But I want to share the journey and the reality of what it takes to get the work done. I want to share MY journey and part of that is creating a space where people can see theirs as well. I want people to remember the real beauty in the world, not the edited story.
The truth is we can tell ourselves anything we want. We can write any story, we can show any altered image and make our lives look perfect. It doesn’t make it real. The point is, the real is beautiful in its own right. The messy, the loud, the broken, the natural evolution and creation of life. Just because it isn’t always aesthetically pleasing doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful. Beauty is more than aesthetics. Beauty IS life. Beauty is how we view life. Beauty is the filter of our mind and how we see the world. That is the only filter I want to work on.
Ok, so maybe not a tree, but a plant. I felt the need to type this little note as I’m looking at my pothos. Last year I wrote about how I had to trim it because it was dying and how sometimes we need to cut away what no longer serves in order to create growth. It worked in spades for my plant and I love seeing the amount of growth it has now. It is still sprouting new leaves as the vines get longer, always creating new life. It’s an appropriate reminder that we are always gifted multiple chances and if we can put away, cut out and leave behind what doesn’t serve, true growth can occur.
If I follow the lines of the vines, I get a bit dizzy. They all spiral and connect, all weaving in and out of each other, new and old combined. It reminds me of the paths we take in life. Just because something happened a certain way doesn’t mean it has to continue that way. Yes, it may always be a part of who we are, but we still move forward. Life isn’t always linear in spite of having a beginning and an end. No. We know it is circular, always coming back to the same lessons over and over again until we learn it and incorporate it into who we are. We even get to branch out at times, taking a new path and seeing what comes of that.
Maybe it’s trite, maybe it’s cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Our life isn’t linear—not ever. The overall trajectory, yes. We are born and we will all die, that is the straightest line of our story. But that story is built of many layers and lines. I used to be afraid of confusing things, forgetting what I was doing and that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back if I needed to. Then I realized I was doing that anyway with trying to control everything. So I want to take a lesson from the plant again and learn to relish in the branches and splits and opportunities that come. If I can celebrate those things as growth from the plant, then I need to celebrate it as growth for myself as well.
Yesterday we talked about having two lives and how taking ownership of our experience creates the life we are meant to have. It’s great to talk about and it is solid advice—live with purpose and intent and all will fall in line, right? It’s logical and makes sense but at times it feels impossible to do. For those of us with anxiety, that can be even more daunting. We struggle making a decision because we don’t know what the results will be and we feel the burden of having to do ALL THE THINGS perfectly and all at once because the world may fall apart if we don’t single-handedly fix it. Plus if we make the wrong choice, it may never go back to how it was supposed to be. Then we create our own anxiety because we have a list a mile long of partially started things that never finished.
It isn’t that those of us with either/both/all of these conditions are lazy or self-serving. We are often scatter brained and fearful because we don’t want to let people down and we may be trying to prove that we are capable. We bite off more than we can chew. But what I’m learning through all of the things I try to do to please or prove is this: 1. Choosing things I don’t enjoy always drains me. ALWAYS. 2. Wandering around trying to find that thing doesn’t work. It’s literally a game of throwing darts and there is no target. 3. If people are with you or value you solely based on what you can give them, they aren’t your people. Relationships are mutual. 4. Not everyone you meet is manipulative or using you. Sometimes they are confused by your energy and they don’t know what to do/how to respond. 5. Focus is the only thing that will keep you on track. No matter how difficult, focus is the only thing to create progress. 6. Choosing something to focus on doesn’t mean you can’t do the rest. You have to learn to be ok doing one thing at a time. 7. In those moments of confusion and spiraling into a million things you think you need to do at once, calm the nervous system. Literally stop and take a deep breath and start again.
Those points are what showed me how important having a purpose is. Purpose gives us that internal motivation and drive rather than seeking approval or permission from others. Purpose guides us and we do the things aligned with creating progress. Purpose is the difference between activity and productivity and it is that central focus that prevents those spirals. Plus the benefits of completing things rather than starting a bunch of project absolutely helps diminish anxiety. I also noticed that when I get into an ADHD spiral, the anxiety is worse because nothing is getting done and then I end up with wasted days or the overwhelm of started projects.
