Today I am grateful for clearing the past.  This is something I have worked on for decades now.  I see now that it wasn’t all just me holding on to crap—there was trauma there, legitimate damage and hurt and mistrust that couldn’t be undone.  I learned early on at the foundational level that I had to prove, that I wasn’t good enough, that I couldn’t trust those I was supposed to trust (except my parents).  And now I know I need to heal that.  There are people around me who I constantly vacillate between trusting and not trusting, both personally and professionally.  There are some I know my instinct is right on but there are others that I know I need to relax.  Just because my senses of mistrust and fear are heightened doesn’t mean I’m picking up on it for the right reasons.  As we heal, the same situations come up and we eventually learn to process them differently.  Each time I make a different decision, I feel better.  Each time I face the same thing over and over again, I do feel frustrated because I feel like my boundaries haven’t been respected.  It took me a long time to figure out which boundaries were ego and which needed to be held.  The more I heal, the clearer that is. 

Today I am grateful for love.  I have had a confusing relationship with love for a long time.  Going back to foundational issues, I really never understood love.  I favored a particular style of romance filled with drama or glamor or both and it was a long time until I understood how to accept a relationship for what it is.  I grew up watching a lot of movies…what can I say.  All that aside, I never understood that relationships don’t need to be dramatic or extreme—there is real value in stability and predictability, in building things together, in knowing the other person is there. There is nothing more disheartening in thinking you have a partner and discovering that they don’t want the same things.  Who we choose to be around, who we listen to, and who we build things with impacts us in so many ways.  When we learn to love ourselves we learn who can love us and who we can love.  We see what our real match is.  I am grateful to be supported by people (some surprising) who remind me that I need to take care of myself, that I need to love myself.  And then I can love them. 

Today I am grateful for releasing.  Following up on clearing the past and building healthy love, I see the limiting patterns that I need to release.  Maybe more than seeing, I feel them.  When I repeat a pattern I can physically feel my body behaving differently.  It doesn’t feel right, kind of like, “Hey, this isn’t fitting.”  Whereas before I would agree with the negative feeling.  In releasing these things and finding foundational change and learning appropriate relationships, I’m learning to trust myself and know that I am capable of doing the things I want to do.  Yes, it takes work, but it is something I am capable of.  When people doubt me, I have transmuted from feeling I need to prove that I can do it to simply doing it.  Similarly, I understand that if I shouldn’t be doing it (like if it’s legitimately someone else’s responsibility) that I won’t do it regardless of who tells me to do it.  That one is still tough, especially in work environments where I do have a reporting structure—but I’m sticking with it.  Part of releasing is letting go of the need to be approved of by anyone.  I’m not a child looking for a parent’s approval, or a teacher’s approval.  I’m an adult and my wishes and boundaries need to be respected as well—and just because I’ve been nice doesn’t mean I need to be compliant to your every whim to the detriment of my own needs.  I’m also grateful to go for things that I wouldn’t have normally because I didn’t feel like I qualified.  For opening my mouth and expressing the truth—because people who understand don’t just listen, they hear.  Those are the ones that matter.

Today I am grateful for understanding my body. There is a Buddhist saying about love pertaining to how we feel.  It’s along the lines of if you feel nervous or jittery or pounding heart when you meet someone, they aren’t the one, true love is calm.  I recently experienced this in relation to success.  I mentioned last week that I had met Loren Ridinger.  Normally when I meet well-known people or people in power (I’m only talking about events like when I’ve attended comedy shows and stayed after to meet people, or when I’ve worked/met with the president of my company etc.—I’m not inflating my ego here lol) I get really nervous and I find myself trying way too hard.  When I met Loren, my heart beat was steady, I wasn’t nervous in the slightest.  I recently went for an interview and it was simply a conversation—no nerves, no trying to prove.  I listened and responded instead of trying to plan my answers.  I’m not saying that anything in particular is going to come of this (I can’t see the future) but I 100% understand that saying.  When something feels right, that knowing takes over us and there is an ease to it rather than an impulse.  The body often tells us what we need to know through what we feel instead of what we think.  It feels even better when we lean into it—it’s a different type of flow.  Allowing is an amazing experience.

