The Beautiful Answer

Admittedly, I try to wake up every day on the “let’s see what happens” side of the bed. I try not to inject too much woo-woo into the day, or force things to be the way I want them to be. After all, this is the recipe for delusion, not happiness.

Some days start off OK, then get a little worse, and then devolve into little more than excuses for filling up the time until bed. Today was one of those days. On a bright note, my short play The Thing With Feathers was chosen to compete in a monologue competition next weekend. That’s great, since it hasn’t been staged yet. But it also means that within the span of 6 days, I have to cut the piece down to a manageable size, find an actor, rehearse, direct him (which I’ve never done before), since I don’t have a real director, and somehow get ready to stage this (which I’ve also never done before). Oh, and keep the rest of my very busy life going, including the running of a pretty successful business.

Great and argh, all at the same time.

It’s been in the making for some time now, I guess, but I only just found out. And it doesn’t help when you’re not feeling all that supported by your friends. Combine that with a little miscommunication, and you have the making of a not-so-beautiful day.

I could thank God for my life again, but I do that a lot. I could go outside and worship nature, which usually does the trick. Or I could be with my feelings, which is probably the healthiest thing to do right now. I’m tired. I work a lot. I give a great deal to my clients and friends. I care, deeply, about what goes on in my world.

So perhaps the best reframing technique I could apply to a time when things aren’t beautiful is to respect what they are. To not force them to be beautiful just because I want them to be. And to realize that this mandate I have set for myself, to look for the beautiful, the mysterious and the ephemeral in my life doesn’t mean that those things will always be there. But I’ll keep looking, believe it.

Much lip service is paid, among spiritual practitioners, to the idea of releasing. Releasing as in negative karma, bad emotions, crap that we’ve taken on from others, and even patterns of belief or behavior that no longer serve our greater purpose on earth. We try to do this with body or energy work, talk therapy, and even things like sweat lodges. But I’ve been reading a book by Ana Forrest called Fierce Medicine, which is as much about healing as it is about yoga. So being the happy seeker I am, I decided to do the death meditation about halfway through the book.

I’m pretty no nonsense as a person. I don’t like idiots, and I don’t suffer fools. And when I aim to heal myself, God damn it, that’s gonna happen come hell or high water. This meditation has you imagine that you have 24 hours to live, then 23, and so on. As you reach each stage of the meditation, you imagine parts of your physical body shutting down, taking note of your regrets, the things you wish you’d said and done, and what you’re left with at the end. I’m a long-time meditator, and have been through a lot of techniques from various traditions. But from about minute three, this thing had me shredded.

I was sitting on my cushion sobbing, at the loss of my husband, my dog, my friends and family. I imagined the things I wouldn’t get to do, and the things I wouldn’t see. And as all of that faded into the background and I said my last goodbyes, I was left with one thing. It wasn’t career achievements or the amount of sex I’ve had. It wasn’t the car I was driving (surprise, surprise), my booty shape, or the people I knew. It though it sounds like a  friggin’ greeting card, it was that I could love, deeply and purely. I saw in that moment that I had been sent here to experience every aspect of love, and to extend it as far and wide as I could.

So while I don’t feel that anything in particular requires my reframing talents today, my perspective has been seriously tweaked. I have a very potent tool to use on more challenging days and that meditation, more than any other I’ve ever done, showed me that there’s no screwing around on earth. Not enough time for that. Instead, it’s time to seize the day, the week, the hour, and make it beautiful.

Have you ever experienced this? You’re humming along, thinking you’re doing a pretty good job at being aware, cultivating kindness and even exhibiting compassion more times than not … and then someone — or better yet something — comes along to completely test that?

I love it when that happens.

OK, maybe not in the moment. I get irritated. I get reactive. I think why is that person doing that to me? and then, because I’ve been doing this for so long, in the next moment I usually laugh. I mean, who the hell am I, that so many people are trying to personally screw me up? Surely they must hold secret meetings to mess with my life.

Suuuuuurrrrre.

The other day I was surprised when feeling of irritation came up around someone I really like. They just had something happen in their own life that pushed some of my own buttons. Easy, right? Just separate what’s mine from what’s not mine. But two days later, I’m still frantically reframing (:) — OK, maybe not frantically — so I can get away from the difficult emotions of fear, anger and frustration, with maybe a little jealousy thrown in for good measure.