Getting clarity and focus, for me, is the start of a second life. I’ve often shared my fears about time and not having enough of it, and living with anxiety and ADHD only makes that worse. So focus and purpose are all the more important so life becomes more intentional for me. I also have to rely more on myself because trying to motivate people to do things with me is like dragging a 2 ton boulder up the hill with me—and that just makes it all the easier to stop and blame them for not achieving my goals. My purpose isn’t theirs—it is my responsibility to tender it and see it through. That is the why behind all of this work, actually. Making sure someone sees they aren’t alone and that we have the ability to change. That we have the ability to take charge of our lives in spite of everything else beyond our control. It’s bringing multiple lives into one and giving it all we have.
“Every man has two lives, and the second life starts when he realizes he only has one,” Confucius. During the evolution of our lives, we will be faced with many choices. Taking ownership of our choices or placing blame. Learning the lesson or repeating the pattern. Staying who we think we are or becoming who we are meant to be. Knowing everything and preaching to the world or putting away what we think we know in favor of growth. Carrying the burden of lessons learned or leaving behind the weight of something that no longer matters. We can make these choices at any time and I guarantee, each of them will change the course.
As I’ve spouted many times, we are trained to attain certain goals, to be a certain way in order to be accepted. Every time something happens that doesn’t align with our true selves, we have an opportunity to let who we really are shine. And if we continue to push that back, we lose momentum. When we see/learn that we truly only have one shot, we approach our decisions differently. We learn to pause long enough to ask if that is what we really want to be doing and if that choice is really going to yield the result we are looking for. Eventually we get to the point where we no longer have to do that because our actions are aligned with who we are—and we simply ARE.
There is immense freedom in choosing to unburden ourselves. Sometimes we don’t realize exactly how many cases of crap we are truly carrying. I’ve gone through so many stages of letting go and putting things down and releasing, always thinking that I’ve “finally done it” only to find that I either have more stuff or I’ve picked up some of the old stuff again. Perhaps that is human nature—we get so used to handling a certain burden that it feels awkward without it. But all the different sizes of those burdens mean they can sneak up on us at any time and we have the choice to put them down in favor of something else.
My biggest distraction in putting things down is constantly picking things up. I have an active mind and I will constantly find something to do—it’s a blessing and a curse. I’m certainly never bored, but I feel exhausted all the time and there is often no completion to the thought or action (that is discussed more in tomorrow’s piece). I’m learning that I can’t pick things up simply to pick them up. Many of them aren’t mine and all they do is hold me back. The same is said for all of us.
We are gifted with one opportunity to live this life. We can choose our experience at any time. Learning to be intentional and aligned is the key. Learning the right questions to ask ourselves is what gets us there. It isn’t just about what we want, it’s about what we can contribute. It’s about the highest good. It’s about how we solve the greater problem using the skills we have and we can only do that when we understand that the story we tell ourselves may need to change. It’s about embracing who we are and calling the shots in a new way. Don’t give up that opportunity in favor of distraction or believing you can start tomorrow. Take every opportunity to simply be yourself. That is when life begins.
“It may seem difficult at first, but everything is difficult at first,” Miyamoto Musashi. Some days are easier than others to get into gear. We feel the flow and we can approach things with ease. Other days it feels like everything is grinding and nothing clicks. I ALWAYS got angry in those moments because I believed that if anything stopped me (or people in general) we were supposed to get mad. I believed that any inconvenience was worthy of giant upset. Now I see that there is purpose in those moments. Those pauses, those breaks in the flow are meant to allow us to recalibrate and incorporate what we’ve learned. A little test, perhaps, to see if we are who we think we are. I can’t tell you how many times I failed that test. But I guess the truth is it doesn’t matter how long it takes us to learn that lesson as long as we learn it.
It amazes me how we are able to live our lives one way while preaching another. I’ve watched people (and I’m guilty of it myself) spin and tell stories of the way things should be, and I’ve heard advice (and offered advice) about what to do when my own life was falling apart. And two things hit me when I read the opening quote: we think life is falling apart when the cracks in the façade we create are too big to cover and it is absolutely easier to point fingers/direct others than it is to take that introspection to self and clean our own houses. The reality is we aren’t able to move forward until we sort our own mess or put it to rest.
90% of the challenges we face are self-created. We carry the weight of everything we’ve done in the past like it’s some kind of trophy and we create busyness to feel a sense of completeness like it validates our worth. All we need to do is redefine what worth is to us and clearly understand what our values are. Once we find what is important to us, the rest falls away. I mean, you can’t be affected by someone else’s opinion if you believe you write your own destiny. Our live is impacted by what we believe and how we are trained to behave. IF we change those beliefs, we can change our lives.