Today I am grateful for releasing.  Yes, I’m talking about releasing again but this is different.  I’m talking about releasing control.  When it came to my day to day or even planning the future, I was always on the defense.  It always felt like I was behind the ball, running to catch up, like I wasn’t good enough so I had to prove.  The little moves I’ve made to bolster my confidence have shown me that I don’t need to have people think a certain way about me to be successful or to move forward.  Freedom comes when we forget about controlling anything and we just do what is right for us.  We will never have a way to control the opinions of the world—all we can do is be authentic and know that the right people will find us.  No matter what the wrong people say, that doesn’t invalidate our message, who we are, or what we are capable of.  There are some cases where that is easier said than done, but I will tell you, since switching to that focus, doing the things I need to do, the need to control anything outside is diminishing and it feels good.  Instead of looking at the steps someone else needs to take to fulfill our needs, we simply take the steps to fulfill those needs ourselves—and no one can take away that work we do on ourselves. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.             

This has taken me a while to articulate because sometimes it isn’t a specific thing that happens, it’s a specific energy—and the last week has been filled with a lot of energy.  The day before the eclipse, I saw Loren Ridinger in person to hear her speak.  The things that have happened since have changed the way I look at things.  I’ve felt this feeling of being on the precipice of a new life for a long time.  I truly do feel it, I just haven’t been able to move forward in it.  It’s fear conditioning as well as fear of the unknown.  It’s also a feeling of not being safe enough to take a risk on something I know I need to do.  I don’t always feel the support from those I have around me in the physical plane so I have to learn that sometimes we only need support from what we know we feel—from source.  I know there are things I have to walk away from—things I’ve tolerated for too long—but I’ve been afraid to because they are familiar.  But if I am to step up into my purpose, then I can’t expect everything to feel comfortable.  I can’t change if I won’t change.  The world will not bend to my will and give me what I want simply because I say I want it—change and development require work. And as easy as it sounds to make everyone understand and accept simply by doing, that isn’t how this works. 

Hearing Loren speak was unique and probably the most vulnerable I’ve heard her in the last few years I’ve worked with her—she is super powerful and incredibly encouraging, but she is a prime example that no matter how powerful we are (or feel) life keeps moving and happens as it wants to.  We have choices in those jarring moments and we can either collapse or we can pick ourselves up.  That type of energy coupled with the eclipse (an eclipse that inspires change), there is momentum beyond motivation at this point.  There is reason to care for myself, reason to stop hating myself, and maybe in healing me I’m discovering the message I’m meant to share with the world.  Hating ourselves gets us nowhere.  Love and healing clears the clutter and the baggage we’ve been carrying for too long—often baggage that was never ours as Loren says.  The world is hard enough and we battle enough with a society that sets us up to fail—we don’t need to have an internal battle with who we are as well, trying to figure out our worth.  We need to remember we are worthy.  We need to have faith that walking away from what doesn’t work for us doesn’t mean that we will lose it all.  Sometimes in the process of losing ourselves, we lose what we know, but we find the way to build ourselves back up again and become the person we are meant to be.

The truth is life is all about facing the moment.  I can’t even say it’s about facing fear because many of us avoid things like happiness and joy simply because we are used to being miserable or scared.  We often make ourselves the elephant cuffed to the chair—we have the power to leave at any time but we keep ourselves in place because we think we can’t move.  While familiarity is comfortable, that doesn’t mean it’s healthy.  Life can hit us with a curve ball at any time no matter how well thought out or well intentioned our plans are.  Life doesn’t give a shit about our plans if they aren’t part of THE plan.  Keeping us locked in a box with the same routine to feed a system that drains us like a battery is not the plan of the universe even if that’s what we know.  In that regard life is about finding our resilience and being secure in our ability as well as developing who we are to become who we are meant to be.  Sometimes in order to fulfill that part of the plan we have to deal with things we would rather not deal with.  It isn’t to be cruel, it’s to push us to the point where we understand we can break that cuff or even crush the damn chair at any time.  There is power not in grinning and bearing it, but in realizing we have wings and then learning to fly.  Loren said our mind is the biggest prison in the world.  But what we need to remember is that we can break free of it at ANY time.  Do the thing, whatever it is, do it. Soon that thing that we’ve been unable to face becomes a kitten in a box instead of a lion—or we realize we ARE the lion and we bust that box down.  Fear only exists because we let it.  Learn to roar—there is no box.        

