The Beautiful Answer

Reframing the Future

I can’t believe it, but this is my 365th post. It’s been a year since I started this blog,  beginning with a line from an e.e. cummings poem as my inspiration: 

“Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.” 

In the year I’ve been writing, I’ve asked a lot of questions. It began with wanting somehow to release some of the negativity I felt surrounded me, to let go of some aspects of myself that I had outgrown, and release some people who weren’t really making my life a more loving and rewarding place to be. 

As I began to actually go out of my way to search for the beauty, I found it. Almost immediately I could feel my heart and spirit becoming lighter. Which is not to say that all of a sudden, everything got amazing and better. But I started looking deeper and even deeper. I started noticing more. Stuff that used to bug the crap out of me, like the endless whining for more love, more attention and more … whatever someone didn’t have, began to sound like background noise. 

In reframing my present, I found. I was reframing the future as well. 

There is no real way to tell where any of us are going, even though I work in the realm of the intuitive every day, and have seen first hand how much this stuff works. But I know that I am headed in a far better direction than the one I had going a year ago. I don’t have to search for happiness now. It’s sitting right in front of me.

I can take my  camera and find a shaft of sunlight, or a little kid blowing bubbles, and everything changes. In that moment, I have found contentment, all on my own, not counted on someone else to determine my mood. I have claimed an entirely new set of tools to work with, broken them in, and even shared them with some of my clients. 

So on this last day of this blog, I want to say thank you to the people I have met. You are a cool bunch, with lots of interesting things to say. You’re funny and human and endlessly searching for that one perfect photo, or post, or joke to share with others. Because blogging is nothing but sharing, after all. So in that spirit, I invite anyone who wants to stay in touch to join me at http://www.sassypsychic.com. Think about signing up for the mailing list (don’t worry, I don’t overemail, and you always have the choice to unsubscribe), friending me on Facebook, or following me on Twitter (links on the left side of the Sassy Psychic home page). 

I hope your journey is made happier for being here. 

Exhausted But Happy

I’ve been traveling a lot lately, which always tends to change you somehow. It may be simple as seeing a spontaneous standing ovation in the airport lounge on the way to Baltimore, as veterans from WWII emerged from the airway. It may be as complex as overhearing intimate conversations you’re not supposed to hear — what the baby likes to eat, when you’ll be home from your trip, who’s speaking in low tones to someone clearly not their spouse.

It may be as great as meeting people who show up to hear the written word spoken aloud in Phoenix, or just to see what you’re like, what your journey has been like as you set it down on paper. That’s pretty gratifying, too. But after a while, you get tired of the wheels spinning beneath your feet and you want to come home again, exhausted but happy, to see what you’re going to get up to next. 

I don’t know what this is, this next path that will carry me forward. I have some idea, of course, but always like to stay open to suggestion. Most likely, I’ll keep writing a project I started a little while ago, maybe start writing a new play as well. The days will pass and I will travel more, meeting more people from different walks of life. And my life will be informed, and feel fuller and richer and just the slightest bit more human because of it. Did I mention that I love being alive? 

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.

Missed Connections

I used to read them, back in the ’80s and ’90s, those missed connections at the back of most major newspapers. One person sees another, thinks there’s chemistry or eye contact and advertises to see if the slight chance that the other person feels the same way, not to mention reads the same newspaper, could lead to something more. 

Part of me used to find them funny, or sad, or some combination of both. Now that I deal with all kinds of people on any given day, I’ve come to realize that missed connections may be the most common of all. 

Today I read a few people, helped extend healing to a few others, and got some writing and research in. On any given day, a theme will emerge, and today’s was love that had somehow taken a sharp right or left turn, or a connection that were supposed to happen which just somehow … didn’t. 

These days tend to make me sad. After all, my years of reading people of all kinds has taught me that we’re so seriously after the same things that no matter where you come from, no matter what your race, creed, color, shape or size, you want to be loved. You want to feel special, to know someone cares about you. To not feel alone. 

You want to feel safe and secure. You want to know happiness. And this happiness sometimes depends on forming and maintaining connections with others.

How can we form these connections when we’re moving so fast beyond one another?

How can we see that we may be perfect for someone right in front of us?

And how can we slow down  for a few minutes at least, to see the person right beside us, who wants and needs the very same things we do? 

