The Beautiful Answer

Why the Hell Not?

This question is going through my mind more and more as the days fly by. I only have a few more posts until I get to the one year mark with this blog, and will have to post some channeling about it before I finish this up.

Today, all I can seem to think about are moments from my past. They seem to come out of nowhere, leveling me with their intensity, until I’m forced to start looking for patterns. These are people from my past that I have not thought about for years, and others that I have set aside to grow in my own direction. What they have in common I do not yet know. 

When I was younger, I was a little dreamer without much time to dream. From my earliest years, I’ve always had a lot of jobs, and did my writing and performing (then, at least) on the side when I had time. I was taught to be afraid of nearly everyone and everything, lest it somehow be coming along to take advantage of me. But I was hungry for experience, and soon learned to throw off my fears. Not that I’m never fearful, mind you. I just have a much better handle on what’s useful fear, and what’s not. 

As this blogging project draws to a close, and things have opened up for me in an incredible new way, I’ve been thinking about how far I have come since I was that fearful little kid, and what it all might mean in the scheme of my larger life. Though I don’t have all the answers, and they’re not really tying themselves up into neat little bundles of understanding, I do have a new resolve, a WTF spirit about me, more than usual. 

If I don’t know exactly where all this is taking me, I can say why the hell not, and dive in with a little more conviction. That right there I can do. 

Me 2.0 

It’s starting to sink in that I’ll soon be finished with this blog, 365 days of almost daily posting, reframing my experience to find the beauty in my daily life if necessary, and finding ways got work with the challenging and the rest. Before I’ve even finished the 365th post, though, I’m noticing that a profound change has already come over me. 

I started this blog because I was noticing a lot of negative people around me. It started to really build up for me — all the bitching and griping, spending previous moments complaining about the same things over and over instead of ever doing anything about them. I got the feeling that these people somehow expected others to build their lives for them, to take the responsibility that was rightfully theirs to make them happy. 

Beauty is always the antidote to complaining, I have found. Try spending a day in nature when you’re in a bad mood if you don’t believe me. 

The Me 2.0 that’s emerging is less afraid, less burdened by other people and their issues. Not that I don’t care about people. I just find their intentions to stay stuck a lot less interesting, and a lot less of a drag on my own energy fields. I feel freer, lighter and happier overall. I enjoy doing my work, and so many new avenues to work have opened up for me of late that I enjoy a great deal of gratitude as well. I’ve met some great friends during the past year and, if we’re continuing the software metaphor, believe there are fewer and fewer sucky people in the world. 

In an era of few morals and even fewer reasons to believe, that’s a pretty big deal.

Fearlessness

“Fearlessness is like a muscle. I know from my own life that the more I exercise it the more natural it becomes to not let my fears run me.” 

        — Arianna Huffington 

And Away We Go

When you’re approaching a big deadline in life, you can go two ways, I’ve found. One is to ball up into the fetal position and rock bak and forth in bed, wondering why you ever had the idea to write that book, or stage that play, or record that song. The other is to try your best to surf the energy of the moment, bypassing any crazy things like sleep or, in many moments, food and proper hydration. 

The latter brings about better balance, and maybe stronger mental health. The former results in, well, better rest, I suppose, as long as you can sleep while fetal. The reason I’m thinking about this, I’m sure has to do with the fact that I have a book coming out in 9 days. I’m not scared. Hell, I’ve been in this position two other times. I’m not exactly blase, either. That just smacks of a kind of arrogance I hope I never feel. I’m somewhere in the middle, even though there are times when the gravity of this moment of my life sneaks up on my and pounds me down to the ground.

It’s in those moments that I find the best stuff to work with. Today I found a morsel of fear connected all the way back to high school, and released that shit for good. I found a pocket of anticipation, and a wee bit of anxiety and, yes, even some anger that had been held back for so long I couldn’t even trace it back to its source. Gone, gone and gone. Thanks for playing.  Don’t need you anymore. 

Releasing all this old stuff in preparation for my book launch was so fun I was releasing negative thought patterns on the treadmill, and kicking old beliefs to the curb in Trader Joe’s. And even when a woman almost ran over my foot with her shopping cart, I was able to laugh and get out of the way, thanking whatever force gave me these reflexes and this indelibly powerful will to live. Not just live. Thrive. 

On Anxiety and the Discontents

You know those people that no one wants to be around, and yet somehow they’re everywhere? I like to call them the Negatives, because no matter what you say, they always find a way to make things not work out? They love to rain on parades, especially if they’re marching in them, and to find a million and one reasons why It’ll Never Work Out. I actually find myself becoming sunnier and sunnier around these folks, until I’m exhausted from trying to balance out their darkness. 

