The cards talked about spending time in inspiration today and as I was scrolling through Instagram, I came across Chris Baron’s post about writing “Two Princes.”  He says, “Other songs I’ve written…I knew I’d written a really strong song.  With Two Princes I was just amused…but audiences really liked it.  And by audiences I mean kids by the fountain in Princeton, and later the 14 people at early Blues Traveler shows in NYC.  When I started working with Aaron and Eric they picked up on that song right away and…it became a juggernaut.  Anyway, I’m glad I finished it.”  What an unbelievable beautiful testimony to the power of following through on something that feels good, on following through with our gut, on being present and going with it even if we don’t understand it in the moment.  When we follow those signs, those moments of knowing that something is fun, it isn’t for what is coming down the road, it’s a matter of presence and joy.  Joy is the greatest inspiration.  It’s the key to creativity. 

The other important mark here is the idea of following through.  He easily could have stopped and said the song was silly, he was just tinkering around.  But when we follow through on something that feels right we somehow end up with exactly what we need.  Baron ends the post saying, “Let’s have a good week and go after some goofy ideas, eh?”  We’ve made this life so serious—not that there aren’t serious moments—but we somehow feel the more joy we strip out of ourselves the closer we will get to some goal.  But when that happens we end up with an achievement and no life lived around it.  Life is meant to be inspired and fun.  We are meant to be connected to our souls/spirit and to each other.  We are meant to listen to the sound of the wind, the call of the birds, and we are meant to speak that language as well.  It’s the language of being alive, of presence.  That’s what comes through when we follow what is calling to us.

We never know when those moments hit but I know I’ve heard/read enough from people to understand that it was in the heart of it, the sticking with it, and the follow through on what felt right that the greatest things happened for them.  The “greatest thing” wasn’t even the goal—it was being present with what felt good in the moment.  The world truly is heavy enough and we need to do our part to make it lighter—physically, visually, and viscerally.  We need to put down the weight of the burdens we’ve chosen to carry, the burdens we’ve created and we need to feel joy.  When we feel joy, we can’t feel anything else.  The lower emotions can’t exist (or be expressed) while in joy.  Sing because we can sing, write because we can write, dance because we can dance.  There doesn’t need to be an ulterior motive, we don’t need to be the best at anything to enjoy it.  We simply need to be present with it and allow it to connect with who we are.  Allow it to take over.  We never know what it will become—or who we will become because of it.  

They say how important it is to have a partner that is focused on the same thing, that values the same thing, that has the same ambition/drive/beliefs.  I can attest that this is true, that we need to be on the same page.  Opposites may attract but in order to sustain a relationship and create a mutually beneficial world, you need to be working toward the same thing.  If you’re not, it becomes disconnected effort and a competition rather than a collaboration.  People whose efforts oppose one another’s only drag us down.  This isn’t to say that our partners need to believe, feel, say, do, and think the exact way we do—far from it.  But if we want a unified effort, we need to be sure we are on the same page.  Spending time with someone who only wants to fight instead of finding a solution, someone who always wants to blame instead of face their own accountability, is enough to make anyone feel crazy and lost. 

Relationships need love and support and care and growth.  All of those things come from a mutual love and respect for one another and understanding how the other person operates.  It is easier to feel those things for someone who operates the same way.  Relationships can’t be about a power struggle where one person is working toward a goal the other one says they want but the other one is constantly sabotaging the other person’s efforts.  This often happens when we fall in love with someone’s potential over the reality of who they are.  The truth is that anyone can be anything but they have to want to be that thing and put in the effort to get there.  If they don’t it’s a waste of time because we aren’t here to change anyone.  As much as we don’t want to be changed, we can’t change others.  Accepting ourselves makes it easier to accept others and to recognize when we aren’t accepted.  Forcing someone to be something other than who they are (or being someone other than ourselves) leads to disaster.    