So instead, I tried following the instructions of a Buddhist teacher I know, who urged us to soften around the pain in our lives, to welcome it as you would a good friend. So I invited my emotions for a pow-wow. We sat around the dining room table for a bit, airing our grievances. I asked them what they wanted and they said, “Dinner.” But if I refused to fed them, I thought maybe they’d go away.

So I sat back in my chair. And after a while, all the feelings fell silent. When they realized they weren’t getting dinner, they got up quietly and left. Pretty damn cool.

Not 24 hours after I took down my “writing for other people” web site, I’ve been besieged with requests for, yes, writing and editing projects. I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but I’m pretty done with that part of my life. I have been published in over 30 publications, I’ve released two books with my name on them, and edited and ghostwritten dozens more. I’ve won awards and learned a great deal about how the industry works, and now I want to concentrate on my own projects.

See, almost everyone I’ve ever met wants to write a book, Not that they all should. They just want to, and feel they’re somehow entitled to it. Most people want me to get them on Oprah, not seeming to know the show doesn’t exist anymore. They say they want to be on her next show, whatever that is. Many of them have nothing to say in a book, but need the platform to speak to others, to let them know how to live their lives. I tell them to try Facebook or MySpace. But none of my advice, honed over more than 20 years of doing this, seems to stick. Sometimes, I feel like I’m trapped in the movie Groundhog Day, talking to the same client over and over and over.

I didn’t want writing, which has been so magical to me, to be robbed of its joy. I didn’t want it to become workmanlike and boring, and it had definitely started to be that. So I pulled the site, and stopped accepting jobs from others to write or edit their books (the latter part happened weeks ago), articles, essays — whatever. I won’t even consider giving advice to someone who I don’t think is trying to add to the planet in some way. The world has enough books. What it needs are people with points of view, and something to actually say. Life’s just too freakin’ short.

But I wanted to reframe this, since the universe seems to be trying to continue sending me good fortune, and recognition of a sort. So I saw all the incoming energy not as an annoyance, to be answered in so many no-based emails, but as a wave of applause and a final bow. As this part of my life is coming to a close, another part begins. I’ve written a few plays, am moving towards getting them staged, and have finished a memoir about the time I spent working as a phone psychic in Los Angeles. My business continues to flourish, and I have so many new ideas it will take me years to write them all. So none of this is bad. Thank you for all the projects and the chance to hone my craft. Now it’s time to open a new door and walk through it.

When God thought about how to simultaneously screw with our realities and make us think we were talking to people who knew what they were doing, she invented tech support. It doesn’t matter what you know or don’t know about computers, web sites or really anything that falls under their purview. It doesn’t matter if you’re an empowered person, trying to do things for yourself, or a disempowered one, who prefers to put your machines in the hands of others. They will find a way to make your day a living hell.

It starts out with the fact that they think they know more than you do, about what you want and need to do. And then they, generally speaking, proceed to do exactly what you don’t want, while not telling you that. All in the name of “saving you money.” Love it.

Today I took a pretty big step, of taking down a web site I used to use to attract writing work for other people. It seems like a simple thing to do. But I couldn’t find any instructions on the site. Preferring not to sit on hold for five minutes of instructions, I emailed tech support on the hosting company’s web site. Who am I kidding? It’s Go Daddy.

Though I received an answer relatively quickly, the advice felt wrong to me. I was advised to change the nameservers, but that didn’t seem to cancel the web site, which is what I wanted to do. So I called tech support and spoke with a nice guy who assured me that my emails would be fine, but the web site would be taken down. We hung up and five minutes later, my emails to that domain name weren’t working.

So I called again to find out that the first guy hadn’t deleted my domain name (which was good), but he hadn’t looked to see if one of my email address was associated with that domain name. So when he deleted it, he deleted perhaps my most important email address. I was assured that it would take me five minutes to fix, but that wasn’t the point. I had trusted that he would look and do his job in a complete fashion. By not looking, he made sure I had to call again, which turned a five minute activity into a little over an hour altogether.

Irritation. Needing to reframe quickly, I imagined all the clients I would no longer have to deal with from that aspect of my business. Because you have never met the unique combination of confused and entitled until you’ve tried to write a book for someone. As I pictured this aspect of my life, a good portion of my income for many years, dissipate into the ether, I found my anger leaving me. And even though I may still cringe when I have to call tech support, at least it’s over for today.

Most of us claim to want the truth, which always caused me great confusion when I was little. Why, then, did no one want to listen to the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes”?