Anxiety has a way of doing this to people. From our distinctly American way of seeing the news (fear), the economy (more fear) and all the big things of life like health issues, family, retirement and Social Security (major uncertainty there), we aren’t really trained to deal with the stuff we can’t see, feel, control or quantify. Instead, we’re conditioned to keep fearing more, so we drive the financial and social agreements we’ve set forth. 

Without getting too conspiracy-ish about it (those are boring anyway and, yes, fear-based as all hell), it’s enough to make you want to climb the nearest mountain or join the nearest ashram. And maybe those aren’t terrible ideas. But for the rest of us who choose to remain behind, maybe there’s another way. Rather than becoming one of the anxiety-prone or the discontents, maybe we can sit with our feelings, not to disregard or even chase them away. Maybe just the act of witnessing what’s really going on inside us, without judging it or comparing it to whatever everyone else is going through, we open up a new dialogue. And if someone is listening, doesn’t that mean that we’re being seen, heard and valued for all the right reasons, at exactly the right time? 

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Conquering any kind of fear is like getting away with something. I realized this today as I was waiting for my attorney to negotiate a contract for me that would change my life in pretty important ways. The thing about negotiation, though, is that you need to have two sides dedicated to finding some sort of common and mutually beneficial ending. It tends to not really work out if you’re not willing to give a bit, and take a bit. 

On a good day, I have a lot of work to do. I don’t fear my life too much, and when I find some fear coming to the surface for me, I try to dig down to its source and move it out out somehow, usually with energy work. Not so with the rest of the world, I find, and I have to be careful, not to mention respectful, of how other people go about dealing with their own fear. Because it’s not the same as the way I do it. Fear of not being seen or heard, fear of not getting every piece of the pie. Everyone’s got something to fear. 

Maybe it’s as much of a crime to deal with your fear as not. I mean, if everyone’s not doing it, you’re going to find yourself at the mercy of other people’s lack of awareness and/or effort at times. Even so, I like to make like Repo Man and do some crimes, maybe even get some sushi and not pay, or just keep working on my fear. 

Participation Isn’t Optional

It’s been quite a day — one for reflection and growth, and another for sheer annoyance. Someone I’ve been reading for more than a year and a half placed an order for a reading only to completely flip out a few hours later, calling me several names, getting belligerent and issuing threats. She was obviously in a lot of emotional pain about something in her life, but no amount of my apologies or money refunding would convince her that I was anything but someone who lived to take advantage of other people and make their lives miserable. Why it took her a year and a half and around 15 readings to figure that out, I have no idea. 

I’ve been doing this long enough to know that it’s not personal. Of course it’s not. And I’ve been doing it long enough to know that no one’s perfect. Not even me. :)  It was the entitlement that was so stunning about it, the idea that she thought I owed her something because her life hadn’t turned out the way she wanted it to.  That was really jaw dropping. As if I somehow predicted a hard and fast truth and if it didn’t happen, or not in the timeframe she had deemed appropriate, somehow I was responsible. As if energy doesn’t change form time to time, and she didn’t have to participate in the creation of her own reality. 

Let me break it down for you. Participation isn’t optional. It’s mandatory. Attendance is taken every day and, if you’re not there, it’ll go down in your permanent record. The real one, where no one really cares if you’re there, but it still has the power to make you happy or sad, fulfilled or empty, all the time, every day, for the rest of your life. 

Believe that. 

If you don’t participate sure, you might be able to cast off whatever you don’t feel like dealing with onto someone else. Picking a fight here, or creating some drama there. Maybe you’re so used to the drama that when you don’t have it in your life, you create it just to feel alive. Maybe you can find an enabler who lets you foist off your drama onto him or her long enough that your discomfort relents temporarily, and the relationship gets used up in five days, weeks or months, only to send you back to the drawing board, hungry for someplace else to place your uncomfortable feelings. 

Me? I’m done with it, and anyone else who comes into my reality this way. I have a huge soft spot for the struggling, the people who recognize their imperfections and work on them, just trying to be a little better, a little healthier each day. I am far from perfect, so I don’t expect it in others. Part of me doesn’t even believe it’s possible, so who cares? I am as much a healer as a psychic, and if you’re not up for it, that’s fine with me. 

So I sat in meditation for a bit, looking for ways to reframe what was essentially unreframable (that’s totally  not a word). Teasing the strands apart, I saw what she had brought to it, what I refused to take on, and how it had inflamed the situation between us. I saw that I had few other options, really, and so I chose not to take it any further. I don’t need to be right; I need be heard, and to at least be granted the opportunity to make my point. If it’s not received, I can’t help that. I can only release with peace, refusing to bring any more suffering, and wish her well. 