And Now It’s On to the Next

Some days, you feel good getting out of bed, ready to tackle the world’s most difficult problems with a smile on your face and a skip in your step. Others, you’re just trying to make sense of the events in your life. So completely out of whack have they come from their normal moorings that you’re just searching around for the rope to tie them back to the dock.

Sigh. Sometimes, it’s just like that. 

It’s been a weird three days, let’s just leave it at that, with many opportunities for reframing. It’s ranged from the sad to the strange to the crazy and threatening back to sad again. I’m still glad to be me. I’m still glad to be doing what I do for a living. After all, I consider it a privilege, not a right. But some days, you just wonder what the hell is going on and question your sanity at choosing this particular profession (for me, intuitive healing) instead of say, becoming a dental hygienist. 

OK. Whatever. Chin up and time to move on. My reframe of the day has been those words, over and over and over again. When I find myself questioning why something is happening, I say the word next. When I wonder why it’s going on, or how long it might last, same deal. Maybe not the most original way of reframing these challenging times, but sometimes you resort to the ones that work. 

Chin up, move along. There’s that’s right, girlie. You got it goin’ on. 

I tell myself these things to keep from crying , though I suppose some of part of me is laughing inside. 

Consider My Mind Blown

I read this today, and my mind froze: 

“The suffering and happiness each of us experiences is a reflection of the distortion or clarity with which we view ourselves and the world.”

— The Dalai Lama 

Whoa. Hold up there. You mean all I have to do is see the world clearly and then I’ll be happy. What the …?

I rolled this around for an hour or so, letting it clunk around the edges of my consciousness. I went over each word, looking inside it for deeper and deeper levels of meaning. Then I found myself back at the beginning, wondering how it had not occurred to me to put it this simply before. It’s a sentence that’s filled with poetry. Every single word means something. Every single one of them explodes in your mind like a little Pop Rock of goodness if you let it. 

And I suggest you let it. 

Clarity — how do you get it? Reframing, for one. I’ve found that out from firsthand knowledge and lots of practice. Letting the crap and negativity roll off you, for another. And allowing your mind to be blown every once in a while by something already know is true, but hear again as if for the first time. 

The Tao of Now

A wise Irish band once wrote that ” all is quiet on New Year’s Day,” and I couldn’t agree more. The older I get, the less important the crazy revelry of the night before is, and the more important the quiet afterwards. The silence of the New Year dawning, and what that might mean for all of us, has had me thinking all day. 

Though I talk to a lot of people who’d probably tell you that 2011 was a bad year, for me it was pretty good. Great even. I had increased business, which means an expanded group of people that I was able to help with what I do. I wrote a lot, completed several projects and even got a few pretty powerful folks to help me along my way, to wherever I’m going next. Not bad at all. 

But I suppose it’s all in how you look at it. I run across people every day who aren’t happy unless they’re “there,” whatever that means. If they don’t have the perfect mate, the perfect job, the perfect weight and hairstyle, not to mention the perfect bank balance (all at the same time), well, then they refuse to be happy at all. Or even enjoy the modicum of happiness that, say, one of these things might bring. 

Let’s just say that reframing has, ahem, taught me that maybe stuff doesn’t always have to be perfect (does that concept even exist in the real world, anyway?) or that I may be wasting time expecting them to be. Instead, I try to enjoy wat I have been given, assuming on some level that this comprises polite behavior. You know, being grateful and all. It just gets wearing, being around these kinds of people all the time, who feel that they’re owed comfort and success. 

Eh. Take it with a grain of salt, no? I set out to reframe the presence of one of these folks today, when they complained for almost a full hour, all the while saying, “I’m not trying to be negative, but …”  As if saying this magical talisman could somehow remove the stigma of, well, being negative. 

As I watched the feelings and sensations arise in my body and then pass away, I was brought back to this concept of silence, how important it is on occasion to make way for contemplation. How rare and luxurious this is, and how silly most people believe it to be. Sure, it’s not productive in any real sense of the world. But it’s renewing, refreshing, and can create space for all kinds of productive things to come about later. 

So when there was plenty of space in my mind, and plenty of time to consider, I just relaxed into it, giving myself the silence. Providing that contemplation I feel I’m missing on certain days. And sure enough, this negative person became smaller and smaller, passing away just like another thought that soon it was time to entertain the Tao of Now again, and Now, and Now, and Now … 

MisHearing the Words

You know when you read or hear a word you know and have seen a billion times before, but somehow this one time, for whatever reason, you hear or read it in a brand new way? 