As it turns out, very few people want the truth, especially when it relates to their own lives. That’s cool. It’s not my turn to watch them. But the spiritual path, as I have found, is not for the faint of heart. Part of that has to do with the constant looking into the proverbial mirror. Often, what you find is not cute. And part of it has to do with the complete lack of ego gratification, if you’re doing it right. :)

Today I started reading Fierce Medicine, by Ana Forrest, and immediately it felt like an unveiling of unbelievable truth. Though Forrest is known as a yoga teacher, she’s way beyond that in my opinion. Like a tigress, she attacks fear and other common issues, and teaches you the same, without apology, with meditations, yoga postures and simple instructions that make perfect sense.

The book immediately provided me with ample reframing techniques for a “not terrible but kind of annoying” group of people in my life. It’s not really about them; it’s more what they represent that I’m internally battling against. But of course, they have a right to inhabit the planet as well. So to reframe this I turned inward, asking for guidance in meditation. I don’t usually do this, because my meditations are about watching my thoughts, or using tonglen or other techniques to work with others. But right away I heard an inner voice that said, “You need to be more yourself, and bring this into your work.”

And just like that, all the annoyance I had been feeling with these people dropped away. It’s not like it was magical; I saw that they represented a part of me that I had moved beyond, but was still valuable — for them. And what good is life if we’re not willing to let other people go through their own journeys in their own time?

On certain days, the stuff I need to try and reframe is staring me right in the face. It pushes past the other things in my life and practically bitch-slaps me until I pay attention to it. Other days, things are a little subtler, and I have to look for them.

Today is an intentionally planned slow day, where I will do the mundane things my business needs to keep itself going — financial reporting, filing, paperwork, emails and letters. There’s a reason no one likes to do this stuff — it’s boring! And I’m the type of person who gets hyper when she’s bored. My husband likes to call me The Most Dangerous Woman on Earth when I’m in one of my bored states.

But it’s gotta get done, right? I have an assistant who comes in to help me from time to time, but I need to make the filing system or I’ll never be able to find anything on my own. So to reframe this decidedly unpleasant series of tasks, I’m imagining my files and other information as part of a beautiful stream, which can burble down a prescribed path, or get all gunked up and polluted. With every folder I put in the cabinet, I clear away some more debris in the way. With every email sent, I open up a little more of its path.  And soon, with all these tasks done, I don’t even notice that I’ve made a wonderful new flow of information in my life — and that’s the way I like it.

I’m a pretty peaceful person by nature. But sometimes, someone does something to someone I love, and the the claws come out. It’s not a balls-out, roller derby kind of throw down. I’m much more strategic than that. Though I’ve been a practicing Buddhist for nearly fifteen years now, I have to say that sometimes, I wish harm to others.

Case in point was today, when someone close to me told me that he may not get a raise this year. Never mind that he’s a manager, has little support help, and does the work of four people. Never mind that raises have been few and far between at his place of employment, and never mind that his subordinate is going to be getting one.

Though I’m not proud of it, I saw red. I know how hard this person works because whenever I see him, he’s dead tired and trying to keep his head off the restaurant table. I know because I see it in his eyes. And I know because whenever I ask him about it, he clams up and says he doesn’t want to talk about it.

Though fifteen years of meditation prepares you for seeing and being with pain, it’s still hard to see in someone you care about. So I knew I had to get my reframe on fast. Adding to his problem by projecting onto it, or taking it on as some crusade I had to solve weren’t going to cut it. I tried tonglen, a meditation practice of taking on someone’s pain and sending them love and ease. I still wanted to kill his boss. I tried sending tonglen to her, but still no go. My heart softened some, but it was still pretty tight and unforgiving.

Finally, I tried forgiveness practice, which I’ve used for many years to good effect. Picturing her in my  mind’s eye, I told her that I forgave her for what she had done to my friend. I said I knew she was troubled, and maybe scared for her own job, but that I would appreciate it if she could find it in her heart to respect my pal, and let him know his hard work was appreciated somehow.

And while I don’t yet know the outcome, at least my chest has loosened up, and I don’t feel so angry towards her. I’m a good person to have in your corner. I can be like a lioness protecting her young. But on most days, I’m happy to keep the claws in, as long as people don’t eff with me or the people I care about.