More, More, More

I get a lot of email each day. Between the accounts for my personal use and my business, there have to be 500 or more every single day, rain or shine, weekday or weekend. My assistant helps me go through some of it, and of course some is spam. Can’t seem to get rid of that, though we’re on all the do not email lists there are. 

I don’t know if it’s the recession and everyone operating out of poverty consciousness and fear, but it seems like there’s way more marketing than ever this year. I watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Paade and it seemd that every single person they talked to, every song that was sung and every word spoken was somehow a tie-in to another show to watch, another song to download, another musical to attend or toy to buy for your kids. The same, it seems is true of almsot every email I’m getting these days. It would be far more punk rock if someone were to write me and say, you know what, don’t buy anything today. Maybe tomorrow, if you really need it, or sometime between now and the holiday. You know, that one that’s supposed to be about giving and light? 

It’s easy to preach about consumerism around the holidays, After all, it seems to get weirder and weider each year, almost liked something staged for everyone’s benefit. It’s no longer connected to anything, no longer meaningful in any sense. So I guess the thing, for me, was to see if I could connect with any sort of meaning for this season. I don’t have any kids, so that’s out, but I sat for a bit, just letting all the feelings and sensations of the season wash over me. Some memories from my past, mostly painful ones about forced holidays trying to impress my relatives with faux gratitude and a litany of my achievements at school, arose. There were a few isolated times of snowball fights with my friends or building a snowman with my family, and then they were gone. 

I thought of the dinners I used to deliver to people with HIV and AIDS, and how most of them haven’t nade it to this year, and paused to remember their presence on earth. I thought of my own little family here, tiny by comparison to most but still strong, and I thought of the memories I wanted to leave behind. Of course, very little of these had to do with material possessions. Very few had to do with things that had anything at all to do with money. As I held the faces of my loved ones in mind, all I could hope was that we’rd have as much time as possible together. 

How’s that for reframing the holidays? 

And Now For Something Completely the Same

You know that feeling you get when you’re right in the middle of some kind of reactivity — anger, fear, frustration or whatever — and you realize it, so you’re inside your body having that experience and then outside it as well, seeing yourself with some clarity and perspective? I had that today, when my new shopping cart, designed to make my life easier, as well as that of my assistant, pretty much stopped doing what it was supposed to be doing. 

The thing is, it’s pretty much not worked as it was supposed to since it was installed, even though we were assured by the developer and various web people that it was working on their end. Now I’m losing customers over it, have fielded numerous complaints, and can’t get any of our alleged tech support people on the phone or through email. Or I get vague promises of action that never seem to materialize. It’s a huge mess, and I can’t say anything positive about the people I spent so much time agonizing over and making sure were the right people to work with in the first place. They’re not the right people. Not at all. Now I have to figure out what to do about it. 

In those moments of reaction, I’ve realized there is truth. Whatever you’ve been skirting around, afraid to notice, or stuff you’ve gone out of your way to do to avoid rocking the boat, comes spilling out, and sometimes I find myself hearing what I’m saying in a brand new way. So to reframe this ongoing and very stressful situation, I stepped way back from it in my mind. I could still see myself angry and hurting over it, unsure about what to do to apologize to people who have been loyal to me for years, and scared about losing new customers who might think I was unprofessional or worse by the behavior of my web site. I could also feel the heat of the anger and fear rushing through my body as energy. 

When I was pretty far back, though, I could see this as a moment, a tiny one on the timeline of my life, which would be soon forgotten. I saw my site getting sorted out by these people or someone else soon enough, and then some ease as my worries left me. As the anger and fear left I felt a whooshing feeling at the top of my head and looked up. Up there, further than I could see, I sensed a warm, caring presence, perhaps something divine, and I knew that even though this moment sucked like hell, it would pass, and that things would get better. Tomorrow’s another day, after all. 

Scared Sh*tless & Time to Jump

Ever know you’re about to change every single molecule of your life with just one move, and your stomach gets tied up in knots because it knows — hey babe, this is what you’ve been asking for all along. And now the moment’s here, and you’re gonna pull that shit?

Uh-uh. Here we go, and there’s not much you can do about it but sit in the back seat and relinquish control because he/she/it’s right. You’ve done everything you needed to do, and now it’s show time, literally and figuratively.

Short post today because I’m out the door in a few minutes to hear my words spoken on stage — for the first time. It’s not earth shattering and it’s not going to cure cancer. But it will cure my life, a little, and help me move in an entirely new direction.

More to report soon. Reframing my fear as we speak. Every time a feel like my lunch is gonna come up — who are we kidding? I was too nervous to eat lunch — I imagine it as flower petals raining down on my head, softly touching my face. If I can transform fear like that and maybe actually eat something when I get home, I’ll have done what I needed to. And thank frickin’ God for that. :)