I love it when that happens. 

Tonight, my husband gave me an iPod Nano. It’s so damn teeny that I’m glad I can clip it onto my clothes. But in the instructions they refer to plugging it in, and then using iTunes to download songs. I read the sentence “Download your content” as download your content, as in happiness. Download your contentment. 

Maybe that’s true for some people. I’m certainly a huge music lover, and it’s played a huge part in my life throughout the years. Maybe downloading music is really a way to download happiness. Maybe it’s a way of reframing your day, to bring joy or righteous rage or even crazy, anarchic creativity around facilitate your own ability to make something happen. Maybe downloading content, or I’m pretty great, or doing just fine can happen without iPods or iTunes or any other MP3 player or downloading site. Maybe it’s done with ideas or decisions or even writing this blog that’s caused so much change in my own life. And maybe ever so slightly it’s done by realizing that maybe our brains want us to see things in a new ways every once in a while, if for no other reason than to make things interesting. 

Don’t Stop Being Amazed

The word cleanse gets under my skin, especially as it applies to the diet. I get that nutritionally, most of us aren’t all we could be, and that bringing more awareness to what we put into our mouths would make us happier and healthier. But the idea that somehow our insides are dirty and that we need to clean them out is to pretty much diss the body and the amazing things it’s capable of, despite our best efforts to eff it up. 

Despite my distaste for the idea of cleansing (I hate even typing the word — it just gets on my nerves), I signed up for Yoga Journal’s 7-Day Detox program, available online. I like the idea of changing my diet to be local and seasonal (luckily, I live in California, so that means I get a lot of choices there), but also to transition into the harvest season of fall in an intentional way with yoga, meditation and other related techniques. 

Ayurveda is on my list of Things to Study as I keep getting older. I’m fascinated how medicine is so intricately entwined with spirituality in pretty much every other culture except ours, and how they treat people often without the high-tech equipment we have in the U.S. This detox program is based in Ayurveda, and so far, I’m finding it pretty great. When fall comes around, I want to go out a little less anyway, so this is a great way to reconnect with myself and what I want to get done over the next few months. 

Another thing that’s arisen on its own has to do with detoxing, but not within my body. I eat pretty well, for the most part, and exercise almost every day. But toxic friends and acquaintances seem to have moved another layer outward in my life. No reframing necessary. Without drama or self-inflicted suffering, they just … moved away. 

Pretty cool, the way this stuff works on more than one level. And me? I don’t ever want to stop being amazed by what goes on. 

Time to Rethink

It was a day of obvious signs, with a flood gratitude flowing from me after I got off the phone from several readings and energy work sessions. Sometimes what I do overwhelms me in a good way, and I think about where I was at this time last year, or five years ago, or even ten, and am so grateful that I get to do what I love every day and make a pretty damn good living at it.

So I’m in that frame of mind, kind of tripping out in my Friday bubble of happiness, and sometimes when I get like this (which happens a lot more than maybe people realize), it’s almost as if dark or negative people can sense it, and they come out of the woodwork to challenge what I feel. I’m sure it’s not really like that (obviously it’s not personal at all), but today a few folks I know on Facebook tried to drag me into a bitchfest about how they hate readings, and how stupid their clients were, and how they didn’t want to do readings anymore because the people they have as clients are losers.

It was so far from my world, so far from my frame of reference today or any other day, that I hovered my little fingers over the keyboard to type a response. Clients do tend to ask a lot of the same questions, but they’re your clients, and you can change the interaction between you. Also, you never know. You may be the most spiritual thing they do all year long, and it’s a great opportunity to practice with your own expectations and projections, as well as letting go of the outcome, both for the reading itself and what the person may or may not take from it, or end up doing.

After all, not every person who comes to a reader or a healer is going to want to know about their life purpose. We all have very similar needs, no matter who we are — to be safe and loved, to feel protected and worthy somehow. We want to feel like we mean something to the people around us, and the world. Very little changes about that from person to person, gender to gender, religion to religion, or culture to culture.

In the end, I never did type that response. It seemed like a battle that didn’t really need fighting. I like to read people, and have a great clientele. I keep expecting there to be a day when I wake up and don’t feel like talking to them, or looking into the universe to see what might be next. But on those days when I’m sure it’ll be time to rethink my career choice, I wake up happy for the most part, and excited to see what the day will bring.