Understanding that a relationship built on anything other than a shared vision will eventually fall apart is the real lesson here.  In order to know what we value and what we need in life, we need to know who we are prior to getting involved with someone.  We want to attract who is right for us instead of what we think we deserve—instead of settling for something.  We need to see the person for who they are.  We are all flawed, but someone’s character speaks louder than their perceptible flaws.  Don’t ever take someone who isn’t already actively emulating what we value.  We aren’t here to control the other person, nor are we meant to diminish ourselves.  We are meant to celebrate who we are and we honor that version of ourselves with the people we surround ourselves with.  If we don’t have “our people” (those who appreciate us as we are and believe similar things to us) then we need to move on.  Forcing other people to change or forcing ourselves to be anything other than who we are isn’t healthy—we must accept, adapt, and move on. 

We can be blind to who a person really is because we want them to be a certain way so badly.  We tell ourselves that things will change and they may even tell us that they want to change.  Words without action mean nothing.  We have to ask ourselves how long we want to deal with someone who says they want things a certain way and then don’t follow through.  What does it do to our motivation?  What does it do to our morale?  What happens to our future when we aren’t working on what we want in our lives because we are waiting for someone else to follow through in their lives?  Resentment, anger, frustration.  Life is too short to deal with that.  Life is too short to not celebrate and love what we have every day.  It’s too short to worry about our needs being met because someone else doesn’t want to hold up their end of the deal.  Respect and honor ourselves (and the other person) enough to walk away and allow them to be who they are.  It takes time to accept, but it’s easier in the long run.  

I recently found out that someone I’ve been following as a mentor faced some legal troubles in the last year.  They ranged from drunk and disorderly to public intoxication to physically assaulting a cop.  When I first read it my immediate thought was that this person must really be that way—super entitled, demanding, overall a real bitch.  I know social media and the like are all curated and we never see the full versions of people, but it no longer surprises me to find out that people who put on a persona of helping others or that life is perfect are truly jerks for lack of a better word.  But in that moment of judgement, I realized something else: we are all human and we all have bad moments.  Yes there are those who truly feel they are justified in making the world bow to their will, but for most of us we are just trying to survive and we all have a few days that we’d rather not share with the world.  They are simply moments in time, not who we are.  Our society is quick to let hard times define us—rather, we very quickly take someone’s hard times and make it define who they are.  That isn’t always the case and if I don’t want that judgement on me, I don’t want to do that to someone else.

So I realized that this could just be a moment for this person as well.  I’ve watched her over the last year and I never would have known that this event occurred—I found it quite by accident.  She has referenced “what happened to her last year” a few times and I had no clue so the work she is doing and the message/lesson I’ve received from her is far from what happened in that one instant.  Why do we feel the need to label a person by their faults?  We are trained to find the worst in people and then label them as that.  We don’t want the same thing done to us so we are trained to hide those mistakes and we treat mistakes as something to avoid.  When we avoid mistakes we avoid an opportunity to learn—and we falsely feed the belief that we know everything and need nothing from anyone.  We can’t discount the resources we have all around us, and we can’t discount the power of learning through experience—even if it isn’t the greatest experience.

Hard times either become a stepping stone or the stone that weighs us down.  I spoke about a staircase built of our doubts and fears yesterday, something that can get us above water.  Well, this is part of that staircase, another foundational piece that we can use to get us closer to where we want to be.  We are really good at creating shame in our lives and carrying that weight with us forever.  We are also really good at shaming others and pointing the finger, thinking it takes the spotlight off of us and our own self-defined flaws.  We all do things we aren’t proud of—they don’t need to be a life sentence. We need to give each other grace for our own humanity, to experience the learning curve and actually learn and apply the lesson.  It takes practice to stop that immediate judgement of others because we are so trained to operate off of first impression.  I know there are times I don’t want people to take away what they saw in me that day, that I want them to think differently.  So why would I do the same to others?  I want to see people succeed, I want to see people thrive, I want them to take their difficulties and fears and use them to guide them toward their hopes and purpose.  I want to cut the weight, not tie the rope—and I’d hope for the same grace for myself.  As I don’t want one moment to define me, I won’t let one moment define others.  I won’t be the foot on the neck of someone trying to build their lives, I want to give them a hand.