This is a long one. I happened across a podcast the other day with Dr. Gabor Mate and he says “If I were to choose to live life over again, I wouldn’t live it in this way.  [The ending of Winnie the Pooh] brought tears to my eyes for years.  Christopher Robin has to go to school and he’s telling his friends, the toy animals that he won’t be able to pay with them as much anymore.  What I wasn’t aware of when I went to medical school and when I was a physician is how driven I was to justify my existence in the world.  I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.  When you’re driven to work too hard you actually ignore what matters and what matters is…taking time and enjoy time with kids and family.  I didn’t do that, and I always thought I had to keep working.  And the book ends with statement, ‘And whatever they do wherever they go, in the enchanted forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing together’.  People sacrifice their playfulness, their joyfulness, being driven by unconscious needs to validate their existence.  And where does that come from?  From childhood trauma.  Play is so important.  Joy is so important.  In that sense we can always keep playing in the enchanted forest and that’s just essential, I think.”

Being human is a funny thing.  We are one of the only creatures that is literally trained to ignore its own instincts while simultaneously being impulsive and giving into what we want in the moment.  We have this natural draw toward play and laughter and love and joy, and we systematically dismantle it and then spend our adult lives trying to make up for it (buying or doing things we think we deserve—displays of extravagance, or thinking we only deserve two weeks off of work a year so we have to go big).  We’ve gone from the need to survive, interact, create tribes, create work, finding common ground to proving how individually great we are through material means or how we look, or some form of notoriety, or all of it.  We learn to erase any draw toward individual goals outside of what is societally acceptable, and we learn to blend in.  Don’t get me wrong, I know there are more than a few who follow the beat of their own drum, but they too are part of a system.  Now anything we want to be a part of we need to prove our worth.  We’ve forgotten the joy of being a child and simply knowing our worth—that we don’t have to be any certain way to be loved.  We’ve forgotten the joy of seeing someone do something new and being excited for them and how to celebrate ourselves.  We’ve forgotten the importance of the every day moment.  Knowing that we are meant to play and feel joy because in joy we are able to find our way.

I have to share that when Dr. Mate shared that quote, it gutted me to the point I struggled to breathe.  It went straight to my soul, immediately bringing thoughts of the child in me I’ve neglected since I was a child, my fears of time and loss, regretting any missed moment with my family (everyone), anger and guilt at any frustration I’ve had with my child and my response to make him “grow up because life isn’t like that” (talk about hearing my parents).  And I saw the entire history of my family laid out before me: my father as a child, my mother as a child, remembering snippets of my siblings as children, my grandparents as children, and yes, myself as a child.  In that moment I felt this profound loss, this disbelief and sadness at ignoring that person, seeing how all of those children were ignored and told to grow up.  And the tears came—they’re coming now as I write this.  We are taught to believe play is a selfish thing, that there isn’t time for nonsense.  The reality is how we live is incredibly selfish.  The fact that we deem each other worthy by anything other than who we are, the fact that we feel we have to justify our existence in this world is truly heart breaking.  If we all got to the point where we remembered who we were as children, we might just come to a different conclusion.  Life has serious moments, it has its tragedies, but my God is it beautiful.  It isn’t nearly as serious as we make it.  We became more focused on blaming others and looking at the injustices we face instead of learning to heal and help each other.  We lost sight of anything that matters.  We forgot that there is inherent joy in our existence.

