The Beautiful Answer

Just A Few More Posts Left

Just three more posts after this one until I’ve officially kept The Beautiful Answer alive for a full year. Wow. 

As I get closer and closer to what this actually feels like for me, I’m happy that I managed to stick with something on a daily basis for pretty much the entire year. Four posts were either skipped because I was sick or traveling, and one because I just didn’t feel like writing anything that day. 

One thing this blog has definitely hammered home for me is the idea of impermanence. Sure, it’s easy to grasp the concept intellectually, that things don’t last. That as each breath leaves our body, one more moment is moving into the past. But it’s another thing to write down your experience every day for 365 days in a row, watching things that annoyed or amazed you yesterday move into the past as well. 

Sometimes I marvel at why people like blogs so much. They offer a place to vent, or keep private thoughts, but only if you don’t mind they’re not really being all that private. For me this has been as much about shifting my perspective on a daily basis, of making that a true spiritual practice so I get used to it, than anything else. 

After a few more posts are written, I have no idea what I will do. And that in itself is a pretty cool place of freedom to be in. 

Indecision Sucks, and Then There’s Clarity

Sorry for the spotty posting of late, especially since I had made a vow to post every day for the past year. I’m pretty close, with only a few posts left to close out this 365 day period, and never expected a book, a play, a potential TV series and more in the works to be happening all at once. 

Pans to travel to Baltimore last Thursday were in place, until I woke up with a sore throat (I pretty much never get sick — maybe once a year at most) and started to worry that I shouldn’t go. I could call and cancel, I thought. Sure, I’d disappoint people and not get to meet all the hard-working folks who have worked to put my words on the stage. But I was feeling crappy as hell and had no real desire to get in a germ tube and fly across the country. Not in that moment. 

So I Dayquil’d up and got on the plane. As my husband was rounding the corner from our house, and heading for the freeway onramp to get to the airport, I kept thinking maybe I should turn back. Maybe it just wasn’t the right time. 

Then a woman with silvery-white bobbed hair, and black roots caught my attention. She was waiting at the light as we went around the corner, so she could cross the street. When I looked at her, I saw that she was wearing a t-shirt that said one word, in huge letters: GO.

There was no logo, and I’m pretty sure that there’s no band with that name. I should know by now that my guides aren’t subtle. They broadcast messages to me through the radio, billboards, people who randomly come up to me on the street, and many other ways. I have a question in mind, and even before I’ve voiced it, I’m getting information. But this one was pretty magical. 

I live in a magical world, I thought. Amazing things are happening all around me. I can either sit by the shore and miss out on the fun stuf, or jump into the moving current.

So far, I’m thrilled to be here. More tomorrow. I’ve got to get some sleep so I can teach a workshop at breathe books on Intuitive Dating, and attend the first-ever fully staged performance of my play Punk Rock Mom (for me, at least). 

How freakin’ lucky am I? 

A Breakthrough

In the eleven months I’ve been keeping this blog, I’ve begun to notice a few things about the way the mind works. How it strives to keep things looking bleak, perhaps so that when joy occurs, it will stand out by comparison. 

Then there are those days when you’re able to break through a pattern that has been so much a part of your life that it’s become like a second skin. Over the years I have raged at it, coaxed and cajoled it, even tried to reason with it as I attempted to move toward some sort of final releasing point, where I could finally be rid of it for good. Today, I stood up for myself in a way I have never done before. And it wasn’t really like anything I expected. 

Most people picture fighting of some sort when you say you’re standing up for yourself. They imagine swords drawn, defensive battle postures, grimacing faces. Not that I didn’t get irritated — I suppose sone of that is required before we all reach our limits and set an impermeable boundary. I did, a little. And then I got tough. 

It’s not something I can talk about in detail because it’s still ongoing, but suffice it to say that I have been offered several great career opportunities since my book Searching for Sassy came out. I’ve had agents circling, publishing companies interested in putting it out on their own labels, and film and television producers vying for the rights. It’s all been pretty heady and confusing at times, even though I have a pretty good working knowledge of how these things work, since I’ve been employed in both the publishing and film industries in the past. 