“You feel suffocated by the ways of the world because you are here to taste a new way.  The see-saw of life, between hope and fear—there is nothing like facing your own demons and battling yourself.  These fears are coming up so we can alchemize them,” Ashmi Pathela.  Going out on the limb and doing things against the norm feels uncomfortable for anyone.  It’s a practice we can learn and do over and over again but the beginning of something new is always rocky.  We are learning to gain our footing as we did when we were babies learning to walk.  We knew we wanted to and it’s a little unsteady at first—we fall down a lot—but we keep going.  The irony of some of this is that we are creative creatures meant to advance the world so we are often diving into unchartered territory, yet it feels uncomfortable to do so—and we are still drawn to it.  With enough practice, we learn to listen to the beat of our own heart more and trust our internal sense of direction.  Soon going against what feels natural for us weighs us down.  It gets shaky as we try to navigate what we know and what we are creating with what we feel.  The goal is to spend more time tasting a new way, taking our lessons and building on them, spending more time in hope than fear.  When we emerge from the depths of fear, we can breathe in hope and we can take all we know and make it into something else.    

Let’s put this in context: Over the last few days we talked about not missing out on the important moments in life followed by understanding the important moments aren’t about perfect.  Life doesn’t stop because things aren’t aesthetically pleasing; life is all the time.  Every moment becomes important.  From birth our society trains us to believe we have to follow a certain pattern and that there is only one path to happiness (or that the paths are limited), there is one path to success. We are told that these limited ways are the “right” way, that it’s good for us.  We are taught only the big things matter. Meanwhile we feel the exact opposite—that there is something more for us, that we are fulfilled doing something off that path.  The conflict causes us to feel drained more often than not, we live in distraction, we feel that there is something more and we ignore it.  We get so close to what we want, we start and we stop because we vacillate between hope and fear, thinking we can do anything and thinking we have no chance at succeeding.  The mind is a powerful thing, something that can tell us to act against our instincts because the crowd is safer—it’s innocuous but if we listen too much we forget the crowd keeps us unseen and drowns out our instincts. 

When we trust the crowd for too long, it takes some time to know that it’s all in our heads, that we need to calm the internal negative voice and drown out the external distractions to understand how we feel.  We are meant to take those fears and build them into strengths understanding that we can overcome anything.  Not just overcome, but that we are architects meant to create something far greater.  The greatest demon we need to fight is the urge to quiet the voice of our true calling, the one that tells us we aren’t good enough, that things need to look a certain way to be good enough, that we can’t enjoy life until it is a certain way.  Learn to trust what we know and use each of those doubts and fears to build a staircase right above the water and breathe in the sustaining breath of our purpose and life.  Quiet the demons inside, ignore the distraction outside, and we win every time.  Trust our power and know we are meant to build and create. Trust the instinct and breathe in our power.

I want to piggy back on Saturday’s post about being in the picture.  I think the main point is this: life isn’t perfect.  We need to celebrate what we have while we are here—we need to celebrate that we are here.  We need to remember that we have a short time here and we are meant to make the most of it.  Instead of living for some unrealistic ideal, we need to learn to sit in the beauty that is simply existing.  The creativity and possibilities we have.  Sharing our understanding with each other, learning from each other, creating with each other.  Time moves so much faster than we think.  If we spend all of our lives waiting for the perfect moments or thinking we only need to document and appreciate those big moments, then we miss so much.  We miss the opportunity to go for things we love because it doesn’t match some ideal in our minds.  Just because it isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.  And maybe it doesn’t look how we thought it would—does that mean we need to diminish the experience that actually happened?  Looking back now, I know this: Never let a special time go by because the image looks different than how we picture it or expect it to be.  We don’t live life for how the picture looks, we live for how it feels. The joy, the love, the people.  It was never about being perfect, it was about how it feels.

There are certain things that can’t be captured on film but there are some things that once on film will forever bring us right back to that moment.  We can feel what we felt then.  If we spend our time trying to make it look a certain way, we lose the authenticity of what actually happened—and that shows.  So instead of trying to make things look a certain way, or avoiding the camera because we think we look a certain way, embrace the moment.  Let it be documented in all of its imperfect glory because those moments, that particular instant will never happen again.  We can’t document the entirety of our lives, but we will always retain the feelings we had.  I don’t want to continue to mourn what I didn’t document because I didn’t think I was good enough to be in the picture.  I don’t want to put off my life until I look a certain way or until things around me look a certain way—time is passing no matter what it looks like.  This is what we have—right here, right now.  I cherish these feelings, these moments.  And looking back, the little moments are all we have.  Those are the things that make up the core of who we are.  My life was more than just the big things—it was the sum of all of those moments that led up to it.  We live every day—not just the big moments.  Each is as important as the last, and I will always remember that. 