The other reason this piece has stuck with me is because I’ve recently had a big birthday—officially 40—and we weren’t able to celebrate it.  Yes, I received the calls and the texts with good wishes, but we didn’t actually celebrate.  And I thought about it—I can count the number of times I’ve celebrated my 40 years on one hand.  That little child in me has had her heart broken so many times, struggled to find worth for so many years, and really has a hard time believing she is worth anything, especially when she can’t find the people to celebrate her.  That little child has been driven for years to find someone who would tell her she is worthy—and she has tried to make the people who should think she is special treat her that way.  She is alone in the woods because she gave up the bear hoping someone else would walk with her and make her feel special—and she wasn’t allowed to feel special about herself.  For all of her accomplishments, she was never allowed to celebrate them; She wanted to be good at it all so she was seen as worthy and people thought she knew how good she was, but she was never allowed to revel in it or appreciate her success, she had to hide her pride in it.  The very things she was good at, the things that she should have shared remained hidden or diminished.  And now people tell her to find confidence when the last time she tried that, the razor met her skin because in her mind she was always falling short.  She has constantly accepted less than what she deserved, settling for what she could get because she never allowed herself to develop the skills that would carry her.  She has never felt safe in her own ability to thrive because her success was diminished and cut down. That little girl needs to be taken back to the enchanted forest and know she is loved and appreciated as she is. That little girl’s heart is still there and can still be heard–and it is my job to honor that.

People aren’t crazy, they’re wounded.  People aren’t stupid, they’re scared.  People aren’t jerks, they’re exhausted by not living the life they want to live.  People aren’t assholes, they’re protecting themselves.  I always found myself thinking the same negative, hurtful thoughts every day while driving home.  A little context: I have a long commute and I get annoyed with bad driving.  Ok, fine, I get incredible rage at bad driving.  That is literally my biggest pet peeve in the world.  You’re operating a 4,000 pound vehicle, fucking act like you know that. Anyway.  It was to the point where I literally felt like I needed a camera for protection because people were so aggressive with my smaller car.  While driving home, I realized that I needed to change the narrative.  I don’t want people thinking bad about me, we all make mistakes, but the truth is there is so much more to what we are feeling.  We all want to get where we need to be, we are all so tired, and we are all in this rat race.  I felt myself spinning and thought I was crazy, and I realized, I have these wounds in my brain because of old programming.  I call myself crazy all the time—and I know it’s not really crazy: it’s because I’m scarred, and if I act this way because I’m scared, then chances are other people are too. 

I realized today that I need to slow down because I too quickly jump to the bad feelings or judgements about others even if I don’t mean to.  So much more than I thought I did.  I’m making mistakes I normally would never make, I’m feeling anxiety, I have old fears popping up.  My brain is in overtime to a degree I’ve never experienced before.  Repetitive thoughts, fears, anxiety, exhaustion, analysis paralysis.  My brain is circling and cycling through the same thoughts because I haven’t moved to change them.  I need to slow down. The constant stimulation and speed of life has made it hard for anyone to get through the day in a normal pace.  We are constantly divided and our brains are not meant to deal with so may forms of stimulation at once.  We do best with one train of focus but somehow we have idolatrized this idea of the multi-tasker.  I don’t want to say that we will never have to do multiple things or that we can’t accomplish multiple things, but we certainly do our best at those things when we focus on one thing at a time.  With billions of us essentially forced to live in ADD every day, it’s no wonder we behave erratically.  Don’t even get me started on the concept of keeping us sick and distracted to have another element of control over us. 

Regardless, the point is we all need to give each other a little more space and grace. We all need to do the same for ourselves and understand that we are all on this journey together.  We all want the same thing, we all want to thrive in this world and no one truly enjoys being told what to do for a living.  We are looking for freedom we inherently have but aren’t allowed to express (or we think we aren’t allowed to express it) because in order to live and thrive int his world, we have set rules that promote some behaviors over others.  If we give each other time to understand that everyone is experiencing the same feeling, the feeling of wanting to come awake and live their lives how they want to, then I think we’d be more tolerant of each other.  We need to remember that if we feel stressed and overwhelmed, other people do to and, unfortunately, not everyone responds to stress and overwhelm the same way.  Some people react angrily, others get sad, others shut down, others lash out.  So instead of jumping to the conclusion that someone is crazy or stupid or doing something intentionally, give them the benefit of the doubt.  The same benefit we’d want for ourselves and we start seeing the world in a different way.