Went to see Anna Deveare Smith’s new show Let Me Down Easy last night, and was immediately taken in by her broad range of characterizations, and the sheer amount of interviews and research she’d done. The piece is about the healthcare system in America, but to just think of it that way is to miss the lion’s share of its meaning. From boxers and sports reporters to Ann Richards, the former governor of Texas, and even her own aunt, she listens, she gleans, and she reports back to us on the human condition with insight and compassion.

I’ve also been studying shamanism lately, after a long time spent mistakenly thinking it was about taking hallucinogens and tripping in some alternative reality. After spending my fair share messing about the edges of society, that just didn’t seem like a great way to gain wisdom. But how wrong I was.

Shamanism is really based in the earth, and calling healing spirits, power animals and other enlightened beings to help heal oneself, the earth and the community. It’s about reaching beyond our prescribed idea of reality to find creative ways of dreaming a new way of being into existence. When the world is out of balance, due to greed, pollution or simple disconnection, shamans say we are “dreaming the wrong dream,” meaning that we simply have to adjust the way we’re seeing the world so we can make it different with our actions.

Though I don’t claim to know what the right dream may be, I can say that greed is one thing that touches my life pretty consistently. Maybe it’s the fact that I live in L.A., where conspicuous consumption is practically required, or that people seem more and more obsessed with toys and technology than, say, making each other happy these days. But if I had to pick one way of reframing that greed, I would choose to be like Anna Deveare Smith, whose work deeply inspires me as a writer and a person, to live in this world listening to and relating the stories of others. Could there be a kinder and more powerful way to stage a small-scale revolution?

Today I’ve been thinking about love, and how it sometimes boggles even the most reserved of minds. Traditionally, we think of this in the romantic way, with hearts, candy, and flowers. For most people, just saying the word will evoke a red drawn heart (as opposed to the anatomically correct kind, admittedly not so appealing) and a welling of emotion. Scientists can actually measure this effect using galvanic skin response and devices to measure blood pressure and heart rate.

But I just finished watching the movie Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, about how a man spends his last days on earth recalling his past lives, and sharing this time with his family and friends. It’s slow and kind of dreamy. Ghosts show up from the past, and sit at the table to eat a meal with the family and catch up on their lives. Natural landscapes, like caves, plains and lakes, assume a supernatural quality as this man prepares to leave the planet. I don’t know if I’ve ever been as sucker-punched emotionally. It’s that quietly powerful.

The film got me thinking about the other kinds of love. I dig romantic love, of course, as most people do. That excited feeling of meeting your lover is almost like looking into a mirror again and again, hence people who are habitually “in love with love.” Friendship is pretty great, as are love of family and community. But what about love of life itself? What if we could step back from whatever effed up shit our parents did to us in order to thank them for simply bringing us into being? How would that feel, and how would our hearts change?

It’s easy to forget that there are a million other aspects of love when we remember to think of it. To reframe this in my mind, I will think of one scene in Uncle Boonmee, when the man, lying on his deathbed, hugs his wife and tells her he will find her no matter what in the future, no matter what form he takes in his next life. That moment is about their relationship, and how it has developed over time, but it’s also about how much he wants to cling to the life of earthly beauty, now that he is facing the reality of leaving.

On certain days, it’s obvious from the first few breaths that productivity isn’t going to be the word of the day. Maybe I’ve not been able to sleep very well the night before, as I didn’t last night, or just be tracking wonky energy that’s still to come during the day. Whatever the case, today is a day of introspection rather than getting a lot of things done.

OK, I’m fine with that. As long as other people’s crazy doesn’t rub off on me. Today, it seemed like nearly everyone had had a bit too much to drink and were either spoiling for a fight or crying into their proverbial beer. I went inward.

I took a Sandra Ingerman online class about shamanic journeying for the 21st-century and attended an energetic activation about connecting with personal destiny, as well as the shared destiny of the community. This is a fascinating discipline to me and, even though I’m pretty new to it, has deepened my appreciation for natural medicine and using the skills of journeying and intuition to help not only oneself but others around you.

I started to think about this as a practice I could adapt to my life as well as my business, as well as to keep the crazy off me when the rest of the world seems to be taking the bullet train to Nutsville. On days like this, I’m so glad to have the time to study and the desire to take my knowledge to a higher place each year. So perhaps I don’t need reframing exercises the next time someone walks out onto an emotional ledge. Maybe all I need is to be secure in my desire to keep learning. I can’t treat everyone, or work with their energy patterns each day, or I wouldn’t be able to get to my clients. But I can activate new patterns that help each person find his or her way to healing and ease.