Today I am grateful for understanding my power.  There are moments in all of our lives where we have the choice to stand up or the choice to remain down.  As I’ve been working through some serious transitions in my life, I’ve understood that I was afraid of something different than I thought.  I used to think I was afraid of time passing, of not being good enough, of never “qualifying” for something I really wanted.  The truth is I was afraid of my worth and I was afraid of my power.  I was afraid to unleash it because people wouldn’t accept me.  But now I see what it feels like to own it and how to maneuver with it, how to guide it, and even how to channel it.  I understand that I didn’t need permission and it wasn’t that people thought I wasn’t good enough.  They were afraid of me.  I was afraid of me.  I thought I needed permission when I needed to make a declaration—I needed to appreciate more.  Instead of looking for the faults, I needed to celebrate the good. 

Today I am grateful for the transitions I’ve made.  It’s been 43 days of solid work on my body and mind.  I’m down 10 pounds.  I’ve stood up for myself.  I’ve put myself out there for different opportunities at work.  I’ve begun developing a program at work in spite of a different directive/belief in what I do.  I’m no longer waiting for permission in that regard.  I’m no longer waiting for someone to tell me it’s ok to do what I know needs to be done—what should have been done a long time ago but I was too scared to work on.  I’m no longer wanting anyone’s opinion of what I do to validate that I should go for it. It’s no longer about seeking their approval or their belief—it’s following the knowing that I’ve always had.  When we feel that spark of greatness, that flame of creativity, that thing we know we can’t let go of—the thing that says, “THIS. This is what I’ve been telling you.  It’s right,” that’s the thing we need to listen to.  Not someone’s thoughts on the matter.  Their path is not ours and they aren’t meant to understand what we are doing.  They don’t always need to know where we are going.  Focusing on personal development and following through on it is a game changer.  It’s not easy to get started on a transition, it’s difficult to maintain.  But once it’s integrated, it’s easy.  We only complicate it in our minds—the body is incredibly adaptable.  Love it and respect it and keep it healthy.  The mind is malleable as well—perspective is a bit more challenging but it IS possible to change perception.  Allow the possibilities to unfold.

Today I am grateful to be a connector.  I struggled with friendships for a long time.  Struggling with control, trust, perfectionism, and a severe lack of knowledge of self from years of people pleasing led me down a fairly lonely path.  I was always afraid of being left behind and there are times I still am.  I get insecure that my friends like each other better than me even if I know it isn’t true—it’s a blessing to have a group that gets on so well. I am grateful because I’ve managed to connect a beautiful group of people.  I’ve managed to help employees find their path.  I’ve mentored people toward better self-perception.  I love having the gift of cutting through all the bullshit and getting to the meat of the matter.  Some people are afraid about that with me—and it has caused a few issues. But I know in the end that directness is far easier than playing nice.  I spent years playing nice and it literally got me nowhere except looking for the next person to tell me what to do or praise me.  Dancing around an issue is never the answer.  I never mean to be cruel, I just don’t like pretending the issue is something other than what it is for the sake of someone’s opinion.  I love that I have this beautiful group of people around me.    

Today I am grateful for the laughs in life.  For the laughs that I heard for the first time, the laughs I couldn’t control, the laughs that bubbled up and out without thought, the laughs I will always remember, the laughs I won’t get to hear again—and so wish I could.  I love the genuine laughs—hearing the sound of my son for the first time all the way to my grandfather guffawing.  I remember the smile across his face when something struck his fancy.  I spent too much time worrying and missing out on the laughs.  I always thought that I had to be serious so I would appear like I knew my stuff and no one would hurt me, like I was older than I was.  But in that process I lost learning about myself.  I missed finding out what I really enjoyed, finding out what I was capable of, finding out what connected me to others.  Don’t misunderstand, I had many beautiful moments, but we so often forget how beautiful life is in every moment.  Find the laughs.  Find the moments to laugh.  Find the moments to feel the joy.     