I’ve spent years working on myself because I struggled to find people to help me develop into who I am. That’s partially my fault because I lived in a rut for a long time, believing I simply am this way. When I started breaking that mold, I felt shame because I saw how much of my isolation was self-imposed. It’s an eye opening moment seeing yourself that exposed, understanding that everything is as it is because of you. And it is also one of the most liberating experiences. As we’ve talked about before, if you are able to tell yourself the negative stories, you’re able to change the narrative to something else—anything else you want it to be.
Life feels overwhelming and hard when you aren’t able to keep up with the story you tell others and it’s hard to tell the story when it doesn’t align with who you are. It’s also infinitely easier to be an armchair quarterback and see people’s lives from the outside. We need to take that perspective in our own lives at times. The point is, things are only as hard as we make them. We can choose to let go of all that we’ve carried and all the things we tell ourselves we need to believe and we can rewrite the story or simply tell a new one. The universe is forgiving and it responds instantly to vibration. If you are able to vibrate at a new frequency through feeling a new narrative, you are able to shift where you will end up. Yes, it is difficult at first, but as we algin with who we are, the doing becomes effortless. Just give it time.
Today I am grateful to rise early enough to see the sun come up. I’m sitting in my office preparing for the day and I see the MOST beautiful light falling across the trees from the East. Gentle, assured, clear, and completely defined, the light spreads over the trees, awakening the world around me, removing all shadow of night and the previous day. It’s comforting that we have the light every morning and that we are given the chance to change what we did the day before. We literally see the birth of a new day and get a fresh start. Even though I went to bed late, sometimes the body knows to wake up early enough to experience this.
Today I am grateful for breakthrough. As I sat with my husband on Saturday evening watching a show about the seedy side of a fantasy world, I had an epiphany. Everything we see is a façade. I’m not just talking about in the social media sense of the word where we create and curate what people see about our lives. I’m talking about the fact that the moment we walk out the door, we become someone else. There are rarely those who wear the same face throughout the day and, after a rough day with my son, I had to ask myself what faces I created to the world and why I was so upset throughout the day. Maybe it was just a surplus of energy leftover from work or it was the final shedding of my own bullshit and realizing I’m in a different phase of my life now. Either way, I understood it was time to stop creating and start being. THAT’S authenticity.
Today I am grateful for following through on an experience I wanted. During some of yesterday’s tumult, I paused and did some earthing. It’s something I had been wanting to do as a reconnecting activity for a long time, but I never really did it. We were working on the flower beds around the house and I was nearing a meltdown, and something came over me where I simply kneeled and put my hands on the ground, covered in dirt and Earth and asked for help. I wasn’t miraculously healed or anything, but I did feel better. I felt a release in that surrender, in knowing I couldn’t keep that type of anger with me. I didn’t want that to continue to spill out.
Today I am grateful to experience nature. As I mentioned above, I spent some time earthing yesterday. Today we went out on the water so to connect with earth and water and feel the breeze the whole time made my fire soul a bit whole again. We need nature medicine more than we do not. We need it more than anything a doctor can give us. If we get quiet long enough, we will hear the calling of exactly what we need. I’ve been in a bit of deep series of thoughts lately, trying to do too much at once, and I knew I needed to slow down. I mentioned above I had been near meltdown when I literally just heard a voice saying put your hands and feet on the Earth. Today I felt the water, felt the sun, felt the air—all of it told me that it will be ok. I don’t have any answers, but I feel better. All is well.
Today I am grateful for organization. Yes, I’ve said it before, but I am grateful for it again. We spent some time organizing the house after we bought a couple of additional storage containers. I need to have an OCD moment and say how unbelievably satisfying it is to put things in order and to be able to see everything. And what a damn privilege to be able to put things in order. They often say to clean or organize or purge when you’re feeling down about something, and my God there is something so satisfying about organizing your life. It’s an outward expression of how we try to organize our thoughts. Plus, it just looks much better, just saying.
Today I am grateful for lessons from my child. Every now and then he says things to me that astound me with how aware and astute he is. My son told me today that I needed to find my comfort zone. The translation of that is actually him telling me to calm down. This child is so perceptive of when I’m off it’s a little scary. But I appreciated the reminder from him. It was and is time to redefine the comfort zone. It’s time to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. It’s time to accept things as they are and give up control. It’s time to embrace surrender. When what you’ve been doing is no longer working it is time to listen and find a new way. It’s time to try something new. And it’s time to be ok with being uncomfortable.