I love the open skies out here on the prairies/farms.  The clouds literally look like giant cotton balls, the fields seem to stretch on forever.  You truly (and literally) can see the curve of the Earth.  It makes me feel so small and so powerful at the same time.  We are these tiny beings floating on this giant rock in space, and we can literally see that—if you have the chance to feel that kind of humility, find a way to sit in that every day.  This world turns at its own pace and it is in its own time and we are just a blip on the radar.  But even if we are “just a blip” think of the ways we still have an impact.  Being human is a funny thing because for as powerless as we are, we have incredible power in our own lives, in our time.  We are so small but we are able to do so much.  It’s hard to break the habit of what we think we are supposed to do in favor of what we know we are supposed to do.  But when we see the expanse of the Earth and know that we are part of this grand design in some way, that we are part of the eternal energy of the universe, we know that there is no reason to not jump whole-heartedly into what we want to do with our lives.  There is no reason to not take every moment and love it, to fully embrace it, to be everything we want to be and do everything we want to do.  Our place is to love this time, this place, this energy we are in and if we don’t, then we need to find a way to change that.  Know that we have the power to shift our reality, and sometimes that is exactly what we are meant to do.  Remember how small we are, know that we can act with humility while still following our purpose.  And the truth is that is all we need to do—even if we feel out of place or embarrassed or scared.  We are simply meant to do what we are called to do, to fulfill our purpose.  That is our place. 

I take a lot of pictures, especially of nature, the sky, the moon.  I was going through my roll and I saw this picture I took of the moon, full and bright and the next one was from the following morning where the sun was sitting high in the sky.  Something about those photos being next to each other just hit me.  Two totally different scenarios, different times, and both filled with light.  Both exuding a different kind of light but both in their own way and in their own time.  It was such a visceral visual representation that we are always guided.  There is joy and purpose and there is always light, even in the dark.  It’s the true combination of the yin and the yang.  We are creatures of timing and there is a purpose for both times, day and night, specifically in our cycle.  Both are energizing and we use them both to recharge.  The night literally allows us to stop and regain our strength while the sun is our fuel and creates the energy for us to consume.  There is magic and necessity in both.  It goes to show that no matter the time, there is always something lighting the way.  We simply have to find the source and allow it to do what it does best: shine.  And if there is ever a moment when we can’t find the way, consider that we may be the light.

There was a description of Chi (Qi) lines that caught my attention where it basically said there is energy everywhere, we just need to reach out and grab it.  I’m not going to be disrespectful and pretend I understand everything about that type of energy, but something clicked about my relationship with source and managing how I want to feel, how I want to use energy.  I’ve been doing a lot more focused spiritual work and I’ve realized that life and spirituality is an amalgamation, an alchemy, of a lot of things: energy, physics, nature, source/God, the body, understanding the elements, respecting timing, etc.  Without putting these things together, we have a half truth, not true understanding of the nature of the universe.  But with practice, we can see how it all comes together.  We’ve been so fixated on domination and proving what we know, feeling and exerting our power that we’ve forgotten what real power there is in connection to this type of energy. 

Control is an illusion.  Well, control of the outside is an illusion.  We’ve bought into a system, a beautifully designed guise telling us we have our freedom when we do the same thing every day and all we do is feed a system, creating wealth for the few while the rest of us do the work.  We live in distraction, waiting for the next time we are “allowed” to focus on what matters to us.  We believe that is free when our soul knows it’s looking for all of these other things to fulfill it.  Our body, mind, heart, and soul all want us working in the depths of what we feel, in the timing of the universe, not trying to find time to make our true nature work.  We need to BE our true nature.  It’s when we are connected to our true nature that this alchemy can begin and the magic happens. 