And that’s enough of a reframe for me, thank you very much.

Perhaps the most mundane of human pursuits has to be a trip to the mall. It’s meant to be an irresistible hymn to capitalism, complete with shop windows filled with Things You Can’t Live Without. But for me at least, it’s a dirge, a place you’re kind of forced to go when your sneakers finally give up the ghost, as mine did last week. I can be hard on sneakers.

To reframe my periodic trips into this place I’d rather not spend too much time, I concentrate on the people I see, rather than the stuff I may want to buy. I’m usually there for a specific purpose — clothes, socks, sneakers — and don’t really care to get too caught up in what I don’t have. That’s not a mindset I care about cultivating, and not the way I want to live my life. But people watching? That’s right in my wheelhouse.

Today, I walked past a bench full of older Hispanic men, slouched there as if they’d been dropped off by some social services van or other to spend an afternoon around people. It was easy to create a storyline for them — how they’d been abandoned by their families, forgotten by their friends, and just sort of pushed to the side of life. But just then, as my mind was starting to “go there,” they exchanged a joke, and exploded into joyful laughter. I looked back at them and one waved at me, winking, as his friends elbowed him in the ribs.

Operation Challenge Your Preconceived Notions?  It’s a go.

As I finished my errands, and got a new pair of sneakers in the bargain, I wondered what they do later, after their trip to the mall, and realized they’d probably be just fine, no matter what it was.

The strangest thing happened to me today. I had been visiting with someone from out of town who I only see from time to time, but talk to relatively frequently. It’s always odd, like time has somehow been suspended, when this occurs. Your former relationship, established years ago, exists as it was then, with all the qualities that brought you together. But it exists in tiny fractals during all the years you’ve known each other, as a kind of array as well.

Today I was kind of existing within the relationship, but also outside it. In a flash, I saw all of the years of this union as a series of points on a line, almost like sacred geometry, and felt that enormity of history as it stretches in either direction. I didn’t have to do this. Hell, I probably wouldn’t have known how to do it if you’d asked. But what happened is that this person’s idiosyncrasies, which have the tendency to annoy me if left unchecked, became invisible. I saw the day we met, and the days since then. In a flash, all the years of being together and being apart coalesced, and I felt like I might cry.

Don’t want to over-sentimentalize the ins and outs of human interactions. I’m not the best person to ask about stuff like that. But when you see something like the long strand of history, and how small a space you occupy within it, little things like talking too much and saying the same thing over and over fade into the background in favor of a giant intake of breath and an amazed aaahhhhh, as everything begins to make a little more sense.

…clap your hands, right? Or maybe make up a silly rhyme or blab along to the radio or jump up and down for no other reason than you have energy running through your body and you have to find some purpose for it to exist.

If you’re happy and you don’t know it, what does it look like?  Boredom? Anger? Frustration?

I’m going to go out on a limb here, but most people seem, at least from the outside, like they’re unhappy. They buy things thinking their lifestyle will somehow change, just from the sheer shift in ownership. They cut each other off in traffic and flip each other the bird. They do mean things and laugh about it, secure and safe behind their firewalls.

Meh. I don’t care from unhappiness today. I saw eight or nine birds sitting on a wire and imagined them singing this song, courtesy of the Monkees, which never fails to make me smile:

Reframing the unhappiness around you, the constant need to start a conversation with a complaint or a story with a “downer,” is as simple as tuning in to the 60s, when things were ridiculously sunny on the radio. This time, more than any other, makes me think of being in the back of my mom’s car, sipping a Slurpee and driving to baseball practice. The dust rose into the slant of sunset from the impressions of a few dozens cleats, and light spread over our heads like halos.

Who can be angry when a thing like that is possible?

I suppose I never know how open my horizons are. I may think they’re pretty good, but then come in contract with someone who wrenches my heart open a little wider, or just challenges my perceptions such that I’m forced to reconsider all I may have once held dear. Today was one of those days.

We all have people who push our buttons — who talk too much when the game is on, espouse conservative politics when we’re an Obama-lover, or just not engage when all we want is a good, old fashioned heart-to-heart. I have someone who comes into my life every once in a while who does this, usually by talking through an orifice better left to other things.