There is so much beauty in life. It is so important to allow the beauty to flow through us and to take it in and remind us of the fragility and strength of life. I often think of all the people it took for me to get here. Thousands of ancestors, 90% of which I never knew their names. The things they went through, the stories they would tell. We are all so intricately intertwined, we could be related to the neighbors and not even know it. More importantly, we technically are. We are all related to each other on some level of this shared experience. The webs we weave, how our lives dance in and out of each other’s, how the stories we tell come to one another. I was always fascinated with movies and books that tell stories like that.
That connectedness is a beautiful thing in itself. We are all human and we have a gift in being alive and experiencing this life. I am so lucky and humbled to witness so much beauty. I think the impressive thing about it all is how small those moments can be, yet how impactful they are. They are available anywhere and everywhere and I saw the love of grandfather/father/son. I found patience where I had been impatient. I saw a video of another father spreading seashells so his children and grandchildren could find them on the beach. My boss and her constant ability to keep giving. My father and the trips he has taken the family on. The laughter of the family in the house. My animals expressing their need for love and attention.
All of these things remind me that we are human and alive. There are moments it gets overwhelming and I need that breath for myself. I am human and we all need those moments. But I am so grateful, no matter how humbling the lesson, that I am constantly reminded that the connection and the love are always there. I am so grateful that I have so many sources to remind me that life is beautiful. I may be a slow learner when it comes to certain things—including learning about myself. But when I learn, I DO learn. There is so much life to live and if we have the chance to be here, don’t take it for granted. Don’t get caught up in the idea that life has to be some series of monumental events to be deemed worthy. Some days breathing is a miracle, and that is enough. So I choose to see that and embrace it. Choose to see the sameness in our uniqueness and the uniqueness in our sameness. Enjoy the experience if being alive.
I’ve had this issue with a parent in the drop off line—he is always delayed in getting the kid out of the car but he is always in the first spot so he always holds up the entire line. Today he got out of the car early and I watched him. It turns out this man wasn’t the father of this child—he is the grandfather. His son works at the school and that is the parent of the child. They started signing with each other. The man who had been holding up the line is deaf. Everything instantly clicked. I had been impatient yet again—my biggest fault—and I didn’t allow the space for this person. He was doing his absolute best, helping out by getting his grandson to school and I found myself annoyed because he kept getting in the way. The reality is, he was making sure he did what he could to get his grandson to school on time.
Yes, it was another does of humility and a lesson in patience and I am grateful for it. I am so fortunate to have witnessed this patience and the love this family has for each other. It got me thinking about all of the other things I am so fortunate to witness, all of the love and the humanity. I preach remembering our humanity all the time and I find myself forgetting it because I hold myself up to some ridiculous standard of what I need to do to be worthy and if someone gets in my way, I get impatient. I still have the tendency to fear losing the things I want over the greater good. It’s important to take the time to remember what we have to be grateful for. I am grateful for the continued opportunity to remember to be grateful. To be humble.
The plans of the universe are far greater than our own and I really needed to remember that. I’ve created impatience in my own life, as if punctuality is a key marker of a good person. I mean, don’t intentionally be rude or get in the way to make people late because that makes you an asshole, but I need to have grace for people who do their best and life just happens. THAT is a different story. Creating space for that allows the same space for me. The world will not end if I’m a couple minutes late signing back into work. And the truth is, I don’t want my kid to continue to witness my impatience because I see him losing patience with himself too. I want to enjoy life and, more importantly, I want my kid to enjoy it as well.
Life happens in the little moments. In the moments we think we are waiting for something, that is when life is happening. That is the time when we need to be attentive to what is actually happening and remember the little things that make life so important. It isn’t in the accomplishments or the big achievements. It is in the little things that show love—like a grandfather taking his grandson to school and making sure he gets there on time. It is in feeling love. I want to examine that in more detail in my next piece, but I want to make sure that we all understand how easy it is to forget what beauty is. Jen Pastilloff talks about finding beauty in everything, and seeing this simple act between father/son/grandfather made me think about the beauty of life in general. We can find it anywhere if we look.
The Intentional Dreamer 