Magic, at its core is about presence and connection.  When we are present and connected to our true nature, we feel and see differently.  We understand differently.  Letting go of the illusions and ignoring the distractions we face becomes easy.  We understand what is truly important and how to do that work instead of what we are told to do.  We learn to feed ourselves and nourish our own systems instead of the systems we are told create freedom and give equity to people.  We forget we are wild, we forget we are animals, part of nature and that we have gifts and are meant to work with them.  To work with our hands and create.  To be in nature’s time, not our own.  To judge our success by how we feel and what we create and not how much we consume or show off.  If we give up the idea of things needing to be a certain way and change our viewpoint of what life is, what success is, what we need to create, the entire view shifts.  THAT is magic. 

Today I am grateful for reminders of what is important.  We had a birthday party the other day and there were so many lessons.  1. Getting older truly is a gift because not everyone makes it.  Not everyone gets that much life.  If we can approach a certain age with health, love, and joy, we are blessed. 2.  Do not take our health for granted, not even for a second.  Do whatever we can to care for ourselves.  3. Not everyone lives their life the same way and we are all simply doing our best.  We do what we think is right—there are no instruction manuals in this game and all we can do is keep trying.  We need to treat each other with a little more grace and respect because sometimes the person who offers a hand is the last person you’d expect—and you never know when you need that hand. 4.  There is so much joy and beauty in simplicity and presence.  Sometimes all we need is an acknowledgement of love, or to step outside and climb some rocks, touch a tree.  When our brains move too quickly, we need to find a way to slow down and come back to presence. 5. Sometimes the people who show you they care, even when you think they’ve forgotten about you, are the last ones you’d expect.  It doesn’t need to be a big show, but it is so important to feel included, acknowledged, and loved, to know that our existence matters.  6. Take the damn pictures and enjoy every fucking moment no matter what.  No matter what.  Capture that moment and cherish it, and always be present.      

Today I am grateful for both surviving and thriving.  I try to spend time in gratitude every day because I am well aware of the importance of each moment in this life but the truth is sometimes you have to survive in order to thrive, to appreciate what you have.  For a long time I never understood some of the people in a certain person’s life.  I see now the appeal of the people in his life—he fought to prove his existence his entire life in everything he did (which he never had to do but he felt that) and these people don’t bat an eye to open their arms.  They’ve taught him to slow down and find value in the moment.  Take the picture, be happy and we don’t constantly have to work on proving ourselves—we are allowed to have fun and enjoy our lives.  Life doesn’t have to be that serious and even if we make a mistake, we are human and we learn…and we move on.  A mistake doesn’t need to be held over someone’s head for years.  The people in my family who always created that sense of needing to prove are on different spectrums now. Some see the value in life as it is—or they are at least awakening to it while others are still trying to control life, place value on certain people, and judgement if things aren’t exactly how they think it should be.  We only get so much time and we can spend it living, learning, and applying or we can stick in a moment and let life stagnate until that moment becomes what we think it should be.  I choose the latter.   

Today I am grateful for being able to return a favor.  It really does feel good to give back.  We are incredibly blessed to have some super loving and generous neighbors.  We aren’t always able to return the level of generosity they have (for various reasons) and sometimes it makes me feel really anxious (talk about needing to prove myself).  One of my gifts is being able to pick up on when people are in distress or out of sorts or just not ok.  The other day I was keenly aware that one of them was in total disarray mentally.  I immediately took stock of the situation and let her speak and she shared some very similar things to my circumstances—attention constantly divided, needing to take care of everyone around you, unable to articulate thoughts because you can’t finish a sentence even if you know what you want to say, feeling obligated (or actually being obligated) to take care of to take care of everyone but yourself.  I took steps to give her what I could, to provide resources with what I had and I could see the relief in her.  It felt amazing and reminds me of the actual work I want to be doing, the type of impact that I want to have on the world.    