This person doesn’t bother to gather facts or filter the Internet or other sources for information. He/she does like to talk a lot, usually about nothing, while clinging to some fabricated sense of purpose or opinion. Which, if we’re being honest here, annoys me to no end. So I tried a variety of means to reframe this, um, person. I tried thinking of time as an arrow, shooting through space so the conversation could be over faster. I tried imagining this person in his/her underwear, as they ask you to when speaking in public. But all this got me was a dizzy, unpleasant feeling I’d rather forget.

Finally, I settled on an old standby, the reframe by committee. In another room, I asked my husband if I was being unreasonable. He, being the reasonable type, would tell me the truth. He agreed. This person was being an idiot. But the look on his face, as he was trying to be fair but honest, got me, and then I started giggling to no end. And then he started giggling, on and on until I’d completely forgotten what it was I’d asked him about.

Given that Carmageddon has taken over my city (for better or worse), and I live in a car culture (fact), I figured that a road trip was in the cards this weekend. I like to wander, especially if it involves some sort of weird Americana stuff that I hope never disappears from the planet.

This weekend, it was all about Route 66, as we headed to the Wigwam Motel in San Bernardino. For some reason, it was de rigeur to feature Native American style architecture in the late 1940s, right after WWII and before the ’50s gave birth to the atomic and Googie styles. I took a few pictures:

Not bad for a Blackberry, and the rooms aren’t bad, either. A little small, but with pretty nice TVs, if that’s your thing. Even though I was happy that this weird little bit of American history had survived, I still can’t decide if it’s right, wrong or somewhere in between. After all, Hollywood studios regularly hired whites to play Native Americans in movies and TV shows (wrong), and you can’t help feeling the slight nod of condescension to sleep “like the natives do” in makeshift teepees (also kinda wrong).

Maybe the best way to reframe this is to let it go. After all, I didn’t create this. OK, I did feel like I had to drive an hour to see it firsthand, but an Indian (from India, not the U.S.) guy named Kumar takes care of the place now. Which seems strange but somehow fitting that the notion of “native” has taken on a whole new meaning as new groups of people arrive, settle and add to the cultural picture of our country.

One of my favorite lines in all of literature (at least the literature I’ve read), is this one, from Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”:

“… the trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.”

She’s trying to create an air of menace, because a family is about to be taken into the woods and murdered one by one, but whenever I think of this line, as I did today, it reminds me a bit of how we live now.

Why is meanness so cool? Why are we attracted to it, and why do we admire it?

We know, when it’s directed at us, that it hurts. We know that in principle at least, it’s the wrong move. Most of us, judging from polls, want peace, harmony and ease in our own lives, and for most others — at least the ones who haven’t pissed us off lately.

But flicking through TV channels, it’s show after show if dysfunctional (at best) and flat out cruel (at worst) behavior. Why is this entertainment? Why does it even last longer than, say, six seconds on any station in the world?

The short answer is that we forget. We forget that others have the same feelings we do, and we forget (conveniently at times) that the world doesn’t revolve around us. That’s why I write this blog every day — to remind myself that though I’m chronicling my own experience, that there is connection in every moment, and that all I have to do is look a little closer to see it. In short, to keep bringing myself back to that place of recalling.

Reframing this becomes easier when I have Flannery to turn to. She took anger, fear and terrible dark acts like murder and turned them not into moments to be celebrated, but times of potential understanding and transcendence. She pitted faith against fate, in a sense. It’s the small human moment the killer shows toward the end of the story that shows he has no power (or perceives he has no power) over this fate.

Accordingly, I will accept that this is the way things are now in our media and entertainment. Meanness and stupidity rules the day. But that doesn’t mean it will be that way forever, or even for another few months.

Have you ever thought about what the world would be like if you weren’t in it? I don’t mean to be morbid — actually, I’m a pretty silly and happy-go-lucky person by nature — but sometimes I like to spend time thinking about what the world would be like if I stopped existing, or if one of my friends did, or a member of my family. No, it’s not a lame excuse for mental revenge. It’s not some sort of passive-aggressive way to imagine them out of existence. But it is a powerful practice in impermanence.

When I first tried this, it was really unbalancing. I would cry, imaging all the things I never got to do, or the people I never got to meet. I would cry at missing my friends or family members. And I would get upset that the world had been deprived of my personal greatness — talk about your hidden complexes! All it takes is a little mental exercise and the ego rears its ugly head. :)

Today I’ve been playing with this concept as I imagine what life would be like if hatred were removed from the world from this point forward, and then I tried it with happiness — really stretching it out as far as I could imagine. I saw people confused and not knowing where to put their energy once strong emotions had been removed. I saw them wanting to connect, and putting more energy into creating. And I saw that sharing — of resources, time, money and other things — became the rule instead of the exception.