Today I am grateful for advancing.  We are our own worst critics and it’s difficult at times to acknowledge or see our progress.  Sometimes we are too close to the scenario to really see the progress—we may feel different (which is key) but seeing what we want is challenging at times.  Last night we were celebrating with some friends—and I’m grateful to have neighbors that are truly such good friends—and there were people in the group who hadn’t seen me for a while.  They commented on progress I’ve made with my health.  This was something I wasn’t even sure was noticeable, but they did.  It gave me the encouragement to keep doing what I’ve been doing.  It really is something I’ve been working on and I’ve been proud of it regardless—we’ve often spoken of how difficult a lifestyle change can be so I’ve already known I was proud for sticking with it—but I am grateful to be making the moves I am in life.  I don’t know specifically what comes next, but I am grateful and I know it is something bringing be me closer to where I need to be, closer to the goal. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.    

The gratitude I feel for my friends led me down the path of those times I didn’t feel so good being recognized and how I hid myself.  There are so many moments I look back and see I’m missing from the picture.  Many times it was because I didn’t like (don’t like) how I look on film—and because I felt like I look so different in reality than I do on film.  I missed a lot of moments that should have been captured–my pregnancy and the birth of my son, times out with my friends, concerts. I realize now that the reason I didn’t want myself on film was so much deeper than not liking how I looked.  It had everything to do with worth—and why I started this journey of perfectionism.  I was blessed to spend some time looking through pictures with my father the other day and I truly started understanding how blessed I am.  We had some amazing times together when I was a kid, the trips to California.  I felt conflicted about those trips as I got older because I never gave a thought to any feelings of inequity with my siblings until they brought it up later—and one sibling in particular loved to bring it up.  I loved those moments and I truly cherished every one of them—to this day those times with my parents in California are some of my best memories.  My sibling never hesitated to point out that they didn’t get that and insinuating I was spoiled.  My enjoyment wasn’t me being selfish or saying that they didn’t deserve those trips.  I was a kid raised differently from my siblings—that didn’t mean I was favored more.  It did mean that my parents were in a different circumstance and I experienced different things than they did. 

The more they talked about those differences as I got older, I started to feel guilty. Which translated into feeling guilty about the rest of the things I had in my life.  Again, we were raised differently so what I had and the relationship I had with my parents was all I knew. I truly never gave any thought to the things I had—I assumed my parents had given them the same things that they gave me.  I understood later that my parents didn’t have those opportunities when my siblings were younger—but I know with 100,000% certainty they would have done exactly that if they did have the same things available to them then.  My siblings interpreted it as my parents liking me more but I ALWAYS knew that wasn’t true.  Shit, I gave up my childhood trying to be older and prove myself to my siblings, to be their equal and I was still compared to them, never celebrated: I was the president of French NHS for Christ’s sake and I was still told about how good my sister was with languages—absolutely dismissing my accomplishment.  I was a singer and told how good my sister was at dancing.  I started taking myself out of the picture because it began to feel like I wasn’t meant to enjoy anything that came my way—including the things I worked and sacrificed for.  I removed myself from the picture because I thought I wasn’t worth anything. 

Most of my teen years all the way through my thirties are barely documented because I didn’t think the moments I was in, the moments captured, were good enough or that I was good enough to be photographed.  And now looking back at those pictures, I see how ridiculous that was.  Those photos I was in weren’t perfect but Christ I looked so HAPPY.  And I remember feeling that happy, alive in the experience.  I dimmed the entirety of my existence because I didn’t want to rub anything in their faces for having a different experience than them.  I thought I needed to have the same experience to justify being here.  I just wanted to be loved and I diminished myself so much, I learned to hate myself so much, because they had a different childhood than me.  They got the memory of the bowling alley and the arcade—I got the bowling alley and sitting in the restaurant and bringing my friends. They got the memory of the family Christmases in the halls because we had so many people we couldn’t fit in the house—I have the quiet Christmases in the homes with barely anyone (and I still loved them, that was all I knew—I didn’t know I missed out until later).  They got the memory of playing together outside, having secrets from my parents, fighting with each other, loving each other, throwing parties together behind my parent’s backs.  I have none of that. 