Today I am grateful for new opportunities.  Today we are going to attend a conference for our business and I feel like I am on the precipice of something.  There has been a lot of emotion over the last several months, surrounded by confusion—some of it self-created, some of it from too much stimulation—but all of it has left me feeling drained and confused about which way to go next.  I understand now that this isn’t the narrative I want to keep repeating so I know that I will need to make a decision soon.  I am grateful to have the opportunities that are coming my way, and I am even more grateful that I have a choice amongst them.  As hard as it is to not see the end, I can’t be upset that I’m not clairvoyant or all-powerful to see the end of the circumstance.  And the reality is that the end is the end—I don’t want to have to rush through my life to get there SO, the point is that I simply need to make a decision and trust it is the right one.  Trust that all the opportunities that are meant for me will come my way and that my life is unfolding as it should.  Stop keeping my life on pause because I don’t see farther down the road.  Enjoy the moment, make a decision based on what feels right, and let go of the rest.    

Today I am grateful for remembering myself.  I’ve been in the corporate world for a really long time and I’ve been leaning more and more toward taking myself too seriously.  I don’t feel connected to anyone around me at times in regard to getting things done.  The list of what we “need” to do is getting longer and longer and treated with less and less appreciation and we have to do it with less people.  I’ve felt like the only way to survive in that environment is to be a machine and just churn out the work.  It’s an incredibly overwhelming feeling.  Sometimes when we are letting go of what we know it feels like we are doing something wrong.  We feel this pull to do what we feel is familiar whenever we try something new.  I know I personally get this sinking feeling in my stomach, like I’m incredibly uncomfortable.  But I know that I need to start embracing the unknown and start working more toward those things until they become familiar too.  And then I go on to the next adventure.  It’s about knowing what works for me and doing what’s right—for me, what feels right. 

Today I am grateful for being busy.  The last week has been super overwhelming—I have a lot on my plate at work because I am down an entire department and I’ve been working with my child as he is back in school, and I have all of these projects at home in addition to things like birthdays and conventions.  It’s been overwhelming and I literally didn’t know what to prioritize first.  But the truth is this: being busy means there is action in my life, there are steps forward, there are things to do.  I have the ability to say yes to things I want and no to things I don’t want.  I am blessed with things to do, I am blessed with choices, I am blessed with people who support me to do new things.  I am blessed to be supported by people who sometimes struggle to know what it is they want.  Being busy means that I have choices—I can be busy doing what I think is right or I can be busy working on the things I want to.  Making the transition is scary, but I am learning to rely on my own steps every day.  It’s not perfect, but I have the ability to do it.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.

I was watching a cartoon with my son the other day and one of those realizations flashed through my brain.  One of the characters finds a way to produce a food that everyone seems to love so she injects her tree with a type of fertilizer to force it to produce more than it normally does.  Meanwhile there is a shaman that advises the other character that she needs to stop and appreciate the relationship she has with nature and to appreciate what is being given to her.  He even advises something along the lines that you get force too much [fruit] off of one tree, you may need to divide the job amongst several others.  She doesn’t listen and eventually kills the tree.  Her source dries up because she didn’t appreciate it, she didn’t listen to advice to stop, and she didn’t respect what it was capable of (its own timing and productivity).  How often do we do this?  Push and force ourselves, those around us, and yes, even our food to be more, to do more?  It isn’t healthy.  It isn’t how to yield the best results. We need to respect ourselves, our ability to produce, our timing—and maybe delegate some of that responsibility to others so we can all carry the load to produce the best outcome for all. 

We are trained to believe that if we don’t do it all on our own that we are somehow less than…something or someone else.  That somehow the work we do isn’t worth as much if we needed help or if we needed to take a different path than others to get where we wanted to go.  There are so many ways to achieve things in this world and none of them has been deemed right or wrong (with the exception of hurting other people or things for personal gain—I think we can all agree that’s crappy).  When we were fighting for survival (literally fighting, like in cave-man times), the only thing that mattered at the end of the day is if we lived.  Didn’t matter how, but if we survived and we were unscathed and we could go another round, it was fine.  As we evolved and became more and more adept at manipulating our environment, something shifted and we thought we needed to get specific and tell people how to do certain things—and we assigned a value to it. We lost sight of the inherent value in everyone and what they could do.  We thought control meant that people needed to do the same thing in the same way or it was somehow not worth as much.  All that served was a system. We made ourselves and others part of the same system so we could understand what was “worth it.” 