Reframing these exercises becomes as simple as flipping them on their heads. Instead of imagining that I was absent from life from this point forward, why not think about what would happen if I were to assume a greater position of power and authority? Or if I were to facilitate the growth and development of others?

One by one, I imagined this for my friends, family members, people I knew only slightly, and those I had only seen once or twice, maybe at a bus stop or in the grocery store. And the more I did this, the more I felt like I was fixing it, a little at a time, repairing those little holes between us that keep us from experiencing how truly majestic it is to be in each other’s company.

I usually keep things to myself when they’re personal, or have to do with business practices. See, I’ve been in business for more than 20 years, longer than Facebook and longer than daily deal sites like Gilt City. I’ll probably be in business long after their “business models” and creative accounting cease to exist. I’m not really worried about that.

What I do have to say is that Gilt City is one of the least professional and badly run businesses I’ve ever had the misfortune to deal with. I try to cater to all kinds of people — from celebrities to regular folks — and all kinds of business, from the flashy (or, in their case, the trying to be flashy) to sponsoring a local community event. In other words, it’s all the same to me. I’m just interested in helping people find information about things that are troubling them, and hopefully clearing a path so they can get what they want out of life.

I wasn’t going to say this out loud, but Gilt City has decided they are too busy to pay me, apparently. The sale was bad enough. After a few hours of its launch on June 29th, it appeared that we had sold out all of our vouchers. What actually happened, which I found out the next day by phone, is that the CEO decided that he “didn’t believe in psychics” and that we apparently “weren’t their brand.” Our sale was pulled down.

That’s funny. I don’t believe in CEOs.

I have a signed agreement with Gilt Group and Gilt City LA. They have lived up to literally none of it. As of the night before the sale, they hadn’t even done the write-up, and I had to write the lion’s share of it at the last minute. Their behavior has been scattered, unprofessional, and incredibly reckless, not to mention incredibly rude and disrespectful.  I have ceased to be a client of theirs. It’s your decision about whether you want to do the same.

I prefer to do business with people who live up to their share of an agreement, who approach things honestly, with the intention of mutual benefit. I take this stuff pretty seriously, as I grow my business and welcome national and international clients alike. I am very pleased to meet all of the new clients I did manage to find through Gilt, but have to say that we will not be doing business with any daily deal sites anymore, no matter who they are. Anyone who wants a fair and periodic discount should join the email list on the home page.

Gilt City LA and Gilt Group have yet to pay me for work I have already done, and since they haven’t told the truth about one aspect of our business dealings yet, I have little hope of their doing so anytime soon. If you want to write to the CEO about his decision to not believe in psychics because they’re “not his brand,” go ahead and email on our behalf. Tell him we sent you.  My celebrity clients have already had a good laugh over the fact they apparently aren’t Gilt’s brand, either.

Reframing this one? It’s all about standing up for what’s right and what I have already earned. Hello, Better Business Bureau and the State Attorney General.

I was walking to a theater the other night, and saw this graffiti from the sidewalk:

Which of course makes me think, well, who does suck?  It’s an ongoing question.

It’s easy to talk about politicians ( I mean, don’t even get me started on Michelle Bachman and her insulting, revisionist version of history — see her recent comments on slavery, if you don’t believe me), Kardashians (heck, any reality TV people) and annoying people at work. Just as there’s a Milton in every office, there’s also a boss asking when the TPS reports are going to be on his desk, am I right?

I can think of a few people who suck, particularly a business that recently partnered with mine, so we could both make some money, then pulled out after the promotion was launched, saying we didn’t meet up to his expectations. Nice one, douche. Try being professional next time, and then maybe we can talk.

Even though there will always be someone who sucks, or is doing sucky things in the world, there’s always a way to reframe it. Maybe it’s not about the sucky things they’re doing, but whatever I can add that’s beautiful, or kind, or compassionate. Maybe reframing generalized suckiness isn’t about what they’re saying or doing at all. It takes a whole lot of light to blot out darkness, so the rest of us better get ready making our stuff, speaking our truths, and getting it into the world instead of complaining or suffering over the junk we can’t control.