The thing is, there are all kinds of people, in each of these businesses. There are your sharks, who want to dominate you (and the conversation, apparently), even if no money is actually yet changing hands. There are your artist wannabees, who will never get quite as close to writing a book as sitting across from you on an expensive couch, and those who crave power and influence, to somehow affect the culture at large. You meet enough of them, and they all start to look the same. 

But I’ve learned that breakthroughs seldom come when you’re trying to make them happen. They tend to creep up on you, waiting to strike when you’re not expecting it. So you have to be ready to walk away from something if need be, even if the very thing you’re being offered is the thing you want most. 

I did that today. I was ready to walk away, even though it was painful, and I ended up winning. It required absolute nerves of steel. And even though this may not happen all the time, or even most of the time, just the act of standing firm and saying no made my legs and little stronger underneath me, and my connection to the earth all the support I needed to move forward. 

200 Posts and Counting!

Hard to believe that I started this daily blog 200 posts ago, to try and reframe the daily events of my life, in an attempt to find small moments of beauty and impermanence, capture times of gratitude, and even reconfigure trying days with these techniques. I didn’t have a huge number of assumptions about what it would be like, nor did I feel that this would “go” anywhere. In other words, I had no real goal other than to do this as openly and honestly as possible. 

Six months later, I have found that reframing my daily life comes very, very naturally. with this amount of practice, I find that I am a lot less negative (not that I was super negative before, but I could “go there” on occasion and get lost in that spiral), complain a lot less, and honestly and without a lot of drama see the incredible moments in my life. I am glad, really glad, to be alive. I rarely find it difficult to connect with this unending source of gratitude. And even when I am angry or frustrated or afraid, I have awareness in the moment itself, and know that it will pass. 

So having no need to reframe this knowledge, I decided to live in it. I felt the sensation of pride, that I’ve been able to do a post every day, wash over me (even catching up after a 2-day power outage), and then another wave of gratitude, that I have the ability to do this — the time, the space to write, and people who read this and sometimes write to me.  I felt warm physical sensations around my heart chakra, and a deep sense of connection to people I’ve never met. 

Here’s to the remaining 165 posts in this little experiment, and several more months of seeing where it takes me. 

Unbelievable

A few month ago, reframing was a new concept to me. I’d heard about it a lot, and thought it was some sort of mind programing, where you pretended that your dark or negative thoughts didn’t exist and instead pasted a happy face over them. By now, I’ve figured out that that was pretty ignorant.  

Now, almost a third of the way through this blogging project of posting daily for 365 days while reframing my life experiences, I find myself a bit more open, pretty effortlessly. In other words, I don’t have to try and pretend my thoughts don’t exist. I just try to find a way in the moment to see them in another way. If that’s not possible, I don’t force it.  No biggie. It’s about perspective. Even investigating a potential alternative reality to the one I’m obsessing on can be quite liberating. 

I find myself a lot more relaxed, and I rarely get overly upset by the little things. Sure, I have emotions. I’m human, after all. But again, I don’t have to think about what the “right” response might be, or punish myself for not having the “right” reactions to given situations. Most of the time, they come pretty naturally, as long as I keep a certain level of awareness in the moment. And I’ve pretty much done away with the notion of “right” anyway. 

When I talk to people about the blog, or whenever people email me asking questions, they want to know if you have to believe in certain things to practice with reframing. Nope. It’s not about beliefs, but being open and fluid as much as possible. It has to do with recognizing your feelings when they come up, and being committed to sitting with and honoring them even as you’re seeking another way to see them. 

Mostly, reframing is kind of like throwing off beliefs, and rules, and unconscious ways of being. So when someone does something that pisses me off, or confuses me, or makes me want to move to an unpopulated country with little more than a backpack for company, I think unbelievable, and the other part of me tells me that’s half right.