It’s quite simple:  the more we force things to be a certain way, or the more we force something to do more of what it already does beyond its natural capacity, it becomes destructive.  We pretend it’s under necessary to produce more and more and to be more and more instead of respecting who, what, and where we are.  We have a lot of talent and a lot of good that we can give this world and it doesn’t have to live up to anyone’s standards.  In some ways, yes, this is simply about being enough as we are.  But it’s also about respecting nature—and we are a part of nature—and appreciating what we have, what we can do, and what the natural world provides.  We don’t need to manipulate anyone or anything to do something it doesn’t do naturally (or to do more than it does naturally).  We are all part of nature and we all have our own rhythm and we are meant to follow it.  The closer we align with what we naturally are, with what we naturally feel, and our natural capacity, the better we feel—and the more we can produce.  It isn’t our job to force more or to produce more—that’s an industry and capitalist thing.  We know we want to live according to the natural rhythm of the world, and the world feels better when we do so.  Don’t allow our source to dry up because someone put an expectation on us.  Be who we are and honor the pace we live.  It all comes in its own time.

You cannot be where you will not go.  I’m not sure where I heard this so apologies, no infringement is intended.  The simplest definition is that if we don’t do the work, we will not get where we want to go.  If we are unwilling to do what it takes, to follow the steps to get somewhere or achieve something specific, then we will never see it to fruition.  We have to do what we say we will if we are to move forward.  We can’t wish in one hand and expect the results to show.  We have to wish, align, do the work, and allow it to come to be.  This isn’t to say change is easy, but if we aren’t seeing results, we need to look at our own actions.

I’ve felt a disconnect lately, like the inside doesn’t match the outside.  There are days I tell myself how powerful I am, that I’m in control and I got this.  I FEEL successful, I FEEL powerful–but I too quickly fall back into my patterns of losing confidence.  I got frustrated the other day because I really looked at my body and saw myself as a mess and realized that isn’t how I feel or how I want to portray myself at all.  My mind has all of these goals and ambitions, I see myself as this healthy version doing what I say I will but that isn’t happening.  Like out of habit, I still drink when I’m with friends, or I have a diet soda—and I had completely stopped those things for a while.  It hit me, though: as much as I am frustrated with how I look and feel—because mentally I am ready to go but physically I can’t seem to get myself there–I can’t be mad at my body.  1. I did it to myself.  The decisions I’ve made and the habits I have got me here.  This wasn’t something that happened overnight.  2. My body, no matter how I feel about its appearance, got me here.  I breathe, my heart beats, my brain still creates, I move—those are major things to be grateful for.  As long as I can do those things, I can fix the rest.  I know I can’t and don’t want to keep operating as I have been—so I have to stop doing what I’m doing and live the life how I would operate as that version of myself.

So the truth about not getting where you will not go is as simple as this: we have to do what we say we will.  If we don’t feel it, if we aren’t aligned with it, if our actions don’t match the words or the feelings—and yes, if the outside doesn’t match the inside—we need to make some changes.  Sometimes our challenges are harder than others but the truth is change is never easy.  If something isn’t working then we have to do something different.  It isn’t a punishment or anything designed to make us feel bad, it’s a guidance system.  If it doesn’t feel right then we know we’ve gotten off course.  So take stock, take a look at where we are at, and address the areas that aren’t working or aren’t what this new version would do.  It starts with small steps: the other night at dinner I didn’t order a soda.  I ordered a lemonade.  Yes, still sugary, but it was a step away from something I know hurts my brain.  I made smoothies the other day and I literally felt total clarity that I have to be that person, making better decisions and following through.  Success is a decision.  If I want to get there, I need to do what it takes to get there, in all the small ways.  We all do.