I have memories of trying to keep up and feeling so alone.  Trying to appear older and losing out on time with my siblings and my friends because I couldn’t fit in with either.  I lived an existence between worlds, not fitting in, not knowing what I was supposed to do, caught between leading my peers and being resented by my siblings, never at home anywhere, least of all in my own skin.  I spent so much time alone, I’m barely ever in the picture—it feels like I didn’t exist.  And that translated to my adulthood.  If the moment wasn’t big enough, I didn’t want to be in the picture.  And now all I have are the memories in my head.  I fear losing that, after watching both of my grandmothers go through Alzheimer’s and dementia respectively.  I have nothing to remind me that I was there except for my work and my things.  That’s why I can’t let it go.  In some ways that work and the things I’ve accumulated over time are the only things that show I’ve been here.  That I lived. Over the last few years, specifically with my son, I have taken a ton of pictures of him because I don’t want him to not have those– and I’ve put myself in the picture but I still get uncomfortable, thinking I need to look a certain way.  I am in this world, I am living this life, and I am grateful for it.  I’d like to be in it and I’d like to remember it.  I never needed to prove anything—not to my siblings, not to work.  I never needed to be ashamed of my success or diminish my success.  Had I reveled in it more, I think I would have gone further.  No, I can’t blame my siblings for how I reacted, but I can understand it and do it differently now.  I see the bullshit resentment they have toward my parents and they have no idea that they were loved in a way I wasn’t, they were loved for who they were and they had each other.  I had to be perfect and I was still left out of the picture.  I have learned to put myself back in the picture and to love my life.  I need to remember to do that every day, to celebrate being alive every day.  Even if they don’t celebrate me in that way, I am alive.   

I am grateful for friends who know me so well.  For the friends I’ve known my whole life to the friends who I’ve met in this new phase.  The friends I met when I moved in here, the friends I met years ago at the apartment, the friends I have now after being a mother and my son is in school.  I am grateful for this because even though I’ve been relatively different people at each of these stages, there are people who understand these facets of me, who have gone through the same thing as me, who speak the same language.  Experience is a uniter.  Being understood is freeing.  Being seen is the ultimate validation of who we are.  It always amazes me how quickly some people learn about others, how they are able to look at a person and simply know them.  It is a beautiful thing to be known.  Whitney Hanson talks about love and a heart speaking the same language—this doesn’t have to be a romantic love, this is the frequency of one heart speaking to another and being understood.  My heart feels understood for the first time in a long time.

Even though I’ve been known and seen at these different stages, I’ve had shields up for so long that I wasn’t sure how to trust that people would care for my heart as I cared for theirs.  I never felt they really grasped who I am—and some didn’t.  But others did.  And those are the ones that I choose to focus on, the ones I choose to be grateful for.  Those are the people I choose to keep in my life.  When you are understood, your life flourishes differently.  We do have different people for different phases of our lives, that is the natural progression of time as well as the natural progression of progress itself.  We can’t stay the same and think things will be different.  So we need different people at different points.  I am thrilled to be seen and I am proud that I see.  I am so lucky to know that, even with a shielded heart, there are people who can see through it and allow me in—so I am safe to let them in as well.  Not everyone deserves access to that level, but those who do have free reign.  I am grateful for that vulnerability and that strength, for that simultaneous acknowledgement of independence and unification. 

I am grateful to be accepted.  There is an irony in this: the more I am able to accept myself, the more easily accepted I am by others.  Learning to love ourselves and accept ourselves are two sides of the same coin and both are necessary in order to flow and be present.  The more present we are, the more we are able to simply be—and that is a moment when we embrace who we are.  Typically it’s at those points, the moments when we stop looking for others to accept us, that we find exactly who we need—the people who take us for exactly who we are.  I had to learn a long time ago that not everyone seeks that type of relationship with us.  I spent too much time hoping and wanting everyone to like me, trying to be everything to everyone.  Instead of feeling more included, I felt further and further from myself and that is when I was most lost.  As soon as I began finding my way back to myself, I found others.  When we find our home in self, we are aligned with those who contribute to our lives.  I am grateful to build that support and to support others who value the effort.  I am grateful for being known.